Culture as Infrastructure: How We Build, Live, and Navigate Meaning

A few years ago, I visited a small community library in western Odisha. It stood quietly between two government buildings, its walls pale and its furniture minimal — a few wooden shelves, some uneven tables, two working fans. On that hot afternoon, a group of college girls gathered inside to read stories they had written in Odia. Their narratives were small but vivid — a grandmother’s lost radio, a school’s old, mysterious banyan tree, a teacher’s mode of transport. They laughed, debated endings, and occasionally argued about dialects.

What unfolded in that modest room amongst girls considered ‘less exposed to the modern world’ was not just a literary session but an act of construction. The library was not merely a space. It was a kind of infrastructure — not of cement or fibre, but of imagination, connection, and meaning.

When we talk about infrastructure, we usually think of roads, bridges, and networks — the tangible systems that enable movement and function. But culture, too, has its infrastructures: the institutions, languages, platforms, and practices that allow communities to create and exchange meaning. To think of culture as infrastructure is to recognise that our collective life rests on more than material systems — it depends equally on the symbolic and relational scaffolding that supports participation and belonging. We might not always see it in tangible forms or overlook its presence entirely, but it exists and influences everything.

In ParibhaAsha’s terms, activating culture as infrastructure means seeing it not as a decorative afterthought to development, but as the essential architecture of how we live together. It is the environment that enables dialogue, creativity, and care — a social utility as vital as any physical one.

What do We Mean by Culture?

Culture is often described as a “soft” domain, associated with art, heritage, and values. But this softness is deceptive. Culture is what gives form to the social — the language of our transactions, the rhythm of our festivals, the logic of our everyday decisions. It underpins institutions, influences policy, and frames our understanding of justice, gender, and identity. As Raymond Williams once said, culture is “ordinary”: it is neither elite nor external; it is the ground on which we stand.

When I think of culture as infrastructure, I imagine a living system, part material, part emotional, part digital, that sustains the flow of meaning. A school, for example, is an educational infrastructure, but also a cultural one: it transmits norms, languages, and aspirations. Similarly, a community radio station is not just a technological setup; it is a cultural pipeline that connects voices that might otherwise go unheard.

Infrastructure, in this sense, is not only built — it is activated. It becomes meaningful when people participate in it, when they use it to tell stories, to contest hierarchies, to make visible what was hidden. The stakes, then, are high: participation determines who can inhabit culture fully and who remains peripheral to it.

The Tangibility of Culture

In Odisha, I’ve seen culture’s infrastructural nature most clearly in the ways people gather and create. The state’s community radio movement is one example. In a village near Jharsuguda, women from self-help groups record programmes on agriculture, folk music, and local governance. Their conversations are aired across several districts. What might appear as a small experiment in communication is, in truth, a deep act of infrastructural work. These broadcasts don’t just share information — they build an ecosystem of recognition. Women who were once silent listeners of public life become its narrators.

What changes when those at the margins move toward the centre is not merely representation — it’s the redistribution of cultural authority. When a woman becomes a storyteller on air, or a local artist gains visibility through digital platforms, the map of culture itself shifts. The centre expands. The infrastructure grows more inclusive.

That shift, from exclusion to participation, is what’s at stake in how we understand culture.

Participation matters because culture, left unexamined, tends to reproduce its own hierarchies. Specific languages dominate, particular aesthetics become aspirational, and certain regions become “cultural capitals.” Meanwhile, other practices, dialects, and voices are quietly sidelined. The incessant debate over regional language domination and Hindi domination in many parts of India is a reflection of such struggles. The moment one narrative is peddled and the others are sidelined, a cultural imbalance occurs.

Seeing culture as infrastructure forces us to confront this imbalance — to ask not only what we value, but how we enable others to participate in that valuing. Infrastructure also implies responsibility. Roads need repair, institutions need reform, and so do cultural systems. If a language falls out of use, or if a festival becomes inaccessible, the loss is infrastructural — a breakdown in the pathways through which collective life is transmitted.

Digitised Cultural Infrastructure

Digital platforms have further complicated this landscape. They have made cultural participation more accessible but also more fragmented. A young dancer from Balangir might now upload her Odissi performance to YouTube, connect with peers across the country, and find inspiration from a global audience. Simultaneously, an older artist might struggle to navigate algorithms or linguistic hierarchies that favour visibility and virality over depth and originality.

