Books

MEDIA AND MEDIATION: Communication Processes, (Vol. I) edited by Bernard Bel, Jan Brouwer, Biswajit Das, Vibodh Parthasarathy and Guy Poitevin. Sage Publications, New Delhi, 2005.

SHOVELING SMOKE: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India by William Mazzarella. Duke University Press, Durham, 2003.

‘Mass communication’ in the Indian context is primarily seen as a vocational and skills-based field rather than an area of critical intellectual inquiry. In their respective approaches to the diversely stratified and pulsating ecology of media forms bombarding the contemporary Indian, the two books under consideration strike an altogether different tone for communication studies. Setting aside older media studies paradigms that construe ‘communication’ as the encoding and decoding of messages and calibrate ‘media effects’ by establishing positivistic links between messages and demonstrable changes in beliefs and behaviour, Media and Mediation and Shoveling Smoke redefine these objects of inquiry in terms that are both more profound and more elusive. Nor is their significance limited to the area of ‘communication’ per se, for both books ultimately illuminate the distinctive character of contemporary neo-liberalism in India by revealing the particularities of state and market interactions with the public.

Without ignoring the significance of what came previously, both works take the economic reforms of 1991 and the subsequent reorientation of the developmentalist state towards the market as a crucial turning point in India’s communication revolution. Yet insofar as both seek to understand how contemporary state- and market-driven efforts to influence the populace are shaped by institutional and ideological legacies, questions of history remain close to the surface. Bel et al voice a noteworthy hauteur towards ‘trendy’ interpretive approaches that celebrate consumer agency and the multiplicity of meanings, a sign of their commitment to a non-doctrinaire variety of leftist structural and political-economic analysis. Equally, while I suspect that Mazzarella’s evocation of an unidentified Mumbai advertising agency might initially set off a trendiness alarm for the editors of Media and Mediation, ultimately the two works espouse rather similar visions of how the exegesis of cultural meaning may be used to deepen rather than displace materialist and structural analysis.

Despite the potentially unwieldy number of editors involved in the compilation of Media and Mediation, its programmatic vision remains remarkably coherent throughout. This coherence is in no small part achieved by the editors’ sustained efforts to frame the book’s project by means of multiple forewords and afterwords. Within the three-part introduction, the editorial ‘overture’ trenchantly sets out the book’s vision of communication processes as irreducibly political. To be sure, it is now commonplace to see the realm of ‘the political’ as encompassing not just macro-level regimes of policy, executive action and elections, but also the multifarious activities of business and occupational lobbies, media conglomerates and gender or caste-based social movements. By invoking ‘the political’, however, these authors also embrace the micropolitics of identity, namely those dynamics of power and culture that shape subjective desires, identifications and self-conceptions. They also seek to show how the political is routinely masked by the tendency of debates about communications and media to focus on questions of efficacy, efficiency and morality – technocratic means towards developmental ends.

These programmatic statements are followed up in two tightly-focussed essays, one of which assembles a theoretical toolkit (drawing not just from media studies but, importantly, from cultural and political theoreticians such as Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School), while the other surveys the rather narrow range of themes and preoccupations that have hitherto dominated the field of communication studies within the Indian context.

The remainder of the text is organized in two parts, ‘Constructions and Configurations’ and ‘Anatomies of Arbitration’. The division of labour here is partly chronological: the contributions comprising Part I tend to stress historical interactions between the Indian state (colonial as well as postcolonial) and the private sector, as well as trajectories taken in the localization of particular media forms (such as radio and TV broadcasting), while the essays grouped in Part II appear more concerned with the neoliberal context and with communicative modalities of the electronic variety. Yet the division between these two parts can also be seen in thematic terms – with the former showing the elaboration of distinctive communication ‘strategies’ structured by key institutions and ideologies in the Indian context, and the latter turning to the ‘tactical’ arenas of practice wherein diverse actors (e.g. political parties, ad firms, activists, and those targeted by the market or by state developmentalism) not only implement but also contest these frameworks.

