Shark Tank India loves an underdog, as long as they come armed with enough capital to start and run a successful business. 

Last year, the show ran a promotional campaign, urging businesses to apply for its fifth season. The campaign takes a jibe at corporate bosses, depicting ultra-rich CEO’s mourning the loss of employees to the rise of entrepreneurship. A sarcastic Hindi voiceover tells the average worker to spare these bosses by working 70-hour weeks, sacrificing their personal lives, and abandoning their ambitions—so that “their millionaire bosses can become billionaires.” 

And no matter what, “Do not apply to Shark Tank,” the ad concludes sardonically. 

In June 2021, Sony Entertainment Television acquired the rights to adapt the American business reality show. Shark Tank features angel investors, or “sharks,” who are presented a variety of pitches by start-up founders and entrepreneurs across the country.

Up-and-coming founders attempt to sell their business, and the sharks question them on their business models, profit numbers, product quality, distribution channels, and more. The discussions are dramatically edited, geared towards a potential investment deal, depending on how much the sharks like the pitch. 

The American Shark Tank features billionaire investors such as Mark Cuban, former owner of the Dallas Mavericks, and branding genius Daymond John, who founded FUBU. Shark Tank America is premised on money, and Americans having lots of it. One of the most successful businesses to come out of it is Bombas, a sock brand that in 2024 hit about two billion dollars in lifetime sales. The founders recount that seconds after the episode aired on TV, their website crashed.

Another noteworthy start-up from the show is Ring, a video-enabled doorbell that the sharks famously did not end up investing in. Despite this, the company took off in ways no one could imagine—with Amazon acquiring it for a billion dollars in 2018. 

The Indian version, which began airing on television and OTT in December that year, essentially replicated the American format. Across five seasons, this core format has remained consistent. Each season features a set of new sharks alongside the original five—Aman Gupta, Namita Thapar, Vineeta Singh, Peyush Bansal, and Anupam Mittal—who have remained on the panel across all seasons. 

Even after several seasons featuring caste and resource-privileged entrepreneurs, Shark Tank India invites us into a world where we must imagine these individual contestants exist in isolation, separated from both reality and their own identities. In presenting itself as a neutral, national interest project, the show dislocates the individual from their caste and religious backgrounds, viewing them as “self-made,” unaffected by the very identities that enabled them to walk onto the golden set. 

The Fantasies of “Development” and Nation-Building

Aman Gupta, in one of his interviews, speaks at length about meeting the Prime Minister, being in “awe” of him, the global delegations they have attended together, and his own company’s decision to begin manufacturing in India after the PM’s push for Make in India. At one point, he says he would love to meet the PM one-on-one, “to tell him what we’re doing more, and how we can help the country…”

This language, blending two separate concepts of nation and money, is something all the sharks deploy, hinting that inside the sparkly golden sets of the show, something akin to nation-building is taking place. Like its American counterpart, the show is driven by the fundamental idea that making and hoarding large amounts of wealth is essential not just for your own well-being but for the country at large. 

This fantasy of an entrepreneurial utopia is sustained by a curated idea of “development”—a word used excessively in political discourse since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government came to power in 2014. 

Yet, more than a decade since its announcement, the numbers surrounding Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Make in India” initiative reveal its failure. The manufacturing growth rate, since 2014, has remained stagnant at 5.9 per cent. And as for entrepreneurs, more than 28000 start-ups have shut down in the past couple of years. 

In April 2025, one of the BJP’s own ministers, Piyush Goyal, made headlines for taking a dig at start-up owners. At the second edition of the Start-up Mahakumbh—a government-led conclave which brought together a large congregation of startups and entrepreneurs —Goyal lamented that Indian start-ups aren’t making any deep-tech innovations compared to the rest of the world.

He said: “They [start-ups] are focused on food delivery apps, turning unemployed youth into cheap labour so that the rich can get their meals without getting out of their house.” These statements left the industry rattled, with several founders rushing to defend their businesses against the minister’s critique.  

As Pooja Prasanna points out, Goyal is both right and wrong. Indeed, no large-scale tech or innovation has come out of India. Shark Tank India’s own range of contestants—many of whom are selling gluten-free and “healthier” food alternatives, wellness or fashion-based products—is a testament to this. 