To discuss these platforms meaningfully, we must move beyond comparisons of superiority. The question is not whether traditional or digital spaces are “better,” but what kind of environment each creates for cultural dialogue. The physical stage and the virtual feed are both infrastructures — they shape participation differently, with their own affordances and exclusions.

For instance, social media offers immediacy and reach, yet often rewards speed and conformity. Community spaces, on the other hand, prioritise intimacy and continuity, though they may lack visibility. Both can nurture culture; both can silence it. What matters is the quality of care and access embedded in the environment — whether it enables openness, plurality, and exchange.

Culture thrives not in competition but in coexistence. It grows in ecosystems where multiple infrastructures intersect: local, digital, linguistic, and emotional.

Is every Act a Cultural Act?

When I first began creating literary reels on Instagram, I wasn’t thinking of it as cultural work. I simply wanted to share the joy of reading. Over time, I realised that what I was doing was building a small infrastructure of accessibility — an informal classroom where literature met curiosity. The comments were often from people who hadn’t read the book but wanted to; others shared how they rediscovered forgotten classics. The platform became less about me and more about enabling participation.

That realisation reframed my understanding of what it means to write or teach in today’s world. Cultural work is infrastructural work — it is maintenance, translation, and repair. It is the act of keeping stories alive, not through preservation alone, but through participation and reinvention. In this, culture mirrors the logic of infrastructure: it needs continuous attention, renewal, and care. Without use, it decays; without inclusion, it stiffens into hierarchy.

When participation widens, power redistributes. When a marginalised dialect enters the classroom, when folk theatre is digitised, when women occupy creative leadership, the architecture of culture shifts. These movements don’t simply add diversity; they redefine what counts as “centre.”

What is Cultural Exchange?

Stuart Hall once described culture as “a site of struggle” — where meaning is made, unmade, and remade. Thinking of culture as infrastructure extends that struggle into space: it asks who builds the roads of meaning and who walks them freely. It also reminds us that culture is not a static repository, but a network of flows — an ongoing negotiation between past and present, local and global, tradition and technology.

In India, these negotiations are constant. A single town might host a handloom fair, a film festival, and a digital literacy camp — all cultural infrastructures that coexist and sometimes collide. Each carries its own rules of participation, its own rhythms of inclusion.

In Odisha, I’ve seen such intersections in festivals that combine performance and pedagogy. During one event in Sambalpur, local weavers presented their craft alongside folk singers and digital storytellers. Bhubaneswar hosts several such events during winter that bring together self-help groups, small vendors, and regional cuisines and performances. The conversations that followed were not about hierarchy, but about exchange — how old and new infrastructures could sustain each other. Culture, here, became a dialogue of methods rather than mediums.

Self-Expression in Cultures

Still, no infrastructure is neutral. Each carries histories of inclusion and exclusion. Language, for instance, is a cultural infrastructure that shapes belonging but also boundary. The dominance of English in digital and educational spaces creates both mobility and marginality. Many of my students in Odisha navigate this paradox daily — using English for aspiration but turning to Odia or Hindi for expression. Their cultural fluency is infrastructural resilience; they learn to translate themselves across systems of meaning.

What we often call “soft skills” are, in fact, acts of infrastructural negotiation. To speak across difference, to listen across experience, to participate without erasure — these are not intangible talents, but essential forms of cultural work.

Participation, therefore, is both the right and the responsibility of living within culture. It keeps the system open, adaptive, and self-renewing.

Culture as Connectors

I return often to that image of the library in Odisha — its cracked walls, its quiet energy. The girls reading aloud were not simply performing literature; they were maintaining a system. They were building roads of language that others could walk. Culture, when seen this way, is not a luxury to be consumed, nor a heritage to be preserved in amber. It is a living network of relations — one that demands care as much as celebration.

In every community radio station, in every translation project, in every digital forum that fosters dialogue, we are not just exchanging ideas; we are maintaining a shared infrastructure of being.

And perhaps that is the promise of ParibhaAsha itself — that by activating culture as infrastructure, we do not simply build better systems. We make more connected lives.

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We believe knowledge grows through participation, not preservation. Paricharchā welcomes contributors who wish to explore how culture interacts with society, technology, policy, and imagination.

You can write with us if you:

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