ICTs, Nationalism, and Religious Diasporas in a Globalized World

When a Punjabi family settles in Toronto, a Telugu software engineer moves to Seattle, or a Malayali nurse relocates to the Gulf, something important happens beyond the physical migration: they carry an identity that refuses to stay packed in their luggage. Today, that identity finds its most active expression online. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) – the internet, social media platforms, messaging apps, online forums – have fundamentally restructured the relationship between diasporic communities, their homelands, and their sense of nationhood and religious belonging. But this is not a straightforwardly celebratory story. Questions of power, colonial legacy, and cultural dominance lurk beneath the surface of every WhatsApp group and temple livestream.

Technology, identity, and globalization: the inextricable link 🔗

Economic globalization did not merely move goods and capital across borders – it moved people. And as people moved, they carried their national loyalties, religious practices, and cultural memories with them. ICTs became the infrastructure that kept those connections alive across vast distances.

Globalization is embedded in systems of power – in political economies, access hierarchies, and inequalities between the Global North and South. Because of this, technology does not reach or affect all communities equally. A diasporic Indian professional in Silicon Valley has vastly different digital access than a Tamil laborer in Qatar. Yet for both, the internet serves a similar psychological function: maintaining a thread back to home, community, and faith.

The result is an intricate interplay between technology and identity. As scholars studying South Asian digital communities have noted, religious and nationalist identities don’t simply survive in the diaspora – they are actively reconstructed and sometimes intensified through digital platforms. A Hindu in New Jersey may be more actively engaged in online Hindu nationalist discourse than their counterparts in Delhi. A Sikh in Birmingham may participate more vigorously in pro-Khalistan forums than many Sikhs in Punjab. Distance, paradoxically, can sharpen identity rather than dilute it.

Cyberspace as a ‘passage point’ for diasporic recovery 🔗

For diasporic individuals, the experience of dislocation – of being between two worlds – often produces a deep need for community. The host country’s culture may feel alien; the homeland may feel increasingly distant. Cyberspace steps in as what scholars describe as an ideal “passage point”: a space where the displaced can reconnect with people who share similar origins, languages, beliefs, and experiences.

This is not trivial. Online forums, diaspora news portals, religious streaming services, and ethnic social media groups offer something concrete: the sound of one’s own language, familiar food discussions, religious rituals broadcast live, and political conversations anchored in a shared history. Victoria Bernal’s ethnographic research on the Eritrean diaspora powerfully demonstrates how internet platforms became sites for political imagination, civil society building, and national identity formation for people who were geographically scattered but digitally connected.

For religious diasporas specifically, the stakes are even higher. When a community’s faith is a minority religion in the host country, the internet becomes almost a lifeline. Hindu temples post daily puja livestreams; Muslim communities share halal restaurant guides and prayer time alerts; Sikh gurdwaras broadcast akhand paths online. These are not just conveniences – they are acts of cultural and spiritual survival.

The specific case of the Indian digital diaspora 🔗

The Indian diaspora – one of the world’s largest, spanning over 32 million people across six continents – has been particularly active in using digital platforms to maintain cultural and religious ties. Rohit Chopra’s landmark study Technology and Nationalism in India: Cultural Negotiations from Colonialism to Cyberspace documents the phenomenon he terms “technocultural Hindu nationalism” – the way global Indian communities have used the internet to promote Hindu nationalist ideologies. He traces how, since the era of British colonial rule, technology and nationalism have been entwined in Indian consciousness. What is striking is how this dynamic now plays out digitally: Hindu nationalist websites present Hinduism as the philosophical foundation of global modernity itself, positioning Hindus as its natural heirs, while simultaneously expressing anxiety about Western civilization. The internet doesn’t just reflect these tensions – it amplifies them.

Imagined communities, reimagined online 🔗

To understand what is happening in diasporic cyberspace, Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” remains indispensable – even if it requires updating. Writing in 1983, Anderson argued that a nation is a socially constructed community whose members will never meet most of their fellow nationals in person, yet share a powerful sense of belonging. This shared imagination was originally built through print capitalism – newspapers, novels, and other print media in vernacular languages that allowed millions of strangers to perceive themselves as part of one people.

The internet is, in many ways, a supercharged version of print capitalism. As the American Association of University Professors has observed, social media have created new discourses for imagining community – political spaces where new kinds of collectives are brought into being. For diaspora communities, this means that the “imagined” quality of national and religious identity is now performed and reinforced daily through tweets, retweets, Facebook groups, YouTube channels, and WhatsApp broadcasts.

Interestingly, Anderson himself observed in a 1996 interview how diasporic communities were gravitating toward niche online spaces – what he called Argentines finding their space on the Argentine net, and specifically noting it was Argentines outside Argentina who were most active. The pattern is universal: diasporic communities imagined through the internet are often more intensely national or religious than the populations back home.

Colonial and postcolonial threads in digital identity 🔗

Here is where history enters the digital present. The identities that diasporic communities perform online are not created from scratch – they are shaped by centuries of colonial history, postcolonial politics, and the cultural anxieties that came with them. Scholars studying digital diasporas have argued that cyberspace must be understood as a terrain where colonial and postcolonial discourses are actively reproduced, negotiated, and sometimes resisted.

A British Pakistani Muslim’s online identity politics, for instance, cannot be separated from Partition, the Raj, and ongoing geopolitical tensions. A Tamil diaspora member’s engagement with online Tamil nationalist forums is inseparable from the history of the Sri Lankan civil war and colonial-era ethnic categorizations. The internet does not erase these histories – it becomes the new archive and battlefield for them.

