Arvind Rajagopal

The Emergency as Prehistory of the New Indian Middle Class

Recent accounts of the National Emergency of 1975–1977 concur that the deviations it represented, while genuine, did not represent any fundamental change on the part of the Indian state, and that the period offers little distinct insight on the post-independence period as a whole. This paper seeks to argue, to the contrary, that the Emergency was a watershed in post-independence history. With its ban on dissent and suspension of constitutional rights, the Emergency sought to suppress all political disturbances to governance. By doing so, it forefronted the problems of postcolonial politics in at least three respects. First, the Emergency demonstrated that coercion was inextricably combined with consent in state-led development. Second, this led to a heavy reliance on practices of communication to redefine coercion and to stage popular consent. Third, in the process, the boundaries of the political were reinforced, emphasizing the friend/enemy difference fundamental to politics. Governance in the aftermath of the Emergency placed an overt reliance on consent over coercion, but in ways that are themselves significant. Categories of culture and community, and related forms of social distinction, gained in importance over earlier developmental distinctions premised on an authoritarian relationship between state and the people. The change meant a shift away from the Nehruvian focus on the economy as the crucial arena of nation-building, involving labour as the key modality of citizenship. Instead, culture and community became the categories that gained political salience in the period of economic liberalization. The mass media were central to this redefinition of the political, multiplying in size and reach, and acquiring market-sensitive forms of address couched in the rhetoric of individual choice. These events, I suggest, are critical to understanding the formation of the new middle class in India, as a category that increasingly defines itself through cultural and consumerist forms of identity, and is less identified with the state.

Mediating modernity: Theorizing reception in a non‐western society

This article theorizes non‐Western media reception, based on a reception study of a Hindu epic, “The Ramayan,”; screened on the state‐owned Indian television system, Doordarshan, in 78 episodes beginning in January 1987. Based on interviews with viewers from a variety of social backgrounds and on analysis of press response to the epic, it argues that the epic represented, for many viewers, a narrative of community opposed to bourgeois modernity, and superior to it. For Doordarshan, as a broadcaster in a non‐western/incompletely modern society, the epic represented a way of mediating between a secular bourgeois public, and a “communitarian public sphere”; which, it is argued, characterizes Indian popular culture.

Switching Channels. Ideologies of Television in India

This is the first full-length study of the current state of television in India. It views the whole history of the medium within the larger perspective of Indias post-Independence encounters with modernity.

Technologies of Perception and the Cultures of Globalization: Introduction

concrete: the name itself carries its connotations, performing what it is meant to presuppose. Unlike predecessor terms such as imperialism and modernization, globalization is more murky and tenuous. It lacks a clear normative force, but to resist it can feel anachronistic and parochial. It describes an inexorable process but does not prescribe any particular values other than the acceptance of its own inevitability. This is perhaps a sign of the decentralized and interwoven character of contemporary power structures. In such a context, the caution of “the local”—frequently summoned against invocations of “the global” and indexed in such neologisms as glocal—has become a ritual of insufficiency (instanced by its absorption in corporate strategy: “think global, act local”). If what is local is no longer self-evident, claims for global validity also have become increasingly suspect.

Special political zone: urban planning, spatial segregation and the infrastructure of violence in Ahmedabad 1

The violence in Gujarat in 2002 presented a paradoxical phenomenon, namely, a spectacle of violence ostensibly enacted by non-state forces that was covertly and overtly sanctioned by the state. Violence was both spatially localized and physically concentrated on Muslims. Apologists invoked a history of communal conflict and specifically of Muslim provocation, explaining the pogrom of 2002 as having ample precedent and justifiable cause. This paper addresses Ahmedabads urbanity as an enabling locus for such violence, and draws on historical and ethnographic research to argue that spatial and perceptual practices in the city have combined to ghettoize Muslims, and produce forms of knowledge complicit with structural and episodic violence against them. Such practices (and their discursive uptake) are enabled by political conjunctures that give structurally embedded processes form and visibility. This paper explores the issue of political violence and Muslim vulnerability in Gujarat under the explanatory rubric of the ‘Special Political Zone,’ an informal analogue to a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), the latter being a site exempt from prevailing regulations, purportedly to enhance economic growth. The political ability to endow specific sites with exceptional legal status for economic outcomes implies the ‘Special Political Zone,’ a site where select laws of the land are voided to ensure specific political outcomes, for example the staging of violence to dramatize the restructuring of the relationship between majority and minority. This paper offers a limited examination of this hypothesis taking Ahmedabad as a privileged site where much of the violence in Gujarat in 2002 was concentrated.

