The curious case of Indian Swifties

Until April 19, not a single international act had made it to India’s Top 50 Songs chart on Spotify this year. That changed when Taylor Swift released her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. In one day, the album’s lead single, ‘Fortnight’, debuted at No 18, while eight other tunes from the 31-track collection entered the top 200.  
 
The pop behemoth has yet to land on Indian shores, but the country’s Swifties are rabid as ever, eager for any glimpse of their hero (or Anti-Hero, if you will). When her concert film, Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour, was released here in November last year, cinema chain PVR INOX sold 3,00,000 tickets (with 25,000 tickets sold on just the opening day) for the movie across 75 cities, from Srinagar to Salem and from Kota to Kolkata. Theatres turned into veritable karaoke bars, with fans singing along, dancing in their seats, and parading down the aisle dressed in outfits that paid homage to their favourite ‘Era’ or album. 
 
A not-insignificant Indian contingent also managed to see her live this March when she performed in Singapore, the closest geographical stop on her ongoing world trek. After the movie premiered on Disney+ Hotstar that same month, fans started contests to see who’s watched it the most frequently. In Mumbai, Pune, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, and Hyderabad, fans regularly congregate at Swiftie Nights, essentially a singing, listening, and dancing party that two Indian fan girls have been organising since December 2021. Their Instagram page has more than 26,000 followers, and tickets reportedly sell out in minutes. “It feels like a safe space to sing, dance, and cry your heart out to Taylor Swift,” says beauty influencer and long-time Swiftie, Deep Pathare. 
 
Tribute gigs have become increasingly popular, too. “The energy is insane,” says lawyer Chelsea Das, who performs such shows with her friend and co-vocalist Kiara Alemao in Mumbai. “There are hundreds of people singing the lyrics louder than we are.” At all these events, Swifties come wearing merchandise that they’ve either made themselves or bought online from the dozens of small businesses that peddle everything from jerseys to journals to cater to the seemingly insatiable demand from fans looking to don their devotion. Of course, no ensemble is complete without friendship bracelets—spelling out a song name, album title, or lyric excerpt—which fans make and then trade with each other. 
 
It’s clear that even in this age of hyper-personalised, algorithm-driven market segmentation, Taylor Swift’s following rivals those of pop superstars such as Madonna and Michael Jackson at the peak of monoculture. In India, the frenzy she elicits has been compared to that evoked by the likes of Shah Rukh Khan.  
 
As these super-Swifties featured below tell us, there’s just something about TayTay. For some, it’s about how she essays the emotional highs and lows we experience with lovers, friends, and frenemies. For others, it’s about how deeply she seems to care about her fans and how she never fails to express her gratitude to them. Still others idolise her for how she has fought for what’s rightfully due to herself and her fellow artists. For all of them though, the main reason is simple—listening to her makes them happy. 

Natasha Mahtani, 27, artist manager, Mumbai 

A bona fide Super Swiftie, Mahtani hasn’t just watched the pop icon perform live six times, she’s also met her. In 2017, she was invited by TayTay’s team to be part of the secret listening sessions the singer held for superfans ahead of the release of Reputation. Mahtani, who was studying in Los Angeles at the time, managed to make it to Nashville for the meet and greet at the singer’s house. 
 
She echoes a chorus of Swifties who loved how TayTay gave her undivided attention to her fans: “She knew every single person’s name and where they had come from.” Mahtani even got a chance to hold the 14-time Grammy Award winner’s trophy for 2009’s Fearless, the very record that made her a Swiftie when she was all of 11. “I know it sounds clichéd, but [it was like] somebody was writing about my own personal experiences. Even on the new album, there are songs that I feel were written about my life.” 

Chelsea Das, 25, lawyer and singer/songwriter, Mumbai

Chelsea Das has been a Swiftie for more than half her 25-year life. Das, who’s been staging Taylor tribute shows across Mumbai since 2022, was introduced to her music back in 2008. Then, at age nine, she heard ‘Our Song’ on her family’s car stereo. “I really enjoyed it even though I never liked the country music that my parents played,” she recalls.  “I’m an only child,” says Das. “[Listening to Taylor] was kind of like having an elder sibling give you advice through songs. I’ve grown up with her.” 
 
Her love story with Taylor has continued into her adulthood and even made its way into her career. A freelance lawyer specialising in the music business, Das sometimes uses the chart conqueror’s well-documented battle with her old record label, which led her to re-record her first six albums, as a case study when explaining copyright law.

Trisha Devnani, 12, student, Mumbai

 In addition to memorising all of her favourite pop star’s song lyrics, Devnani has also imbibed some of her entrepreneurial spirit. The eighth-grade student makes her own TS stickers, bookmarks, and posters that she trades with friends. Recently, she downloaded and printed Swiftopoly—a fan-created version of Monopoly in which TayTay’s songs replace the properties—and used it to fashion her own version of the board game in which the winner gets a (notional) ticket to the Eras tour. 
 
“Taylor inspires me to be myself,” says Devnani, who finds comfort in the recently minted billionaire’s compositions and feels she stands out from other artists on account of her originality.

Gwenllian Fflur, 52, social media manager, Goa 

A late entrant into the Swifties club, Gwenllian Fflur didn’t get into Taylor Swift until 2022’s Midnights, but she loved the album so much that it propelled her check out the artist’s back catalogue and find out more about the woman behind the hits. “Last year, I watched [the documentary] Miss Americana in which she came across as smart, savvy, and tough,” says former UK resident, who moved to India in 2015. “I respected that she spoke out against the Republicans at the risk of alienating a lot of people. It was a ballsy move.” 
 
Fflur says the superstar is one of the few pop artists on her playlist. “I like that she writes her own songs whereas everything else on the charts today sounds really manufactured, robotic, and dull.” As an older Swiftie, Gwen might stand out in a crowd of tweens and Gen Z-ers but she stans TS for the same reasons. “Maybe [in] the times we live in, you need to listen to someone who makes you feel happy and that’s what Taylor does.” 

Meera Krishnan, 7, student, New Delhi 

The elementary schooler had just two things on her Christmas wishlist last year: a cinnamon roll keychain and something considerably harder to acquire: tickets to see Taylor Swift in Singapore in March 2024. Fortunately, Santa showed up. 
 
Krishnan has been listening to Swift’s tunes for less than a year, but she’s already learned to play both ‘Love Story’ and ‘Welcome to New York’ on the piano. She cracked the second tune “on my own by listening to it 1,000 times,” she says. In addition to the musicality (“her songs have beautiful words and catchy beats”), Krishnan is impressed by her idol’s seemingly inexhaustible energy during her three-hour plus show. “She doesn’t stop [even if] it’s raining.”

Shrey Jadav, 27 vocalist, Surat/Mumbai 

Among the relatively few guys you’d spot at a Swifties gathering, Jadav started listening to TayTay around the time he had his “first mini heartbreak”, when he was about 13. “I heard ‘Teardrops On My Guitar’ and thought, if there was a female version of me, this is what she’d write,” says the singer-songwriter and resident vocalist with the National Centre for the Performing Arts’ Symphony Orchestra of India.  
 
That was almost 15 years ago in Surat, where his family is based. For Jadav, who moved to Mumbai in 2014, Swift has remained a constant source of inspiration. Although his elder sister is just a casual fan, he thanks her for introducing him to his icon. And the siblings have planned to catch the star’s concert live in London this August.