Ranu Mondal Is Still Going Viral. She Doesn't Know It.

A video on Facebook, viewed more than two lakh times, opens with three young men walking into a house in Ranaghat, a town 87 kilometres from Kolkata. They carry a packet of biryani. The woman they have come to see did not invite them.

Ranu Mondal, the singer who went viral in 2019 for her railway-platform rendition of 'Ek Pyaar Ka Nagma Hai,' is visibly agitated. She does not want to be filmed. The men push the food toward her and ask her to sing. She refuses; they persist. She picks up a broom and swings it at one of them. The video ends abruptly.

Decode found dozens of reels like this. In some, creators dance around Mondal while she stares blankly at them. In others, they offer her plates of chicken biryani and ask her to rate the food on camera. In almost every video, she appears confused or angry, unaware that these clips are being uploaded to platforms where they accumulate millions of views and generate revenue for the creators who film them.

Mondal, the principal subject in all of them, receives nothing. She does not even know that social media videos can earn money.

In 2019, the internet discovered Ranu Mondal and turned her into a sensation. A Bollywood composer recorded a song with her. She appeared on reality shows, flew to Mumbai, travelled abroad. Then the internet moved on. Seven years later, Mondal is 65, lives alone in a relative's crumbling house in Ranaghat, has no regular access to food, and shows signs of chronic mental illness that has never been properly treated.

Her children are unreachable. Her managers have quit. Her neighbours call her 'Ranu Pagli.' But the content has not stopped. Creators still visit her home to shoot reels that go viral while she lives in conditions worse than the ones she was in before she became famous. The fame did not lift Mondal out of poverty. Instead, it made her a permanent subject of entertaining content.

The House at the End of the Road

Almost everyone in Ranaghat knows where Ranu Mondal lives. E-rickshaw drivers at the railway station used to make five trips a day to ferry vloggers to her door. That traffic has slowed. The driver who dropped us there said the last time he brought a vlogger was three months ago.

He had a piece of advice: bring food. "She is often starving," he said. "She doesn't allow anyone unless you get her some food."

Mondal's house sits at the end of a narrow lane, the last structure before the paddy fields begin. The entrance is choked with bamboo and weeds. The backyard is piled with torn clothes and snack wrappers. Both doors are padlocked.

 "I have strategically left the entrance uncleared," Mondal told us when we greeted her on a warm Sunday morning. "I do not want unwanted guests." 

She did not ask who we were or why we had come. She asked for the bag of food we had brought. The 65-year-old appeared to be wearing three nightgowns layered over one another despite the July humidity. The room she led us into had a wooden bed, a bare mattress, a suitcase, and wet pieces of cloth on the floor. Half-eaten biscuits, jackfruit rinds, and mango seeds lay scattered.

"I just came back from Mumbai," she said. "I have been very happy but they come and disturb me a lot. That is why I don't allow anyone to bother me anymore. I am very tired of them now."

She went on to describe her stay in Mumbai in some detail. None of it had happened. Decode reached out to her erstwhile managers Tapan Das and Atindra Chakraborty, both of whom confirmed that Mondal has not been to Mumbai since before the pandemic. "This is not correct information," Das said. "Ranu di has been visiting some local tourist spots on request of content creators recently to shoot reels. But she did not go to Mumbai in the recent past."

Neighbours said Mondal often talks with people who are not there, talking about Mumbai, her stardom, and her life as it once was.

The life she keeps returning to in these conversations was real, briefly.

The Discovery

In 2019, Atindra Chakraborty, then a 25-year-old IT professional who vlogged on the side, noticed a woman in her fifties on the Ranaghat railway platform. She wore tattered clothes and was singing a Bollywood classic with startling clarity. He filmed her and posted the video.

It caught the attention of Bollywood music composer Himesh Reshammiya, who invited Mondal to record a song. She sang 'Teri Meri Kahaani' for the film Happy Hardy and Heer. The film flopped. The song was a hit. Mondal became a national sensation.

Chakraborty became her full-time manager. By August 2019, Mondal was appearing on reality shows, giving interviews, and flying to Mumbai for photoshoots. She travelled to Abu Dhabi and Kuwait. She stayed in hotels and ate well. At the peak of her fame, she distributed relief food for the homeless during COVID.

Then the misinformation started. Mondal's fame had coincided with the Supreme Court's Ayodhya verdict, delivered on November 9, 2019. A right-leaning satirical website The Fauxy seized on her newfound celebrity status and her Christian faith to claim she had asked for a plot in Ayodhya to build a church. The post was taken at face value. Other rumours circulated — that actor Salman Khan had gifted her an apartment and a car, that she had been given a singing contract. None of it was true.

