Subhashish Panigrahi and meaningful access to the internet in South Asia and beyond

by the Whose Knowledge?

Episode 13 of Whose Voices? podcast | March 20, 2023

Subhashish Panigrahi and meaningful access to the internet in South Asia and beyond

Reviewed by Bruna Damiana Heinsfeld

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Introduction:

You are listening to Whose Voices, a podcast from Whose Knowledge?.

Jake Orlowitz:

Hi, my name is Jake, and I am here with Subhashish at Decolonizing the Internet's Languages conference. Subha, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how that brought you to this conference?

Subhashish Panigrahi:

Sure, Jake. My name is Subhashish. I'm a documentary filmmaker, and in the past, I've worked with several organizations like Wikimedia Foundation and Mozilla, the Internet Society, and the Center for Internet Society in Bangalore, India, as part of the community development programs for the respective communities. So I've mostly worked as a community manager and supporting the volunteer communities to grow and also providing them with different kinds of resources so that they could do the things that they do to contribute to the open internet. What brings me here, I think, I've been quite active recently, at least in the last four or five years, and I've been working towards contributing to several indigenous languages from South Asia, but also from other parts of the world. And my primary goal sort of has been to help the communities develop their own independent media and the process that leads towards that. So developing technical resources, educational resources that people can learn how to create media content that would be relevant to their communities. And yeah, so I think this conference brings people that are experts in different fields. So there is a lot for me to learn and, and I think I, I'd be able to contribute as well to the whole discussion that is going on here.

Jake Orlowitz:

Thanks for introducing yourself. So for the languages that you speak and contribute to and the languages of the community that you're supporting, how are you and they using those languages online now?

Subhashish Panigrahi:

So it really varies from language to language, some languages, and it's a broad range of expertise that the communities have themselves. For instance, I've worked with communities that don't have any presence whatsoever online when it comes to their linguistic resources. And then there are communities that have Wikipedias of their own. Santali, for example, is a language originally from India, but the diaspora is spread across India, Bangladesh, and Nepal. And they have a Wikipedia of their own. The Santali Wikipedia came into existence last year around August, I think. And that's the first-ever South Asian Indigenous language Wikipedia. And the community is really thriving. They have, so India has something called Sahitya Akademi, that's sort of the board for giving awards to authors that contribute creative literature in a particular language. And Santali is included in the Sahitya Akademi. So that means that the language is well recognized.

There is an education board in this state of West Bengal which means it's part of the education. The state of Odisha has recently published a trilingual dictionary in Santali and 21 other Indigenous languages from this state. And I think there's a lot happening, in that particular language. Similarly, another language, Ho, is sort of in the same direction. They have a Wikipedia incubator. There is a small but thriving community, but there are also several languages that I've worked with, particularly a language called Kusunda, which is spoken in Western Nepal in a place called Dang. And Kusunda is spoken by just two individuals, and one of them is 85 years old right now. So the language is almost extinct, but right now, there are efforts to revive the language by providing kids who are either native Kusundas or people from the same locality. And there is some interest in learning the language and keeping it active, keep it alive.

Jake Orlowitz:

So that was some really interesting information about what exists in the languages you work with. I'm really curious about what's missing from those languages online.

Subhashish Panigrahi:

As I mentioned earlier, some of the languages don't have any presence online. Sometimes it might not be required for the language. Sometimes the language community can decide if they want to be online or not, but in many cases, it's the lack of understanding or the lack of know-how if they go online and share content online, if that would be beneficial for the community. So it's also a very gray zone. And I would say from the perspectives of several communities that I've personally worked with, and I know of, there's a lot missing in many languages. First of all, languages that have their own writing systems oftentimes don't have enough resources, enough technical resources to write the language online. Sometimes they don't have a Unicode standard, which is the encoding standard for writing systems, and it's universal. Sometimes that's missing. Sometimes they don't have a good quality font that's Unicode compatible so that they could write content online or publish books and so on.

So that's just a technical part, but also people don't have enough education about how to use, even though the technical tools exist, or they don't know where to find those tools or how to type using their phones. India, particularly, and South Asia in general, has a really emerging and thriving internet penetration right now. And then, when we're talking about the internet penetration arising, I think one thing that's really missing is how people access the internet. If they don't have any content that's relevant to their own community, it doesn't really make any sense just to have access to the internet. But that said, a lot of communities are now getting connected to the internet, and that could be really beneficial because they don't have to spend a lot of money to get their content online so that their community that lives elsewhere could still access that.

So I think that there is a lot of positive things that could be done, and they're missing particularly content that's relevant to the community and is made by the community because a lot of times there's misappropriation communities have to access content about themselves, which are made by someone else, and sometimes that kind of content has an inherent bias. So that's not really helpful for any community. It's important that communities develop their own content, decide what they want to share online, and I think that's missing big time. And yeah, so technical, educational, and content, these are the three main things that I would say are missing online for many languages.