Yet, this lack of innovation largely reflects his own government’s policies and funding priorities. For instance, China pledged about 1.4 trillion dollars into tech and infrastructure, which is ten times more than the money India put into it. Even Research and Development—the very bedrock of innovation—receives a mere 0.64% of the country’s GDP. 

Quite unintentionally then, Goyal’s own statement ends up driving home the fact that business, or certain sections of society generating more wealth, is not, in fact, a marker of a “better nation.” 

Despite this, catering to the aspirations of a perceived “middle class,” Shark Tank India attempts to sell them the myth that hustle alone is enough to succeed in the “new India.”

The Mainstreaming of Hindutva

Shark Tank India frequently serves its viewers a toxic theatre of religious hegemony and economic nationalism.

An episode in the show’s ongoing fifth season titled “Heritage, Expression & AI: The Future of India” features a business couple from Noida, selling soft toys of Hindu Gods. The couple, who are co-founders of a start-up named Panda’s Box, begin the pitch by posing a question to the sharks: who should children look up to as role models—Western superheroes or “Indian cultural superheroes?” 

The question itself is laden with ideology, presenting Indian-ness as essentially Hindu. Scholars Anderson and Longkumer argue that this conflation is a kind of Neo-Hindutva, in which the ideology is fostered in indirect, mundane ways, beyond the structural framework of the Sangh. The entrepreneurs go on to speak of their staggering range of religious kids’ toys of Hanuman, Krishna, Ganesha, and more. They specifically exhibit their Hanuman soft toy, which plays the Hanuman chalisa mantra when pressed. 

What is being presented for the audience to pick up on is this synonymous, intertwined identity of the country and its dominant religion. This narrative is not only advanced by the contestants and their brand; it is something that the sharks—and by extension the show—actively participate in.

Namita Thapar brings in a dash of pseudoscience, explaining how a lot of “international research” supposedly proves that chanting has huge bodily health benefits, including a lowered heart rate, leading to community gatherings and “bhajan-clubbing.” 

These benefits are framed as universal, effectively positioning a product deeply steeped in religion, to somehow be beyond it. It is also impossible to imagine a minority religion and its deities or scriptures getting this kind of massive space on national television. 

This majoritarianism plays out in the sharks’ own lives, too. For example, Namita Thapar faced massive trolling and threats online after she posted a video on the health benefits of Namaz.

Right after the entrepreneurs introduce themselves and their brand, Anupam Mittal responds by casually chanting, “Jai Shri Ram.” This slogan by itself carries a charged and political meaning. Repeatedly, and across the country, Hindu mobs have attacked Muslims, while forcing them to chant the Jai Shri Ram—making it a violent political slogan, associated with the mob lynching of Muslims.

To deploy it as casually as Mittal does, on national television, is a choice—a tactic, perhaps, to make one’s political allegiance clear. 

Caste, Capital, and the Savarna “Middle-Class” Entrepreneur

The Panda’s Box couple can be understood as the template of the kind of people who participate in Shark Tank India—and perhaps also watch it. They are polished English-speakers, have studied and worked abroad, are armed with MBAs, and can relatively easily leave the salaried life and foray into business.

At one point, the sharks ask them if they ever regret leaving their comfortable, well-paying jobs. They respond promptly, by explaining their desire and passion to build something larger that involves “teaching culture” to young children. Mittal reinforces this by speaking of the “sacrifices” inherent to entrepreneurship, framing the couple’s decision to set up shop as “taking the plunge.”

The plunge is what the show celebrates—the kind of people who dive into the deep, because they’re backed by MBAs, financial cushioning, and considerable caste capital. This is the only story that Shark Tank India knows how to tell. The central, most consistent character of this story is a Savarna middle-class entrepreneur playing saviour to India’s cultural heritage, artisans, and culture. 

Imagimake’s Indian-themed toys are applauded for manufacturing in India; “traditional” Indian cookware, helmed by privileged caste founders claiming to “boost India’s artisan economy,” gets an investment deal from all the sharks present; a mother-son duo making jewellery for decorating idols of Hindu Gods in temples garners a lot of praise and good publicity. The examples are endless.

With a masked caste privilege, they become faces for a non-existent meritocracy. The show operates on a simplistic logic: the more money you make, the more you participate in nation-building. 

