From the Margins to the Mainstream: How a Small-Town Influencer is Reshaping Agrarian Discourse in Assam

In the far-flung district of North Lakhimpur in Assam, a quiet but powerful wave of digital resistance is emerging. It doesn’t come from politicians or seasoned journalists, but from a young local woman named Gungun Chetia, whose smartphone has become her weapon of choice. In a region where rural struggles rarely pierce the mainstream media bubble, Gungun’s viral video documenting an emotionally charged land eviction has become a pivotal moment in the digital reimagination of agrarian politics in Northeast India.

Her rise as a digital influencer in Assam’s rural media ecosystem is not driven by lifestyle branding or commodified aesthetics. Rather, Gungun represents a different kind of social media presence one that thrives on real-time resistance, emotional resonance, and narrative authenticity. In doing so, she is not just amplifying the voices of marginalized peasants, but fundamentally challenging how the politics of land and livelihood are constructed, circulated, and contested in contemporary India.

The video that catapulted Gungun into the public eye was recorded during a land eviction drive conducted by the district administration in Phukanhat Milon Nagar area in Lakhimpur district of Assam on June 3, 2025. The eviction targeted smallholder and indigenous farmers people who had been cultivating the land for generations without formal land ownership documents (patta). Despite submitting petitions for regularisation of their land rights under various government schemes, their claims were ignored or indefinitely delayed.

What made the eviction particularly distressing was its timing that is the mid-agricultural season. Crops were trampled, homes were razed, and entire families were uprooted. Eyewitnesses reported the use of bulldozers, police personnel, and minimal notice. Gungun, who lives in close proximity to the affected area, was alerted by frantic phone calls from villagers. She reached the site, smartphone in hand, and began recording.

The scenes she captured were emotionally devastating: elderly women weeping beside their demolished homes, children sifting through broken household items, and anxious farmers watching their fields destroyed. Her video narration, delivered in colloquial Assamese, combined raw emotion with political clarity. Without relying on any formal media house, she uploaded the video to her Facebook page, where it went viral within hours.

In the absence of adequate rural reportage by national and regional media, Gungun’s intervention filled a critical vacuum. Her work exemplifies what media theorist Nick Couldry calls voice—the capacity of marginalized individuals to narrate their realities outside elite-controlled platforms. In this context, voice is not merely expressive but strategic: a tool to reclaim visibility, legitimacy, and space in the public sphere.

This form of bottom-up media power challenges the long-standing asymmetry in how news is produced and who gets to produce it. By uploading raw footage without edits or corporate filters, Gungun constructs what scholar John Postill might describe as fieldwork media—an embedded, participatory form of journalism where recording and sharing become acts of political agency. Postill stresses that media should be understood not only as texts or technologies but also as practices. Hence, fieldwork media are not just tools or content, but the ways in which people use media in everyday contexts (watching, sharing, producing, commenting)

Her use of Facebook, YouTube, and WhatsApp doesn’t just relay information; it builds a communicative infrastructure of trust. Unlike traditional journalists who are often perceived as outsiders, Gungun’s rootedness in the community allows her to speak with, rather than for, the people. Her digital persona is not that of a detached reporter but of a participant-observer, someone who feels the same precarity and expresses it publicly.

Assam’s agrarian context provides the structural backdrop to Gungun’s activism. With erratic monsoons, flood-prone zones, and ambiguous land tenure systems, smallholder farmers are routinely pushed to the edge. Particularly vulnerable are residents of char areas and tribal belts, where customary claims over land are often invalidated by bureaucratic interpretations of ownership.

In such a landscape, visibility itself becomes political. The act of documenting a forced eviction, showing the destruction of livelihoods, or capturing the tearful pleas of displaced families can reshape public consciousness. In this sense, Gungun’s video did more than inform, it provoked, mobilised, and unsettled.

Her work also aligns with Jodi Dean’s idea of communicative capitalism, where digital networks offer opportunities for resistance while simultaneously subjecting voices to commodification and algorithmic control. Although Gungun has not monetized her content, her visibility still depends on shares, likes, and views, metrics that bind even the most radical content creators to platform logics.

Gungun’s efforts can be framed within the concept of subaltern counterpublics, articulated by theorist Nancy Fraser. These are alternative spaces where marginalized groups construct their own narratives and engage in oppositional discourse. For too long, Assam’s rural and indigenous populations have been excluded from mainstream public debates. Through social media, however, Gungun and others are crafting a parallel digital public sphere—one that centers agrarian distress, land rights, and cultural memory.

The reception to her video also highlights the presence of an emergent, vernacular digital citizenry. Youth in towns like North Lakhimpur are not merely consumers of national narratives, they are co-producers of local ones. This digital literacy, coupled with deep community ties, allows for hybrid forms of engagement that blur the line between activism and journalism.

Following the viral spread of her video, local protests were organised. Civil society actors, student unions, and leaders like Akhil Gogoi, an iconic figure in Assam’s land rights movement took notice. This suggests that digital resistance, when grounded in the vernacular and embedded in community life, can transcend online boundaries and catalyse offline mobilisation.

Yet, this space is fraught with risk. As digital dissent grows, so does the state’s capacity for surveillance, censorship, and suppression. Gungun has already faced criticism from detractors who accuse her of spreading misinformation or instigating unrest. This highlights the double-edged nature of digital activism, while it can shield voices from local censorship, it also exposes them to trolling, defamation, and administrative retaliation.

The digital field in Assam is now a contested site, particularly in the wake of polarising debates around identity, indigeneity, and citizenship post-NRC. In such a context, Gungun’s interventions also draw attention to the gendered dimensions of rural politics, where women are not just victims but frontline narrators of displacement, resistance, and community survival.

In Gungun Chetia, we see the emergence of a new media archetype, the small-town, grassroots digital influencer who is reshaping public discourse not through spectacle but through sincerity. Her storytelling is intimate yet political, emotional yet factual. It destabilizes hierarchies in news production and redistributes narrative power in ways previously thought impossible from peripheral regions like North Lakhimpur.

At a time when India’s mainstream media faces an ongoing crisis of credibility and centralisation, Gungun’s story signals a decentralisation of media influence. Her videos are not mere content, they are community documents, evidence archives, and catalysts of civic awakening.

She is not just a content creator. She is a chronicler of the overlooked, a memory keeper of resistance, and possibly the voice of a new generation of Assamese youth who see the digital not as escape but as encounter, an encounter with injustice, with history, and with the hope of change.

Her revolution may not be televised, but it is most certainly being streamed, on Facebook, on YouTube, and in the hearts of those who refuse to be unseen.