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

In the concluding chapter, I reflect on the possibilities offered by the Internet for reimagining Indian identities in light of the historical associations between nationalism and technology. I extend the discussion of Indian identities online to the complexities of the production, representation, and consumption of online discourse in general. I outline some directions for theorizing the relationship between the modalities of Internet communication and online expressions of identity. I also offer a reflection on the viability of the theoretical framework employed in the book, based on the reading and analysis in earlier chapters.

The role of technology in imaginings of the Indian nation and in ideological projects of nation building in the colonial era and the Nehruvian era has been assessed in some depth.⁶² There is a large body of work on various aspects of Hindu nationalism.⁶³ The use of the Internet for the promotion of Hindu nationalist ideologies has also received some attention from scholars, typically in essays or articles that address contemporary expressions of the ideology.⁶⁴ However, the relationship between technology and Hindu nationalism as it takes shape on the Internet has not been assessed in sufficient depth as a phenomenon in and of itself. This phenomenon, which I have termed “technocultural Hindu nationalism,” has not been sufficiently historicized with respect to the longer history of technology and nationalism in Indian society, specifically, in terms of how that longer history, with its shifts over time, influences the character of the discourse.⁶⁵ For example, while Hindu nationalism is opposed to the Nehruvian understanding of India as a multicultural and multireligious society, technocultural Hindu nationalism’s obsession with scientificity is also strongly influenced by the Nehruvian emphasis on scientific and technological development. The ambivalence of technocultural Hindu nationalism with regard to Nehru’s legacy has not been adequately addressed in analyses of online Hindu nationalism either. The analysis of technocultural Hindu nationalism offered in this book addresses such complexities of the discourse.

Studies of Internet discourse are often characterized by insufficiently theorized notions of online communities as well as by either romanticized or neo-Luddite conceptions of technology.⁶⁶