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

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

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: