Inside a shamiana (a ceremonial tent), commonly used for festive occasions in India, a stage has been set for Nautanki. The crowd gathers in anticipation. A man in khaki trousers, a pink-and-purple shirt, and a sequinned hat steps to the mic. “Mai khadkhara waala hun [I am a tonga driver],” he declares, voice bouncing across the loudspeakers.
This is Haggan Joker on stage—Wasiuddin by name, sixty years old, a local Nautanki star from Dhema village.
Over five years ago, someone in the crowd recorded this clip on a phone. The video now has over 10 million views on YouTube. But Wasiuddin had not uploaded that video, he does not even own a smartphone.
“A local journalist once told me that videos of my performances had thousands of views on YouTube,” Wasiuddin says. “But I have never earned a thing from those videos.”
He still juggles Nautanki and farming to make ends meet. “I earn around Rs 1,000- Rs 1,200 for a performance. In a year, it comes up to Rs 70,000–80,000, including what I make from farming. Sometimes, if the audience is pleased, they give tips like a plate, a sari, or a box of sweets.”
Nautanki originated in the late 19th century in the United Provinces of Oudh and Agra (now Uttar Pradesh). It was built on immediacy and community, performed under open skies, thick with improvisation and local humour. Over the last decade, it has found a second life online, scattered across YouTube channels and Instagram feeds. The transition wasn’t deliberate — it was filmed, uploaded, and algorithmically amplified, often by people in the crowd.
Meanwhile, the performers who make the art happen often find themselves outside the economy enabled by the internet.
“Your Nautanki… On YouTube”
Seventy-year-old Nisar Ahmad of Bhitaura in Ayodhya district, for instance, learned of his digital presence the way many artists in remote villages did: through other people. He rarely touches a phone. One day, someone told him, “Chacha, we saw your Nautanki on YouTube.”
“That’s when I found out my videos were on the internet,” Nisar remembers. “People say good things. But my life is where it has always been.”
Once a household name in his region, Nisar stopped performing four years ago after a turn toward faith. He now lives quietly with his family in a modest house, supported by his son who works in Saudi Arabia.
“People said I was getting old, that it was time to focus on roza-namaz [fasting and daily prayers], not this,” he recalls.
Nisar’s nautanki has plenty of audience on YouTube, but that doesn’t translate into earnings for him.
These days, life moves slowly for Nisar. Illness has kept him indoors, but he still manages to visit the mosque for prayers. Mostly, he spends long afternoons lying on a cot outside his house, watching people—and life—pass by. His daughter-in-law sometimes plays his old performances on her phone. He smiles at the memory, but there’s no revenue or recognition attached.
The people who upload his performances, count the views, and profit from them, he said, have never reached out or paid him.
Visibility Without Control
Dr. Devendra Sharma, performer from a long Nautanki lineage and a scholar who teaches communication at California State University, USA, says this digital displacement follows a pattern. “Many traditional artists lack the educational capital to participate in the digital economy. They can’t tag metadata, claim copyright, or negotiate contracts.”
Into that gap step intermediaries, specifically, local recordists, small-time channels, and the odd production houses. They film performances, publish them, and collect ad revenue. Occasionally, they recruit performers with promises of revenue-sharing; often, the performers sign contracts they cannot fully parse.
Wasiuddin had an encounter with digital middlemen a few years ago. After a video of his act circulated widely, a Delhi-based production outfit that runs a YouTube channel ‘Nautanki Tamasha’ offered him work, asked for his bank details and insisted on a contract.
Wasiuddin, nautanki star from Dhema village, makes about Rs 1,000 for a performance. His video gets millions of views on YouTube.
“They wanted me to sign a five-year contract that would bind me to their company,” he recalled. “A staff member I knew assured me I’d receive Rs 16,000 once I signed. But they wanted complete ownership of my performances. The contract even demanded Rs 75,000 from me, supposedly to cover the cost of recording and uploading my shows on YouTube,” he alleged.
At a lawyer’s office, he finally learned what the document’s terms meant. “When he explained what was written, I was taken aback,” Wasiuddin said. “I told him to tear up the contract right there. I never saw those people again.”
Decode reached out to the production house through email and phone, but received no response.
Wasiuddin did not file a formal complaint or retain a copy of the contract, though he says he reached out to the company later, asking for a share of the revenue from his videos. The request was refused.
Wasiuddin remembers the experience as betrayal. Then, with a half-smile and a practiced satirical eloquence, he recites a couplet from a poem he wrote about the incident:
“Mujhe bitha diya gaya us bench pe jahan pehle se bomb tha,
Mujhe sula diya us kabristan mein jahan shaadi ka function tha.”
[I was made to sit on a bench that was already rigged with a bomb;
I was laid to rest in a graveyard where a wedding was underway.]
YouTube Is The New Stage
A quick YouTube search for ‘Nautanki’ shows more than 300 active channels.
The biggest, Nautanki Tamasha, has 4.9 million subscribers, over 1.3 billion views, and more than 1,200 videos since its launch in 2016. Its sister channel, Gaon Ki Nautanki, has 1.27 million subscribers, nearly 300 million views, and close to 800 videos. Together, these two channels under the label Ganga Cassette [ 3.3 million subscribers and more than 820 million cumulative views] account for over 1.6 billion views.
