The least interesting way to describe Tulsi is as a village full of YouTubers. That phrasing invites the usual television treatment: a grandmother performs for a smartphone, somebody points at subscriber numbers, and urban viewers are permitted three minutes of astonishment that people outside a metro understand cameras.
What interests me about Tulsi, near Raipur in Chhattisgarh, is not technological novelty. Smartphones have been ordinary village objects for years. The remarkable part is social: residents have turned video production into a shared local practice. People act in one another’s sketches, lend locations, learn editing and move between roles. In an online economy obsessed with the solitary genius of the “creator”, Tulsi looks more like a repertory theatre with mobile data.
The village did not begin with an influencer fantasy
Accounts of Tulsi’s transformation trace it to Jai Verma and Gyanendra Shukla, who started making Chhattisgarhi videos and developed the channel Being Chhattisgarhiya. Other residents joined productions and then created channels of their own. An India Today account of the village describes a mature ecosystem rather than a lucky viral clip: writers, actors, technicians and residents learning from one another.
That distinction matters. Viral fame is an event; a local skill base is infrastructure. One person can accidentally collect a million views and still leave nothing behind. A community that knows how to frame a shot, record usable sound, write a comic scene and edit on limited equipment possesses knowledge that can migrate into weddings, advertising, local cinema, education or work in Raipur.
The collaborative habit also changes who gets to begin. A solitary aspiring filmmaker must find actors, persuade someone to hold the phone, borrow a room and solve every technical problem before making anything worth showing. In Tulsi, those resources are partly social. A beginner can enter through a modest task, observe a shoot and discover an aptitude without first declaring a grand career plan. That low threshold matters in a field whose glamorous language can make experimentation seem reserved for unusually confident people. A local production culture gives curiosity somewhere to go before it becomes professional ambition.
Tulsi also had a cultural runway. Reporting has noted the village’s tradition of performance, including Ramleela. I like that continuity because it punctures the lazy claim that platforms bestowed creativity on passive users. YouTube supplied distribution and a possible income stream. The appetite to perform, watch neighbours perform and turn familiar life into drama was already present.
Language is part of that continuity. Chhattisgarhi video does more than translate a generic internet format into another tongue. It allows jokes to depend on local rhythm, relationships and recognition. Viewers are not merely consuming a sketch; they are hearing a public voice that commercial Hindi entertainment often treats as peripheral. This does not make every upload culturally profound, nor should it. A language remains alive partly by being used for silliness, melodrama and ordinary entertainment rather than being displayed only as heritage. Tulsi’s creators can preserve something without behaving like museum attendants.
A public studio is a more radical idea than it sounds
When local authorities and the gram panchayat supported a dedicated production facility, Hamar Flix, they made an unusually intelligent public investment. The facility cost ₹25 lakh, according to reporting including a later Hindustan Times visit to Tulsi. Governments routinely fund physical stages, auditoriums and sports grounds. A studio serving local digital workers belongs to the same family, even if ring lights make administrators nervous.
The case for such a facility is not that online fame deserves a subsidy. It is that some productive tools are too expensive or too intermittently needed for every household to own. Cameras, lights, microphones and editing space resemble a community hall or workshop in that respect. Their value increases when many people can schedule and use them. The difficult work begins after inauguration: transparent access, maintenance, training and rules that stop one successful group from quietly treating public equipment as private property. A shared asset succeeds only if the sharing survives the ribbon-cutting.
Shared equipment lowers the cost of failure. That is crucial because most videos will not become hits and many channels will never provide a full salary. The mythology of the creator economy hides this base rate. It shows us the person who escaped a conventional job, not the thousands purchasing microphones for audiences that never arrive. Tulsi’s collaborative model distributes equipment, labour and learning; it does not eliminate risk, but it makes experimentation less financially foolish.
There is also value that subscriber counts cannot capture. A teenager who learns to edit may later cut a wedding film, a campaign video for a local business or instructional material for a school. Someone who becomes comfortable recording sound can work on productions that have nothing to do with personal celebrity. Even a failed channel can leave behind practical competence and a portfolio. I would judge the experiment partly by those quieter routes into paid work, not merely by whether Tulsi produces a nationally famous face. Public investment should build capabilities that remain useful after the original fashion cools.
I would still resist converting the village into a government slogan. “YouTube Village” is a charming label until every visiting official demands a performance and every young resident is treated as a future influencer. Tulsi contains farmers, teachers, students, older people and workers with ambitions that need not fit a thumbnail. A place should be allowed to have an unusual specialism without becoming a theme park devoted to it.
Collaboration does not automatically make the arrangement fair. The person whose face attracts viewers may receive attention that depends on several neighbours doing less visible work. Women may find participation constrained by household expectations even when a studio is available. Volunteers can be celebrated as a community while still supplying labour from which somebody else earns. Those tensions are not reasons to dismiss Tulsi; they are reasons for creators to discuss credit, payment and access openly. A cooperative culture deserves cooperative habits around money as much as around equipment.
There are harder questions too. Platform income can change without warning. Recommendation systems reward repetition, provocation and relentless output. Copyright claims can erase revenue. Family-friendly comedy may attract viewers today and disappear from their feeds tomorrow. A village that collectively learned production should therefore guard against collectively depending on one American platform.
That means treating YouTube as a route to an audience rather than as the owner of the entire enterprise. Skills, raw footage, local contacts and reputations can travel across platforms and into offline work. Creators can retain copies of their work, learn the terms attached to music and images, and build relationships with viewers that do not depend entirely on one recommendation feed. None of this guarantees income. It does, however, separate the durable part of Tulsi’s achievement—the ability to make media—from the fragile bargain offered by any particular technology company.
The useful export is cooperation, not imitation
I do not think every panchayat should now build a studio and instruct residents to become content creators. That is how a living local phenomenon gets flattened into a scheme with an acronym. A studio without an existing community of practice becomes another locked room inaugurated with a ribbon. Tulsi’s facility followed years of voluntary work; it did not manufacture that work from a tender document.
What other places can copy is the logic. Find the activity people already pursue—music, weaving, repair, food, theatre, agricultural instruction—and invest in the bottleneck they cannot solve individually. It might be recording equipment, a workshop, storage, broadband or a shared sales operation. The public contribution should strengthen a real network rather than stage a photo opportunity.
Officials should also ask modest questions before copying the model. Who already does the work? Which shared constraint repeatedly stops them? Who will manage the asset, and can newcomers use it without knowing the right person? The answers matter more than the novelty of the equipment. Success might mean more reliable income, lower production costs, apprenticeships or stronger local markets rather than a viral post. If the only measure is online reach, public policy will imitate the same attention economy it ought to balance.
I am also taken by the way collaborative production makes room for people who do not want to be stars. Online culture tells us visibility is the prize, but every watchable video needs someone checking sound, holding a reflector, finding a costume, remembering continuity or feeding the cast. Tulsi’s story gives those supporting roles a place in the local economy. That is more humane than insisting everyone turn a personality into a brand.
The internet usually extracts stories from villages: a strange incident is filmed, stripped of context and circulated for distant amusement. Tulsi has reversed that direction. Residents choose the stories, perform them in their own language and participate in making the image that travels. The result may sometimes be rough, sentimental or algorithmically familiar. It is still authorship.
So I am not impressed merely because a village can use YouTube. I am impressed because Tulsi has made an individualistic medium behave, however imperfectly, like a cooperative. The cameras will change, platforms may decline and subscriber counts will wobble. The habit of making things together is the part worth preserving.
