Digitisation has been an integral part of the last quarter century’s worth of promises of development in South Asia. In parallel, the meaning, goals and political economy of ‘development’ too have been redefined in this period. This course will examine how claims of development and digitisation have intersected, and been co-constituted in the subcontinent since the 1990s. How has the global shift from the state to the market as the doer of development shaped the digital age of development in South Asia; and how has the region’s own legacy of a faith in technology fuelled these trends? At the other end, how have these shifts shaped social, economic, political and cultural inequalities in contemporary society in the region? The course offers a unique perspective through three modules on the encoding, decoding and recoding of the digital in South Asia. Building on conceptual readings from multiple disciplines and on cases focussed on the contemporary use of digital technologies in the domains of health, education, agriculture, governance and political advocacy, we will examine how classical inequalities along the lines of caste, class and gender (and debates about them) are reproduced in the digital space and, second, how the digital space has opened up opportunities to challenge these divides.
While focussed on South Asia, the course shows more broadly how an approach that foregrounds history and pays attention to continuities with technologies that are often characterised as “disruptive” can tell us more about the evolution – and radical possibilities – of social relations and technologies alike.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
