Asian Journal of Education and Social Studies

Although digital space has been dominated by text-oriented paradigms, the community is increasingly engaging with multimodal research objects and methods. It designs to answer questions like ‘How technology can be leveraged to advance humanistic enquiry?’ or ‘How media can represent?’. The advance humanistic inquiry paves for a digital space that has abundance scope for democratization and curation of knowledge. This visualization technique helps to understand new ways of conceiving narratives and to bridge the gap between the centre and the margin. Expansion of internet connection and the availability of smart phones at affordable prices in the Indian market are the two fundamental reasons to enable digital empowerment among the mass. The margin, though an umbrella term, serves the specificities of Indian indigenous communities in the present article and to shape the framework of discussion, the understanding of positionality of them in digital space includes the streamlined mediums like social media and websites. Such digital platforms aim at the erasure of binaries between the mainstream and the indigenous conglomeration, where the latter can be a prima facie. The scope of inclusivity encompasses the richness of facilitating wide range of possibilities. The indigenous accommodation in the digital space is either presented out of identity or they are ‘represented’ out of interest. However, unimagined initially, much of this ‘representation’ conclusively gives way to a minimal and reductive mode of portrayal. The manufactured popularity accomplishes its own goal of generating revenue and fame and during the process these indigenous communities form a mere sensational content to rope in maximum viewers. The article aims to present the misrepresentations and under-representations of the indigenous communities in the digital space and how significantly it reflects upon deep seated biases, historical erasures, and contemporary stereotypes that determines their identity through evolution. In the purview of Digital Humanities, theoretical framework of Digital Capitalism is used to analyze how an authentic portrayal in the digital platform appears to be missing because contemporary challenges of their identity and lives are often neglected. The theory of Marxism maps the unidimensional representation concentrating on ceremonies, rituals, spiritual beliefs, adornments and their traditional attire. The instability and impreciseness shrouding the representation by the ‘other’ demand a representation by the ‘self’ which aims to show the findings of the article how the indigenous communities are advancing on their usage of digital space by using the authenticity of the content and also by the commercialization of their identity to combat digital colonialism and data sovereignty.