Choking the ‘periphery’: pride and prejudice in India’s globalizing Internet imaginary

Abstract

Abstract This article complicates India’s Internet history by offering a ‘particular’ account of the Internet in a ‘geographical context’ of the country’s conflictual relationship with its peripheral regions such as Kashmir and the northeast. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the ‘state of exception’ and Partha Chatterjee’s notion of ‘the rule of colonial difference,’ the article seeks to interrogate India’s Internet governance practices in peripheral regions and the disabling impact of shutdowns and filtering on local e-communities. In critiquing the Internet historiography of the technology predicated on its materiality, rendered through numbers and events and centred around the nation’s urban technoscape, it explores local imaginations of the Internet in particular regions alternative to the one perpetuated by the Indian state and market forces while highlighting the strategies used by e-communities to circumvent state filtering mechanisms.