The book is further subdivided into six sections whose titles (‘Fulcrums of Administration’, ‘Invasion and Intrusion’, etc.) are only occasionally helpful in disambiguating their respective concerns. By and large, however, individual contributions resonate well with the programmatic goals set out by the editors. In his case study of the 19th century introduction of the telegraph, D.K. Lahiri Chaudhury chronicles a colonial official’s hybrid career as a technological innovator-cum-administrator, effectively showing the initially haphazard yet ultimately coherent emergence of Indian telecommunications as ‘state-controlled technological enterprise.’ Quite a different focus animates V. Parthasarathy’s account of how firms, artists and audiences interacted in the early history of the Indian recorded music industry; here, what is stressed is the inextricable intertwining of marketing logics with the birth of new sensibilities and values surrounding ‘disembodied music’.

If some contributors focus on how specific communication modalities became grounded in the Indian context, others usefully address the ideologies that mediate communication processes at turning points of transition or crisis. M. Chaudhuri’s reflections on press freedom in the post-liberalization period focus attention on the paradoxical danger of censorship by the market (such as when pressures of corporate sponsorship serve to constrain and shape media content), a concern also raised in U. Chakravarti’s broad-ranging and incisive polemic on the ironies of female agency and dominance as depicted in contemporary advertisements, TV serials and talk shows. The essays by B. Das and S. Kumar on the formation of colonial and national policies on broadcasting complement each other well; the former highlights how security concerns historically shaped not only national-level policies towards the ‘Indian public’ but also the state’s very construction of that entity, while the latter explores its fragmentation (political as well as cultural) in the wake of recent moves towards direction of decentralization.

A special gem is D. Sinha’s ‘Information Society as if Communication Mattered’, which unveils the arena of development-oriented communication as a mode of paternalist dominance in which both state and market have long been complicit. As do J. Maid, P. Padalghare and G. Poitevin in their joint contribution to the volume, Sinha challenges practitioners of communication to re-imagine the targets of their messages in ways that actually facilitate rather than ignore dialogic process of reception and appropriation. Other contributions to the volume are equally interesting if less well integrated into the overall plan of the volume: they include discussions of the role of media in Andhra Pradesh electoral politics, the construction of virtual social worlds through transnational electronic mail, the communication strategies of Narmada activists, and the shifting regulatory frameworks surrounding copyright.

The editors of Media and Mediation call for a ‘critical interpretation’ that involves both accounting for how people perceive their own media consumption as well as relating these experiences and meanings to ideological structures and formations of social power. If Mazzarella’s brilliantly-realized ethnography of a Mumbai advertising agency is any illustration, such a feat is more compellingly realized within the roominess of an extended case-study rather than the confines of the brief essay. An extended exploration of how admen negotiated and helped define the uneasy transition from developmentalist to consumerist visions of the nation and the Indian citizen from the 1990s through the present, Shoveling Smoke is also a fascinating and lively portrait of a professional life-world whose denizens take themselves intensely seriously, perhaps never more so than when crafting images of pleasure and fun.

Interestingly, the two books resonate closely on many scores, including their understandings of how global consumer ideology paradoxically replicates itself through localized discourses of cultural integrity and uniqueness. Particularly noteworthy is Mazzarella’s wry account of the Kama Sutra condom campaign, an expertly-balanced analysis of ‘aspirational commodity erotics’ wherein political-economic, ideological, and cultural strands are interwoven to reveal the almost-poignant struggle of admen to live up to their conception of themselves as fulfilling a public service even as they sought to liberate the supposed libidinal impulses of Indian consumers from the long dark night of repression under developmentalist austerity.

The sensory quality of Mazzarella’s prose brings to light what is sometimes missing in the contributions to Brouwer et. al., which are occasionally laden with enough jargon to run the risk of putting off the practitioners and pundits of media and communication who ought to form the book’s audience. Ironically, given their subject matter, the book’s editors could have struck a finer balance between reiterating their programmatic vision with academic precision and tailoring the message for non-scholars. But there is no doubt that both Media and Mediation and Shoveling Smoke are timely and extremely important contributions towards theorizing India’s ongoing ‘communication revolution’. Critical as they are in stance, these works neither decry nor deny its significance but rather highlight its multifarious ‘discursivities’ and ‘materialities’ – its smoke and mirrors as well as its hidden machinery – bringing to view a nexus of power and meaning, dominance and desire, cynical calculation and utopian dreaming that interweaves elements of both the old and the new.

