Sepia Mutiny

» see sepiamutiny.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Sepia Mutiny's whole subject was one hyphen: what it meant to be Indian American and second generation, argued out daily by people who were. That is a very specific address, and mine was a TTNet line in Turkey, so this one is read off its own archive rather than out of memory. The archive is still up, which is why the reading is possible at all.

It began on 30 July 2004, a date I take from the writers because they put it on their own closing post. The founders were mostly second-generation Indian American students and young professionals, the site was owned by somebody who signed as Abhi, and the bylines stayed on first names and handles for eight years. Nobody was building a personal brand out of it in the way the next decade would demand.

Scale came faster than anyone expected. By May 2007 the site FAQ claimed over five million readers since launch, which for a group blog about a diaspora was enormous, and the posts were being cited by other blogs and by newspapers that had no desk covering any of this.

The range was wide for a blog with no payroll. Congressional and presidential election coverage from an angle nobody else was taking, obituaries and anger after attacks on South Asians in America, then book and film reviews from writers who had actually finished the book. India and the subcontinent got covered too, mostly as it reached the diaspora.

~ the record ~

~ what it owned ~

Two stories in 2006 made the site unavoidable. One was Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard undergraduate whose debut novel turned out to contain passages from other writers, a story the mainstream press handled badly and Sepia Mutiny handled at length. The citations that followed ran up to the New York Times and the Washington Post, which is how a volunteer blog ends up in the record.

The other was the Virginia Senate race, where the sitting senator pointed at a rival campaign's volunteer, an Indian American student born in the state, and called him macaca on camera. American political media needed days to work out what it was looking at. The people on this blog did not, and the senator lost in November.

~ mutinous end times ~

On 15 March 2012 they posted the notice, under the title Mutinous End Times, and gave 1 April as the last day of new posts. The reasons were honest and dull. The blogosphere had evolved since 2004, they had not kept up with it on content or on the technical side, and the writers had lives that had filled in around the site.

The first of April brought the goodbyes rather than a redirect. Abhi posted one called All good things, Taz posted a top ten and a thank-you list, Manish posted one titled Relax. Then the posting stopped, nearly eight years after it started.

~ the headstone post ~

They came back once, on 6 May 2012, for a post titled with two dates and nothing else: 7/30/2004 to 4/1/2012. The body is one sentence, and the operative half of it is that the archives are still available. Under that sits a list of the writers with their individual handles, which is the part that dates it hardest. A group blog dissolving into eight personal feeds is the 2012 internet in one page.

The promise in that post held up better than most of them do. Fourteen years on, sepiamutiny.com still answers over plain http and still serves the 2012 front page, title bar and all: all that flavorful brownness in one savory packet. The https host is dead and nobody has renewed anything, so the whole archive now depends on an old web server that somebody is still quietly paying for.

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