Introduction: Critical Explorations of Media Modernity in India

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.

Media refers to means of mass communication such as TV, radio, newspapers, etc. Media, be it any type, reaches the remotest corners of our country. As the literacy rate is increasing, Indians realize the need for more and more information. Newspapers, national and regional, focus on the various aspects of information : political, social, economic, sportive, etc. Radio is also a good source of information and entertainment. It helps a great deal during emergency or some disaster. Like radio, TV, too, is a very powerful media. With a continuous flow of news about business, sports, etc, TV has turned out to be a useful electronic media. Internet is an indispensable tool of our economic sector. In fact, it is required in public and private sectors. The use of computers for teaching is truly innovative which has benefited students of all streams. Whatever the type of media, its duty is to report impartially. But unfortunately media mostly focuses on catchy and exaggerated news to attract readers' or viewers' attention. Some newspapers indulge in the malpractice of " paid-news ". Besides, media highlights violence which has a negative influence on juvenile minds. Perhaps the spirit of competition propels it towards indulgence in malpractices. But the fact remains that media is a powerful and useful medium, if it is used with care and responsibility

South Asian Popular Culture , 2022

Editorial introduction to the special issue of the journal South Asian Popular Culture. The editorial is a 7000 word essay that takes the question of "regional cinema and media" from merely problematising to situating the category in the intersecting nodes of technology, place and form. Through the thematically curated essays we argue that the region in film and media is a relational concept that are often mobilised through interlaced histories of movement of media technologies and social labour

Indian mass media, in the modern age, was dominated by the prints; in postmodern era television became the prominent medium whereas in contemporary post-postmodern time social media is tightening severe grip on public opinion and agenda setting. Post-postmodernism or digimodernism, the terms got popularized around a decade ago, reflect the technological control over human mind where 'the truth' is 'manufactured' in a virtual space and disseminated to digitally connected society. Digitally constructed or manipulated ideas are able to distract the attention of middle class from the real issues of poverty, environmental hazards, and infrastructure development. Post-truth, the latest repercussion of Post-postmodernism is a new term; widely used to understand the contemporary socio-political situation, have an impact on the landscape of mass media, in India, too. The mainstream media, newspapers, radio and TV channels are facing grave challenges to retain their audiences and capability to influence the politics and culture. Social media have accelerated the falsification and distortion of facts, simultaneously, with advancement in techniques of image sharing, extensive feedbacks, and live videos. This paper will analyze the tussle between the mainstream and social media of contemporary India under the post-postmodern conditions and comment upon the media landscape emerging out of it.

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.

Thesis Eleven, 2012

We live in worlds of signs and wonders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary mega-cities of India. For over a century now, urban sociologists, flaneurs, ethnographers, psycho-geographers, and semioticians have been pointing to the power of the visual media and publicity of the city street -not just the street lights, signboards, posters, and graffiti, but the very design of the motor car and the tram, of shopfronts and sidewalks. The new century has brought a whole host of new technological artefacts within hand's reach of all but the poorest denizens of the city street -the cell phone, the iPad, and attendant applications that help us navigate the city and connect and network cyber and physical spaces. These technologies are creating new cultures, material and aesthetic, cyber and physical space-making of new kinds that do not simply alter older traditions but transmogrify them into new shapes and flows. Older forms of social theorization of structure-agency, objectivity-subjectivity, human being and technological artifice are in turn being rethought afresh in new material contexts, even as we have yet to absorb what the dominant media technologies of the past century -the book, the photograph, the neon sign, television and cinema -mean for understanding human society. In recent issues, Thesis Eleven has been exploring these themes of the ways our new, globalized technological social worlds are mediating our social worlds and annihilating time. Peter Murphy and others explored a post-discursive social theory of knowledge in Issue 89: 'Medium Theory and Social Knowledge' (2007). As Murphy himself states: 'The key insight of medium theory is that linguistic acts (signs, symbols, codes, grammars, justifications, writings, and so on) are only a tiny aspect of the way in which

The essay suggests that the ideologies of the privatized satellite television in India remain largely inconceivable unless one takes into account the complex relationship between the Indian state and realms of ‘popular’ down from the 1960s. It takes a close look at the way India’s state-controlled television tried to frame a certain aesthetics of ‘development communication’ involving issues of pedagogy, nationhood, citizenship, sexuality, morality, autonomy and publicness. One of the key arguments is that the State’s moralizing effort to conceive a modern televisual public as antagonistic to what it thought to be a ‘vulgar’ cinematic public, along with a concurrent obligation to make television popular and profitable, created a host of contradictions within the hegemonic projects of the state. This, however, also led to possibilities of negotiation between the statist forms and the emergent consumerist forms of citizenship post-1982. In this sense, we are looking at the conditions of possibility of the way post-Liberalization satellite television most aptly demonstrates the inter-constitutive relationship between the State and the Market, the historical liaison between democracy and capitalism.

This article provides a review of the academic and popular literature on new media practices in India, focusing on the country’s youth's use of mobile phones and the Internet, as well as new media prosumption. One particular feature of the Indian case is the confluence of commercial exploitation of new media technologies and their application for development purposes in initiatives that aim to bring these technologies to marginalized segments of the Indian population. Technology usage in turn is shaped by the socioeconomic location of the user, especially in regards to gender and caste. The potential of new media technologies to subvert such social stratifications and associated norms has inspired much public debate, which is often carried out on the Internet, giving rise to an online public sphere. In all of the writings reviewed here, the tension surrounding new media technologies as a meeting place of the old and the new in India is paramount.

Sharing an excerpt from my essay, ‘New Media Overtures Before New Media Practice in India’ -- first published in Marg, in 2009 and republished in Domus in Jan. 2015. My formulation of a genealogy or ‘pre-history’ for India’s new media practices of the 1990s is based on a well-developed theoretical position that I have manifested over the last decade through my lectures and essays published in anthologies. I chart this ‘pre-history’ through the collaborative endeavours, experimental films and photographic experiments of Akbar Padamsee, Nalini Malani, Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain and Krishen Khanna during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Dashrath Patel’s transdisciplinary practice from the 1960s to the 1980s. This is part of my commitment to retrieving the lost histories of art, and to writing art history against the grain of received narratives. During the 1960s and 1970s, when these experiments were being conducted, the art world in India was fixated on painting as the premier form, so these were seen as aberrations if they were noticed at all. Art criticism was still obsessed with the questions of modernism, indigenism and authenticity, and had not expanded to be able to embrace such experiments. There was no critical framework or cultural context for them. That is why I have analysed the history of Indian new media art as a passage from ‘no-context media’ from the late sixties to ‘new-context media’ of the nineties. *

Contributions to Indian Sociology, 2022

Markus Schleiter and Erik de Maaker, eds. 2020. Media, Indigeneity and Nation in South Asia. London and New York: Routledge. xvi + 281 pp. Notes, figures, references, index. £120.00 (hardback). Contributions to Indian Sociology 56, 1 (2022): 99–118