1. The Short Circuit of Viral Narratives
In recent period, digital discourse surrounding the historical and community practices of hereditary dancers and various forms of dedication has undergone progressive trivialization. We regularly witness a flood of high-impact visual graphics, posts engineered for instant outrage, and slogans claiming a “progressive” or anti-caste lineage. Yet, beneath this veneer of digital activism lies a deep continuity with early 20th-century colonial and bourgeois narratives.
Social media propaganda does not seek archival complexity; it thrives on shock value. To secure rapid consensus and algorithmic visibility, it systematically resorts to decontextualization, moral oversimplification, and the reduction of centuries-old histories into mere trophies for a “cultural war” waged from positions of privilege.
2. The Harm of “Convenient Syncretism”: Blurring Irreconcilable Historical and Caste Contexts
The primary and most severe methodological flaw of digital propaganda is the total erasure of historical, geographical, and caste coordinates. We observe an arbitrary blurring of boundaries: the complex urban, courtly, and temple realities of hereditary practitioners (such as the Kalāvantulu / Isai Vellalar communities of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh) are indiscriminately fused and confused with marginalized rural dedication systems, such as the Yellamma or Mathamma cults across Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Telangana.
This forced convergence inflicts devastating historiographical and political damage:
- The Eradication of Śūdra Somatic Sovereignty: Flattening the history of patronage, musical mastery, land ownership (inām), and economic independence embodied by hereditary Śūdra women into a monolithic narrative of “prostitution, pedophilia, and sheer degradation” constitutes a second act of dispossession. It retrospectively applies the very same puritanical lens used by colonial administrators and bourgeois reformers to strip these women of their material rights and artistic heritage. Recognizing that this historical system was complex and inherently imperfect does not mean equating its social mechanics with rural atrocity.
- The Erasure of Dalit Material Vulnerability: Conversely, rural dedication systems like Yellamma overwhelmingly involve Dalit women (Avarna), who were historically segregated, denied land ownership, and subjected to systemic economic coercion. Applying the aesthetic-political categories of urban Sabha debates to these village contexts prevents us from analyzing rural vulnerability for what it truly is: the product of precise land-tenure relations, poverty, and caste domination enforced by local agrarian elites.
Treating historically, structurally, and sociologically distinct phenomena as a single, monolithic “aggregate of backwardness” serves neither to comprehend the past nor to achieve justice in the present. It exists solely to construct a simplified narrative tailored for algorithmic consumption.
3. The Genealogy of Respectability Politics and Reformist Compromise
The tendency to demonize hereditary performers while ignoring rural economic exploitation is rooted in the history of modern reformist politics. In the race to challenge Brahminical hegemony and assert modern legitimacy, early to mid-20th-century non-Brahmin and Dravidian reform movements frequently internalized Victorian colonial puritanism and bourgeois morals (respectability politics).
To present a “clean,” modern, and rational society to the world, the autonomous Śūdra female artist—who held land, managed her own assets, and operated outside the nuclear, monogamous family structure—was turned into a convenient scapegoat. Eliminating her public presence allowed reformist movements to claim a moral victory over the old order at no cost to the emerging agrarian classes.
Crucially, this moralizing crusade left the underlying material structures of oppression untouched. Truly addressing the vulnerability of rural Dalit women in systems like Yellamma would have required radical land reforms and a direct confrontation with dominant-caste landowners (Śūdra intermediate elites) who formed the economic backbone of these political movements. It was infinitely more convenient to wage a puritanical war against the bodies of hereditary artists than to dismantle the land-based power of agrarian landlords.
4. From Puritanism to Victim Blaming: The Hypocrisy of “Salvation”
When digital propaganda addresses contexts of deep rural marginality, the hypocrisy of this approach emerges in full force. Instead of directing the spotlight onto the structural mechanisms that generate exploitation—dominant landlords, ruling agrarian castes, lack of property rights, and systemic poverty—the narrative imperceptibly shifts the blame onto the victimized communities themselves.
Through a vocabulary steeped in paternalism, the oppressed woman is framed through categories of “contamination,” “moral degradation,” or total passivity. This reproduces the classic mechanism of victim blaming:
- Responsibilities Shifted to the Oppressed: Subordination is treated as a moral stigma or a cultural choice of the marginalized group itself, framing mothers and women in these communities as perpetrators or custodians of “immoral practices,” rather than as individuals navigating severe structural violence.
- Absolution of the System: By focusing on the moral judgment of the practice or the individual, public discourse fails to confront the material perpetrators of exploitation: the landlords, local patriarchs, and state apparatuses that profit from that vulnerability.
- Reification of Suffering: The trauma and deprivation of these communities are transformed into a digital fetish, once again stripping these women of their voice, their political agency, and their historical dignity.
5. Toward an Ethics of Complexity: Restoring Historical Accountability
An analysis that purports to be truly intersectional and rigorous must firmly reject the shortcuts of digital propaganda. Social critique cannot be achieved while remaining bogged down in the hypocrisy of bourgeois puritanism and selective historical amnesia.
Deconstructing toxic social media narratives requires asserting a fundamental ethical principle: the responsibility for exploitation rests solely and entirely on the systems of power that produce it and the perpetrators who profit from it—never on those who bear its weight.
Restoring truth to history demands separating distinct caste and economic contexts, studying agrarian land structures, respecting somatic and hereditary sovereignty, and ceasing the use of others’ suffering as leverage for digital visibility and moral posturing. Only by dismantling stigma and decontextualization can we build an archival and analytical space that is genuinely liberating.
