'Benny Lava' and the buffalax-ing of Indian songs: Was onetime internet trend racist, or harmless fun?

‘Allegedly Problematic’ is a monthly column by Kuzhali Manickavel, which takes a cheeky look at literary/cultural offerings from the past that would now be considered, well, problematic — and asks, ‘But are they really?’.

Read more from the series  here .

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Today, we will be looking at the gripping question, “That whole buffalax thing — were they really making fun of Prabhu Deva and Daler Mehndi, or nah?” I was asked this by someone who wasn’t really interested in what I had to say, which was totally rude, but anyway.

First, let’s get the tedium of explaining buffalax out of the way. It is a rather old online phenomenon, which comes from the username of a former YouTuber, Buffalax, who became famous for making videos, many of which used Indian content. A buffalax can also be called soramimi, which is, according to Wikipedia, a Japanese term that means interpreting song lyrics in one language as similar sounding lyrics in another language. A buffalax can also be called a mondegreen, which is defined as words or phrases misheard in ways that yield new meanings. This is done in many different languages but we will just focus on the English ones, because that is the language with which we have the most complicated history.

Basically buffalaxes can be hilarious, especially when the source language has words in it that sound like gay, poop, boob, balls and pee in your language. Buffalax’s original YouTube channel no longer exists but I watched some of the more famous buffalaxed videos, by which I mean I started watching them but didn’t necessarily make it to the end of the video. To be fair, songs in other languages have been buffalaxed as well, but obviously we only care about the Indian ones.

My notes proved to be unhelpful but here they are anyway.

‘Benny Lava’ (’Kalluri Vaanil’ from Pennin Manathey Thottu) — This is Buffalax’s most famous video and I regret to say that for the most part, I did not get this, probably because I understand Tamil. Does ‘maanavar nenjil maintha nilavo’ really sound like ‘minor bun engine made benny lava’? Maybe it does a little. But not really.

‘Indian Nipple Song’ (’Dilbar’ from Sirf Tum) — Super-disappointed this was not called ‘Crazy Indian Nipple Song’. Does ‘dilbar’ really sound like ‘nipple’? Does ‘kya deewanapan hai’ really sound like ‘can’t live on a butter head’? So many questions!

‘Urvasi Urvasi’ from Kaadhalan — Hahaha ok, I kinda get it here but not really.

‘Girly Man’ (’Golimaar’ from Donga) — This seems to be one of the go-to videos for when someone wants to talk about “Crazy Indian Videos!!!!!” ‘Golimaar’ sounds more like ‘go lead Mark’ than ‘girly man’, no?

‘Tunak Tunak Tun’ by Daler Mehndi — I feel like the language issue aside, this would be a flabbergasting video for anyone not familiar with Daler Mehndi. Amazing, but flabbergasting.

‘Sha ra ra ra ra’ by Daler Mehndi — Aw, I remember this song! It was off the chain back in the day. And I forgot to watch the buffalax version of this, but whatever.

As someone who is not the target audience for most things, I can say with a great deal of confidence that I was not the target audience for these videos either. If you’re familiar with the source languages used, it’s difficult to switch and view them as a collection of gibberish English words. It’s not impossible, but it takes some going back and forth and at some point the effort became too much for me and I just ended up singing along with the original song.

It is also super-weird to get up in arms over someone slapping gibberish onto ‘Kalluri Vaanil’ or ‘Dilbar’. I mean, it’s not like these songs were examples of ground-breaking lyrical excellence.

Apart from that, this is hardly the first time people have LOL’d at us on the internet. We are Indians, which means by default that whatever we are doing must be crazy. The way we dance is crazy, our music is crazy, our food is crazy, our weddings are crazy, our toilet habits are crazy and our traffic is crazy. Half of the LOL content out there wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for us crazy Indians living our best crazy lives. The ‘Benny Lava’ buffalax was originally labelled as ‘Crazy Indian Video, Real Title Unknown’, as if it was some terribly obscure alien artefact that was of course just-so-Indian-and-so-crazy. Which is interesting because it was actually a pretty mainstream, run-of-the-mill, and ultimately forgettable Tamil movie song featuring a very well-known actor (at least in Tamil Nadu).

It frankly feels a little precious and nit-picky to be looking at buffalax videos this way. But that’s just what we are going to do in our next instalment , because that’s what this column is all about.

Kuzhali Manickavel  is the author of the short story collections ‘Insects Are Just like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings’ and ‘Things We Found During the Autopsy’, both available from Blaft Publications