E-Karaoke Learning for Gender Empowerment in Rural India

A folksongs karaoke product has been created to increase usage of subtitled media to enhance literacy and technology use, particularly among girls in rural India. This entails generating and proliferating popular local folksongs with social and cultural themes of interest to girls, accompanied by the award-winning Same Language Subtitling (SLS) feature. In this paper, the prime goal is to discuss possible implications of this novel technology content on girls' socialization, education, and activism. Based on initial findings from a pilot test of this product in schools, private and public in rural India, I propose that this product has the potential to raise literacy among girls through musical enculturation and entertainment in rural India. By linking folksongs to computers, I argue that this association can shape, transform and/or (re)configure spaces for/by girls in rural India through interaction with technology in ways meaningful to them. Thereby, I problematize the transposition of "western" perspectives of gender and technology onto the rural terrain as understood within a development discourse