This middle class itself is a nearly mythical category, with almost everyone in the country claiming to be a part of it. Yet, a Pew Research Centre study suggests that only about 2% of Indians actually fall in the middle-income category, with up 95 % of the population continuing to be poor. The “State of Inequality in India” report further reveals that earning a monthly income of merely Rs. 25,000 or higher already puts one into the top 10% earners in the country.

In the presence of such glaring inequality, it becomes evident that having the capital to start a business is something that most cannot afford. 

In his book Meet The Savarnas, scholar Ravikant Kisana writes that Modi’s rise can be understood within the context of a new Brahmin-Baniya alignment in the corporate world. New India, therefore, is essentially a rejection of the older guard of the Savarna elite, which largely functioned as a Brahmin-Kayastha domination.

This “new vision” of India, according to Kisana, “was erected upon the preceding decade of non-BJP rule, where the Savarna middle class was given a free hand in shaping socio-economic narratives.” What we see today is not a shift in power dynamics, but a realignment in caste arithmetics. 

A lot of pitchers on the show come from business families that back them up with capital. For example, in season 4, the cousins behind the jaggery brand Gudworld explained how they source raw materials from their 400-acre family land and that their initial seed funding of ₹4.5 crore was put up by their family.

This family and generational wealth is ever-present on the show; Anupam Mittal himself has stated that 18% of contestants were “couplepreneurs” and 34% were family-run businesses. Across seasons, then, this pattern reveals itself: pitchers arrive with pre-existing manufacturing capacity, family land, or seed money. 

Even while the show’s registration states that pre-revenue companies can apply, these are rarely featured on the show. Businesses that get invested in are largely in a selling or profit-making phase. The aggressive myth-making that it indulges in, of the “self-made entrepreneur,” is ignorant and untrue

This new kind of Savarna dominance is ever-present on Shark Tank India. The show is less about innovation and more about toeing the line. It sells the stories of the privileged, peddling their success as evidence of a broken system working. It is in many ways a reflection of what we have come to understand as progress and nation-building. 

Political Endorsement: Explicitly Praising the BJP and Modi

Over the five seasons, the show has also frequently praised the flagship economic policies of the BJP government. For instance, in the fourth season, one episode begins with a founder from Morbi, Gujarat, whose business is distributing and sampling ceramic tiles. In her pitch to the sharks, she cites one reason for her business success as new government regulations that have enabled “the ease of doing business.” 

Kunal Bahl, the founder of Snapdeal and a shark on the show, while examining the tile samples, says it’s nice to see “Made in India” carved on all of them. The scene is constructed in a way that makes no direct mention of politicians, governments, or leaders, but the language it uses is directly borrowed from the BJP’s own political messaging. 

“Make in India” was one of the earliest BJP policies designed to boost entrepreneurship, manufacturing, and job creation within the country. The idea of “ease of doing business” was a core part of this policy framework, as declared by the Prime Minister himself on various occasions, referring to creating a regulatory environment that is simpler and more conducive to starting a business.

Using these phrases back-to-back in a conversation between a fledgling startup owner and an established investor acts as a tacit, almost invisible political endorsement. 

Nonetheless, many of the sharks have publicly endorsed the Prime Minister and the BJP. Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, who also had a brief stint as a shark, directly credited the BJP government and its policies for someone like him—“a small town boy”—succeeding in business. 

Aman Gupta, who owns Boat Lifestyle, too, has praised the government on several occasions. While receiving an award from the Prime Minister, he applauded the leader for his “Make in India” policy, claiming 70% of his company’s manufacturing now takes place in India. These endorsements are a part of the narrative-building, one in which India is achieving unprecedented economic heights. This is exactly what the BJP has been relentlessly propagating –the unlocking of a new, untapped potential and innovation in the country, the arrival of a “new India,” under their watch.

Kunal Bahl, in an interview with NDTV Profit, stated that the word “start-up” entered national discourse only post 2015, when the Prime Minister launched the Start Up India initiative. This, Bahl claims, gave start-ups “legitimacy.” A decade later, as Sandeep Mertia writes, Start-up India has created several state-supported start-ups that failed, and the system by itself did not use this failure in any meaningful or instructive way. 

