The songs in question rarely comment on women’s bodies directly. What they police is clothing, and through clothing, respectability and belonging. In the examples reported by Rini Barman in Scroll.in, a woman in jeans, shorts or a skirt is mocked or framed as less desirable, while a change into a mekhela-sador or other traditional Assamese attire earns approval, often from a male character or singer. Read together, the videos treat a woman’s modernity as something that needs correcting. A 2022 scholarly article in Feminist Media Studies offers a wider frame: the dancing body can challenge gender norms, yet it is also regulated through gendered and hyper-nationalist ideas of what Assamese culture should look like.
That answer is bounded by the evidence. The reporting covers a selected group of songs and videos, not the whole of Assamese popular music, and it does not establish what every artist intended or how every listener responds.
What the songs do with clothing
Barman’s feature, “Why is Assamese cringe pop obsessed with policing women’s bodies?”, was published by Scroll.in on September 19, 2017. It examines a group of cringe-pop songs that repeatedly tie a woman’s worth to what she wears. The English descriptions below are this article’s paraphrase of Barman’s reporting, not verbatim lyrics.
| Song | Contrast the song stages | How the outcome is framed |
|---|---|---|
| Disco Bhonti | The woman’s Western outfits give way to a conventional mekhela-sador in the closing sequence of the video. | Singer-lyricist Kussum Koilash signals approval at the traditional outfit. Scroll.in describes the song as a hit in Assam toward the end of 2016. |
| Jeans Pant Half Pant | The female lead wears jeans and shorts, while the male lead prefers a churidar or mekhela-sador. | The final sequence presents her in a sador, which resolves the contrast in his favour. |
| Tepa Mora Jeans | The lyrics criticise skinny jeans. | Western dress is framed as a fault to be corrected. |
| High Heel / Disco Bihu Rap | A mini-skirt is set against muga-riha, a traditional garment. | The traditional garment is presented as the proper choice. |
| Narrow Jeans | Jeans and T-shirts are linked to parental disapproval. | Traditional clothes are linked to praise. |
The recurring device is not simply that traditional clothing appears on screen. It is that a woman’s desirability and social standing are presented as conditional on dressing in the approved way. The same sequence that displays a woman’s body for the camera also instructs viewers on which version of that body is acceptable.
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Rural men, urban women and “sons of the soil”
Barman reads the videos as staging rural men as “sons of the soil” and urban women as figures in need of cultural rescue. In this reading, the clothing contrast carries a larger story about place and class: the countryside is cast as the keeper of authentic culture, and the city’s young women as the place where that culture has been lost. Barman argues that these songs combine a sexualised display of the female body with a policing of the same body. That is her interpretation of the reported material, and it should be attributed to her rather than treated as a settled account of why every songwriter writes this way.
Two readings of the dancing body
The most detailed scholarly frame available is Simona Sarma’s article, “Analyzing cultural politics through the ‘dancing body’: a study of Assamese item songs in India,” published in Feminist Media Studies in 2022. Its abstract is available on Taylor & Francis’s site, and the article considers the surveillance and control of erotic performance in a local setting, using visual methodology and textual analysis of Assamese item songs and cringe-pop songs.
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The abstract holds two claims together. The first is that the dancing body “has the capability to subvert gender norms.” The second is that it “is often controlled through hyper-nationalist imaginations.” The two are not contradictory. A performance can unsettle expectations about women’s movement and display while the surrounding song and video reassert which forms of womanhood count as Assamese.
What the abstract does not show
Only the abstract was available for this article, so the detailed arguments of the full text are not described here. The abstract supports reading these songs through the lens of gender and nationalism, but it does not measure how widespread the pattern is.
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Why the songs get attention
Explaining why a particular song becomes popular is harder than explaining what it says, and the sources do not offer a single cause. Scroll.in quotes Kussum Koilash on this point. He says: “I am not a rich singer and I know my songs aren’t perfect but every generation has understood the colloquial Assamese I have used. The world around is changing, even rural Assam is equally accessing the internet and it cannot be predicted what exactly made certain songs more popular than the others. Perhaps people are intrigued about Bihu rap; they have found it new and hence applauded it.” That is the artist’s own account, not independent evidence of why audiences listen.
Criticism as amplification
Bidisha Singha Dutta, a journalist with The Assam Tribune, makes a different point about the circulation of these songs, as quoted by Barman: “As listeners, we might crib about them but we inadvertently discuss and popularise these self-acclaimed hits. Even bad publicity is publicity. If we ignore them completely, artistes will receive the message that only good music will enter our conversation.” Her observation suggests that the critical commentary this article is part of may itself help keep the songs in circulation.
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The DY365 episode
Barman also reports on an episode of the Assamese channel DY365 titled “Kune ‘Balatkar’ korise oxomiya gaanok?”, which she translates as “Who has raped Assamese songs?” She criticises the use of rape as a metaphor in a discussion of sexist lyrics. The reporting does not establish the full context of the episode, so the translation and interpretation here are Barman’s.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.What the evidence cannot tell you
- The reporting covers selected songs and videos, mainly those discussed in a 2017 feature. It does not establish that every Assamese song follows the same pattern.
- No measured figures on how common these songs are, how many people hear them, or how audiences respond are available in the sources cited here.
- The sources do not establish the private motives of individual songwriters, directors or listeners.
- The 2022 scholarly source is cited here through its abstract only.
These limits matter because the pattern is easy to overstate. A reader can reasonably conclude that the songs repeatedly link women’s clothing to desirability and cultural worth. A reader cannot conclude from these sources that Assamese music as a whole works this way, or that the songs reflect a single shared attitude among the people who make and enjoy them.
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Using the word “cringe”
“Cringe” is a dismissive label, and it can make a genre and its listeners look like a joke. The more useful question is what these songs do with their audience’s assumptions about gender, place and tradition. Describing the pattern does not require treating the artists or their fans as backward, and the reporting cited here does not do so.
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