Indian Hongkonger YouTuber New Dellily breaks stereotypes and educates viewers about her culture
- Pranali Gupta’s Cantonese videos about her life and heritage reach more than 56,000 subscribers on the video sharing platform and 81,000 followers on Facebook
- Every week, Talking Points gives you a worksheet to practise your reading comprehension with questions and exercises about the story we’ve written
Pranali Gupta, known as New Dellily on YouTube, creates videos about her life and Indian culture in Cantonese. Photo: Xiaomei Chen
When Pranali Gupta walks around Hong Kong, she usually blends in with other commuters, but occasionally, a fan recognises her. From curious Chinese grannies to eager primary school students, the content creator has a diverse audience.
The 29-year-old social media star, known as New Dellily, recalled a mother who approached her, saying, “My daughter is a huge fan. She’s in secondary school, and she gets bullied a lot because her skin colour is different. My daughter loves your channel – that’s one way she copes with bullies, and she’s starting to speak up.”
Gupta was touched by the comment. “This is why I do this,” she said.
With more than 81,000 Facebook followers and 56,600 YouTube subscribers, she is likely Hong Kong’s best-known female entertainer of Indian descent making videos in Cantonese. She has a wide range of content: some of her videos counter misconceptions about Indian culture, while others are playful vlogs featuring her family members.
“If you’re brown, you speak Cantonese, and you’re on YouTube, it’s hard to miss,” she said.
Hongkongers from non-Chinese speaking homes do learn Cantonese, but it isn’t easy. Gupta credits her dad, who came to the city as a teen, for inspiring her.
“Whenever he [my dad] spoke to anyone in Cantonese, they would just be so friendly,” the YouTuber shared. “I wanted to be close to people. And I thought that if language were one of the factors [preventing that], then I’d learn it.”
Struggling to fit in
Gupta said that when she started her primary education, her parents could not afford international school, placing her in a local school.
“My first year, I was failing all my classes because everything was in Cantonese, except English class,” she recalled, adding she was the school’s only non-Chinese speaking student.
Intent on helping her child succeed, Gupta’s mum found a tutor who helped the youngster with homework and immersed her in the local language by taking her to a cha chaan teng and watching cartoons.
“I improved a lot that year,” Gupta recalled, saying she won the title of “Best Improvement” in her class.
However, she still struggled to make friends. Some classmates bullied her, weaponising stereotypes about Indians. Though teachers intervened when they could, Gupta thanked her mother for encouraging her to stand up to bullies.
“I didn’t want to keep quiet,” she said.
Once the youngster picked up more Cantonese, she started responding to bullies by educating them.
“When you don’t know about something, your first instinct is to joke about it,” she said. “If they would joke something like, ‘You always eat curry rice’, I’d be like, ‘Why do you always eat char siu fan?’”
Long before Gupta began discussing her culture online, she was responding to micro-aggressions from peers – even scaring away her brother’s tormentors. “I don’t want … my future kids or the next generation to also go through [the experience of] people laughing at their culture.”
Subverting stereotypes
Over time, Gupta made friends and became a “Q&A expert for Indian culture”, a role she continued in university, she said. After she graduated and began working, a friend suggested that she launch a YouTube channel.
Gupta thought it was a joke: “I was like, ‘Haha, so funny. What should I talk about – my culture?’ And she was like, ‘Yeah, why not?’”
So her friend brought a camera to Gupta’s home and they filmed a video about trying a Chinese dating app. “The response was great,” the YouTuber recalled.
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Encouraged, she continued. Her first videos to catch people’s attention included one debunking stereotypes about India and another explaining traditional clothes. Her most popular upload to date includes her husband.
“[We] answered questions about what Indian couples go through … how our parents reacted when we were dating, whether Indian people really date or if they just get married,” Gupta shared, adding that her local Chinese viewers were surprised by the content.
“Even my friends were like, ‘You guys go for movies and dinner like us?’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, what did you think we were doing? Dancing in a room? No, stop watching Indian movies,’” she laughed.
Celebrating all of Hong Kong’s stories
In 2021, Gupta had the opportunity to act in a locally-produced film, My Indian Boyfriend. Despite feeling nervous about working with full-time actors, the content creator, who played the sister of the male protagonist, was grateful to be on a team with others who looked like her.
“You’re eating food together, and you’re not … having to explain what the food is,” she recalled fondly.
From interviewing people in marginalised communities for the Equal Opportunities Commission to collaborating with Mehek Gidwani, an Indian Hongkonger and member of the LGBTQ community, Gupta hopes to showcase the city’s diversity. “People with different skin colours will be like, ‘I’m a Hongkonger’ because we’ve lived here all our lives,” she explained.
She credits her strong sense of cultural identity to her parents, who raised her to find her footing as a Hongkonger while maintaining her Indian roots.
“[They] blended all these local cultures with our Indian culture … We are Hongkongers. But we are also Indian, so we have two identities that we should be proud of.”
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