Media, Social Movements and Culture of Controversy : A Study of the Debate Surrounding Arundathi Roy’s Introduction to the Annihilation of Caste

How to make a struggle public ? How to make the claims of a social movement visible within the dominant public space ? The stakes are high for subaltern social movements and resorting to the media is generally absolutely necessary to any kind of visibility strategy. As a matter of fact, the demands of movements that emanate from the dominated strata of the society aren’t always relayed by the institutions of the dominant public sphere. Diverging strategies exist in order to be heard and to weigh within the latter space. These differences of opinion can be illustrated by two opposite visions. On the one hand, a vision that favours an « externalisation » of the struggle, in the hope of putting pressure on local institutions (e.g. by integrating international activism networks (Keck & Sikkink, 1998)). On the other hand, the partisans of a more circumscribed logic of the cause (to the local and regional scale). This opposition has strong ideological implications and draws on lines of separation within the movements, which can clearly be seen in the relationship that activists maintain with the media. Lying at the core of these debates are the nature of the visibility granted to the cause, as well as the establishment of a hierarchisation of the « legitimate » voices to relay it. As an illustration of this tension, we will present and analyse a controversy which happened in 2014, in India, following the publication of « the Doctor and the Saint » by Arundhati Roy (Roy, 2014), an internationally acclaimed author and member of the cosmopolitan Indian intelligentsia. She wrote this piece as an introduction to one of the founding texts of the thinker B.R. Ambedkar, the « Annihilation of Caste », which is a touchstone in the ideology and history of the dalit movement. The latter is carried by and for the populations that are still seen as « untouchable » by the rest of the Indian society. It forms a subaltern public, marked by strong ideological divisions. The release of Roy’s text provoked very contrasted reactions among the dalit activists, which were especially noticeable online (blogs, social networks…) before the mass media started relaying them, thus giving a new scope to this controversy. We shall present a sociological analysis of this quarrel by considering it a sui generis phenomenon, namely a specific form of collective action. That shall help us analysing the different arenas where it grew (within the subaltern public of the movement, online, in the mass media, in the dominant public space) and to comprehend the « culture of controversy » (Lemieux, 2007) and the regulation mechanisms of violence that are specific to the online representatives of the dalit movement.