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#BRITISHRAJ : ANALYSING INDIA’S VOICE ABOUT
ITS COLONIAL HISTORY ON SOCIAL MEDIA
By Sanjna Sudan
Knowledge, Power and Resistance
By Dr. Diana Ibanez-Tirado
University of Sussex
Brighton
May 29, 2019
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“Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”
― Chinua Achebe
This famous quote by Chinua Achebe, an acclaimed Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and
critic of the colonial era, summarizes the angst colonised communities felt about how their
stories and histories have been represented and narrated through the colonial lenses.
Scholars have stated that the history we know today is nothing but a narrative that has been
built, spoken, written and popularised by the dominant communities over generations, year after
year. Each historical narrative renews a claim to truth (Trouillot, 1995), but then ‘what is
history, but a fable agreed upon’ as Napoleon Bonaparte had once famously said.
One of the first and foremost critical communication theory that is taught to a Media student
like me, is
"The medium
is the message"
; a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan, an acclaimed
media theorist, in his book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
. According to
McLuhan, the medium
is more important than the message
, as the content of the message can
easily be grasped, but the character of the medium, which is often overlooked, is another
message.
In the case of historical stories and references, what if the medium was a white man, writing
about a colonised community and their history in his own language and not of the community?
Would this new narrative about the community be superior and more ‘rational’ to the one that
had been built by the community itself? Who
is consuming this information or narrative, and why
does it matter to them? Anthropologists and historians have long examined and analysed this in
different contexts- in case of colonisers and the colonised. Is today's digital era any different?
2
Through this paper I posit that colonial and anti-colonial sentiments still play out, and this
time on a newer medium, i.e social media. However, because the medium has changed, the
message has changed too. I will combine Ethnographic examples specific to India’s digital
world, especially Instagram, and to explore how its users interact with it on the subject of Indian
history.
India as a digital narrative
The Indian democracy today is home to a wide milieu of cultures and ways of life. Its
colonial past still governs much of its present and everything still centers around the English
language, the language of its erstwhile colonisers.
India after its independence in 1947 has come a long way. Today, it is one of the fastest growing
economies, and in the late 80s and 90s, the country made huge strides forward to embrace
technology. Today, Indians form the largest community of internet users. 241 million Indians use
Facebook, with 64 million on Instagram, as of 2019. Owing to its diversity and its past, India’s
virtual presence is a rich fodder for anthropologists, especially digital ethnographers.
Indian content creators on the internet and their use of this digital ‘medium’ is drastically
different from what has been historically prevalent. The ‘message’ too has changed, owing to
the collaborative nature of social media. Hashtags, access to cheaper technology, open source
software, photographic filters and growing dependence on social media for community building,
has changed the way communities form and look at themselves and their own histories. Histories
after all, as we said earlier, are stories, and they bind people together due to their commonality.
The struggle for independence, followed by a bloody partition of India into Pakistan, India and
Bangladesh is still a strong, living and breathing memory for a large part of the Indian
population. The generation that was ruled by the English and faced personal losses during the
era, still lives to tell stories and share objects and photographs, with wrinkly hands, with their
children and grandchildren, who in turn belong to the digital generation and post them online.
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We know that the proposition, that history is another form of fiction, is almost as old as
history itself (Trouillot, 1995), however, the onset of social media with platforms like Instagram
and Youtube, have been heralded as revolutionary, for their ability to invite participation by
common people to be authors of their own visual narratives. In India, there are countless social
media handles that crowdsource such stories and posts them on social media, almost like a
reminder of the past. However, as Foucault puts it ‘revolution is a different type of codification
of the same power relations’ (Foucault, 1980), and therefore social media too has inherited the
prevalent power relations.
History Making in the Colonial Language
“All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the
natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover
so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to
translate any valuable work into them.
