Commoners Speak Now

Before social media, a relatively small number of people spoke in the name of commoners, often usurping their voices and even their sense of being. Post-colonialism examined how international power cliques, through their intellectual and institutional machinery, claimed to speak on behalf of the world's marginalised while simultaneously casting them in their own image. Yet many of the protagonists of post-colonial discourse were themselves carving out niches within Western academia, speaking in the name of the very people from whom they had become socially and materially distant.

The phenomenon is not confined to international politics or academia. It operated at every level of society, descending through institutions, communities, and even families. Someone would speak for another, define another, and gradually appropriate another's being. The power to represent often became the power to replace.

The social media landscape has opened the means of public expression to ordinary people. Millions now speak for themselves rather than through designated intermediaries. It is perhaps not surprising that, as direct voices proliferate, the lords of abstraction redouble their efforts at distraction.

Niraj Kumar Jha