The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena

About the Book

This book offers a groundbreaking account of the role of media technologies in Indian nationalism and democracy.
From the Brexit referendum in 2016 to the phenomenon of ‘Trumpism’, there has been much speculation about the role played by new media in an apparent return of illiberal politics and primordial identities. Dhital argues these developments could best be understood by not taking identity for granted as a static and exclusive form of affiliation. She also emphasises how the technical and material are interwoven into human thought and action rather than acting upon them externally. She accordingly focuses on the technopolitical means by which groups have been ventriloquised during critical periods in Indian political history, across various media – from newspapers and magazines to radio broadcasts, speeches and online platforms.
Chapters cover prison writing produced during the emergency of 1975-77, regulation of public speech during the 2014 general election, and the Citizenship Amendment Act protests of 2019-20. Through these case studies, Dhital works towards an alternative, more reflexive, basis for popular representation, one that does not sacralise ‘the people’ and assume power in their name.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction
Kaleidoscopic communities
The dispositif of state
The orphan word
Qaum, millat, ummat
Background and outline of the study

1. The immense writing-machine
Ignorance and power
Split publics, forked tongues
The file paper
‘An ignorance which liberates’

2. The one-man media house
Abul Kalam Azad: Imam ul-Hind
Aziz Burney: Azizul Hind
Impossible Speech

3. Emergency pedagogy
Chaos in the air
Prison writers
‘Back to the barbaric feudal days’
‘We, representing the entire political spectrum in the country’
Reader voters

4. The model code
The sacred space-time of popular sovereignty
The numbers game
Social engineering
The ethics of electoral regulation
The scandal of democracy

5. Fearless speech
‘I hailed you, you cut off my tongue’
‘I am willing to give my life for my own qaum’
‘I will sit here till blood stops flowing in my veins’
Epilogue

About the Author :
Pragya Dhital is a Lecturer in the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

Review :
An original and innovative examination of the complex processes of media and political communication in modern India, crossing boundaries between literary and textual criticism, political science and social anthropology. Dr Dhital explores political mobilisation , the operations of ‘subversive’ literature, and the transmission of ideas through ephemeral literary productions with incisiveness, imagination and insight. Her conclusions about language, state media policy, censorship and electoral law are strikingly relevant to current conditions as well as to colonial and post-colonial history. This is a notably impressive debut, subtly but decisively advancing the discussion of nationalism and identity in the ‘imagined communities’ of the modern world. In the contemporary era of digital populism, the role of communication technologies in the formation of new political constituencies that cut across pre-existing identities has never been more important. In this brilliant analysis of political communication in modern India, Pragya Dhital explores the role of media in the formation of state and national identity. Drawing on science and technology studies (Latour), and political theorists like Jacques Rancière and Ernesto Laclau, the author shows how the figure of ‘the people’ was constructed across Urdu and Hindi daily newspapers, journals and speeches, in the same way that TV and, increasingly today, internet communication technologies and social media articulate new political identities. This is a fascinating study of the technopolitics of the media in post-colonial India, and its legacy today in the populist politics of the BJP and Indian nationalism. It will appeal to scholars working across a number of different fields, including political communication, post-colonial theory and populism studies.

In this sophisticated study, Pragya Dhital looks at some key moments in Indian politics through the media forms that the protagonists adopt or deploy in order to communicate with their putative publics or communities – and the ways in which these, in turn shape their political publics or collectivities themselves. She calls this mutual imbrication of media forms and political address “technopolitics”, which serves as the crucial window into some important moments in Indian politics – both in colonial and postcolonial times. It is an important study into the ways in which media technologies enable or limit the contours of politics.

With respect to the 2014 elections in India and the use of social media by the BJP, Pragya Dhital relates this period of extreme “political volatility” directly to the rise of new digital media forms and the inability of the government of the day to keep pace with the rapid changes that were coming in its train. This is certainly an important departure from the standard ways in which Indian politics – or right-wing populism for that matter – is generally studied.

Through a series of case studies from colonial India to the Citizenship Amendment Act protests in 2019-2020, Dhital examines a compendious variety of textual and non-textual forms to provide us with a startlingly original and expansive model of the ‘technopolitics of communication’. Defined as ‘an alchemical combination of speaker, audience and context’, this is at once a brilliantly researched, theoretically astute and intricately argued investigation and exemplar. This remarkable book is a major intervention in contemporary global debates around democratic representations that continue to shape our political lives. The book develops the concept of 'technopolitics', drawing from Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, Karl Deutsch, Benedict Anderson, and Judith Butler, among others, but makes an original intervention both theoretically ambitious and densely academic.