It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the
people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means
of some language not vernacular amongst them” - Macaulay’s Minute, 1835
In the 200 years that the British ruled India, the fate of Indian history and its language
decidedly changed forever. Thomas Babington Macaulay, who served as the Paymaster-General
between 1846 and 1848, played a crucial role in the introduction of English and western concepts
to the education in India. The excerpt above, has been taken from the "Macaulay Minute" in
1835, that eventually attracted widespread condemnation due to its skewed historical contentions
(Macaulay, n.d.). Macaulay’s statement here, is a testament to the colonial and eventually
western dismissal of the colonised people’s knowledge. The reason for stating superiority of their
own understanding of the colonised communities, by its western observers, was that they
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believed the non-western societies do not differentiate between fiction and history
(Trouillot,1995) as is the case with Macaulay. But we know that these western observers did not
find grammar books or dictionaries with the so called rude ‘savages’, and thus were unable to
understand or apply to the grammatical rules that governed these languages (Trouillot, 1995) and
eventually were quick to dismiss this knowledge as non-existent.
According to Obeyesekere, History is a product of real- politik
, a genre appropriated by
those in power and denied to those who lack it. He states that it plays a crucial role in the
conquest of one people’s minds by another and not only shapes the discipline of history but also
gives it a fluidity, so that form and content vary with the distribution of power at any one
moment or in any one place (Modell, 1992).
Indian-English Literature and translations were therefore, born once Indian population
grasped the colonial language. Within Indian-English literature, Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay
wrote Rajmohan's Wife
, which is hailed as the first English book written by an Indian and it was
published in 1864. However, it was Jawaharlal Nehru, who eventually became the first prime
minister of India, who wrote the first book on Indian history titled ‘Discovery of India
’ that took
references from Indian scriptures like the Vedas and Upanishads. He wrote it while he was in
prison (1942-1946) during the struggle for independent India, and this book traces India's history
starting from the Indus Valley Civilization. Before Nehru, authors like James Mill (1773–1836)
who was Scottish-born writer and political philosopher, and had never travelled to India, had
written a book on British Indian History, with harsh judgments on Hindu culture and civilization,
characterizing it as “rude” and “backward.” Nehru’s work therefore, was the first English book
on history of India, by an Indian himself.
However, as Foucault in his discourse about authorship states, “The author allows a limitation of
the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations within a world where one is thrifty
not only with one’s resources and riches but also with one’s discourses and their significations.
The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning. As a result, we must entirely
reverse the traditional idea of the author”.
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Therefore, a closer look at the forefathers of Indian-English Literature and its medium,
which happens to be English books, reveals that they were a small and privileged group within
the colonial system, who were able to use the new medium to give a different message. Their
discourse too, was influenced by the colonial rulers of that time. Nehru, was a central figure in
Indian politics before and after Indian independence and belonged to a powerful Kashmiri
Brahmin community in India (Brahmin community has been the highest caste in Hindu varna
system with considerable historical influence) had been tutored by English tutors and had
eventually studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Although the book was translated in many
different languages later, the fact that Nehru’s work with the Discovery of India
, was read and
appreciated widely by western audiences more due to Nehru’s western connections and hence
rational
beliefs and opinions; something that the local languages were not given credit for.
Post-independence, attempts were made by the government under Nehru’s leadership, and
the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) was established in 1961 by
combining a number of existing organisations. NCERT saw education in schools as an important
vehicle for the emotional integration of the nation, and the Minister of Education M. C. Chagla
was concerned that the textbooks in history should not recite myths but be secular
and rational
explanations of the past. However, English continued to be one of the main languages that Indian
education systems worked with, as colonialism had deeply entrenched in the Indian mindset the
value of knowing English over one’s own language.
“We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom
we govern; a class of persons Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in
morals, and in intellect.” (Macaulay, n.d.)
Even as a 21st century citizen of India, most of the literature and history I was encouraged
to read till date about India has been through the medium of English books written by European
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academics and authors. The perspective that the colonial language was of more value lingered on
in the Indian subcontinent even after the British had left.
Literature in languages like Sanskrit, Urdu and Hindi were almost never encouraged and
most of what was read in my family for the last two generations (we supposedly belong to upper
middle class of the Indian society, because of our traditional caste) had been in English, owing to
our British colonial past. The ‘medium’ therefore, were English books and newspapers, while the
‘message’ varied, and so did our own historical narrative about ourselves. We saw in English, a
medium that connected to the rest of the world and felt more empowered to speak about
ourselves and be heard.
The Instagram Filter: Ethnography and History of India in a Digital World
Ethnography can be defined as a collection of qualitative methods used in the social
sciences, and is a branch in Anthropology that focuses on the close observation of social
practices and interactions. These qualitative methods enable the researcher to interpret and build
theories about how and why a social process occurs (Erial, n.d.). History, being the study of the
human past recorded via texts and oral forms, is therefore of huge relevance to ethnography.
