ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I use the oral histories method and focus group discussions to answer these questions and thereby demonstrate how the contemporary socio-technological outcome among Dalits in peri-urban south Bangalore is a result of an intersectionality of three elements: (a) the durability of caste in peri-urban metropolitan India, (b) the social construction of the usage of mobile phones, and (c) the myopia in the conventional understanding of the digital divide in India.
As the literature has indicated, if society reproduces its cleavages in the technologies its uses, we have to adopt a new perspective of understanding the relationship between new technologies and the subaltern. We have to rethink the digital divide as not simply a binary of haves and have-nots but as a multi-dimensional spectrum - much like caste itself is a spectrum of inequality and forced deprivation. Here, I adopt the concept of the “information have-less” as employed by Qiu. This chapter urges for a reassessment of our solutionist perception towards the revolutionary potential of mobile phones, an approach that has manifested in state programmes such Digital India and the National Digital Literacy Mission.
