Summary and Analysis of Beyond the Nationalist Panopticon: the Experience of Cyberpublics in India By Ravi Sundaram

In this essay, Ravi Sundaram talked about the concept of modernism in post-independence India and its relation with cyber activity. The concept of modernism had been changed over the last century where the concept of border and sovereignty over it had shifted by the advance of technology development.


He assumed that West’s possession over modernity had come to an end and the power would shift to Asia in which it would most probably be China since the old state-system of modernity which is based on borders and sovereignty has collapsed. Through this shifting, the third world countries, India in particular, had seen the opportunity to gain its role in the process of modernity through the media of cyberspace. This new mode of space had enabled the Third World countries to travel without restriction of borders and sovereignty to the new area. The collapse of Western modernity and its products had given India the opportunity to move toward this new electronic space.

Sundaram proposed that to adopt a certain diffusionary model of the spread of cyberpractices in India, there are two things we have to consider which are a) The simple fact of India being a peripheral society in the capitalist world-economy: with one of the lowest saturation rate of telephones in the world; only a small minority of the population has electricity, b) India has no tradition of cyberpunk, in fact there is no indigenous science fiction tradition. Most existing cultural communities have remained ambivalent about technology. Historically, representations of science and technology have been state-sponsored and social-realist in form. Despite of these facts, the number of people linked to electronic network is getting larger every time and the term ‘cyberspace’ has become a significant term in public discourse in India. He further divided the user of this new public space in three categories which are those of the nationalist state, the transnational elite, and that of the space between the market and the state occupied by various bulletin boards, and social movement networks.

Ever since the anti-colonial movement in India, some visions of nation and nationalism had been contested. After independent in 1947, Jawahral Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, lead a new turn of acceleration process of modernization through the building of rational institution of state order. However, Nehru policies denied the previous concept of development in India which was laid by Gandhi where he took village as the starting point of his struggle against British imperialism or other development in India where he also stressed the necessity of cultural heritage. The post-independence nationalists incorporate the growing discourse of development into state policies and later this incorporation would play an important role in the development of cyberpublic.

The focus of these post-independence national was to represent economic development as part of the national identity. However, economic development became accessible only to a certain class of privileged and enlightened modernizers. This development also acted as the mean to achieve order in society by eliminating poverty and cultural ambivalence. And the result came similar to Bentham’s Panopticon where Panopticon was conceived as a prison where ‘rational’ methods of confinement were deployed to ensure the visibility of all the prisoners to the warden’s gaze, while he himself remained out of their sight. In this Panopticon the oppressed would not be able to visualized heir power and order would be achieved. In relation to India, Nehruvian’s modernism focused its goal in temporal acceleration, development and order.

In Nehruvian’s modernity, ‘Dam’ along with steel and electricity production was the symbol of development as opposed to Gandhian movement where village would become the symbol. The state policies over economic development became highly centralized and repressive state policies which resulted in loss of power for Congress party in the 1970’s but they regained power in the 80’s when Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister with similar policies but in different territory. The first was to ensure temporal acceleration while at the same time perform the task of emancipating the state-managers from the everyday, the interaction with place. In other words the annihilation of space through time would obtain without the messy political problems that spatiality and its associated politics produced. Further in these policies ‘development’ remained an issue but was reconstituted as a problem of communication. Government tried to promote and simulate this project via public lectures, television programs and press campaigns. The notion of nation had transformed from the problems of borders and sovereignty to the problems of speed accessibility and information.

The government introduced National Informatics Center (NIC) in the mid 1970’s to promote computerization in administration but it became an important project in the 80’s when it launched satellite linked network: NICNET. It links up all district, state and national centers, runs large databases on social science, medicine and law; it works all state research institutes in the country. It provided its users with web and internet access. The very goal of NICNET was to form a new public space not merely provided a new media of administration and education. The NICNET experiment tried to enhance the old grid of Nehruvianism which based on representational realism. Obviously, NICNET’s working scheme has similarity with the earlier panoptic where each district connected to state capital and state capital connected to the national capital.

In recent development of cyber public the idea of the Journey had changed where during anti-colonial agitation, Gandhi invented the idea of nationalist journey. This journey signified human interaction where only through walking that human came into interaction with different cultures and people. Gandhi transformed the journey as a vehicle to politically re-map the nation. This journey was also as dialogue, with conventions of public interaction, anti-colonial agitation and spectacle. Moreover, the journey also acted as a public journey with the attendant modes of representation constructing an imaginary community of nationalism. However, borders and sovereignty limited this kind of physical journey. In the era of cyber space the physical boundary had been eliminated since the notion of border which played an important role in the idea of state-nationalism becoming blurred. The virtual journey would create the state of de-stability in the hardening of national identity as what James Clifford described. The old landscape of nationalism underwent a double process. The first process was a certain de-territorialisation of the old nationalist space which was restrained by border and the other process was he process of trans-national territorialisation where in this process, a section of non-resident Indian tried to rediscover India in virtual space. The Indian state actively promoted this process. The state actively pushed a new category of identity in cultural/political discourse - the figure of the diasporic citizens, also known as the NRI or non-resident Indian. This new category of identity in result pushed the border outside the nation sovereignty. For NRI, the virtual journey to India could satisfy the need to return to their native land.

