A satirist who lays bare the absurdities of Indian politics while remaining veiled in anonymity—that is Editor J. It is an irony that delights them. Editor J is the internet alias for the 22-year-old creator of The Savala Vada, a satirical meme page with over eighty thousand followers on Instagram, which employs sardonic, dark humour to comment on contemporary news and politics. Each post resembles the front page of a newspaper, with a large headline and an image, usually referencing current events and online discourse. J leads a small team of twenty-something university students, who spend their time reading the news and making memes.
Their tone is irreverent and dissentious, taking pot shots at political parties, governments, the judiciary, the rich, the Savarna—“punching up,” as the term goes in comedy, at the elite and the powerful. One of The Savala Vada’s most popular posts, for instance, was a response to the inauguration of the Ram Mandir at the site where Hindu mobs had demolished the Babri Masjid: “Remains of Indian Constitution Beneath Ram Mandir: ASI Survey.” After the death of Ratan Tata, the former chairperson of the Tata Group, when the internet was crowded with praises for the late industrialist, The Savala Vada posted the headlines: “Tata Bye Bye,” “Humble Billionaire passes away in country where 60% live under Rs 260 a day,” and “Ratan Tata passes due to natural cause unlike his workers.” When I met J in Delhi this month, they told me the goal was not just laughs. “That moment was when people were paying attention to his legacy, and we used humour to critique it.”
For J, the humour is an attempt to stave off despair, especially the kind resulting from the often-grim Indian political landscape. “We’re just trying to laugh the pain off, right? There’s a lot of gloom and darkness, but you need that laughter because you need that hope and you need that optimism,” J said. “The moment you lose that sort of optimism for a better world, then it’s like you’ve settled for the status quo.”
The page was founded in July 2023, by a group of college students. “We liked memes and funny stuff, but we also had an interest in geopolitics and political issues,” J told me. Their inspiration to marry both stemmed from the hugely successful satirical news website The Onion, based in the United States, and a now-defunct Indian satire Instagram page called The Kanda. The result was The Savala Vada—the name of a fried onion snack popular in Kerala, the state J hails from.