This article addresses the reframing of Hindu history, mythology and rituals in a WhatsApp group as part of a larger social movement called the ‘Mahishasur movement’ arising from a nation-wide controversy around a religio-political ritual. It addresses the mediatized controversy that led to the movement, the creation of this particular social media network, the material circulated on it and the nature of hierarchy between different participants. Contrary to existing scholarship, the findings from my fieldwork in different parts of India show that non-elite precariat groups involved in identity politics at different levels participate in social media activism which has so far been understood as a domain of Anglophone middle classes. The article shows the possibilities and challenges generated by the participation of these non-elite political activists in rural and small town India in social activism alongside their urban counterparts on social networking sites particularly WhatsApp.

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This article analyses the visual rhetoric of anti-Muslim imagery in the memetic internet cultures generated by Indian users, as well as the transnational iconology of terror that the Muslim male body is made to embody. The core problem the article addresses is located at the intersection of three crucial contemporary challenges: the global pandemic, rising global anti-Muslim ideology, and the role of socially mediated popular political imagery. Here, I look at corona-jihad memes – a subset of anti-Muslim popular imagery made viral through social media. These images illustrated the fake news spread globally, connecting Indian Muslims with the pandemic. Here, I show the strategies of representation used by Hindu nationalist users to create an iconology – or a mode of recognition – for the Muslim male as the threatening and dehumanised other, through a process of mimicry, counter-influence, translation, and flow in a rich intermedial world of transnational imagery.

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