Smita Lahiri

 

RELIGION, VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL MOBILISATION IN SOUTH ASIA edited by Ravinder Kaur. Sage, Delhi, 2005.

Ravider Kaur’s edited volume, Religion, Violence and Political Mobilisation in South Asia, is a useful collection of essays that seeks to map and analyse the phenomenon of socio-political mobilisation and mass violence around constructed religious and ethnic identities. Loosely termed ‘communal violence’ in South Asia, this has been and remains a source of enormous suffering and insecurity among the people of this part of the globe for more then a century.

Ravinder Kaur herself persuasively rejects simplistic and facile explanations of such violence as ‘spontaneous outburst of emotions’, the handywork of a few ‘anti-social elements’ or as proof of regrettable mutual hatred that periodically recurs in South Asia. She also argues against the assumption that frequent incidents of violence occur like a disease in the society and leave everything unaltered, only to return to ‘normal’ once the disease has lapsed. Instead, she sees these episodes of collective violence against a community as part of a process of ongoing social control exercised by the dominant groups.

Most popular and scholarly analyses of communal riots neglect the aftermath of the violence when survivors frequently seek ‘safety in numbers’, that is, migrate to areas considered safe because of the numerical strength of their group. Another neglected trend is of ‘economic boycott’ by the majority group that ensures further loss of economic and social power of the minority group. Kaur importantly sees significance in the lasting psychological, social, economic and political impact of the physical violence in terms of the violent rupture in people’s personal lives, loss of faith in government agencies, and a deep sense of subjugation and alienation from the ‘mainstream’. She aptly sees these trends as part of a project to reduce the victim community to ‘second class citizens’ – deprived of protection, fundamental rights, and basic human dignity.

This framework is particularly useful in understanding the Gujarat pogrom of 2002. Most analyses dwell on the grisly events of slaughter and rape and not on the lasting impact of ghettoisation, social and economic boycott and cultural suppression. She points out that conventional studies of communal violence view ‘hatred’ from the ‘other’ community in an almost ahistorical and de-contextualized mode, mainly in terms of actions and reactions, usually a response to provocation by minorities. She rightly observes that this obscures the central role of religious mobilization on the one hand, and of various arms of the state on the other.

Bjorn Hettne makes a useful classification of forms of political violence that occur in South Asia. These range from assassination of political leaders (usually inspired by ethno-racial conflict); riots between communities usually sparked off by a provocative religious ritual or neighbourhood conflict but deriving from struggles for power and resources; sectarian violence within the same religion; inter-ethnic violence between ‘sons of the soil’ and poor immigrants; upper caste violence against Dalits; ethno-racial political violence aimed at political independence or autonomy; pogroms; and ethnically organised gang wars.

In the post 9/11 context, Hettne finds that the highly contested term ‘terrorism’, usually prefixed with ‘international’, has penetrated the discourse mainly to justify greater tolerance for repression. It usually induces elements of fear, surprise, civilian victims and political objectives, but mainly old internal conflicts increasingly described as ‘terrorist’. In India after 9/11, Indian Muslims are increasingly seen as participating or at least sympathetic to terrorism. The paradox is observed that while India is evolving in a fundamentalist direction, explosive and chronically violent Pakistan under Musharraf is trying to break with fundamentalist forms of Islam. In Sri Lanka, the conflict between Tamils and Sinhalese which resulted in 65,000 deaths has come closer to a solution, in that the international war against terrorism has been reduced to the freedom of movement for the Tamil Tigers, branded as a terrorist organization by several countries, including India. In Nepal, Maoists are no longer simply dubbed ‘terrorists’ and are seen as more akin to the Indian Naxalite uprising.

