Abstract:
This paper explores the case of right-wing Hindu nationalist volunteers in India, to turn a critical eye on a digital practice that has become prominent on social media in India in recent times – the assembling of facts, figures and treatises as an ideological exercise by the net-savvy ‘non-experts’. Building on ethnographic fieldwork among social media users in urban India, I argue that the practice of online archiving constitutes a distinct politics of history-making, pertinent especially for the varied ways in which online users participate in religious politics. Online archiving for religious politics offers a sobering, and even troubling, picture of the digital commons, and unsettles some of the universalist claims underlying much celebrated user-generated content.