Aniket Alam
Presently:Associate ProfessorHumanitiesInternational Institute of Information Technology HyderabadPreviously:Executive EditorEconomic
Phone: +91(40)66531606
Address: International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad
Gachibowli
Hyderabad
Telangana 500032
India
Phone: +91(40)66531606
Address: International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad
Gachibowli
Hyderabad
Telangana 500032
India
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Papers by Aniket Alam
Spiti Valley is a cold desert situated in the northeast part of Himachal Pradesh and was historically part of Guge or Western Tibet. The people of Spiti are Buddhists. Chorten (stupa) is a religious structure, associated with Tibetan Buddhism, which embodies various religious functions. According to Tibetan Buddhism, there are eight different types of Chorten, signifying the eight major significant events in the life of Buddha. These Chortens were built at eight different places to house the relics after his death. Most of the Chorten are replications of these eight different types with minute changes in architectural patterns and religious significance.
During the fieldwork carried out in Spiti Valley as part of an ICSSR sponsored project on “Change and Continuity in Spiti”, we conducted a census of all the religious sites of 25 selected villages through a questionnaire, interviews with people, and visited each of these sites to get their location, images, and other information. For this particular study, we have created a dataset of 132 Chorten from the information of religious sites collected during the fieldwork. We have categorized all the Chorten by comparing them with the architectural patterns of the eight traditional Tibetan Buddhist
Stupas. We have built a web server according to the client-server architecture using open-source QGIS desktop software by adopting solutions that facilitate interoperability between different systems that need to communicate with each other on the Web. By mapping the Chorten along with OpenStreetMap layers on the web server, we are identifying interconnections and invisible patterns in their distribution, analyzing change and continuity in the traditional pattern of their distribution, understanding new spatial cultures and Modernization in these landscapes. We hope to show how the changing pattern of social, economic, religious life in Spiti can be plotted through the analysis of Chortens.
prose and poetry spanning across 1870-1920 and 1970-2019 have been created, and multiple experiments have been conducted to prove that prose and poetry in the latter period are more alike than they were in the former. The accuracy of classification of poetry and prose of 1970-2019 is significantly lesser than that of 1870-1920, thereby proving the convergence of poetry and prose.
The proposed paper is an outcome of research on how curiosity and outrage help draw people to online communities, even if temporary. This paper will study the online life history of outrage & trace the various paths of it's political life.
Conventional theories of outrage, which give insights about why and when people get outraged and how organizations like corporations and governments deal with them, are unable to explain the manner in which outrage builds up, grows and influences politics in the internet age. Protest cultures triggered by public outrage spreading through social media networks inhabit times and
geographies which are alien to the explanatory framework on conventional theories.
The proposed study is a novel attempt at quantifying digital protest and outrage movements in the Indian context. There has been previous work in these aspects, Conover et al (2011) show that political retweets have a highly segregated partisan structure in the context of 2010 U.S congressional elections, similarly Iyengar et al(2012) have shown the magnitude of polarization during election campaigning online. However, the dynamics of political tweets in protest cultures with completely different origins and goals are yet to be examined. The feeling of denial of justice is expressed as outrage and social psychologists have found that higher degree of concern for justice is often expressed by higher outrage. Rothmund et al(2014) have shown that individual differences in perceived justice from different perspectives, like victim & observer, account for people engaging themselves in political actions. Bekafigo et al (2013) demonstrated that online political participation on social media correlates with offline participation, and supports the idea that a real world protest culture originates and grows from social media engagement.
This paper is an attempt to bring some of these insights to the study of the politics of social media in India. It studies the response on social media to two major incidents in the recent past which were based on the use of outrage. The first incident studied is the gang-rape and murder of a 23 year old student in Delhi in December 2012 and the second one is the recent murder of an activist journalist in Bangalore.
We have collected the twitter responses of the second incident, using a standard scraper tweaked to our needs. The facebook data collection for the first incident is underway. We plan to collect all the facebook posts shared by different individual profiles that are public, public pages, and the corresponding influence parameters like likes, shares etc. All the tweets which have a reference to the murder incident of the activist journalist have been collected with keyword gauri lankesh, they appeared in the window of 05/09/17 to 05/10/17. The total dataset of size 103,601 tweets and facebook posts will be used for our research.
We will analyse the group dynamics during the period about both the narrated incidents, the conversations and responses between like-minded and different-minded people using clustering algorithms and the consequent implications and semantics for group identity. Also we propose to analyse the emergence of public conversation and how they take a political shape. We will try to construct alignments and partisanship based on hashtag usage and retweet network. Further based on the established personality-strength models we attempt to study the formation of opinion leadership and political involvement. We will also use tools to examine the clustering and communication dynamics of ideologically similar / heterogeneous groups and individuals. We propose to analyse from the large set of twitter & facebook data whether outrage is triggered by influential social media users which could be individuals or groups and try to alienate the chain of causation: where does outrage originate and how it moves on digital media. We will conclude by explaining whether and in what ways is it similar to and different from the experience already noted in the literature.
Our paper looks at an outlier to this general case, studying the village of Hurling in the Spiti division of Himachal Pradesh to understand how and why a small rural community managed to deal with dislocation and social churn without significant social, cultural, or even political, injury.
Hurling is a new habitation located outside of the traditional area of Spiti, on the modern road which connects it to Kinnaur. It is composed of 36 households, most of which were uprooted in the aftermath of the 1962 India – China war from border village of Kaurik. Traditional agricultural lands, grazing spots, kin and affinal relationships, as well as monastic links extended into Chinese Tibet. After 1962, Kaurik’s residents were shifted to Hurling, about 25 km away. The people of Kaurik/Hurling lost not just access to their lands and families on the Chinese side, but also contact with their monastery.
Our study of Hurling is based on interviewing 12 households over two visits in 2019, and part of our larger study of Spiti for an ICSSR project. We find that the villagers drew on government schemes, linked up with a growing market for commercial crops, and engaged with both local and trans-local cultural influences to weld themselves a new identity. Surprisingly, each of these three encounters – with post-colonial governmentality, with a liberalising market, with religious and national identities – have been successful in terms of outcomes for the villagers of Hurling. Today it is a prosperous village looking to seal its place within Spiti’s political-social landscape with a new monastery.
We study how new land was brought under cultivation through nautor allocations, how government’s agricultural and horticulture extension was used to build a cash-crop economy, and how a new cultural space was carved out by leveraging the parallel yet distinct processes of Indian nation-making and the circuits of Tibetan religious modernisation. The recreation of the village was literally a creative process of reimagining themselves through new forms of family, private property and nation-state identities. Hurling shows in sharp relief the larger, slower, processes at work in Spiti, provides a contrast to the trajectory of similar processes in India’s other Himalayan borderlands. What was it that allowed a displaced community, in a productively challenged agro-climatic zone from a historically marginalised region within the Western Himalayas to integrate thus into the mainstreams of culture, nation, and market? We do not aim to provide definite answers but attempt to delineate the direction of the possible answers. We hope our research will add to the understanding of how the new borders in the Himalayas are being imagined and engaged with, and possible directions these open up.