The return of small-town creators on Instagram

"Basically, it’s about how people in big cities have started watching reels of people in villages, right?” asks Deeksha Choudhary. I had been grappling with how to explain the story’s central idea without getting lost in the background: TikTok’s rise and sudden ban in India, Instagram’s entry into short videos, and the platform’s rigid visual grammar that dictates who belongs there and who doesn’t. Choudhary, 26, landed on the heart of it in a single sentence.

A screenwriter from Raisinghnagar in Rajasthan, Choudhary runs Registani Ladkiyan (Desert Girls), an Instagram page featuring her younger sisters, Aavya, 10, and Ronak, 11. Their videos, scripted by Choudhary, carry wholesome life lessons through the gaze of these tweens, set against the backdrop of everyday village life. In one video filmed in a field, one sister dresses the other up like a scarecrow. Mid-game, Aavya asks, “What’s your biggest fear?” Ronak replies: “That I might disappoint my people.” When the question is returned to Aavya, she says: “That I might spend all my time trying to make others happy.” The exchange ends with a signature “hmmm” from Ronak.

There are no cuts, no external audio. In a one-take, 30-second reel, there’s a good 10 seconds with no dialogue at all, just a pause, allowing for what’s been said to land. The video has crossed over 107,000 likes. Since they began posting around October 2024, Registani Ladkiyan has grown to nearly 850,000 followers. According to Instagram’s analytics dashboard, Choudhary says, the bulk of that audience comes from Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru.

TikTok’s rise in early 2020 had briefly put small-town creators on the map, promising a more democratic internet fame. Creators from non-urban, less economically privileged backgrounds amassed audiences of millions on content that urban India often dismissed as “cringe”. When TikTok was banned later that year, many of these creators were displaced overnight as Instagram’s quietly enforced “posh” aesthetic made them feel they didn’t belong on the Meta-owned platform. In the last few years, however, a new wave of small-town creators has followed a different trajectory. Without conforming to Instagram’s visual ideals, they’ve found acceptance, and increasingly admiration, among urban, affluent audiences. Whether this signals a lasting shift remains unclear. But the moment is a reason to consider how urban India consumes content today, and whether belonging online is ever permanent.

“High-budget, polished stuff with multiple edits was long considered engaging,” says Choudhary. “But deep down, the human tendency is to connect with something raw. That’s why people have got bored of Instagram’s aesthetic,” she adds. It’s almost as if we had stopped breathing in between, notes Choudhary, referring to the period of aesthetic consumption. “Now we’re breathing again.”

The thinning of air was hard to miss. “There was a cultural divide,” recalls Praanesh Bhuvaneswar, CEO of Bengaluru-based influencer analytics firm Qoruz. “An established urban creator frowned upon you meeting them in the same cafe as a popular TikToker. We had to navigate all this delicately.”

That divide extended well beyond cafes. TikTok creators weren’t invited to industry parties. Most big agencies hesitated to sign them. Anshu Patni, an executive coach and strategic adviser from Mumbai who was a talent agent at the time, remembers the hierarchy clearly. “Instagram was considered ‘cool’. Big-city creators were groomed, media-trained. TikTokers, on the other hand, were seen as people who didn’t know how to talk. Most of them were dancing, anyway.”

The shift now isn’t just semantic. It’s economic. Registani Ladkiyan has done collaborations with Mother Dairy, Spinny, Swiggy Instamart, Wakefit, Shaadi.com and Ixigo, to name a few. Global brands like OpenAI are collaborating with creators such as @Lifeofpujaa, whose modest life in a remote village in West Bengal exists far outside Instagram’s dominant aesthetic, yet commands attention and algorithmic love for her opinions on rural life, feminism, and culture.

Dev, who goes by Baaghi Haryanvi, a 30-year-old political science graduate who discusses sociopolitical issues in Haryanvi, is followed by celebrities like Saba Azad despite their limited understanding of the language. He’s invited to conferences and talks. Then there’s Bablu Khan, a construction worker from a village in Maharashtra’s Parbhani district, whose videos—largely of him dancing at construction sites with his teammates—belong to the very genre once written off as cringe. His account currently has over a million followers. What, or who, was once dismissed as “cringe” is now being re-evaluated as authentic, humbling, even eye-opening.

