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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. This is the Nordic Asia Podcast.
- [00:15]
B
Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. Today we will discuss the book Digital Expressions of the Selfie the Social Life of Selfies in India with the main author Avicek Rai. My name is Ksenia Zeiler. I'm a professor of South Asian Studies at the University of Helsinki. My research and teaching are situated at the intersection of digital media, culture and society, specifically as related to India and global Indian communities. And because I tried to understand more broadly how digital spaces such as social media or video games and more traditional media such as film or TV shape but also are shaped by different actors. I also research and teach pop culture and cultural heritage themes, that is digital culture. And our guest today is Abhishek Rai. He is Associate professor of Cultural Studies at the National Institute of Technology, that is the NIT Silchar. His research spawns mobility, marginality and digital culture, with a focus on South Asia. He is the author of the Vagabond in the South Asian Imagination, which was published by Rutledge in 2022. And he's co author of Digital Expressions of the Selfie the Sou Social Life of Selfies in India, published by Rutledge in 2024, which of course is the book that we'll discuss today. Fulbright Nehru Fellow in 2021. He has held visiting fellowships at institutions across Europe, North America and Asia. Welcome and thanks for having this discussion with me.
- [02:17]
A
Abhishek, thank you for inviting me.
- [02:20]
B
Lovely. Now, let's delve right into the first question, which would be about your own position in the field. You are among the most visible and certainly also most productive in terms of publications, researchers of digital culture in India also. You have been doing this for a while already. So how did this begin? How did you become interested in the topic?
- [02:50]
A
I'm interested in questions of media and I also taught courses in media. By the time I was teaching media courses, so the digital boom had already started. So many of the media courses that I taught integrated a lot of components from the digital stuff. So that's the primary interest, broadly speaking, in digital culture. And then with regards to selfies, I was fascinated by how something as ordinary as holding up your phone and clicking a picture would carry so much weight. And I don't know how much of this is an Asian or Indian phenomena, but I've been witnessing, like, people take selfies of the most banal and trivial things and using it rather than just for photographic instances. So in India, for Example, selfies are everywhere, from young men striking poses in public parks, issues of gender bending, to friends sharing moments on WhatsApp, to workers having to take selfies just to prove that they did a job, or they had been there at the moment, which of course had been issues of debate in the Indian context for some time. So at this point I realized that this isn't trivial anymore, and this probably warrants academic attention. And selfies are performances, negotiations, and even tools of control. And strangely, nobody really had taken a closer look at them. When I say this, I mean academically, in the Indian context and elsewhere. And that's what drew me in.
- [04:27]
B
What a rich material indeed. And this also perfectly leads us to the next question, in fact, which would be about the academic research on digital culture. So while certainly I think there is no need at all to emphasize how important digital culture, including but not limited to selfies, as well as their academic study, are globally, and while by today we fortunately also see an increasing number of studies on digital culture in India, this nevertheless is the first book on selfies in India. So to begin with, which geographical settings in India and also which digital spaces, that is for instance, platforms and the like, and also which thematic settings in which selfies play an increasing role did you include in your book? And also why these?
- [05:29]
A
So this is a co authored book and different people chose to study different phenomena, different things, different setups. So I'll speak here on behalf of all my co authors. So we looked at, as I said, very different kinds of spaces in Delhi, for example, we followed young men who choreographed their Instagram reels in public sports. So we studied the Connaught Place area, for example, and we were fascinated to look at how young men kind of played around with gender issues when they posed and made reels, short reels, in the Connaught Place area, in the metro stations and parks in central Delhi. So these aren't just fun performances, they are about claiming spaces, also gender assertions, and crafting a version of a certain kind of masculinity or otherwise. And that was like literally visible everywhere. So this is one of the chapters that we did in the book. So in Kolkata, for example, we studied cafes, and specifically those cafes that are branded as instawarty. So we call them insta worthy, the cafe. So this is a terminology or a categorization that has come up, especially based on the platform, of course, Instagram, and where taking a selfie as much as part of the experience as drinking coffee. So kind of they fit into each other. So we also stepped Outside leisure spaces. Selfies are now also used, as I said, in workplaces for surveillance. People have to just take selfies to prove that they were there or they did something in order to showcase it. Sanitation workers, for example, in Delhi domestic stop, for instance, have to send selfies as a proof of their attendance or having met certain target. And then there are deeply personal moments. For example, we studied posthumous selfies where people used pictures and selfies of posthumous superstars as a matter of mourning and kind of reliving the experience and the questions of stardom and all of that. And finally, we looked at the final chapter, look at what we call aspirational selfies. They are not selfies in the conventional sense of the term. They don't feature people either in the foreground or background, but they just feature books, for example. And that we call them aspirational because it has also linked to questions of class mobility, certain values where people want to, let's say, showcase their libraries, their living room full of books, their bookshelves stacked with books, and so on and so forth. Yeah, so these are the five chapters.
