NirdigantaOnly wholesome toots on this site, so I will start by sharing what I'm reading today.
D. Ravikumar's essay "The Unwritten Writing: Dalits and the Media"
Ravikumar points to the rich print culture existing in TN among Dalits, none of which translated into jobs in mainstream news media, as per Robin Jeffrey. But perhaps rather than see this as a lack, an epistemology of absence, why not suggest that there was a vibrant alternate public sphere that was its own "mainstream"?
If anything, the content-ification of mainstream news itself indicates that "news" is rarely "news" anymore. Opinions, analyses, commentary, reviewing, all exist simultaneously as "news."
In this sense, community media run by Dalits, for Dalits were ahead of the game. They created a "social media" in the truest sense of the word -- one premised on their own social identity and interests.
The reason this remains "forgotten" (by whom? - should always be the question) is because they could never be a "national" media, restricted as they were by language.
"National" news in India could only ever be English, and that regional caste-based media histories have been abandoned by historians & media scholars so far is something worth dwelling on.