Sindhu Biswal, who runs a media company and growth advisory for creators in Bengaluru, is clear that the shift isn’t rooted in a sudden moral awakening. “It’s not because urban audiences suddenly became more inclusive,” he says. “It’s because Instagram stopped rewarding polish and started rewarding relatability.”

In other words, the algorithm evolved, he reckons. Creators like @Lifeofpujaa were always culturally relevant; they simply didn’t fit Instagram’s earlier, aspirational template. “Today, the algorithm optimises for watch time, shares, and emotional connection, not visual perfection,” Biswal explains. “Urban audiences are also fatigued by hyper-curated lives and are gravitating towards familiarity and cultural truth.”

“Instagram’s ongoing improvements to ranking systems and its focus on surfacing original content have been pivotal in enabling the discovery of smaller creators,” says Ankit Rihal, lead, global partnerships, at Meta India.

Mansi Singh, a 27-year-old writer from Pataudi village in Haryana, believes something deeper is at play here. “Creators like Puja are breaking stereotypes by speaking in English despite being from a small village in West Bengal. Baaghi Haryanvi talks about philosophy in Haryanvi,” she says. Singh, under the username @Gorraiya (sparrow in Hindi), has gained a following of 141,000 followers on Instagram by making reels on gender discourse and literature in Hindi. The idea that only urban, English-speaking people can be intellectual is being dismantled. “Their work reminds us that meaningful ideas come from many backgrounds and in many languages, often shaped by lived experience rather than elite spaces.”

D. Ramakrishna, popularly known as Ramki, a Mumbai-based advertising executive, consumes this content with both professional curiosity and genuine fascination. “Some of these accounts are so refreshing that the cynical part of you starts wondering if it’s all staged because the storytelling is that good,” he says. “It’s a welcome interruption to doomscrolling. Beyond memes, this is what’s actually happening in the country. It gives you a window into lives and ideas outside your echo chamber.”

Ramki, 61, admits the first lens is still urban elitism. “When content comes from small towns, we respond differently because it’s unexpected,” he adds. But the appeal doesn’t remain novelty-driven for long. “Puja, for me, has gone beyond the village framing. I now want to know which films she likes and why. After a point, that elitist lens wears off.”

Biswal, 31, points out that even the metrics have shifted. “Today, creators with just a few thousand followers are clocking millions of views,” he says. “Follower count has lost its meaning.” As a result, M-class creators (with millions of followers) and K-class creators (with thousands) now find themselves invited to the same rooms. “I’m optimistic about how that could change ideas of belonging and respect.”

But party invites only tell part of the story. Anurag Minus Verma, author and cultural critic, questions whether this moment signals genuine acceptance. He’s heard brand managers discuss campaigns with small-town creators in ways that unsettle him. “The language is disturbing,” he says. “It’s like picking up cheap labour from a labour chowk, one-off campaigns, transactional thinking.…

In his book The Great Indian Brain Rot (2025), Anurag writes that Instagram initially favoured creators with “class privilege”. When internet culture shifted from aspiration to irony, ‘cringe’ suddenly became acceptable on Instagram, he notes. But it’s still unclear whether this is real acceptance or ironic, and whether it will last beyond this wave, he adds, citing the example of Puneet Superstar, a creator from east Delhi who has over 9.8 million Instagram followers right now.

Once dismissed as cringe for reels showing him rub a pineapple cake on his face while riding a donkey in Delhi’s Sadar Bazaar, Puneet’s catchphrases like ‘nalle berojgar’ (unemployed slacker) were later mimicked by upper-caste and upper-class creators as a shortcut to virality. “First they mock you, then they appropriate you, then they call it a trend,” Anurag writes in the book.

Big creators hype them briefly, but it’s often a selfish branding exercise,” he adds. It’s similar to when global TikTokers were dancing to Indian songs during the pandemic for wider reach. “Nobody actually helps them understand how to work with brands or negotiate,” he says.

