Dalits, internet and emancipatory politics

Introduction

Voltaire, writing in 1764, remarked on the constructed and contested nature of historical narratives. “All ancient histories, as one of our wits has observed, are only fables that men have agreed to admit as true. With regard to modern history, it is a mere chaos, a confusion which it is impossible to make anything of.” 1 Voltaire’s remark is as much about the conspiracy of consent regarding the constructed nature of ancient history, as it is about the uncontrollable and contested nature of modern historical narratives. If one applies his words to the case of Maharashtrian Dalit2 narratives of history, it becomes evident that historical narratives about a distant past are, indeed, traditionally monopolized by the powers that be. However, in the case of the recent past, more and more voices are being heard, though some may be deemed as ‘mere chaos’.

Historical Background:

When the Indian Nation was being ideologically constructed in the nineteenth and the twentieth century, it was realized that caste is a major obstacle that thwarts the road to a unanimous vision of the Indian Nation. Indian National Congress and its leaders tended to believe that in the struggle between the colonizers and the colonized; caste really is an inconvenient nuisance which needs to be quickly forgotten. While for Dr. Ambedkar, the leader who represented the multitudes that faced discrimination, caste was a systemic problem. Without achieving Fraternity and Equality, he believed that Liberty or political freedom was meaningless. On this background, on 14th August 1931, Dr. Ambedkar famously argued, “Mr. Gandhi, I have no Homeland.”

Dr. Ambedkar drew out a clear agenda for creating an identity for the Dalits on a clean slate. He did not approve of the Gandhian nomenclature of Harijan for the Dalits, nor did he want them to be known by their castes. Hence the word Dalit that underlined the identity of oppression was chosen by Dr. Ambedkar and his followers to identify themselves. In 1956, Dr. Ambedkar chose to become Buddhist and millions of his admirers followed suit. The idea was to create a new collective and individual identity for the Dalits that would have no affinity with the caste hierarchy implicit in Hinduism. Before the new identity could be reinforced on the public mind, however, Dr. Ambedkar passed away. The mantle has since been carried by a collective leadership of the Dalits. This absence of a singular figure of authority perhaps accounts for the variety of manifestations of the collective identity of Ambedkarite Dalits. Especially in Maharashtra, they have helped evolve a collective identity and culture which is not fixed to their political affiliation.

History and traditions have been harnessed for legitimizing the Dalits’ lowly status and consequently, it has been very important for the Dalit publics to search for a counter-historiographical tradition. Major revolts against caste oppression and other inequalities in Indian history seem to have used a two–pronged strategy: first, claiming the authority to write independent historical narratives from one’s own point of view, and second, discrediting the grand narratives constructed by those in power. Thinkers starting from Buddha made efforts to effectively communicate the ideals of equality and social justice both to the oppressors and the oppressed. Charvaka’s (before 500 C. E.) criticism3 of the creators of the Vedic literature or Tukarama’s (17th century) claim4 that ‘we are the only ones who truly understand the meaning of the Vedas’. These were manifestations of the thinker’s efforts to discredit the grand narratives and claim the authority to ascribe meaning to the scriptures. The modern period of history also saw efforts such as the Satya Shodhak Samaj (Society of Truth Seekers established by Jotirao Phule in 1873), which attempted to offer an alternative cultural narrative that exonerated the lower castes from the responsibility of their plight5.

Argument:

All these efforts can be seen as attempts to claim the agency to historicize one’s own past. In the nineteenth and the twentieth century, thinkers such as Phule and Ambedkar used the print media for sharing their emancipatory counter-historiographies with the Dalit publics. Twenty- first century Maharashtra has seen the communication revolution and a concomitant democratization of knowledge. It is argued here, that Dalits in twenty-first century Maharashtra are creatively using the Internet as an emancipatory space. They may not be able to fully utilize the potential of the internet, nor are they working in an organized and uni-directional manner. However, a review of their activities in cyberspace attests to the fact that just like Gutenberg’s revolution, the Internet is acting as a catalyst in a number of inter-connected phenomena that are useful for Dalit emancipation.

A technocrat at a world summit of the G-8 nations in 2011 thus described the potential of the internet for the disadvantaged people.

The critical change produced by the digital network environment is the radical decentralization of the capacity to speak, to create, to innovate, to see together, to socialize, the radical distribution of the poor means of production, computations, communications…that which gets us together inside the experience, being there on the ground” 6.

This ability to share things as they happen is a remarkable thing for any society. For the people who have been historically deprived of the agency to tell their own story, the importance of the internet and the opportunities it offers for networking with fellow human beings cannot be overemphasized. Maharashtrian Dalit youth have definitely taken to the internet in the last few years. That the figures of internet penetration among the Indian population have been growing at a breathtaking speed, is no secret7. However, specific caste-wise data of network usage or connectivity are not available. In such a scenario, case studies become an important tool of understanding how the internet is used by the Dalits, who have been deprived of opportunities to create and share knowledge.

What is worth the attention of researchers of Maharashtrian place and space is perhaps the fact that the Dalit youth in Maharashtra are increasingly making use of the internet as a space that offers emancipatory opportunities. The present paper argues that Dalits in Maharashtra have learnt to make use of the internet in support of their emancipatory politics. More than any public space that is physically identifiable; the Dalits in Maharashtra are comfortably making use of the internet to voice their concerns about inequality, document instances of unfair treatment, and rally together for a common cause and share their successes and failures in their fight for equality. This is not to say that by virtue of the huge potential of the internet the Dalits have successfully achieved what they want. Far from it. However, the fight for equality would have been much less visible and much less effective, had the Maharashtrian Dalits not been able to use the internet as effectively as they do. What an African journalist has said in her local context can be relevant in this case, too. She says that ‘the mere presence of women in online spaces does not constitute emancipation unless they can exercise agency and use those spaces to assert themselves8.’ Similarly, Dalits in Maharashtra, it is argued here, have been able to exercise their agency in their use of the internet and have effectively used it to assert their ideas and voices. A large chunk of the Dalit population even today is definitely on the wrong side of the digital divide. However, a review of the various creative ways in which the Dalits have used the internet helps us paint a picture of resistance, a picture of hope and also of melancholy.

Discussion:

Beyond a few web-pages that have largely gone un-archived, source materials relevant for Dalit emancipation began to appear online in the year 2000. This was also the year when the International Dalit Solidarity Network was established. From 2001 onwards, Dr. Ambedkar’s speeches reported in The Hindu, a daily newspaper, back in 1951 found their way into the online edition of the newspaper, which was indexed and archived by Francis Pritchet in his pages on the website of the Columbia University9. Though these were not direct contributions by Maharashtrian Dalit people, they have proved to be important for the emancipation movement as widely used source materials to date. A Maharashtrian Dalit engineer had begun the work of Dalit emancipation and solidarity from a different location a few years before this. The first ever Dalit International Conference was organized through the Dalit International Organization, Malaysia (DIO) in October 1998 in Kuala Lumpur by Mr Rajkumar Kamble and his colleagues10. While the internet may not have been used for organizing the conference, its documentation has been preserved with the help of the internet. After 20 odd years, the pamphlets and the photographs of the conference are preserved on the website of the organization that bloomed from the conference, Dr. Ambedkar International Mission (AIM). The AIM has not only organized a number of follow up conventions of Dalits in Paris and the U.S., it has also been instrumental in organizing a Conference at Columbia University, USA in 2013 to commemorate Dr. Ambedkar’s arrival there a hundred years before.