Beyond these, several smaller but active channels have emerged, including, Nautanki Samrat (678K subscribers, 277 million views), Avadh Sangeet Nautanki (271K subscribers, 112 million views), Nautanki Khela (468K subscribers, 100 million views), Gold Audio Nautanki (380K subscribers, 116 million), Diksha Nautanki Video (380K subscribers, 176 million views), Nautanki Lok Sangeet (117K subscribers, 37 million views), Pooja Cassette Nautanki (127K subscribers, 19 million views), and Ayodhya Nautanki Tamasha (61K subscribers, 16 million views).
Combined, these ten channels have accumulated over 2.5 billion views, averaging roughly 250 million views per channel. Most of these were created in the last six to seven years, rendering the centuries-old live art form a relatively recent digital origin.
The audience has multiplied. But the people who created the art remain locked out of its digital economy.
The New Creators
Not all of the change is extractive. Where one generation of performers lacks the tools to claim their digital presence, a younger, scrappier cohort has built small economies on the margins.
In Karaundi, Ashok Kumar, a 36-year-old who sold peanuts before he started filming Nautanki, has become one of the region’s most punctual uploaders. He shoots with a basic smartphone, edits on free apps, and posts regularly. His YouTube channel has around 19,000 subscribers, more than 1,400 videos, and over 6 million views.
“I learned video editing on my own, all by watching YouTube on my phone,” he says.
His income from the platform is modest but steady. “I make about Rs 100 to Rs 250 a day, sometimes more if a video goes viral.”
Ashok had been behind the scenes, managing sound and stage, for years. But the first time he recorded a performance was when he attended a show of Nisar near a mill in Bhidora village. “I uploaded one video, it went viral. Now, everyone in the Nautanki scene knows me,” he said.
“Whenever a Nautanki is about to be staged, we get informed in advance. I try to record the entire performance and then divide it into episodes of 15 to 20 minutes each so it’s easier for people to watch,” Ashok explained. “There are many performers, but I usually title the videos with the most popular artist’s name to attract more views.”
The comments, he said, range from encouraging to instructive. Viewers often point out if the sound is not clear or ask to see more of a particular performer. “I take those comments seriously and try to improve based on them,” he said.
Ashok still sells peanuts for a living, but YouTube has inadvertently become an important part of his life.
Repackaging The Form
Teenagers like Ajay Kanojiya straddle two worlds: they are both troupe leaders and channel owners. Ajay’s uploads draw messages that convert to more bookings; the video is both advertisement and record.
Ashok Kumar, 36, sold peanuts before he started filming Nautanki. Screengrab of his YouTube channel
His current channel, Ajay Nautanki Tamasha, has around 800 subscribers. “I lost access to my earlier channel, which had over 1,200 subscribers, so I had to start over,” he said. While the channel is not monetised yet, viewership is growing.
“People often message saying they enjoyed the shows and want similar performances in their villages. We have been invited to Gonda, Basti, and other towns also.”
Ajay understands that the mood of the audience is mercurial online and those shifts reflect on live performances as well. “What people want changes with time, place, occasion, and even the social or political demands of the moment.”
The uploader-creators have begun adapting to this volatile attention economy: trimming scripts into shorter clips, refining videos with titles, cuts, pacing adjustments, and more so, focusing on moments that the algorithm is likely to reward.
The platform’s aesthetic prizes clarity, speed, and repeatability.
Long improvisations, dialectal specificity, and slow-building humour no longer fare as well as clips that can be looped, shared, and consumed in seconds. Nautanki, therefore, is changing — not only in venue, but in grammar, too. The stage of Nautanki has progressively doubled as a content factory as much as a cultural space.
“Earlier, we used Bollywood music thinking it would attract more viewers, but copyright strikes made it difficult to continue,” he said. “Switching to music original to the Nautanki performances worked better and avoided copyright issues. It is really about figuring out what works and adapting quickly.”
Who Gains And Who Loses?
The digital afterlife of Nautanki postdates a repeated cultural pattern. Platforms create attention economies that reward certain actors and structures. Those who can manage metadata, maintain channels, and play the algorithm win; those who cannot, are left behind.
“Digital platforms are democratic in reach but unequal in power,” Dr Sharma says. “We must build a digitally literate community so artists can protect themselves.”
It is late evening in the village of Neora. The final act of the Nautanki organised for a wedding reception has just ended. Wasiuddin, still in his stage costume, sits placidly on a wooden charpoy, the face paint settling into the lines of his face.
He ruminates on the long way he has come as a Nautanki artist and how the art changed with time. “I only hope it does not slip from my hands, the art, the hunar [skill], you know?” he murmured under his breath, as an afterthought.
“We perform, people film, and they profit. But we continue, because this art is our life. It means more to us than anyone else.” he adds. “When the camera is there, you want to give your best. There’s a sense that thousands will watch you. It’s not always about money.”
As the lights dim, the stage workers fold the shamiana and the audience drifts home. In someone’s pocket, a clip is being uploaded; somewhere else, years later, the same act will keep finding new audiences.
This story was edited by Adrija Bose.
