India as the Scout for Duangu: The View of Sanidhya Narain

During the roundtable discussion, "Short Drama Forum 2025," organized by Wenwen Han, Sanidhya Narain shared his experience and vision for the Indian mobile drama market. As co-founder of Dashverse, a mobile-first entertainment service with products like DashReels, he represents a generation of entrepreneurs directly shaping the future of the format.

A colossal and young market

For Sanidhya Narain, India has an incomparable asset: an extremely young population, massively connected to smartphones. Consumption habits are evolving rapidly, and viewers are demanding formats adapted to daily use, fragmented and immersive. Duanju perfectly meets this need.

With Dashverse and its offshoots like DashReels, Sanidhya is already exploring new ways of storytelling. He emphasizes the ability of Indian creators to test new narratives, to play with verticality, and to imagine plots calibrated for the speed of consumption. Where some markets hesitate, India is daring, seeking models that will work on a large scale tomorrow.

Beyond the domestic market, Sanidhya sees duanju as an opportunity for intercultural dialogue. Local stories, he says, can travel and reach other audiences if they find the right outlets. As a narrative laboratory, India could thus become a key player in the format's international growth.

Through his words, the profile of a passionate entrepreneur emerges, attentive to the evolution of uses and convinced that duanju is not a passing fad but a new audiovisual grammar.

Interview conducted by Wenwen Han. Discover her YouTube channel.

#WenwenHan