Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from C ...

In either formulation, it has granted the possessor of technological skills social status both as an individual and as a member of a larger imagined national community. This is the history that the book engages with, en route to explicating the characteristics of technocultural Hindu nationalism. The story allows one to read technocultural Hindu nationalism as a palimpsest of the many overlapping and contradictory histories that, like tributaries, have flowed into its making. The reading undertaken here also seeks to unpack the complex collusions and mutual reinforcements across discourses of state and society in affirming the associations between nationalism and technology in each historical era.

The characteristics of technocultural Hindu nationalism arise from a complex genealogy, with its attendant twists and turns and continuities and discontinuities over the course of historical time. But the discourse of technocultural Hindu nationalism is also shaped by its online location and the context of its production and consumption in cyberspace. The question at stake may be expressed as follows: what is the consequence of the intersection of Hindu nationalist discourse and the Internet? A comparison with other Indian nationalisms online appears to be one useful framework to employ in seeking to answer the question. To be more specific, a comparative analysis of the relative distribution of themes, such as scientificity and globality, across different Indian nationalisms online can help establish which themes are foregrounded as a result of the medium of the Internet and which are prominent as a result of their centrality to the particular nationalist discourse. And, relatedly, the impact of the modalities of Internet communication on the forms taken by Hindu nationalism in cyberspace, its similarities and differences from its “offline” avatars, also demands attention.

My analysis takes shape as an interdisciplinary endeavor, combining qualitative and quantitative research methodologies and drawing on historical scholarship about South Asia, social and cultural theory, and the sociology of new media—specifically, the evolving field of Internet studies. The theoretical framework utilizes key concepts from the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, specifically the concepts of class, field, and capital, and the theory of the state. Two important characteristics of Bourdieu’s framework, which indicate the mode in which it is used in this work, warrant noting here.