Although numbers of users in India kept on growing, but statistically the group of users dominated by male users from the middle and upper strata both in economic and social terms of community and caste and also a large numbers of network users still worked from offices, research institutions and from public terminals. In term of economic development, Indian company could take these borderless advantages in their expansions. In the Indian case, the commercial message was clear: to be a genuine ‘national” capitalist, you should transcend the border and enter virtual space because it was here that the peripheral status in real-time will be transcended. Since the 1980’s, the oppressed caste had emerged the composition of India’s political sphere and the effect of this emerging is the challenge to the old panoptic of the state which was predicated on a homogeneous legislative modernity, led by an elite of modernizers. In the event, the social landscape had undergone an effective Haussmanisation which was marked by upper-caste retreated from the old grid of politics and abstract nationalist identity. Later Sundaram argued that the change in large metropolitan to accommodate the development had caused the old journey was being transcended for the old elite.

The new landscape acquired new technologies of representation in its center which could disturb the old tropes of anti-colonialism and Nehruvian nationalism. Despite all the effort to limit direct foreign influence in India, the new technology of representation had crossed all of physical boundary and sovereignty where now foreign satellites beamed image into India territory. In the result the new cultural space was crowded with the fluidity of national, regional, and global culture which was mediated by the recognition of a new agent, the consumer subject. In this context, the web provided the imaginary possibility of playing with identity that recognized displacement beyond any physical boundaries. There is a certain experience of web travel when logging on from the Third World that almost evokes Benjamin’s analysis of Baudelaire’s flaneur, or the stroller in Second Empire Paris. The web-traveler in the elite cyberpublic seeks out the virtual space of the web to experience the “shock of the new”, which Benjamin calls the distinctive feature of modernity. The flaneur would hide behind the crowd from its imaginary space. Web strolling from India is an entry into a space whose virtuality enhances the feeling of being in the “West” or they tried to reach out for the new.

The third cyber public was relatively different from the other two, it constantly shifted from the zone of activist network, small bulletin boards and dissident scientists but still without any fix borders. For instant, bulletin board (BBS) had an important role in the opening up of electronic space beyond the frontiers of the state/ market dichotomy. At the beginning most of this kind of bulletin board only discuss issues related to their necessity but by time issues were getting broader toward issues concerning public in general. Bulletin boards or BBS existed between the space of state control and the power of global capital and further it offered a new form of agency within the discourse of virtuality. For some part of society whom disembedded by globalization and subject to the shock-like experience of the new Haussmanised city, bulletin boards offered an important zone of engagement and the possibility of a new performative space. The oppressed classes of society also had a new mean to express their thought in bulletin boards.
As before when the state treated dam, steel mill, and electricity as the icon of modernization and they were some groups in society who opposed this thing. The introduction of computer in the 1980’s also had almost similar rejection from some part of society the critique that generally echoed then prevalent notions of utility, sustainability and concerns about workforce cutbacks and the fact that computer was introduced with almost similar rhetoric with the old-style rhetoric made the movements even more suspicious. However, in the 1990’s most of groups in society had accept the existence of computer and its creative possibility of networking. Not like previous developmental project which caused natural destruction and displacement, cyber space development did not cause any such destruction. A certain aesthetics of experimentation had already been experienced by activists in their search for alternatives to developmentalist disasters. With the coming of e-mail, the Internet, and later bulletin boards a liminal space emerged, where utopian desires for modernity, the possibility of experimentation “without destruction”, overlapped with the pleasures of initiation rituals into techno culture.

In the Third World the mode of developmental modernism was similar to what Foucault called as the black mail of Enlightenment in his essay on Kant’s “ What is Enlightenment”. However, in Indian case, the situation was not as great as that. It operated within the rather simplistic oppositions of development/science/progress versus tradition/reaction/stasis. Although the state plan of operating ERNET would increased the accessibility of this third cyber public with all of its richness and potentials to negotiate a space between the market and the state, the access to virtual space still remained a privilege for a certain group of society. So, in a country such as India where the income gap relatively high, it is necessary for the state to fund this kind of developmental project since it would be hard to expect private sector to fund this project.