Among the other significant papers in the volume is Jan Breman’s analysis of Gujarat 2002. An outstanding scholarly observer of the state over decades, he notes that the state apparatus – both the leading political party and government agencies – condoned or even facilitated the pogrom, rather than stop it. Moreover, the trade union movement which used to be the main platform for collective action has withered away. What he describes as the ‘paralysis’ of social movements, could not have been better illustrated than by the decision of the board of the Sabarmati Asharam to close its gates when the violence spread through the city. He observes that the front organizations of Sangh Parivar were able to mobilize mercenaries of subaltern castes to assist in operation of killing, burning and looting.

Paul Brass is another perceptive foreign scholar who focuses on the discourse of Hindu-Muslim communalism that has corrupted history, penetrated memory, and contributes in the present to the production and perpetuation of communal violence. He notes that the ‘memory’ of Indian history has been kept vivid also by the militant Hindutva demand to recapture and restore temples allegedly destroyed by the Muslim conquerors and replace these by mosques. He evocatively maps how Hindu and Muslim bodies are both the location and the metaphor in the production of communal violence.

This slim volume of essays is both brilliant and disturbing in its flashes of distilled insights and provocative analyses. The major limitation is that the essays were collected for a seminar, and inevitably are both uneven and fail to build a coherent discourse. Yet the flashes of insight into phenomena that constitute some of the gravest contemporary challenges to our survival as a secular democracy are enough to make the manuscript worth careful study.

Harsh Mander

 

THE INSURRECTION OF LITTLE SELVES: The Crisis of Secular-Nationalism in India by Aditya Nigam. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2006.

IN the last two decades, academicians as well as public intellectuals have made important interventions in the debate on secularism. The book under review is a welcome and refreshing contribution to this debate. In the very first line, the book makes its object clear – an exploration of the ‘entity’ called ‘secular-nationalism’. It further claims, ‘As the ruling ideology of the postcolonial Indian state and elite, it (‘secular-nationalism’) represents a specific, historically constituted, ideological configuration.’ Refreshingly, the rest of the book does not confine itself to defining this construct (or track its historical roots in conventional manner) and instead opens it up at its specific genealogical moments, mobilizes a wide range of political thought and anchors on the scrutiny of the construct of ‘modern unmarked abstract citizen’. The idea of this unmarked individuated abstract citizenry (a dream of modern democracies) is interrogated by rupturing it with the Foucauldian expression, ‘insurrection of little selves’.

In this project, the author focuses on 1980s and early to mid-1990s and a wide spectrum of activities these decades witnessed, threatening the project of nationhood in India. These are lower caste movements (including the Dalit movement), ecological movements, women’s struggles, eruption of ‘subnational’ assertions like the issue of Khalistan and Assamese nationalism (absence of a full length discussion on Jammu and Kashmir is striking in this context) and so on. The term used in this context is ‘infra-nationalism’ which should be understood as different from ‘subnationalism’ in that they need not ever express themselves in the desire for another nation... but they nevertheless insist on redrawing the internal cultural boundaries of the nation-in-the-making.’ Avoiding existing currencies like ‘identity politics’ or ‘class politics’, the politics of this period is described as an insurrection of little selves. Another thematic focused on in this study are locations, concerns and perspectives of Muslims and Dalits in this discourse.

With these two threads, the author moves up and down in colonial as well as post-colonial periods, draws comparative insights from the South African context and engages with liberal, Marxist as well as post-colonial thinkers from across the globe. Venturing across the colonial times, he argues that ‘the project of Indian nationalism was an impossible one, precisely because it was impossible to have one common history.’ It can of course be argued here that no matter how flawed the nationalist legacies, for a large section of the population the nation was ‘imagined’ as one community. Nevertheless, unlike what is argued by western theorists, in India, the heritage of these legacies was not predicated on ‘a past of common memories and common amnesia’ but on a contested ensemble of often mutually conflicting and heterogeneous memories and forgetfulness.

To puncture the hegemonic discourse of nationhood, the author looks ‘at the historical imaginations at work among the Dalits and the Muslims.’ In his selection of examples and narratives he remains fruitfully fragmentary, which further opens up threads and problematics rather than lead to a closure of the arguments. However, in this reading of colonial voices (of Dalits and Muslims) the agenda he sets up is ‘the question of the hegemony of one particular voice’ and not mere recovery of the many voices of Dalits and Muslims. Hence we find critical scrutiny of figures like Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Periyar, Sayyed Ahmed Khan, Muhammad Ali among others. This reader, however, was expecting more analytical space to the developments that took place in late 19th century as this period has been regarded as the foundational moment in the emergence of Indian nationalism.