Jake Orlowitz:

That may tie into the next question, which is, uh, what do you really wish you could create or share in the languages you work with? And in particular, what is the barrier to that happening today?

Subhashish Panigrahi:

So I think the first part, what I could do to support these languages, I think my first, you know, contribution would be to create resources that are educational in nature so that people that are developers or are technically competent could make use of those resources and do something for their own language, because they're the best people to do anything for their own language. And a language community has to take the lead in reviving languages or making a language thriving on the internet. So I think I could contribute towards the technical educational resource building, training communities, training leaders, mentoring them, and once they are competent or they have enough know-how, then they can take off and, and take lead in many activities. So I just wish that I could do that. But I also, because I have a background in filmmaking, I think I can help communities to create the very first sort of media content, so they get an understanding, they get an idea of how things are done. So I would, I'd probably love to train enough communities that could then take off with creating their own multimedia content.

Jake Orlowitz:

So in terms of training and awareness, what are the barriers to that? Why, what is standing in the way of that being much more broadly, uh, used or applied by you in the communities you work in?

Subhashish Panigrahi:

There are many different factors. One is the socioeconomic factor for many communities, particularly indigenous. And they are particularly not rich in terms of, you know, the resources that they have. It's difficult for people to prioritize any kind of contribution for their language when their first priority would be to feed their family. So I think that's the biggest factor to me, particularly coming from a developing country like India. And I think that's not the same case everywhere. So many minority languages are not necessarily spoken by communities that are, you know, financially unstable. So it's a very different thing for many other communities. For example, in India there is the Parsi community. The Parsi community is generally financially very stable. They're mostly business people, so they have enough resources financially to support if they want to do anything in their language and culture. It's a different factor, you know, it's a different thing altogether why they don't do that.

But yeah, coming back to many other indigenous communities, they also lack sort of understanding of what really is required. So for many communities, entertainment media is sort of a priority, and I don't get that at times. For me, it's important that the language has all kinds of stuff from scientific literature to, to literature about anything else. And not, not particularly only the entertainment media, and I won't disregard that is, you know, people's own languages and they have to decide what they want. But I personally think that if they start contributing, say, news media, you know, if they create some independent news platform using Facebook or Twitter or something like that, that's cheap and I'll probably won't cost any money to them. That would be very useful because without the lack of that, people generally move to other languages, subscribing content from other languages, and that sort of drive people away from their own language. That's really a big hindrance for people to create anything in their own language.

Jake Orlowitz:

That was a really helpful explanation for all your efforts with training and community capacity building and awareness raising. How is it working? Is it working?

Subhashish Panigrahi:

Well… Sometimes it works really well. Sometimes it just  fails miserably and there are lesson to belearned. And I've learned a lot of lessons myself, and I think a lot of things did work in terms of, so when I start recording content in different languages, multimedia content particularly, that part really worked well, what didn't work. (and that's also partly my mistake). I was expecting the community to make use of the content. Once I produced that, sometimes that didn't happen so well, and I said I'd partially blame myself because, you know, once I work on a project and that project is over, I don't have the same amount of time and resources and, and also interest to take it forward and train communities. And sometimes, all these constraints work against the community to make use of that content. And that probably is a case of many other filmmakers and many other people that work closely with communities, but also the time and resources are very limited. And sometimes, it's important that the communities have to really own the content that comes from their own community.

Jake Orlowitz:

Since we're here at Decolonizing the Internet's Languages, I want to ask you how you're experiencing this conference and what it's like for you being in a space with so many other folks who are working on similar issues.

Subhashish Panigrahi:

I think people here are working on really important issues and a wide range of different issues. For me, coming here and even just interacting and listening to so many people or sharing my work that's linked to many opportunities, many collaborations, and those collaborations as they have worked really well in the past, I'm sure they're gonna work really well this time as well with so many people. And I think that's something that's missing. So I think this conference is sort of a bridge to bring people together and enable them to work together because the community that really is contributing towards the development of languages and ensuring that communities make use of their own language on the internet, that's really missing. And it's a really small community out there. So I think bringing so many people together just sort of opens that door for people to work together and also share the issues that they are experiencing in their own work. And sometimes that's very important because I might not be knowing about the challenges from a different part of the world. And meeting someone just makes it easier. I mean, there is a lot of resources available online, but sometimes we don't really have an aggregation of that to go look at things that we really are looking for. So sometimes this, this kind of conferences help a lot.

Jake Orlowitz:

Thank you so much, Subhashish. Really appreciate you sharing with us today.