Abstract:

This article argues that contemporary Indian fiction registers a decisive historical shift: algorithmic classification does not supersede caste hierarchy but launders it through the legitimating apparatus of technical neutrality, reproducing what B.R. Ambedkar theorized as "graded inequality" in the domain of data. Drawing on postcolonial digital theory, surveillance studies, and close readings of five literary texts — Bama's Karukku (1992/2000), Prayaag Akbar's Leila (2017), Arundhati Roy's The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), Samit Basu's Chosen Spirits (2020), and The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF (2024) — the paper constructs a framework of "digital untouchability" that names the condition of Dalit and marginalised subjects in India's algorithmic welfare state and gig economy. The theoretical framework synthesizes Michel Foucault's biopower, Oscar Gandy's panoptic sort, Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star's classification theory, Ruha Benjamin's New Jim Code, Virginia Eubanks's automating inequality, and Achille Mbembe's necropolitics with postcolonial thought from Gayatri Spivak, Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, and Dipesh Chakrabarty to produce a specifically Indian analytical lens. The paper demonstrates that Aadhaar's biometric apparatus functions as a necropolitical instrument whose exclusion deaths recapitulate caste's management of life and death, that gig-economy rating systems launder discriminatory customer preferences into algorithmic outputs that cannot be legally named or contested, and that speculative fiction — especially Dalit futurism — constitutes the necessary narrative medium for converting the slow violence of digital exclusion into politically actionable form. The paper concludes by theorizing a "New Manu Code" as an adaptation of Benjamin's New Jim Code for the Indian context, calling for anti-caste provisions in digital governance that would honour Ambedkar's vision of structural annihilation rather than computational accommodation of hierarchy.

Keywords:

algorithmic discrimination, caste, digital India, Dalit futurism, surveillance capitalism, postcolonial digital theory, Aadhaar, Indian fiction

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