- [08:14]
B
This is amazing, the sheer broadness of where and how selfies are used. And you wonderfully illustrated, in fact, what I was also going to ask already. So we do know, of course, from India and from elsewhere that selfies are very, unsurprisingly, very large, a very diverse research theme in terms of who uses them to represent or to express what on which platforms, and so on. So it's really a very complex matter. You have been talking about the spaces where selfies are taken. You have given us some beautiful examples. Maybe we can dwell a little bit on the primary platforms or digital spaces where selfies are posted in India in particular. So again, why these. Why would certain platforms maybe be used more than others? And which platforms are these?
- [09:21]
A
Instinctively speaking, I think gender and class has got a lot to do with the kind of selfies you post and wear. So it really depends, as I'm trying to point, that whole you are and what you want to convey by posting what you are posting. So I think that determines the kind of platforms you choose. So for younger people, for example, Instagram is a big thing. I mean, that is not specific to India, I would say, but that's a global phenomena. It's visual, it's stylish, it has a very unique visual language. For example, the square frame, for example, that kind of influenced, I would argue, that many of our photographic practices with think when we take pictures, we think how it would futuristically look when we Post it on Instagram. So the frame itself. So in other words, what technically we refer to as platform affordances kind of govern the way we take photographs. Facebook still matters, I would say, especially with the older generation and in the maybe in the suburbs for wider recognition. It is not so niche or up market, so to say. But then it still has a very wider reach, I would say wider compared to Instagram. I don't have the stats at my fingertip, but I think in terms of number, Facebook still has a wider reach. And then there's also WhatsApp, which is kind of understudied, which of course we also didn't study in our book, but which is probably the most intimate space when it comes to, to gender and things like that. People share selfies with families, close friends and. And there's a completely different feel from posting on a public venue like Instagram or Facebook. So the platform itself shapes the meaning of the selfie. And when I say meaning of the selfie, I hint at the afterlife of the image that is circulated. And of course it's also about the question of access. So your, as I said, your class, your gender and the kind of phone, of course. And now you have all those selfies where you have the phone model mentioned at the bottom. So also the way that the phone model is mentioned in the selfie is also a reinscription of class. What kind of model you can afford. That is also a question that is then skipped into large gentis courses of class. So all of these influences where and how selfies circulate and the platforms people choose and the kind of meanings they want to convey.
- [12:02]
B
Indeed, I mean, yes. And also you already said that your co authored volume, very appropriately I think, focuses on individual case studies to discuss and show what is happening in India. That regards again the geographical settings, the digital spaces, platforms and also the thematic settings in which selfies play a role. But in a nutshell, when binding the volumes finding together, is there, do you think anything characteristic, if you will, or anything distinctive about selfies in Indian contexts as compared to other world regions?
- [12:48]
A
I would say yes, it's a strong yes because selfies in India are tied so closely to social hierarchies. I mean, when I invoked class and gender, so this was the hint I was trying to get at. So I think this is what makes selfies distinctive in India because it's so much steeped in questions of class and gender. So they often carry the weight of class, caste, gender, as I said, in ways that might not be visible elsewhere. For instance, Young men from working class backgrounds perform choreograph poses in Delhi con plays and make them visible in spaces that usually or otherwise exclude them. They also have like a greater claim to gender assertion, people who are poor performances and things like that that are otherwise forbidden in other setup. So in Kolkata, cafes become stages for middle class, upper middle class leisure and global aesthetics. They kind of mimic say for example, a New York cheesecake, for example. So when you pose with the New York cheesecake, so the kind of mimic certain values and certain aesthetic choices. And then at the other end of the spectrum, compulsory selfies for sanitation workers show how the same practice can be turned into a tool of surveillance, control, power, and so on and so forth. So while selfies are global, in India they become a way to negotiate belonging, sometimes empowering, sometimes coercive, sometimes surveilling and all of this. So I think this makes selfies distinctive in India. And just as a matter of anecdote, I think India also, statistically speaking, also has the largest cases of selfie deaths, like people, you know, going out of their way to pose for that, literally the perfect selfie, and people falling off a cliff and people dying. So India has also the largest selfie deaths, which of course point to the extent that people can go in order to pose for a selfie. So what, what is at stake these people would otherwise put in taking a self.
- [14:53]
B
So given what you all just wonderfully explained, it's still a fact, and we said this earlier, that this is the first ever comprehensive work focusing on this still understudied field of selfies in India. So why is this so? What would you say are the reasons for having only so few publications on selfies in India so far at least.
