Empirical data from the last two-and-a-half decades tells stories of upper-caste hegemony and lack of lower-caste representation in Indian media. After the advent of digital media, and especially after the proliferation of social media and content-sharing platforms, Dalit–Bahujan professionals and many amateur journalists started their own websites and video channels, and Dalit–Bahujan intellectuals have their footprints on social media platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. The rising phenomenon of Dalit–Bahujan media in the digital space and their success or failure in democratising Indian media is examined.
What remains behind the repetition of brazen violence is the continuous and calibrated deployment of different techniques of power that involve the recycling of violence in various forms and continuous yet ad hoc negotiations by the state and the mining company with the affected communities that seek to contain the communities and limit the forms of resistance available to them on a day-to-day basis.
Profits made by large tea corporations continue to increase at the expense of tea workers who are paid unfairly, and whose access to quality education, water, and other basic services is severely curtailed.
The religious identity of the Hindu fisherfolk of Kerala—the Dheevaras—has been a site of multiple and contradictory interpretations by agents and institutions with varied interests. While their caste association—the Akhila Kerala Dheevara Sabha—is urging them towards Sanskritisation and allegiance to Hindutva, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh is engaging them in their communal propaganda. At stake is a host of religious practices and philosophies evolved by the Dheevaras through their occupation of fishing, and the contribution of early Dheevara reformers in critiquing the Brahminic domination of Hinduism and the caste system.
Indian democracy acknowledges the legitimate claims of Dalits and provides for institutional provisions to safeguard them. However, successive governments and society at large deny such claims. Wildly inaccurate descriptive representation of Dalit reality conspicuously rejects most of their genuine claims as citizen.
F G Bailey, the renowned British social anthropologist, conducted fieldwork in Bisipara in the highlands of Orissa in the 1950s to examine the ways in which the state, democracy and new forms of economy were changing the traditional organisation and apprehension of power and status. At the time, and following the Temple Entry Act, the former untouchables of the village attempted to gain entry to the Shiva temple. On that occasion, and as Bailey recounts, they were unsuccessful. A new fieldwork conducted in 2013 in the same location presents an update of the continuing drama surrounding the Shiva temple, against a backdrop of the changing polity and economy of the village, and as a manifestation of contested postcolonial identity politics.
Mobility through sanskritisation in a caste context generates social friction. Lest its mobility endeavour turns out to be a superficial course of action, a mobilising caste will not remain content with mere emulation but will question the superiority of the upper castes. The main barriers on the path of mobility chosen by the lower castes are endogamy and hierarchy which are the essence of caste.