Ethnography focuses on what is happening here and now, and history gives contexts via past
experiences as to why people live at present the way they do. Therefore both these areas of study
are intertwined, as history is made of certain claims, stories and knowledge of events that
happened in the past, which shapes mindsets of community being studied (by ethnographers or
anthropologists), current set of beliefs, opinions and subsequently actions.
Over the past few years, many social media handles exhibiting and exploring Indian art and
culture have blossomed. Pages like @daakvaak, @brownhistory, @museumofmaterialmemory
and many more have a huge following and they attempt to collate and curate, historical and
ethnographic examples of the Indian subcontinent and post them for a varied audience on social
media. These pages are almost similar to online museums in themselves; however, they invite
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real-time participation and co-creation of content on display by their audiences unlike museums.
Ethnographic study of Indian population by non-indian scholars is nothing new or specific
to the colonisers but has been of interest to many foreign scholars for centuries. For instance,
Xuanzang who was a prominent Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveller, and translator who
travelled to India in the seventh century and described the interaction between Chinese
Buddhism and Indian Buddhism during the Empire of Harsha. Megasthenes was another
prominent ancient Greek historian, diplomat, Indian ethnographer and explorer in the Hellenistic
period who wrote about his experience in India during the Mauryan Empire. Much of these
recordings are lost (especially Megasthenes’ Indika
) as many ancient libraries were destroyed
during wars, however some of the translations and later works based on Megasthenes’ work
survived.
Therefore, apart from being a one-sided narrative, criticism about written and published
ethnographic studies (in books, scrolls, papers or any written recording) has also centred around
the fact that their rhetorical conventions and material form froze the people being represented in
history, restricting recognition of both the ongoing development and the limits of ethnographic
analysis of that development. The ethnographic monograph or article literally became the end of
the analysis (Fortun, et al., 2016).
That is why the advent of digital technology and its innovative use to preserve, archive and
publish work, has been heralded as a breath of fresh air in academia or otherwise.
In itself, digital anthropology or digital ethnography is a growing field of study and provides
opportunities to reiterate and transform all threads of the Writing Cultural Critique of
ethnographic form, and extends the tradition of experimentation they have engendered
(Boellstorff, et al., 2012). The critical and experimental promise of digital anthropology,
according to Boellstorff et. al. lies largely in the potential to enable more collaborative and open
ended ethnographic work/writing—across time, space, generations, and “cultures.” (Boellstorff,
et al., 2012). It is interesting to note that, many writers, anthropologists and historians have
turned to crowdsource stories, anecdotes and ideas on social media.
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Social Media as a field site for studying post-colonial India
Social Media spaces have become valid venues for cultural practice. Anthropologists are
able to immerse themselves into the medium and understand how their culture or community of
interest interacts with it. Historians are able to crowdsource visual and textual narratives.
We know that cultures, as shared systems of meaning and practice, shape every community’s
hopes and beliefs; our ideas about family, identity, and society; our deepest assumptions about
being a person in this world and the virtual world reflects a lot of that (Boellstorff, et al., 2012).
With approximately 1,368k users, India has a burgeoning digital culture, owing to the fact that, it
is the second largest community on internet and tops the Facebook user list with 260 million
users (as of May, 2019). Therefore, internet is an exemplary field site to understand what India
of 21st century thinks about its colonial past. Internet and crowdsourcing via it, can also help
document history of India in a participatory and inclusive way.
This is a huge shift, for the study of both anthropology and history because, social media has
made it possible for scholars, students and enthusiasts alike, use the space and the opportunity to
gather and disseminate information about, and to communities of interest. For the purpose of this
paper, I have used digital ethnography framework discussed by Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan
Rosa in their paper #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of
social media in the United States,
where they do a closer reading of digital ethnography in
practice along with a few others. I’ve taken a few case studies from Instagram in order to put
forth a few ideas:
Indexing and Framing
Anyone who uses social media knows how hashtags
are almost central to the online norm of posting content.
Hashtags enable social media to be highly collaborative in
nature, as they serve a huge role in acting as an indexing
system in both clerical and the semiotic sense. In the
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clerical sense, it allows the ordering and quick retrieval of information about a specific topic.