"The internet came down heavily on her religious beliefs, concluding that she was misusing her fame," said Tapan Das, who worked as a manager for Ranu Mondal.

"It was bizarre. We did not know what fake news was and did not have the mechanism to fight it despite it affecting Ranu di's reputation." As a temporary measure, Chakraborty and Das started issuing statements to entertainment portals whenever a new claim surfaced.

In Ranaghat, the damage was harder to undo. "People started thinking that we became rich overnight because Salman Khan gave an apartment and a car to Ranu Di," Das said. "But the reports were fake."

The internet that made her famous had also, within months, poisoned the public perception of her. And then it forgot her. But her presence online did not end — it simply shifted from something she participated in to something that happened to her.

Chakraborty said Reshammiya paid Mondal Rs 50,000, deposited directly into a bank account that Reshammiya's team had opened for her at a private bank in Ranaghat. Decode reached out to Reshammiya's manager Rahul Sheth to corroborate the figure. He refused to share details.

Chakraborty and Das said they received Rs 12,500 each as a lump sum from Reshammiya during their 2019 Mumbai trips. "The amount was a small gift to us by Himesh Reshammiya sir," Das said. "I went to Kuwait and Abu Dhabi with her and Himesh sir and during the trip all the expenses were borne by his team." Chakraborty added: "We were being sponsored by Himesh sir on each trip. But small expenditures like an in-flight meal were taken care of by us."

Mondal also did a few live shows before the pandemic stalled everything. The cash she received was handed directly to her, both managers said. Neither claimed to have taken a cut, though neither could account for where the money went.

Mondal told Decode a different version. "I don't have much food left these days. I take whatever I am offered. I don't have money either. The money that I got from the shows was taken by my relatives. They think I am unwell, so they arranged for a prepaid account for me at the grocery and vegetable stores. Now I barely get anything, as the shopkeepers claim that the account has been exhausted."

One of Mondal's maternal cousins, from the Biswas family that owns the house she lives in, offered a third account. Her daughter Elizabeth Sathi had been funding her food expenses for a while, he said, but stopped. "When it trickled out, she left." He described Mondal as a "social problem."

Three versions of the same money — Reshammiya's team deposited it, the managers handed it over, the relatives took it — and no clear answer about where it went.

Elizabeth Sathi Mondal lives in Suri, Birbhum. One of Ranu's sons sells tea in Kolkata. Both, Ranu claimed, have cut off communication with her. Decode attempted to contact Elizabeth, but she didn’t receive the calls.

With no manager, no money, and no family around, Mondal became easy to access. And creators found her.

Duli Sarkar, a content creator from Bagula in Nadia district, first visited Mondal without an invitation in December 2025. She has been coming to her home almost every week since, to shoot reels. Sarkar now has over 300 reels featuring Mondal on Facebook. Almost all have garnered over a million views.

She was reluctant to disclose how much revenue the videos generate but acknowledged the visits have been profitable. Whether she shares any of that revenue with Mondal is unclear. "I bring a lot of food for Ranu Di whenever I come," she said. "Ranu Di knows me by name. She loves me a lot."

Another creator, who goes by Foodie Great Subhajit, featured Mondal reviewing a plate of biryani in 2021. The video has been viewed more than five million times.

Antaryami Sing, with the username foodbite_with_yami visited Mondal from Odisha this year to make content. She did not ask for money from him, but when Sing offered her a hundred rupee note, Mondal did not refuse. "I gave 100 rupees to Ranu Mondal on my own. She had never asked for any money," Sing said. His video with Mondal has earned over a million views. 

Decode identified at least 350 videos featuring Mondal across four accounts, with a combined view count exceeding 10 million. 

On the walls of Mondal's bedroom, alongside printouts from her Mumbai days, phone numbers are scrawled in ink. Decode tried one. It was Sarkar's.

Mondal does not understand the transaction. She does not know that the reels exist, that they earn money, or that Sarkar's visits are a business arrangement. When Mondal showed us her bedroom, she said it was "extremely private" and that "only special people" were allowed inside. There were no sheets on the bed. A monitor sat disconnected. A photograph showed her with a woman she called her daughter. She could not recall the woman's name.

During our visit, her conversation drifted. She spoke about Salman Khan and filmmaker Rohit Shetty visiting her house and eating there. There is no public record of such a visit. Both Chakraborty and Das confirmed it did not happen. She mentioned her loving grandmother and Mother Mary. In between, she described her love for a meal of jackfruit seeds and rice. July is the season of jackfruits in Bengal, and a neighbour said they often helped her with seasonal fruit and kitchen-garden produce.