Similarly, while the discussion on Muslim voices remains confined to the north Indian ruling elites, the debate on the Dalit question is based on voices from the South. This disjuncture, one can argue, is due to the lack of historical studies on the respective subjects – Muslim communities of the South and Dalit voices from the North. This analytical gap is partly filled up with references of caste associations from north India (i.e. Kayastha Sabha from colonial UP and a very detailed discussion of lower caste movements in the second half of 1970s). Here, it would not be unfair to expect more space to figures like V.P. Singh and Laloo Prasad Yadav along with a more nuanced analysis of the relation between Mandal and Mandir. On the other hand, in exploring the colonial roots, the book provides a rich understanding on a complicated relationship between Ambedkarite Dalit politics, Hinduised mainstream Congress attitudes, Hindu nationalists and, last but not least, the Hindu communalist elements.

Along with Dalits and Muslims another ‘self’ examined closely in this book is of the Indian Marxists. Pointing to the gulf between ‘high’ theory and ‘low’ practice among the secular Marxists, the author for the first time goes beyond the level of political elites and interviews local leaders, activists and party workers of CPI(M) in Bengal. On the basis of this interesting interaction he notes the immense variation of the meanings assigned to the term ‘secular’ which further points out that ‘there is an attempt in the present conjuncture to try to negotiate the rapidly changing situation.’ These discussions help highlight the disjuncture between the demand of local level politics (to actively participate in the religious life of the community) and the impositions from above to conduct political behaviour in a highly sanitized manner. As two activists put it, ‘despite party injunctions, "we have to" participate in the life of the community’ (p. 295).

These narratives and references thus calls for a scrutiny of various concepts, i.e., ‘mass man’, ‘homogeneous empty time’ of modernity (Walter Benjamin) and nation (Benedict Anderson) and demands a recognition of different temporalities and their articulation. This is particularly crucial as ‘nationalism, because it was coeval with industrial/capitalist development, was also coeval with large-scale dislocation in social terms, leading to an uprooting of communities and their insertion into a different logic of modern community-identity formation’ (p. 307). This is a helpful framework and allows substantive analytical freedom to engage with the community of Dalits who ‘represent a deep resistance to the two great artefacts of our modernity, secularism and the nation. By privileging lived experience, as for instance feminism does, it also represents a resistance to the fundamental epistemic disruption instituted by modernity, that between the subject and object’ (p. 309).

The merit of the book lies in its successful translation of this ‘lived experience’ of the concept of abstract unmarked individual citizen at theoretical levels, that too in a remarkably lucid language. On the other hand, it demonstrates how ‘lived experiences’ of the communities like Dalits, Muslims and Marxists are represented by ‘secular-nationalists’ in their own terms, not merely denying these communities a political participation in their own manner but making the very process of the (non)emergence of ‘mass man’ a unique one in Indian contexts. It is these denied voices or repressed selves that have returned in the last two decades forcing us to adopt new analytical frames. This new framework demands we move beyond the language of either state or civil society. The notion of political society (Partha Chatterjee) is helpful in this context. ‘Here the key figure,’ the author concludes, ‘is the bilingual intellectual/activist who speaks at once the language of community and that of civil society. In other words, the privileged position of the enlightened intelligentsia has to be abandoned’ (p. 325).

Sadan Jha

 

PRACTISING JOURNALISM: Values, Constraints, Implications edited by Nalini Rajan. Sage Publications, Delhi, 2005.

INDIA, we are informed, represents an exciting media market. With well over a hundred TV channels, countless print publications, and more recently, FM radio – fuelled in part by a burgeoning middle class hungry for news, views and infotainment – the last few years have witnessed a sharp escalation of investment, both domestic and foreign, in what not too far back was derisively described as a dull landscape. But it is not just the growing lucre of profit or the prospects of a wide range of jobs for an emerging strata of professionals that is driving the new developments. It is equally the amazing range of stories and events waiting to be captured and communicated that drives our new media practitioners. All of which go towards formulating new challenges for practice.