Furthermore, as Bonilla and Rosa posit, similar to the coding anthropologists use in research,
‘hashtags allow users to not simply “file” their comments but to performatively frame what these
comments are “really about,” thereby enabling users to indicate a meaning that might not be
otherwise apparent’, which is its semiotic relevance.
For example, if you look up #BritishRaj on Instagram, one finds a wealth of visual narratives that
different people belonging to different parts of the world have put up related to the British
sovereignty in India. Users are able to add up to thirty hashtags per picture which act as different
folders that picture goes into, to be later found by a searcher interested in the topic.
The image (Img 1.1) is an example as it is also labeled as #IndianArmy along with #BritishRaj,
even as Indian Army is nothing like this anymore, and if we go to #IndiaArmy itself, the content
will be focussed more on the current army, however the user who posted this is from Britain, and
their view of Indian Army is inherited from reading about colonial literature or grandparents, and
talks about it with sense of nostalgia and pride.
#BritishRaj (img 1.2) is another hashtag that has a vast collection of photographs posted by
Instagram users about their (or inherited) narrative
of the British supremacy in India. The word ‘Raj’
means ruling, and the word in relation to British,
is held with a bit of contempt, and the content
posted by Indian users with this hashtag is
scornful the whole colonial era, unlike the one
posted by a British.
Even though it is quite likely that none of them experienced colonialism first hand, they have
used social media as a platform to put forth the narrative that they have consumed.
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Therefore, this mediatized and global space of Instagram is powerful in creating and
influencing narratives of how communities and histories see themselves. Pew Research Center
shows that in 2016 Instagram was the second most dominant online social network in young
people’s everyday life (Greenwood, et al., 2016), with over 500 million active users and 95
million posts every day.
As an image-focused platform, Instagram functions as a visualization of everyday life, culture,
spirituality, and existence. Borrowing from Foucault, Rocamora (2011) writes that, by fusing old
– photography – and new – digital media– ‘technologies of the self ’, image-oriented social
networking sites facilitate self-expression and online identity construction (Frissen, et al., 2017).
Collaborative Seriality
Historical storytelling of such accounts on
social media thrive on seriality and its
collaborative or ‘crowdsourced’ nature.
Narrative analysts have long analysed serial
forms as a vital stimulus used by storytellers all
over the world for plot dynamics and suspense
(Page, 2013). Seriality therefore is a decision the
author undertakes- be it texts, radio or television
mediums.
However, unlike these mediums, the digital media is dynamic in its approach to seriality and is
more collaborative and participatory in nature than ever. Hashtags on mediums like Twitter and
Instagram enable users to create real-time narration and form a constellation of narratives.
For example, #RemnantsOfaSeperation was a hashtag that was created by Aashna Malhotra, an
Indian born historian, for publication of her book ‘Remnants of a Separation’ (img 2.1) on
India-Pakistan partition in 1947, through the lense of objects and spaces that are a reminder of
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that era to their owners. A young and social media savvy woman, Malhotra used Instagram to
draw in conversation while writing her thesis on the topic (which was later published as a book).
Today, three years after the book was published, #RemnantsOfaSeperation has become a hashtag
(Instagram allows people to
specifically follow content of certain
hashtags without necessarily
following their posters) for everyone
looking to post content in form of
photographs
and texts about this partition that
happened immediately after Indian
independence.
Img 2.2 is one such example, where someone else has used the hashtag to tell a story about his or
her ancestors. For her next book on people who found love during partition, Malhotra is actively
using her huge Instagram presence to draw in conversation and crowdsource stories.
However, such storytelling projects that collate personal narratives as ongoing, online
archives might not constitute an unfolding story arc, but they do facilitate serial documentation
of a particular community or neighborhood (Seriality and Storytelling in Social Media Ruth
Page). This interaction can be regarded as collaborative practice, typical of conversational
narrative. For instance, another project by Aashna Malhotra is the @musuemofmaterialmemory
page on Instagram that she runs as an extension of her website to curate photographs of objects
along with their stories from the Indian subcontinent. She actively uses crowdsourcing from her
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followers, centred around this theme, and her followers post the same under the hashtag
#museumofmaterialmemory, making it a space where this interaction happens over a period of
time.
