Tralalero tralala. Bombardino Crocodilo. Tung tung tung sahur.
What do these phrases have in common with Sukumar Ray’s poems?
They’re all examples of what the Internet now calls brainrot. It refers to content so absurd, that it leaves you laughing, confused, or hypnotised (or all three). It’s the label we’ve finally given to something that has existed in human culture far longer than TikTok loops and AI memes.
Today, brainrot is everywhere. You see it on TikToks repeating nonsense until your brain melts, chaotic Italian gibberish reels, or surreal YouTube edits stitched together from discarded dream fragments. It’s the core of doomscrolling culture. You might start watching a recipe video and end up with a distorted voice screaming "skibidi toilet" while spaghetti explodes in the background.
Today, it's Italian brainrot making the rounds, but the phenomenon isn’t new.
Before memes ruled the Internet, Sukumar Ray (1887–1923) was crafting Bengali nonsense poetry so brilliantly chaotic, you might assume it was ripped off of some modern shitpost. A luminary of the Bengal Renaissance, Ray built worlds where logic bent and language played tricks.
Characters like Ramtaram and Beshikoron spoke in riddles and argued in paradoxes with invented words. Reading Ray today feels like stumbling upon a 1920s Twitter thread, where everything rhymes, absurdity rules, and words drip with subtext.
His iconic works like Abol Tabol, HaJaBaRaLa, and Pagla Dashu were layered satires written for children but rich enough for adults to appreciate. They used nonsense to skewer colonial rule, blind nationalism, and the Bengali elite’s obsession with performative intellect.
Was he the first? Not quite.
While Sukumar Ray may be the godfather of Bengali brainrot, his genius belongs to a much older tradition of literary nonsense that spans cultures and centuries. This lineage becomes strikingly clear when we examine Lewis Carroll's Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland, who is akin to Ray's absurdist characters.
The Mad Hatter's iconic nonsensical dialogues ("Why is a raven like a writing-desk?" or "If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense") served the same essential function as Ray's wordplay. Both used deliberate absurdity as social commentary.
Where Carroll's tea party anarchist mocked Victorian England's rigid social conventions, Ray's chaotic verses ridiculed colonial bureaucracy and the Bengali elite's pretensions.
This parallel reveals an important truth: what we now call "brainrot" has always been more than random silliness. The nonsense tradition, whether in 19th century Oxford or 20th century Calcutta, demonstrates how absurdity can become a potent form of truth-telling.
We can also see how brainrot ties to anti-art movements
We can find traces of brainrot even in art or anti-art movements. Dadaism was one such anti-art movement that emerged in the 1910s and 1920s as a reaction to the horrors of World War I.
It rejected traditional art values, logic, and reason, embracing instead the illogical, irrational, and absurd. Dadaists used humor, satire, and shock value to challenge societal norms and the status quo.
Even philosophers weighs in. Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that nonsense arises when language breaks its own rules, yet humans still find meaning in chaos.
What we see of brainrot online is just the frosting. If we dig deep, we can see how it can be a coping mechanism, a rebellion against rigid structures, and, sometimes a mirror to society’s absurdities.
Whether it’s Ray mocking the babu class or a TikToker looping "tralalero tralala," brainrot often carries critique.
And that’s why Ray’s brainrot still matters. His work was funny, yes, but also sharp and subversive. Today, AI narrators repurpose his verses into eerie reels, turning century-old absurdism into something uncannily dystopian.
Even the silliest brainrot leaks meaning. What begins as innocent nonsense can reveal how gibberish smuggles in aggression, satire, or protest. Context is everything.
This is why AI, for all its mimicry, can never truly master nonsense. It can replicate absurdity and even make us laugh, but meaning-making requires human eyes.
We’re the ones who decide when nonsense is playful, when it’s subversive, when it’s rotting. AI can generate brainrot, but only we can understand it.