Indians Online: Communities & their Wired Champions The Internet has become the locus of a contest between India’s myriad communities, each seeking to establish for posterity their versions of India’s story. Rohit Chopra argues that the narratives that emerge from a close examination of this space tell us much about how communities are imagined and constructed in India. Rohit Chopra 25th Dec 2011 Illustration by Dev Kabir Malik Design n the last couple of weeks, Indians on Twitter and Facebook have been up in arms about Minister for Communications and IT Kapil Sibal's plan to ask social media and Internet companies to regulate online content. Sibal has insisted that he is not against censorship but merely against the use of the Internet for the expression of socially divisive and inflammatory sentiments. Indians don't seem to be buying it though. For one, the Indian state apparatus has a long and nasty history of enforcing, as instruments of censorship, laws that make it a crime to offend the religious sentiments of Indian citizens or promote disharmony between different cultural communities. Combine that with the postcolonial state's fetish for secrecy, and Indians should rightly be uneasy about uncle Kapil's new interest in their online habits. As Google noted in its Transparency Report for 2011, India was one of four countries that requested it to remove offending items from its results. Of the 358 such items that the Indian state identified, 255 fell under the category of "government criticism." It remains to be seen how the Indian government's strategy to monitor online media will pan out. Beyond the official equivocations, however, one can detect a more general anxiety on the part of the Indian state about the need to control narratives of national and cultural identity in cyberspace. Its gestures in this regard, misguided as they are, point to the rich and fascinating world of Indian identities online. Much of the conversation about the Internet — in the Indian context or otherwise, online or offline, of the techno-utopian or neo-Luddite variety — is marked by assumptions of technological determinism. One version of the argument suggests that the Internet, through some mysterious agency, will usher in a new age of political freedom beyond the shackles of narrow identitarian commitments. The other version proposes that on the Internet, unanchored from the ethical imperatives of embodied face-to-face communication, we are reduced to a state of virtual Hobbesian savagery, incapable of a modicum of civility let alone rational discourse. { Life on the Internet reflects social practice in its diversity but at the same time reshapes the nature of that practice. The reality is less sensationalist but more interesting. Life on the Internet, as the sociologist Manuel Castells has argued, reflects social practice in its diversity but at the same time reshapes the nature of that practice. In the Indian case, what we see online stems from a complex amalgam of factors: a history of technology being defined as a uniquely Hindu attribute; the rise of a global, significantly US-centered, Indian diaspora with large numbers of technology professionals; the disposition of privileged, English-speaking elites to speak for the nation; the rise of identity politics in twentieth-century India, especially the resurgence of Hindu nationalism; and India's gradual integration into a global capitalist economy. These factors, yoked to logics of communication on the Internet, give rise to often unexpected forms of political expression online. Indeed, articulations of Indian religious, cultural, linguistic, and caste identity in cyberspace expand and confound some of our commonsensical understandings of what it means to be Indian. According to Internet World Stats, India had 100 million Internet users as of March 31, 2011. As with other developing nations, Internet access in India is characterised by a digital divide. It is monopolised by a transnational elite, possessing ample educational, economic, technological, and cultural capital and located in major urban centers in India and abroad — nodes in what Manuel Castells calls the global "network society." If one were to map a history of the use of the Internet by Indian groups, it is Hindu nationalists, and conservative Hindus more broadly, who stand out as early, prominent, and enduring users. In the late nineties, I worked at rediff.com, a pioneer in the Indian Internet space. Ultra-right wing columnists like Varsha Bhosle and Francois Gautier were among the most popular voices in rediff's stable of journalists. In part they were responding to already existing sentiment but in part were a creation of that moment. Media studies scholar Arvind Rajagopal points out that for Hindu nationalists, the Internet is a "battleground" on which Hinduism must be defended from the "pseudo-secularism" of the Indian state. Hindu scientific ability is strongly emphasized on a range of Hindu websites, whether of the nationalist variety or not (for example, Science of Hindu Gods). From historian Gyan Prakash's work, we learn that this theme has its roots in early anticolonial consciousness when a Hindu intelligentsia forged a powerful case for a universal "Hindu science" as an answer to the dim colonial view of the degraded state of Indian scientific knowledge. The Internet is also seen as a kind of natural habitat for — and emblem of — Hindu networking ability, technological expertise, and entrepreneurial ability. On sites such as Hindunet Signature Merchandise, the performance of Hindu identity is linked to the consumption of a range of products, which — tellingly — include baseball hats.Image 2nd Yet, it would be reductive to see the Indian Internet as having been colonised by Hindu nationalist groups. Public spaces are marked by competing voices, and the Internet is no exception. The Hindu nationalist view that India is essentially a Hindu nation and that minorities, especially Muslims and Christians, are outsiders, is visibly present on countless websites. But that narrative is relentlessly questioned by Indian Muslims, Christians, and Dalits online as by groups that define themselves as multi-religious, pluralistic, secular, or progressive. The now-defunct Dalitstan website (http://dalitstan.org) argues that Dalits are the true inhabitants of India and that Brahmins are aliens to the subcontinent. On sites like the Indian American Muslim Council and the Urdunet portal, the Hindu nationalist claim to the Babri Masjid is challenged, even as these sites become a space where the demolition of the mosque is mourned and remembered. A site of memory, real and imagined, the Internet is also text and instrument for writing and contesting history. espite conflicting substantive claims in accounts presented by various Indian groups in cyberspace — Muslims, Sikhs, Christians — they resort to a common form of political reasoning. Each group describes itself as the victim of a holocaust or genocide, each group argues that its rights have been violated, and each group insists that it has been the victim of terror at the hand of either the Indian state, the US, or another group. Drawing on the language of universal human rights and post 9/11 tropes that dominate mainstream global media, they all seek to present their claims in a universal and globally resonant currency of victimhood. The phenomenon of virality and the speed of adoption of new conventions online contribute to this standardised vocabulary. Other unlikely resonances reveal themselves. Indian libertarians, who very much behave like an ethnic group online with their own criteria of belonging, share the historical amnesia of the Hindu nationalists. United in their loathing of Nehruvian socialism and embrace of the free market, both groups view 1991 as a symbolic moment of Indian rebirth, a new moment of independence. Finally, there is a peculiarly Indian form of historical argument seen in Indian cybercommunities, which suggests that the laws identified above may not be very easy to overturn. Since the colonial era, one of the key strategies of constructing community in India has been an assertion of the exclusive right by religious, ethnic, caste, and linguistic groups to rework the repositories of colonial knowledge about their respective communities. The colonial archive of knowledge thus operates as a buffer zone through which communities negotiate with the Indian state for political rights and concessions. On a forum such as Jatland, we find a narrative of Jat identity that draws on the colonial archive in precisely this manner. The Jats are defined as a "people" or a "race" with a tenuous connection to a specific territory, whose existence can be traced back to the mists of antiquity. In this seamless genealogy, Indian independence becomes but one moment in Jat history and the Indian postcolonial state merely another state like the British colonial state and Mughal state before it. The nation here is subordinated to the ethnic group, and ethnic history granted priority over national history. In its relationship to the colonial archive, the Indian state, in some respects, emulates groups like the Jats online. The Incredible India site and assorted microsites developed by the Ministry of Tourism aesthetically pleasing as they are reproduce longstanding stereotypes and cliches about India with astonishing fidelity. These sites are aimed specifically at foreigners with deep pockets. But in general the awareness of communicating to a global audience mark expressions of both Indian state and society on the Internet: a sense that the world is watching, a collective self being presented in the Goffmanesque sense, and an attempt to stake out a place in a changing world. Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. Joomla SEO powered by JoomSEF