How K-Pop Is Powering A New Wave Of 'Girl Power' In India

It’s 2 a.m. in Delhi, and in a college hostel, a group of students gather around their phones, refreshing YouTube to stream NewJeans’ latest video before their global fandom friends call them out in the group chat. On social media, hashtags like #IndiaLovesLisa light up the timeline almost after every comeback, while Blackpink edits flood Instagram reels. What might look like “just fangirling” is, in reality, a movement that has quietly grown massive in India, stretching from school classrooms in Lucknow to college corridors in Bengaluru, to fan clubs in Mumbai with thousands of members.

For many young women, the joy, obsession, and solidarity of fangirling K-pop idols isn’t only about music, it’s also about carving out identity, sisterhood, and resistance.

More Than Just Music

K-pop’s girl groups aren’t only entertainers. For many fans, they’re icons who bring people together and spark entire online communities. In India, these fandoms have become little pockets of the internet where Gen Z women swap stories about gender, push back at stereotypes, and lean on a larger sense of sisterhood.

In Mumbai, it isn’t unusual to find a teenager still awake at 3 a.m., streaming a NewJeans track, while halfway across the world someone in Seoul, Manila, or São Paulo is hitting play at the same time. From the outside, it’s just another late-night stream. But together, these small rituals show how young women are stitching networks that spill across borders and cultures.

And these networks aren’t hidden anymore. Fan clubs in India, like Blink India for Blackpink or Bunnies of India for NewJeans, pull people together for streaming parties, giveaways, and even charity drives, where money raised goes to flood relief or women’s NGOs in the name of their idols.

Fans spend hours online, making edits and chasing hashtags until they show up in the trends, and even translating Korean interviews into Hindi or English so nobody feels excluded. And all that effort? It’s not only about the music. It’s about girls staking out a corner of the internet, making it theirs, and running it their own way.

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Fangirling as Self-Discovery

For many, this feels personal.“Being a fan of Blackpink made me more confident,” says Harshita, from Delhi. “People call fangirling silly, but in our group chats I’ve found friends who hype me up, support my career dreams, and remind me that being a girl doesn’t mean being quiet.”

This shows that it’s not only about sitting back and watching. It’s about being part of it, getting involved, and feeling like it actually gives you a boost.

When Fangirling Becomes Feminist

The feminist vibe here is impossible to miss. Blackpink’s mix of bold fashion and unapologetic confidence, or NewJeans’ playful take on “girlhood,” really hits Indian fans who are often told to shrink themselves to fit rigid societal norms. The idols show a version of femininity where softness and strength can exist together, and it makes fans think twice about gender roles in their own lives.

Conversations about body positivity, double standards in dating, or women going after ambitious careers usually spill out of fandom spaces and into real-life debates, so yes, fangirling gets unexpectedly political.

This really matters in a country where girlhood gets policed a lot. Traditional expectations might demand modesty, restraint, and silence, but K-pop fandom gives something different: freedom. On Twitter threads, Discord calls, or Instagram edits, Indian girls can scream, cry, obsess, and create without having to apologise for it. By doing that, embracing all the excess, joy, and passion, feels like a small rebellion against the script they’re usually handed.

And that’s where the real excitement comes in. Unlike the usual feminist spaces, which can feel serious or academic, K-pop fandoms are just full of glitter, laughter, and all kinds of emotion. In these spaces, passion isn’t only allowed, but you get to celebrate it and let it out. Loving a girl group loudly and without holding back? That in itself becomes a feminist act.

From charity projects to late-night streaming parties, from standing up against body-shaming online to carving out digital spaces of sisterhood, Indian K-pop fandoms are rewriting what it means to be young, female, and powerful. For Gen Z girls, Blackpink and NewJeans aren’t only playlists, they’re more like blueprints for a global girlhood, where solidarity can travel faster than beats per minute.

Views expressed by the author are their own.