For many people, filming one’s joyrides and pleasure trips on bikes and making reels for social media may mean just that—a form of entertainment. But for Alisha Ansari, such videos have also turned out to be a veritable ‘source of income’. So popular are the 29-year-old Bengaluru resident’s videos that brands and organisations reach out to her for paid collaborations. Ansari has already worked with several companies such as Soiewoman, Elite Proteins, One Whey, and Bolt Nutrition, doing photoshoots and video projects for their products, besides modelling with bikes and biking gear.
That she’s a fitness coach also helps her cause. “Anyone will tell you how important fitness is to be able to ride an adventure bike,” says Ansari. “Not only do you have to be fit and agile, but you must also have the strength to take the weight of a bike of that size, which takes practice,” she adds.
“Similarly, my collaborations for biking content serve to push my fitness influencer vocation online as well,” offers Ansari, who has about 99.3K followers on Instagram.
A former Miss Karnataka (women’s fitness category) title holder, Ansari says being a ‘bikergirl’ also fits in well with her social media persona and the parts of herself she wants to portray to her audience. “Given my background as a former Miss Karnataka and my fitness regimes, the brand deals and projects I get serve to push not only my fitness influencer profile but my biking’s as well,” she adds.
Another Bengaluru-based rider, Saadhana KM, says she started getting offers for brand collaborations after getting noticed on Instagram where she has around 7.9K followers. Having clocked in more than 16,000 km on her Himalayan 350, the 23-year-old startup employee now says she plans to further monetise her Instagram content. “Outside of people reaching out to me with offers, I will also start contacting people that I myself want to work with soon. The first step is to ensure that I can be consistent with these brand commitments once I begin,” says Saadhana.
Life in the fast lane
Move over, food vloggers and fashion influencers. Women bikers are the latest to take the social media brandwagon by storm. Sitting proudly astride their sports bikes and cruisers, these rider-creators are not just sharing their passion with their followers but also trying to monetise their content, be it through brand deals or promotions.
Thirty-one year-old Pooja Rai, a police constable based in Darjeeling, West Bengal, is a member of the local riders’ community. She has attended about seven riders’ meets so far, and amassed a social media following of 133K (Instagram), and counting. Even though she cannot take on formal contracts alongside her day job—she does make a decent earning from a two-wheeler company’s showroom that enlists her for promotions, as well as collaborations with other organisations.
“I never officially quote an amount or have discussions regarding payment with these companies. However, at the end of the promotional commitment, I have received my dues from them,” she says.
Rai says she is yet to do any big brand promotions on her Instagram channel as she does “not have much time for such contractual commitments due to my duty timings”. However, given that she is gaining a reputation as a woman biker in Darjeeling, she says she is open to considering such opportunities in the future and will weigh them keeping her duty as a cop as her top priority.
Meanwhile, in Kerala, Misriya KS, 26, is a professional dirt track rider and a national champion, who took to Instagram to grow her community of bikers, and serve as a promotional space for her ventures like the Women’s Moto Squad (WMS), which she founded and completed one year this August. This Instagram page has not only brought on opportunities for Misriya herself, but for WMS as well.
“While they are not all paid, they certainly do the job in getting us visibility in our early days,” she adds. Most of Misriya’s work now gets featured on Instagram, where she has about 31.4K followers, and a large number of her work opportunities also come through the “work portfolio of sorts” that keeps on getting updated on her social media account.
Similarly, she ensures to post about her work on her LinkedIn and Pinterest profiles as well, so that the audiences can be connected across platforms. So far, Misriya has done collaborations with Mototrain Adventure Park, bike rental showrooms like Himalayas Hawks in Manali, among others. Her social media presence has also brought her brand collaborations with bike showrooms in Kerala, as well as event collaborations for her biking group.
She has collaborated with Royal Enfield too, promoting the brand on her Instagram page. “After having a career as a professional dirt biker, it is extremely fulfilling to continue this passion by virtue of social media, and to earn opportunities and income from it as well,” she says.
Behind her monetisation efforts is a larger goal to support the community of women riders. “If I want to do collaborations, my profile has to be one that brands and companies would like to collaborate with,” she says, adding: “Moreover, I do not run my profile solely to gain audiences and get views. Rather, the larger goal is to draw more women riders into the community, and to support that community we need funds, endorsements and visibility.”
Like Misriya, Kanpur-based Prabhleen Kaur, 26, is also trying to monetise her social media content to fund biker meets and bring more women into Nari on Wheels, a women riders’ group that she founded. “I am trying to be consistent with the content, and spreading the word as much as possible so that more women come on board,” she says.
