India On-line: Electronic Bulletin Boards and the Construction of a Diasporic Hindu Identity

Abstract

The Hindu diaspora is being written through the lines—the techno-informational lines of electronic bulletin boards. These “nets” provide a space for South Asian Hindus to construct and contest identities that are doubly marked by the nightmare of all the dead generations—what we diasporics remember as India—and by the always deferred promises of this new land of opportunity—what is imagined as America. To be able to annotate this double movement, one must see these subaltern counterspheres (Fraser) as crosshatched by contradictions, by the heterogeneous strands of Third World secularisms and centuries-old yet constantly changing religions, all of which coexist and intermingle “in an apparently eclectic fashion with the original elements of common sense” (Chatteijee, “Caste” 172). This essay interrogates the dynamics of this diasporic public sphere in the context of the events in Ayodhya, India, on 6 December 1992.

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