The Pedagogy of Pujarini On Babasaheb's birthday, a note on the only literacy that matters: the literacy of our own investment in caste. A Savarna influencer's "media literacy" reels against a rural Bengali creator, read step by step, turn out to be an unintentional master class in caste, gatekeeping, and the feudalism at the heart of Internet 5.0 in India. I made myself watch every single one of Aishwarya Subramanyam's Instagram reels on Pujarini Pradhan. All of them. Twice, in some cases, because I wanted to be sure I was not being uncharitable. I was not. What Aishwarya — who posts as @otherwarya and has built a tidy following as an "internet-appointed truth speaker," to borrow a phrase from a glossy profile of her — calls "media literacy" is not media literacy. It is the sound of Savarna anxiety dressed in the borrowed vocabulary of critical theory, performed for an audience that has been trained to mistake vocabulary for analysis. ...
The culture-centred blog of Mohan J. Dutta — Massey University, Aotearoa. Home of The Margins Review: critical intellectual opinions from Aotearoa to the world.