Nitya Kamble, a 22-year-old from Sagar, Madhya Pradesh, began posting dance reels to K-pop tracks six months ago. She had been learning K-pop choreography since the early months of the pandemic, but didn’t have a phone capable of recording high-resolution videos until recently. She got married last year and her husband upgraded his phone. She now uses it to record and upload videos in the morning and late evenings. During the day, her husband uses the phone while working at construction sites and often responds to her Instagram messages.

Kamble studied science in school and once hoped to become a nurse, but the pandemic stalled that plan. She went on to complete a bachelor’s degree in arts instead. She dances with her face covered. Living in a village, her mother-in-law—who often appears in the videos with her—advised her to do so to avoid unwanted attention. Kamble now posts almost every day. The reels, she says, are practice and preparation, a way to sharpen her skills and build visibility in the hope of eventually cracking a formal dance audition. She has around 23,600 followers, the bulk of them from South Korea, followed by Delhi, Mumbai, and Bengaluru.

A few weeks ago, she received an invitation to travel to Mumbai for a photoshoot and audition. She didn’t go. “Darr lagta hai, bada sheher hai,” she says. She was unsure if the offer, from a big city, was even genuine. While she has collaborated with urban dance creators online, Kamble hasn’t felt comfortable approaching any of them for guidance on navigating opportunities like these.

Dev (Baaghi Haryanvi) began posting after a personal run-in with the system left him frustrated by how little sociopolitical information travels within one’s immediate social world. If these conversations mattered, he felt, they should be accessible to the people around him, his neighbour included. That choice determined both his language and his format.

He speaks in Haryanvi because that is where his audience already is. And he chose reels because he realises that’s where attention has migrated. He compresses philosophy, politics, labour, dissent—ideas typically gated behind English, institutions, or long-form writing—into short videos designed to travel within the endless scroll. Today, he has 70 subscribers paying ₹400 a month on Instagram. “Money isn’t my end goal,” he says. “I don’t have many material desires. This gives me purpose.” Dev also admits that no one from the established creator ecosystem has reached out to guide him on monetisation now that he has chosen to do this full-time.

Choudhary from Rajasthan had an advantage these others don’t: spending a year working in ad agency in Mumbai in 2022. Even then, she realised they were underpricing themselves. When an agency came on board to represent their Instagram channel in April 2025, they started charging four times what they had been initially asking. But how many creators know an agent should 4X your rate, not halve it? The creator ecosystem is rife with stories of creators from diverse backgrounds getting shortchanged at the hands of an agent who took advantage of their lack of access to the market and awareness of their own worth in it.

Bhuvaneswar from Qoruz points out how, even as follower count loses relevance to views per reel, Instagram doesn’t yet provide a geographic breakup per post, making it harder for creators to fully understand their brand’s worth and negotiate their terms better.

Ramki is concerned that brands will continue to treat these creators as novelties. “They’ll do one or two campaigns, then move on,” he says. “They still see more value in conventional influencers.” His bigger worry is structural. “You know how MBAs think,” he says. “My fear is agents will come in and turn this into another gig economy: MBAs managing platforms, creators doing the labour.”

It’s a familiar pattern. Tech platforms promise democratisation, then build systems that concentrate power. The creator economy offered a new social contract: make good content, build an audience, earn a living. But the fine print was always there. Platforms control distribution. Agencies control access. Brands control budgets. And at the bottom are creators: producing the value that sustains the entire pyramid.

For creators who fit Instagram’s original aesthetic—English-speaking, metro-based, brand-literate, well-networked—the system was always navigable, if not entirely favourable. For everyone else, every advantage remains harder won and easier lost.

Choudhary doesn’t allow her sisters to interact with the media. “They wanted to make reels because that’s what they see everyone doing these days. So I indulged them. They go to school, come home, make reels. Only the good parts. The rest they should decide as adults.” There’s a protective instinct at play, an understanding of how fragile attention can be.

As Choudhary put it, we’re breathing again. The question is: who controls the air supply?