Piracy as social antagonism: platform capitalism and censorship in India

This paper reads Indian media piracy through Gavin Mueller’s account of piracy as social antagonism – a structural response to capitalism’s internal contradictions rather than a deliberate political act. It argues that in the Indian context, this antagonism operates along two interlocking registers. Economically, the informal labour and suppressed wages underpinning platform capitalism’s profitability also price most Indians out of its subscriptions, while physical media’s obsolescence and streaming catalogues’ volatility erode a stable, accessible cultural archive. Politically, rising Hindu nationalism has expanded state and platform censorship through the CBFC’s certification regime, IT Rules 2021, and the proposed Draft Broadcasting Services (Regulation) Bill, progressively narrowing what can legally be produced, distributed, and watched. Piracy, this paper contends, absorbs both gaps simultaneously, functioning as both economic workaround and inadvertent, non-intentional circumvention of content control. The Indian case thus confirms rather than exceeds Mueller’s framework, revealing political economy and information access as two faces of a single antagonism.