- [15:20]
A
I think there are two reasons. First, selfies have often been dismissed as silly, narcissistic, too trivial, banal, and not worth the academic attention, not something serious for scholars to invest their attention in. And second, digital culture research in India, or even people from outside who study digital culture in India, for them, the question of digital divide has been so overwhelming. So it kind of overshadows and undermines everything else. I think the question of digital divide, of course it's important, that goes without saying, but it also undermines and overwhelms a lot of other interesting and important problems. I think when it comes to India, digital divide becomes like a very big buzzword that people readily plunges into to study, and everyday practices like selfies fall through the cracks. But if you really want to understand how digital life reshapes identity and Power you have to look at the everyday practices like in the sociological, anthropological sense of the term and selfies are right there at the heart of it. I mean they're so much part of these everyday trivial practices and yet they carry so much meaning.
- [16:40]
B
And if we can follow up up a little bit on this and I couldn't agree more by the way. So one of the many things that your book does is to connect selfie taking and posting practices to some exemplary recent public debates. Could you give us an example for that?
- [17:01]
A
So one very clear example is the sanitation walk. I think I mentioned it a couple of times in our podcast. So in many Indian cities workers are now required to upload selfies while on duty, sometimes with GPS tags. And I heard literally in some institutes when you go for conferences, the institute admin asked you to post selfies with a geotag as approved. So you earlier they used to go and bring a certificate as a proof that you attended so and so conference. So that is now becoming redundant in the so called posh institutes. They are instead asking for geotagged selfies to prove that you have have been there, completed certain tasks. So this is especially the conference question aside, the sanitation work especially this has sparked heated debate. On the one handed it is framed as accountability. On the other hand it raises big questions about dignity, trust and digital surveillance of already vulnerable peoples. And they also subject them to a greater degree of scrutiny. The idea here being they are less trustworthiness and the others. So another example is politics for example, as politicians and citizens alike using selfies at rallies, vote booths with leaders. And this image is spread as symbols of belongingness. And for I don't know if that is still the case for especially after Covid. A lot of those Covid kiosks were there where you could I don't want to take names of certain leaders, but you could pose selfies with kiosk with certain leaders and then especially railway stations for example, so that also become symbols of you know, rallying and as a mechanism how they can be manipulated for uses of food bank and so on. So I think these two examples, although we haven't explicitly discussed this in the book, but when speaking of public debate, these are perfect examples of like how selfies could speak to like rather contentious issues. Yeah.
- [19:08]
B
To summarize, let me come back and my final questions to the regional specifics again, do you have some sort of takeaways or key points summarizing all of this? What we just said on what is typical about selfies in and as related to Digital spaces in India, you said yes, a strong yes. There is something typical and characteristic, but also connected to this when you summarize, could you share your ideas or your wishes for their future research on this theme on selfies in India and digital spaces, where that should lead or head towards? And this also includes asking about your own future work? Of course. Do you have forthcoming publications, conferences or the like that you would like to mention?
- [20:08]
A
Here I think I'll speak on my behalf. Here I cannot speak. I don't think I'm qualified to speak on behalf of larger academy. I think the main takeaway is, to put very simply, is that selfies are not true. They are not banal either. That is my personal takeaway. So they, on the one hand they democratize self representation, but at the same time they also reproduce inequalities, caste and gender assertions, and so on and so forth. So not everyone has the same freedom to be visible or to be seen in the same way they want. And my personal future trajectory in terms of research is I'm interested in the question of platform affordances. For example, I'm just now working on how certain platforms determine what is deemed as cringe, for example. So I just wrote something that has got to do with how TikTok, for example, as a platform was associated with a certain aesthetic value and it was deemed as a cringe worthy platform. Whereas the same platform, TikTok, if you look in China or for example in the us it is not merit to the question of class in the same way it is done in India. So in China, for example, it's kind of a very upper middle class, posh platform. Like especially upper middle class people associate themselves with TikTok. So when it comes to India, TikTok becomes very cringy. And of course like TikTok was banned in India at a very heated moment of a high time of Indochina conflict. I'm not going into that, but I'm interested in larger questions of platform affordances, how certain platforms carry certain weight or certain significance, like they're symbolic in certain ways. So in India, TikTok represents something which is not the case, let's say elsewhere. So looking ahead, I think I need to pay more attention to like this question of affordances. So who gets the visibility and who disappears and what kind of visibility they afford? Are already experimenting with, let's say, faceless selfies, object selfies. So these are not selfies in the conventional sense of the term. So the last chapter of our book, as I said, it discusses object selfies, selfies of books people still call themselves, but it's not selfies in the conventional sense of the term. So there's a definitional expansion, if my if I may call it that way, of what we used to understand by selfies, let's say, five years back. So selfie also is becoming expansive in many creative ways. I think we have to attend to those questions, how the definition of selfies is being stretched, and they're meant to accommodate different kind of photographic practices.
- [22:52]
B
And I'm sure you'll do so very successfully. Thank you so very much for your time and for sharing your expertise and insights. Abhishek so this was Ksenia Zeiler in discussion with Abhishek Rai. Thank you for joining the Nordic Asia Podcast showcasing Nordic collaboration in studying Asia.
- [23:16]
A
You have been listening to the Nordic Asia Podcast. You have been listening to the Nordic Asia podcast. Sam.