What Happens When a Woman's Viral Fame Ends

In Mondal's neighbourhood, the conversation about her is less about her music and more about her character.

A relative who lives next door said she was married twice — to two brothers who were cousins — and has four children. He described her as ambitious, someone who always wanted to experience city life. "When she saw that nothing ambitious was happening with her husband around, she married his brother and moved to Mumbai," he said. He called her promiscuous.

"We have seen unwarranted men enter her house in the middle of the night. We later beat them up and drove them away," the relative said. When asked whether the visits were consensual, he said he did not know. The same fame that brought strangers to Mondal's doorstep is now used to question her character.

The local church, where Mondal worshipped as a Roman Catholic, has informally ostracised her. Mondal is a member of the Ranaghat Begopara Church, but according to her relative, she is no longer welcome at the premises. A church member, speaking anonymously, told Decode: "Her wayward means and demeanour make her a subject of ridicule at local gatherings. So we have collectively decided to boycott her."

The boycott, the member said, was fueled by the stream of strangers visiting her house. "After the lockdown was lifted, a lot of content creators came and filmed videos with her. She was often ‘dressed inappropriately’, which did not go down well with the locals here. We are a small town and most of the families have young children."

Shampa Sengupta, a disability and gender rights activist, said Mondal has become a shorthand for mockery. "Ranu Mondal is the parameter of a bad looking woman," Sengupta said. "Even now, when a woman dresses up and doesn't match social standards of beauty, she is compared to Ranu Mondal on social media. Such has been her impact, and she is almost unaware of it."

"Such women are branded as paglis and scoffed at," Sengupta said. "In her case things flared up because of her fame. She is a single woman living alone, which automatically made her a fallen woman." Sengupta called it a failure of the state and of society.

"She is a classic example of what social media can do to a woman. Content creators have done an extreme kind of violation. None of us took responsibility for her well-being and psychological issues."

Neighbours said Mondal was rude to a domestic help they had collectively appointed. Her relatives had stalled renovation work arranged by a local club during the second COVID lockdown. One of Mondal's distant cousins from the Biswas family said workers had shown up without warning. "She has brought unwarranted attention to our house. It was a clear violation of privacy. So we had to stall the house renovation," he said.

Chakraborty said he severed all ties with Mondal in 2021 after she was "curt and dismissive" to him on his birthday. "I have been around for Ranu di since 2019," he said. "We did not realise that her stardom was so short-lived."

When asked whether Mondal had ever received medical treatment, Chakraborty said they took her to a doctor once in Ranaghat, "but she never cooperated later." She was scared of medicines, he said.

Das gave a fuller account. Mondal was taken to the Ranaghat Sub Divisional Hospital at Anulia and seen by a psychiatrist from RG Kar Medical College and Hospital when she "started behaving abnormally." She left after preliminary treatment. Das said they considered consulting a psychiatrist before the shoot of her biopic in Rishikesh in 2019, but she refused after the first visit. "When a doctor from a private clinic visited and prescribed medicines and an injection, she attacked him with a broom. After that, we stopped."

Chakraborty recalled an incident on the way to Mumbai. Mondal said she needed new shoes and deliberately damaged the pair she was wearing. He stopped the car, bought a new pair in Ranaghat, and drove to catch the flight. "Suddenly before leaving for Mumbai she would say I don't have a sari, please buy me one," he said. "So we had to go and buy new clothes for her and then go to the airport. She has been extremely moody. Maybe that is why she could not handle her short stint with fame."

Decode showed video footage from its visit to a practising psychiatrist from RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. The psychiatrist, after watching the footage, said Mondal appeared to be suffering from chronic schizophrenia. "She has suggestive schizophrenia and psychosis because she seems to be constantly muttering something. She is also bipolar and manic and imagines things that have never happened," the doctor said. Patients like these require constant caregiving, the doctor added.

What Chakraborty described as moodiness — the damaged shoes, the last-minute sari demands, the hostility to doctors — may well have been early symptoms of the same condition.

For a woman who once recorded with Bollywood's biggest musicians, there is now no meal at home and no clean space to live in. Her children, visible in photographs during her viral days, have stopped calling. The neighbours who once escorted vloggers to her door have turned away.

The overgrown bamboo and weeds at the entrance to Mondal's house look like neglect. They are a barricade — her way of keeping out the strangers who still turn up with cameras and food and demands that she perform.

Her daughter Elizabeth tried to take care of her, according to the Biswas family cousin, but "she has also been battling a broken marriage and a life of struggle. So she chose herself."

Duli Sarkar will visit again next week. She will bring food. She will bring her phone. She will press record.