For example, a large number of companies like Blinkit, Zepto, Swiggy, or Zomato are not creating anything new; they’re connecting already existing services. The booming quick commerce industry that runs on an infrastructure of gig-workers hasn’t even generated formal employment; instead, it has furthered class and caste inequalities. 

A Niti Ayog report projects that the gig workforce will grow to 23.5 million workers by 2029-30 from an estimated 7.7 million workers in 2020-21. Gig workers—whose labor is central, but invisibilized in the quick commerce economy—work long hours with negligible wages to cater to the needs of upper-caste, upper-class people. In a report, a Zepto delivery worker says that he doesn’t even get time for lunch. “Lunch is when I’m stuck in traffic,” he tells the reporter.

This is precisely where Shark Tank India does the work of economic fantasy building. In season 2, we meet the founders of the brand Nirmalaya—a brand selling premium incense sticks and other perfume-based products used in Hindu pujas. Their pitch hinges on the fact that the fragrance in the incense sticks is made of recycled waste flowers gathered from temples. Even though the brand also sells essential oils and other puja accessories, the aspect of recycling becomes their focus; it becomes the thing that makes them larger than a business. 

This is a format the show has perfected—with each pitch, religiously attempts to suggest that every gluten-free snack and vegan lipstick inherently means something more than itself. It is somehow a step towards nation-building, spoonfeeding its viewers this flawed logic, expecting them not to question who is building what, for whom, and at whose expense.

The Social Enterprise Myth and the Moral Branding of Capitalism

The entire show rests on branding the rich as inherently good people. It persistently returns to present itself as a changemaker, an advocate for social good. It reaches for a self that is virtuous and deeply engaged in “empowerment,” without explicitly taking on socio-political structures that create oppression in the first place.

In its fourth season, Shark Tank India staged two social impact episodes—#Ecopreuners, featuring founders “trying to make sustainable businesses that will help the environment,” and another one themed around showcasing entrepreneurs living with disabilities or those working to “empower” them. 

One of the pitches that came in during these special episodes was from an entrepreneur who founded Cool The Globe, an app that tracks your carbon footprint and offers solutions to be more eco-friendly in one’s day-to-day life. The founder is a young girl—shown to be full of hopes, dreams, and strength—leading other individuals to create and inspire change.

The questions asked of her by the sharks, such as what led her into this journey, how her parents raised her, all work as clever narrative tools to present her as a solitary individual—someone who has, against all odds, crawled out of societal hierarchies and is working, miraculously, beyond them. 

Her solution, too, is individualistic in nature—ignorant of the fact that one’s carbon footprint is linked to one’s social status. The world’s wealthiest 1% have a carbon footprint more than two times higher than the poorest 50%. In India, research shows that households that fall in the top 20% have a carbon footprint almost seven times higher than that of lower-income households.

What does it mean then, for a group of wealthy businessmen, to sit on a slick set and debate over whether they should invest in an app that claims to solve problems that they themselves helped create? 

On Shark Tank India, systemic problems are separated from their societal roots, sanitized, and presented as entrepreneurial opportunities. This idea of a “social enterprise” or entrepreneurship as a solution to societal problems is inherently flawed. It suggests that an individual is at the centre of social and economic life, holding them responsible for their condition.

In reality, these issues require state-led solutions. A social enterprise cannot solve them—its function is more seductive here, it works as a strategic PR move, allowing the rich to look good, and even virtuous, while they continue to hoard both wealth and power. 

Ultimately, the show isn’t merely about getting an investment deal from a shark; the class of people it features would probably have gotten their investment deals even before the show’s existence. It is equally—perhaps more—about “being seen” on national television. While the promotional campaigns may mock the ultra-rich, the show itself is propaganda for a new kind of rich, who aren’t doing anything differently per se. 

The larger cultural function of the show then becomes about the people that Shark Tank India showcases—both the contestants and the judges. Apart from staging a kind of meritocracy that doesn’t exist, the show inevitably justifies the creation and hoarding of wealth. It presents wealth as some grand equalizer—intentionally humanizing the wealthy, and suggesting that, perhaps, they deserve their wealth for being more daring, more creative, more enterprising than the rest of India. 

In many ways, then, the pool of contestants who do get funded, and the sharks themselves, both reveal something larger: who has the cultural and economic capital to dream in India.