Pragya Dhital’s The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India explores how media has shaped Indian political identities and collectives ideas of “the people” and the “nation”.
The book’s analysis is original, theoretically rich and wide-ranging, writes Sneha Roy, though it will appeal more to academic than general readers.
The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India: Paper Chains and Viral Phenomena.
The Technopolitics of Communication in Modern India examines the intersections and dialogue between media, political communication, and identity formation in colonial and postcolonial India.
Focusing on historically significant moments such as the Emergency, the 2014 general elections, and the Citizenship Amendment Act protests, Pragya Dhital argues that the media does not simply transmit political ideas.
Instead, it actively shapes political identities and collectivities or “the people” and the “qaum” (an earlier articulation of the nation).
The book develops the concept of “technopolitics”, drawing from Bruno Latour, Hannah Arendt, Karl Deutsch, Benedict Anderson, and Judith Butler, among others, but makes an original intervention both theoretically ambitious and densely academic.
The book makes a strong argument against an essentialist understanding of political identities, wherein they are seen as fixed or natural.
Dhital figures the “the people” and the “qaum” as collectivities continuously being formed and reformed through communicative practices.
The media serve not merely as a neutral tool that transmits information, but rather as an “artefact” that articulates identity formation and collective action through political communication.
Dhital conceptualises the agency of media (including social media) as a relatively autonomous entity that can be understood through the Marxist scholar György Lukács’s work on fetishisation.
It acquires a life of its own when placed in dialogue with broader political movements and communicative processes, showing how power operates through media to construct political identities.
