Subcontinental media

Indian Media: Global Approaches

""""The very rapid growth in the Indian media industries and the vibrancy of India′s popular culture are making a working understanding of the Indian scene a prerequisite for any serious study of media in the twenty–first century. As one of the largest and most influential emerging economies in the world today, India now plays a crucial role in any serious discussion of social and economic change taking place at the global level. As new commercial and political alignments take shape in the face of new global circumstances, thinkers and decision–makers are inexorably drawn towards the reality of a new India being forged in the technological and cultural flux of global media flows. Taking an innovative interdisciplinary approach to the complex field of Indian media and society, this book combines a rich descriptive account with critical analysis designed to engender informed debate amongst students, academics and other researchers. "Adrian Athique offers a comprehensive and engaging introduction to the media in India, situating the topic in the context of global media flows and debates. He covers the field in a way that is as clear–headed as it is clearly written." Toby Miller, co–author Global Hollywood "Despite unprecedented expansion of media and communication in the world′s largest democracy and one of its fastest growing economies, in international scholarship the study of media in India has rarely gone beyond tokenism. Taking a global approach to the study of Indian media, Athique′s accessible and incisive book makes a major intervention in Indian media studies and more broadly contributes to the internationalization of our field. Highly recommended." Daya Thussu, University of Westminster "Assessing the distinctiveness of Indian media while framing it in relation to global media practices, Adrian Athique offers an astute overview of India′s globalization by considering its media along the registers of technology, commodity, services and markets. With insights into Indian media piracy, digitality and corporate branding, this book is a welcome contribution to conversations on the centrality of media institutions in shaping heterogeneous forms of globalization around the world." Priya Jaikumar, University of Southern California " "Adrian Athique’s Indian Media provides an accessible and comprehensive account of media trajectories in India and the implications of the changing patterns of production and use for India’s diverse population. The book is unique in scholarship on India: it bridges the divide between scholarship on old and new media, links political trends and technological ones, and brings together pre- and post-independence cultural politics in relation to media and communications. In doing so, it links approaches from political economy and history to those from sociology and cultural studies to paint a picture of a vibrant and changing but always ideologically driven Indian media sphere. Hundreds of research reports, articles, books, and projects on issues from film finance to online marriage websites are referenced and thoughtfully related to major theories of mediation, development communication, and the public sphere that would be familiar on graduate and undergraduate courses worldwide. Students of almost any area of media and communications today would find something useful in this volume, and researchers on Bollywood, technological change, and Indian cultural politics in particular will find rich pickings.… Athique has done a sterling job of pointing readers in fruitful directions, politically and practically, without drowning them in esoteric argumentation." Shakuntala Banaji, London School of Economics "A succinct reader for anyone looking to gain a grasp of how Indian media operates ... Contextualises the contemporary media landscape from film to news to online media and tackles all the relevant topics. A must read for those starting media studies in India and a good reader for those outside to gain insights about the Indian media’s unique place in a globalized world." Vijay Selvarajan, Queensland University of Technology "A significant contribution to the field. It is not just a valuable survey of how India's media landscape has developed and changed since the colonial era, but also is an important intervention in continuing debates about the impact on India of global media and information flows...Indian Media deserves wide readership" Gary Rawnsley, University of Leeds. "Provides a clear understanding of the growing importance of the media industry in India … Given the growing interest in Indian media as an object of academic research and study around the world, this book provides a useful introduction and sets directions for further debates." Rohit K. Dasgupta, Contemporary South Asia " Indian Media deals with a wide range of issues, such as the making of modern India, a critical appraisal of Gandhi’s views on media and its development, liberalisation and the age of television, piracy, cybercultures and media provisions in the scenario of the new leisure economy. Athique identifies the development of ‘native’ cinema as rare among colonial societies, and demonstrates an impeccable understanding of the cultural hegemony of Bollywood in Indian cinema." D. Pongiyannan, Media International Australia "A good, clear and concise book examining developments in the Indian media in the context of colonial, post-colonial and post-liberalization environments has been long overdue. Athique has pretty well filled this gap. He has produced a commendably jargonfree work that places the phases of development of the media within their social, political and economic contexts, providing a well-written and researched narrative and a thoroughly supported analysis of the factors involved in each stage of development." Keith Somerville, University of Kent "The truest reason Athique’s work stands out is that it addresses one of the extensive, influential, and expanding systems of freedom of expression—India’s. For its subject, it is an important work that adds to relatively sparse literature, offering both an introduction and a commentary on contemporary Indian media—especially cinema— from a global-critical perspective." Nikhil Moro, University of North Texas" "Overall, this work represents a historically and theoretically grounded account that contextualizes Indian media in relation to global forces, which is no mean feat given the scale and complexity of the topic. Thus, in contrast to accounts that analyze Indian media in terms of sector-specific changes, Athique’s thematic narrative traces the dialectical interplay between India’s distinctive media system and global trends in communication. The result is a rich and nuanced picture of varied aspects of the country’s contemporary media landscape" Kalyani Chadha, University of Maryland.

2007

This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution). Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances. In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.

Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research

Surely it was a call for justice – academic as well as applied – a call for greater social justice, for which the theme 'Media and the North East' was chosen for the current issue of the Global Media Journal, Indian Edition. The choice was indeed a significant and strategic one and it is expected that an analytical understanding on North East India would hopefully emerge from this exercise and the dynamics of the region would be understood through a prism of media studies. For a couple of unavoidable reasons, we were rendered late in bringing out the issue, for which the Guest Editor takes the full responsibility. We have tried to accommodate representative papers from across the region and also across the spread of the theme that would explain the often-overlapping complexities of the region, its politics, economy and its media. The multi-layered problems of understanding media and its role in addressing social situations were key objectives that this issue has tried to unfold. Many tribal societies of North East still have their traditional communication intact by and large despite the boom of commercial media. Our first article of Dr.Raghavendra Mishra & K. Newme of Assam University showcaseone such sample – Zeme Naga Traditional Folk Media and social communication. The second article-'Print Comes to North East India', written by this guest editor, tried to situate the advent of print media in North East – a portion of the print media history of our country which has fallen out of our traditional media history books of India. The placing in of the textual history continues with the third article by Dr.C. Lalmuansangkimi, from IIMC, Aizwal, which is a reflection on the emergence of Print and Electronic Media in Mizoram-one of the important and distinguishable states of North East.

There is a curious partitioning of media histories of the west from those of other countries. The kind of comparative analysis that would be expected with a set of global technologies and practices is lacking. Although communications media were promoted as a technology of nation building by western powers and received as such by countries such as India, strangely, there is a wide gap between the rhetoric of globality and the literature pertaining to local and national uses of media technologies. My essay situates the history of post-independence media growth in India within this gap, in a preliminary attempt to bridge it.