In a world where global connectedness is shaped by digital platforms, it is important tto takea closer look at the systems through which representation, access, and visibility are oorganisedonline. The assumption that colonialism is over has been interrupted by the emergence of digital colonialism, a regime through which the colonial epistemology of ccategorisation control, and domination is reinforced through algorithmic brokerage, data capitalism, and platform rule.
This essay argues that race and caste remain axes of discrimination in digital worlds, fueled by corporate monopolies, algorithmic bias, and asymmetrical access. By pursuing the intersecting frameworks of race, caste, and coloniality, this essay examines how digital media has neither displaced traditional hierarchies nor repurposed them for the era of surveillance capitalism. Although there has been the end of colonial empires, the empowering systems of domination, which Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano calls the "coloniality of power", remain. For Quijano, coloniality outlives colonialism through epistemic domination, hierarchization of race, and global capitalist order. Coloniality persists in classifying and organising human life by means of systems of race and caste, inscribing these logics into modern institutions. This framework is particularly applicable in the digital era, with technological systems increasingly controlling who is seen, whose knowledge is authoritative, and whose bodies are readable.
British colonial rule in India did not create the caste system, but it simultaneously moulded and institutionalised it, turning what had originally been a complicated social matrix into a bounded and bureaucratically controlled hierarchy. As Nicholas Dirks argues in Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India, the British colonial enterprise used ethnography not as an intellectual pursuit but as an instrument of government. The 1871 census marked a decisive milestone in this transformation, as it was the first all-India attempt at classifying the population along fixed caste lines. What had once operated as localised, and sometimes bargained, social differences were inscribed as absolute identities, making caste an administrative reality and a legal and political verity. The colonial state's preoccupation with Indian society's classification duplicated its general imperial strategy: to dominate by dividing, to survey native populations through scientific taxonomy, and nnaturalisesocial hierarchies as measurable truth.
This classificatory urge went hand in hand with the larger racial discourses of European 19th-century Europe. Colonial administrators, ethnographers, and anthropologists depended upon discredited sciences like phrenology, physiognomy, and craniometry to order human groups. These skull shapes, nasal inclines, and skin colours were used both in India and throughout colonial empires in Africa and the Americas, creating a universalist logic of race that attempted to legitimate colonial rule. In India, these racialised instruments reaffirmed caste hierarchies by mapping higher castes to Aryan, "civilised" origins, and labelling lower castes and tribal groups as aboriginal, backwards, or subhuman. These definitions were not objective descriptions of Indian society; they actively created and solidified new social inequalities.
This epistemological violence, the reduction of social categories to biological and bureaucratic certainties, has had a long legacy. It made caste not just an affair of social practice or religious faith, but one of fixed, state-legitimated identity. The colonial census, schooling system, legal system, and even land revenue records all began to echo and replicate this rigidity. Colonial modernity in this regard did not free Indian society from tradition but represented it in a new guise. Most importantly, the logic of control and classification that characterised the colonial period has not gone away; it has simply relocated to new areas, primarily digital infrastructures. Algorithms nowadays are the counterparts of colonial enumerators. Sold as neutral, effective, and fact-based, algorithms are imbued with assumptions taken from the social and historical realms of their creators. They categorise, sort, rank, and suggest, sometimes silently without explanation or accountability. The algorithm is the new bureaucrat, quietly duplicating the colonial dynamics of who is visible, who is muted, and who is classed as marginal.
Digital Colonialism and Algorithmic Inequality
Digital colonialism describes the control of digital infrastructure, data, and stories by a handful of strong, mainly Western companies. Facebook, owned by Meta, Google, and X (formerly Twitter), have unprecedented influence over what is viewed, uttered, and silenced online. Their algorithms are not neutral; they are taught on data sets that reproduce current societal prejudices and tend to augment them. Facial recognition technologies, for instance, are far less accurate in identifying darker-skinned individuals. These technologies thus replicate racial inequality under the guise of objectivity. In India, the digital caste system is vividly apparent. In 2019, a report pointed out how Google search for "Brahmin" returns images of sages and scholars, whereas "Dalit" returns degrading and stereotypical material. Such a trend, also referred to as algorithmic casteism, implies that the online world is no exception to India's most deeply rooted social hierarchy. Shadowbanning, content downranking, and language hierarchies based on caste are not one-off events but structural phenomena connected to the design of platforms.
Digital discrimination takes several interdependent forms that perpetuate prevalent social hierarchies in virtual spaces. Perhaps the most significant is algorithmic bias, whereby allegedly objective machine learning mirrors and amplifies societal bias inherent in their training datasets. These biases over proportionally misrepresent or misrecognize marginalised communities, especially Dalit, Black, queer, and disabled populations. Closely associated is the shadow banning and censorship practice, in which the work of marginalised creators is systematically repressed or marked as "undesirable" without their awareness or coherent reason.
Digital platforms tend to favour English and other mainstream languages over regional and local vernaculars, in effect silencing a large array of voices of culture. Digital redlining, the disproportionate allocation of digital infrastructure and literacy, in analogy with caste, class, and geographic disparities, leading to a stratified digital experience, is another essential problem. Together, these mechanisms generate what scholars and activists refer to as digital untouchability, a bleak state of affairs in which marginalised groups are super-visible in the sense of being under surveillance but become invisible in terms of representation, agency, and narrative power. This doubled insistence of being surveilled but not heard reinforces traditional exclusions in new technology-styled forms.
In spite of the ubiquity of digital coloniality, resistance is not silent or absent. Activist movements like #DalitLivesMatter and #BlackLivesMatter, as well as platforms like Dalit Camera, The Savala Vad, and Equality Labs, resist the dominant narratives and build counter-histories that centre marginalised people. These projects refuse the homogenised, whitewashed vision of the internet and instead imagine a multilingual, intersectional, and culturally diverse digital space. Radical change depends on the decolonising of knowledge systems, which involves centring indigenous epistemologies, retaining marginalised histories in open-access archives, and combating the commodification and tokenisation of cultural narratives. Resistance, here, is a call to action as well as a group reimagining of what digital justice might be.
We are still in the long and incomplete process of decolonisation, not just from the deeply ingrained legacies of Western imperialism, but also from the hierarchies and injustices inflicted within our borders. We are trapped in a system that feeds on control, distraction, and disposability, a system that sells attention while muffling dissent. Shaking off this cycle takes more than consciousness; it takes the development of a collective conscience, one that challenges power, expands resistance, and opts for purpose over passivity. Our generation is more networked, knowledgeable, and capable than any other. And yet we are continually bombarded by a media environment crafted to divide our attention. Viral trends, sensationalist journalism, and algorithmic distractions tend to overshadow the pressing realities, whether it is the tragic suicide of queer artist Pranshu following relentless cyberbullying, violent attack on a Muslim boy in Ghaziabad, targeted for simply drinking water at a temple.T hese are not standalone tragedies but symptomatic of deeper, systemic failures that need attention and action, not indifference. If digital media was once dreamt of as a means to democratisation, it now reflects the very colonial hierarchies it once sought to overthrow. Our work, as digital citizens, is not just to scroll and consume but to reclaim, repurpose, and resist. To render the internet not a marketplace of distraction, but a platform of solidarity. To make sure that amid the din, the truth continues to get heard, and that voice, resonating through the code and chaos, becomes impossible to drown out.