Is journalism, as editor Nalini Rajan in her introduction to a fascinating collection of essays writes ‘…a crusading vocation against the different currents of scepticism and pragmatism in the media’, is ‘the idea of ethics in journalism being challenged today by market-driven ethics’ or is, unlike what most observers tend to believe, the struggle to define the values of the profession and craft still alive? Given the power of big money, monopoly and consolidation of markets, the role of advertising, and the tendency of owners and investors to convert media into just another product, many of us, readers/viewers, are dismayed at the sameness of a rather ‘dumbed down’ offering that we are forced to choose from. Not so if these essays from a wide range of practitioners are to be believed. Be it core values, issues relating to specialization in the craft, impact of new technologies, the changing legal framework – all these and more are being seriously debated in terms of how our future media will appear and perform.

From B.R.P. Bhaskar’s ‘The Press and Law’ which debates the fine distinction between freedom of expression and freedom of the press, N. Ram’s recalling of enduring journalistic values – credible information function, the critical adversary or watchdog function, the education function and the agenda setting function – and Harivansh’s moving account of Prabhat Khabar, without doubt the most notable of the new crusading newspapers, we are reminded of the ongoing struggles to retain and deepen values/ethics in journalism. It is another matter that many readers, particularly of the English national dailies, might beg to differ. When advertisements creep into all pages, and paid advertorials parade as objective reporting, and worse, the fine line between reporting and views gets as blurred as it has, one might wonder what is happening to the credible information function. Equally, when farmers’ suicides get relegated to inside pages if covered at all and fashion shows make top news, there is cause for worry. Nevertheless, we have today a wider range of offerings to choose from and fortunately even media giants are realizing that the reader cannot always be fobbed off by titilatory gossip. We still have hope.

Credibility, however, also demands some expertise, more so when dealing with complex issues. Are journalists equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills, is the pressure of deadlines too demanding, what about space and presentation style implications, or the fact that the copy desk and headline writer may completely change the nuance of the story/argument? What of the pressure to be different, to ‘break’ news, grab attention to boost eyeballs, circulation and TRPs? Are our journalists increasingly crossing the Laxman-rekha, intruding into privacy, using inventive methods/technologies to ‘get at the truth’. The list of worries is never ending. Dilip D’Souza and Mukund Padmanabhan discuss some concerns, even as Darryl D’Monte, Pamela Philipose and others remind us of the new requirements of new areas of concern.

What, to the practitioner more than consumer, might be more valuable are the reflections on practice. How do we report on caste without becoming casteist (S. Anand), or do non-dalits writing on dalit concerns run against the wall of ‘epistemic incommensurability’, that there is no way in which we can authentically communicate or dialogue with the angst of the social other. Similar issues arise when discussing terrorism and counter-insurgency (Praveen Swami), gender, or even issues of urban malgovernance (Kalpana Sharma). Just recollect the writing on the recent spate of demolition/clearance drives in Delhi, often under pressure of ‘right sounding’ entities like the judiciary and environmentalists. All these essays make for provocative reading. Above all, readers would enjoy Robert Brown on ‘The Importance of Being Earnest as Well as Entertaining’.

All this assumes importance as the media, both print and TV (private radio is still not permitted to get into news) has started stressing exposes and got into campaigns and agenda setting. The recent campaign to reopen the Jessica Lal trial is a case in point. Are we getting into situations where the media, with its own version of reality, is working to discredit extant institutional structures and practices? In playing along with current sentiments, are we missing out on a more reasoned discourse? Despite what the contributors to this volume seem to suggest, reflexivity appears at a premium in our media. Surely, a cause for concern.

So, how do we look ahead? If the many worthies who have contributed to this volume – from Robin Jeffrey to Ashish Sen, Mahalakshmi Jayram to Anjali Monteiro – are to be believed, we have little cause for despair, this despite the convoluted trajectory that both the media sector and journalistic practice seems to be taking. Even our young, as Anjali Kamat reminds us, are dissatisfied with Page 3 trivia.

Harsh Sethi