Anderson’s concept has since been applied more broadly to any community whose members share a sense of collective identity without necessarily meeting in person – online communities, communities defined by sexual orientation, political affiliation, or global risk awareness. In the diasporic context, this flexibility is crucial: it captures how a Malayali Christian in Melbourne, a Gujarati Hindu in London, and a Punjabi Sikh in Vancouver can each belong to entirely distinct “imagined communities” online, each regulated by its own historical memories, religious codes, and postcolonial anxieties.

Vinay Lal’s critique: the new colonialism of the digital world 🔗

Not everyone is convinced that the internet’s role in diasporic identity is liberatory. Vinay Lal, the historian and cultural critic at UCLA, offers a sharp dissenting perspective. While scholars and enthusiasts celebrate cyberspace as a democratizing space for marginalized communities, Lal argues that this celebration obscures a deeper problem: cyberspace itself may represent a new and sophisticated phase of Western colonialism.

His argument, developed most fully in Empire of Knowledge: Culture and Plurality in the Global Economy, is that the world we understand today is structured almost entirely through categories produced by Western knowledge systems. Development, progress, democracy, the nation-state, linear time – these are not universal concepts but historically specific Western constructs that have been globalized through colonial power and now through digital infrastructure. When a Moroccan logs on to a platform built in California, when a Bengali student navigates a university portal designed in London, when an Indonesian signs up for a social network headquartered in Silicon Valley – they are not entering a neutral space. They are entering a space whose architecture, values, language, and logic are Western.

Scholars writing in the Journal of Communication have documented this “one-size-fits-all imperative” behind how major technology companies enter Global South markets, and how the dominance of English as the default language of tech products and coding represents a form of cultural imperialism. Silicon Valley engineers do not just export software – they export an underlying set of values, assumptions, and ways of organizing knowledge.

Lal’s critique goes further. He argues that local and indigenous knowledge systems – oral traditions, non-linear epistemologies, community-based ways of knowing – are systematically marginalized or simply erased when digital infrastructure built on Western assumptions becomes the primary medium of knowledge exchange. The internet does not preserve plurality; it often destroys it by making Western frameworks the default standard.

The homogenization problem 🔗

This critique connects to a broader concern about cultural homogenization. Electronic colonialism theory argues that the information revolution created a new form of neo-imperial reach – not through military force, but through the capture of minds and consumer habits. Multimedia conglomerates treat global audiences as obtainable territories, and the result is a landscape where a teenager in Chennai, Nairobi, and São Paulo increasingly consumes the same platforms, the same content formats, and the same cultural references.

For diasporic religious communities, this poses a specific paradox. They may use digital tools to preserve cultural identity, but the very tools they use are designed in contexts that are structurally indifferent – or actively hostile – to non-Western epistemologies. A Hindu religious community may livestream sacred rituals on YouTube, but YouTube’s algorithms, monetization structures, and content policies were not designed with the Manusmriti or the Upanishads in mind. The medium shapes the message in ways that are rarely acknowledged.

Lal’s position is not that the internet is simply “bad” for non-Western communities. Rather, it is a call for critical awareness: to recognize that cyberspace is not a neutral commons but a structured space with embedded power relations. Celebrating diasporic digital communities without examining who built the infrastructure, in whose language, and according to whose epistemological assumptions is, for Lal, a form of intellectual complacency.

Holding the tension: opportunity and critique together 🔗

The most honest position on ICTs, nationalism, and religious diasporas is one that refuses to settle too comfortably on either side. Cyberspace genuinely does offer diasporic communities unprecedented tools for cultural survival, political organizing, and religious practice across borders. Scholars like Bernal are right that Anderson’s concept of imagined communities must now be updated to account for how diasporas and information technologies have transformed the ways nations are sustained and challenged. The digital world creates new forms of belonging that are real and meaningful.

But Lal’s critique is equally important. If we accept that colonial history shaped offline knowledge systems, we cannot naively assume that the internet – built largely by Western corporations, in English, on Western assumptions about information, privacy, and commerce – escapes that legacy. The diasporic Hindu who recovers a sense of religious community through a California-based platform, the Eritrean activist who organizes politically through a Massachusetts-based social network, the Tamil who reads diaspora news on a server hosted in Virginia: all are participants in a system whose terms they did not negotiate and whose assumptions they rarely interrogate.

The challenge, then, is to be both users and critics – to use digital tools for community-building while remaining alert to who built the stage, who writes the rules, and whose knowledge gets to count as knowledge.

What do you think? Does the internet genuinely help diasporic communities preserve their cultural and religious identities, or does the Western architecture of digital platforms subtly reshape those identities in ways communities don’t fully control? And if cyberspace is – as Lal argues – a new phase of colonial knowledge politics, what would a genuinely decolonized internet look like?

References

1. https://www.anthrocervone.org/worldreligions/introduction/
2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287073906_Cyberspace_the_globalisation_of_hinduism_and_protocols_of_citizenship_in_the_digital_age
3. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo18221277.html
4. https://www.cambriapress.com/pub.cfm?bid=258
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagined_community
6. https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/102-1/imagined-communities-social-media-and-faculty
7. https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/5923399/cfp-diaspora-and-post-digitality-imagined-communities
8. https://networks.h-net.org/node/113394/discussions/5894463/call-papers-diaspora-and-post-digitality-imagined-communities
9. https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/social-sciences-and-humanities/imagined-communities
10. https://history.ucla.edu/person/vinay-lal/?lid=51
11. https://books.google.com/books/about/Empire_of_Knowledge.html?id=JO4SAQAAMAAJ
12. https://academic.oup.com/joc/article/75/5/385/8078024
13. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_colonialism