Kaur aims to leverage her association with Royal Enfield, which enabled her to learn riding and go on adventure rides with bigger groups, to make those opportunities available for the new riders in her group as well. “Once we start earning from our social media account, we can utilise that to plan for bigger initiatives for the group. Currently recovering from an injury, Kaur is undergoing a few months of physiotherapy, and has been off biking for quite some time now. “I hope to recover soon so that I can get back on my bike again,” she adds.
Riding the storm
Despite the innumerable efforts, biking has never been easy for women in a country like India. Saadhana KM, for instance, has often been advised to tuck her hair into her balaclava, or make an effort to hide her gender when she is riding.
However, she says: “I make it a point to ride with two ponytails because young girls and women who follow me or see me ride by on the street will know that I am a woman, and we need to see such examples on the streets and online to know that they exist.”
For Darjeeling-based Pooja Rai, riding a bike was never easy—even her family members would look down upon her for that passion. Then came her job. “I became a cop, and that’s when people stopped judging me,” she says. “Somehow, my line of work makes it easier for people to accept that I might have interests which are typically not ‘ladylike’,” she explains, adding that her job gives people a firmer affirmation that she is self-reliant and is able to protect herself.
In the beginning, Rai used to ride a scooty, and funnily enough, it was her grandfather who encouraged her to ‘graduate’ to a bike. “I used to be intimidated by the weight and size of it, though. After I got my job, I finally mustered the courage to buy a bike for myself,” says Rai, who has been in the police force for seven years now, and a rider—even longer.
After riding a scooty till 2016, and experimenting on other bikes, she finally bought a Himalayan 411 in 2019. “I made this choice because the Himalayan is a good bike for off-roading, and Darjeeling roads tend to get quite rocky,” she explains.
Meanwhile, Rai is happy to note that the number of women riders is growing, even in and around Darjeeling. “Earlier, when I used to go on rides, there used to be only two to three women riders, but now I see at least 12-15,” she shares.
“The stares and naysayers of society will always exist, and women cannot sit and wait for their mentality to change,” says Rai, adding: “The time is now to make the change ourselves and nudge them towards acceptance.”
Similarly, Bengaluru resident Rachna Gowda, 19, had to face many taunts, from family and friends alike, in the beginning, which she suspects was largely because of the absence of many women riders in her community. “My goal is to inspire other young girls to follow their passion. I want them to feel liberated the way I do when I ride,” she says, adding: “My bike is my everything.”
Gowda started her journey as a biker influencer with a whopping three Royal Enfield bikes—two Meteor 350s and one Meteor 650. Aside from adventure rides with Royal Enfield and other biking groups, Gowda rides her bike to college and back, which is about 30 km each way. She vlogs her rides and biking experiences on Instagram, where she has about 76.3K followers and counting. “Whenever I turn the key in the ignition, I get a childlike excitement. I feel my insecurities melting away,” she adds.
She says that she’s currently working on creating a finance plan to be able to monetise her Instagram following soon, a goal she has set for after the completion of her college exams. “Although I started creating content out of passion, I now have an active audience and following. I am waiting for the right opportunities to come along which properly complement my style and content,” she says.
A large number of the women riders who are present on Instagram prefer to film their rides live, if not vlog it in real time. This helps to maintain an added layer of safety, since proof of any mishaps, if any, gets recorded. Nearly all of them have at least one reel or post, if not more, of their experience or footage of being harassed, catcalled or cut off on the street by other bikers or cars.
In a recent case, a rider in Himachal Pradesh was harassed by a car full of drunk men while on a ride. Since she was recording the journey live, she got all of their faces, their vehicle number and their jeers on video, rode up to the next police patrol vehicle and submitted the evidence. The men were later reportedly booked by the police. In such cases, having a live audience, or even a community to support them online, goes a long way, they say.
While Ansari has filmed and made posts of herself doing impressive stunts in the gym, recording dance reels and going on joyrides on her bike, she has also posted live footage of herself when she met with an accident while riding with a friend. She has also taken her audience through her recovery journey when she sustained a leg injury in the gym.
Ansari’s plan for the time being is to continue to grow her social media following as a fitness and bike influencer online, and invite more collaborations to grow her visibility to larger audiences.
The path ahead
Despite the bumpy road, what motivates these women riders is the encouragement that some of them get from established motorcycle companies like Royal Enfield and Harley Davidson in the form of events and rallies that are inclusive and empowering for women as well.
The most popular among them is the Women Motorsport Club (WMC India), which in association with private partners hosts a bike rally for women every year. Then there is also the Women in Motorsport section of the Federation of Motor Sports Clubs of India (FMSCI), which was established in 2017 with the vision of harnessing the passion and talent of women in motorsport.
The Great Himalayan Exploration, an annual event organised by UNESCO in association with Royal Enfield, also regularly includes women in their rider cohorts every year. It is about to commence its fourth edition soon.