Mediatization of the past
Looking at Malhotra’s @musuemofmaterialmemory example, one cannot help but be struck
by the way the page’s content is photographed and displayed. Methods and forms that have
otherwise been made redundant by a fast-paced production and reproduction of media have
reappeared. We can see this very strongly in the adoption of the square frame within such
sharing tools as Instagram and the omnipresence of analogue filters that now replicate across our
screens.
These visual echoes of the past imply a culturally alternative or ‘authentic’ (Berger, 2009)
vision, which can be seen to counteract the flawlessness with which digital reproductions were
initially associated. Some argue that the persistence of the analogue implies a ‘faux nostalgia’
but it is more the case that the attachment to the past performed within social media today is
representative of an ostensibly more conscious renewal, or remediation, of a social aesthetics of
an era (Cross, 2019).
Distortion
The types of communities created by Instagram and Twitter, emerge from the hashtag’s
capacity to serve not just as an indexing system but also as a filter that allows social media users
to cut through the chatter, and reach the content they are interested in. With collaboration and
crowdsourcing, comes the challenge of accuracy and distortion of information, as there are few
check and balances on social media to curb these.
Furthermore, social media create a distorted view of events, such that we only get the
perspective of the people who are already in our social network (Garret & Resnic, 2011).
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Anthropologists interested in social media, should therefore be vary of this, and avoid the
common slippage made by journalists and others who tend to represent Twitter as an
unproblematized “public sphere” without taking into account the complexity of who is on
Twitter, as well as how people are on Twitter in different ways (e.g., some are constant users,
others tweet infrequently, some do so from their phone, some from their office, etc.).
This is highly problematic, as social media for a specific person might not be how it works for
another, as there is no uniformity (which is a blessing and a bane).
Moreover, language is a huge barrier for many communities to interact with each other
online, as social media remains an English dominated space, even as most platforms have tried to
diversify languages for better access. Instagram algorithms, also feeds its users content that it
statistically predicts the user will consume more, and hence, chances of alternative content and
opinions are greatly reduced.
With regard to history and a sense of community, this might not be the best state of affairs, as
users over a period do not get to know opinions and narratives of things that are beyond their
online community. It does push them into the danger of being in a bubble, where if a certain set
of users consume content dominated by communal hate (like between Hindus and Muslims in
India) owing to fake news and one-sided narratives, misogyny etc., then the repercussions will be
damaging. Accuracy of such content is always a question and it goes viral or trends a lot, then
the damages at times go beyond control.
Digital Divide
Even as there is a huge population who actively use social media, we know that digital
divide exists that divide the society into internet or technology haves and have-nots. India being
an emerging economy, has a huge population that is facing socio-economic backwardness that
has stopped them from embracing technology, as they still grapple with issues of poverty and
illiteracy. Low cost of data and mobile phones has still made the technology more accessible
than any other form, but a large chunk of the country is still far away from being able to critically
14
engage with social media in light of their missing history or presence. Therefore, at the end of
the day social media is not representative of the entire Indian community even though it has
democratized the act of content production.
Conclusion
Putting all these insights from social media together, we can understand how this new
medium of social media lends itself to historians, everyday content creators and anthropologists.
It is indeed a very interesting space for anthropological research about contemporary politics
between communities and how they view their past, which have been narrated to them via their
parents or grandparents.
With respect to India, it is evident that colonial and anti-colonial sentiments still play out on
social media almost as a reflection of how it happens in the real world. However, because the
medium has changed, the message has changed too.
Instead of journals, books and stories, we are in the era of hashtags, captions, pictures with
vintage filters and white frames, that seek to invite the audience to immerse themselves in a
visual past.
Virtual communities are a reflection of the real world communities, which is evident in the way
anti-colonial sentiments still play out on social media. It is interesting to note that these
narratives are akin to heirlooms for these users who post content about anecdotes from the
previous generation. However, it is evident that with the change of medium, the message has
changed too, as we discussed in the paper. The authors or ‘content creators’ for this new
medium, continue to be from the more dominant groups of the society, who have the access, time
and insight to be able to create content in the English Language. The use of the English language
gives this content more credibility and makes itself available to wider international audience,
even as there is a huge population in India itself (and the world) that is not being heard, spoken
about or reached.
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