Global primordialities: virtual identity politics in online Hindutva and online Dalit discourse

Abstract

This article analyzes the online representations of the identity politics discourse of the elite Hindu nationalist community and the subaltern Dalit community. The assumptions underlying assertions about Hindu and Dalit identity on select Hindu nationalist and Dalit websites are remarkably similar despite deep ideological differences between the two. Developments in the Indian technological and cultural fields in the 1990s have enabled the emergence of a new mode of representing collective identity ('global primordiality'), which explains the resemblance between online Hindu nationalist and online Dalit discourse. The logic of global primordiality typically finds expression in cyberspace, where the realms of technology and culture intersect. The representational framework of global primordiality is shaped primarily by Hindu nationalists who also occupy a privileged position as elites in the Indian technological field. In its participation in cyberspace, Dalit discourse may tend to mirror this dominant mode of online representation, even as it remains opposed to Hindu nationalism.

Web sites for e‐electioneering in Maharashtra and Gujarat, India

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Between Lived and Archived Memory: How Digital Archives Can Tell History

“…Navigating through the Internet is to a large extent also guided by companies. Processes of transnational democratisation are, as Bohman persuasively argues, a possible but not intrinsic characteristic of the internet (Bohman 2004). And navigation through digital archives might be broader compared to their analogue counterparts, but is still framed by the ideas and interests of those creating and controlling the archive's structure and content.…”

Diasporic grief and grievance on-line: how South African and Serbian diasporas use the web

“…The close relationship between the ways in which diasporic imaginations, narratives, identities and articulations are used on the web is also well theorised (see, in particular, Aksoy, 2007;Appadurai, 2000;Jones, 1995;Sreberny, 2002;Chopra, 2006;Georgiou, 2001;Naficy, 1999; Skrbis, 1999;Gillespie, 1995). The literature identifies how diasporas use the Internet, and the most common arguments about the potential of Internet are, firstly, how the Internet presents a new vehicle for internal and external communication, for self-determination, and for resistance to outside cultural…”

“…Secondly, to many scholars (Aksoy, 2007;Chopra, 2006;Sreberny, 2002), the Internet offers a possible means -social, cultural and political -for reproducing and transforming cultural identity among people who have experienced massive political, geographic and economic disruption. Thirdly, the Internet is intended for both intercultural consumption and to cross over cultural boundaries.…”