Power and Subjectification at the Edge of Social Media Interfaces in the Aftermath of the Jallikattu Protest

Abstract

In January 2017, millions of people occupied various public places across the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, protesting the Supreme Court’s ban on Jallikattu, a bull-wrangling contest considered central to Tamil identity. Social media was thought to have triggered this ‘leaderless’ protest. Seven days in, a police crackdown splintered the protest’s seemingly unified front. Academic commentators have argued that social media present radical possibilities, ‘short-circuiting’ older forms of broadcast media, which had already been colonized by the state. Taking as discursive sites two videos, one of them posted by a popular Facebook group and another by a YouTube channel centred around Dalit issues, I argue that an a priori claim of new media having a lesser or greater potential to resist colonization is largely untenable. The possibility of such resistance is contingent on the micropolitics of contestation within concrete, localized sites. I analyse narratives of loss and rage on two different social media spaces, elicited from a fishing community near one of the protest sites, after their homes were attacked and their local market had been burnt down by the police. By focusing on tactics of interviewing, I demonstrate that, in the span of a week, the same technological platform credited with sparking the protests that brought the Tamils together as one, now constitutes the limits of the formation of radical subjectivity, as Tamil society finds itself fractured once again.