America and its others

Markets, media and techniques of violence are the worm-holes of the late imperial formation of today, and shoot from the periphery to the core and back at the speed of light. To defend a space called America in this context is not the self-evident task it has been assumed to be. Increasingly, strategies of counter-terrorism blur into their target and form the nodal point for understanding a new era of governmentality. This essay briefly considers some key characteristics of this late imperial governmentality.

On the Aesthetics and Ideology of the Indian Documentary Film: A Conversation

Understanding Indian documentary film as aesthetic practice and as a set of historical traditions has usually taken second place to political and ideological judgments about filmic significance. However these judgments usually refer to the Indian context exclusively, and ignore the wider global context. We can distinguish two broad trends in the history of documentary film, one that critiqued naïve realism and treated the cinema as a means of self-empowerment for the masses, and the other, that regarded the masses as the object of modernization practices. Both these trends have a shared history, of course, namely, the rise of the masses as a political force, which posed the problem of how the masses/”the people” should be represented, as subject or as object. Assumptions about realism flowed from the historical resolution of this issue in a given context, and changed quite slowly. In the Indian context, they provided the basis for a system where the funding and circulation of documentaries occurred within a complex web of identity and patronage. These assumptions are increasingly coming under scrutiny, due to the pressure of at least three developments: market forces that foreground popular appeal rather than verifiable fact; historical events such as the emergence of the Hindutva documentary that mobilize the presence of invisible worlds to political advantage; and the growing influence of global circuits of funding and exhibition, along with a proliferation of more diverse local spaces, that provide room for a greater range of artistic practice. This article, written as a conversation, discusses these developments and offers some arguments about the ideology and aesthetics of the documentary cinema.

Notes on Postcolonial Visual Culture

Analysts of visual culture have only recently begun to reckon with the complexity of postcolonial visual culture, acknowledging that it presents discontinuous temporalities and complex aesthetic forms that challenge routine ways of relating the history of media form to conventional historical processes.1 For example, visual realism appears as only among a range of options utilized by cultural producers in South, South-East or East Asia, to mention a few regional examples, despite extensive and sophisticated communications industries in those regions. Technological sophistication does not always lead to the annihilation of older aesthetic forms, but may instead provoke their renewal, whether of martial arts film and their link to Peking opera traditions, or mythological epic traditions and their transformation in India and many South-East Asian countries. For scholarship on earlier periods, by comparison, arguably, a greater scholarly consensus prevails about the protocols of research and argument, and there exist more accessible archives. Or else scholars have focused on specific crafts and technologies of visual culture such as painting, print or film, deferring broader questions about the institutionalization of visual practices across media and that socialize audiences into new habits of perception. Image making in postcolonial society is now so extensive and multifarious however, and the questions they pose are so unpredictable, that the guidelines for inquiry available from nationalist historiography, art and cultural criticism, or from postcolonial social sciences, are manifestly inadequate. The proposal by BioScope’s editors to stimulate reflection on screen studies of South Asia is therefore to be welcomed for what it can offer to the study of postcolonial visual cultures.2 With the proliferation of media technology and the inter-animation of media forms across print, cinema, television, mobile telephones, and the Internet, South Asia seems to have arrived at a communicative modernity in the space of hardly two decades, or from the first Gulf War onwards, when satellite television was launched in the region. Globally, South Asia’s communicative modernity signaled a postCold War period defined by intensification of securocratic regimes of visual surveillance, and geopolitical alignments organized around “Islamic terror” instead of the spectre of Communism.3 In India alone, the past two decades have witnessed a compressed series of developments. The long-delayed market prominence of indigenous language media in relation to English was closely followed by the ascendancy of an aggressive strain of Hindu nationalism in its wake, which has taken on a new intensity with the growth Roundtable

Violence, publicity, and sovereignty: lawlessness in Mumbai1

Lawless violence often preceded the rule of law. British sovereignty depended on non-state actors such as the East India Company, whose lawless acts provoked the demand in the British Parliament for the rule of law. Contemporary terrorism marks a time when lawless violence proliferates and territorial boundaries are infringed upon, when state leaders invoke ‘non-state actors’ and argue for the need to respond in kind. Today the state mimics the behavior of private parties, justifying violence as revenge and practicing torture as the just desserts of terrorists. If one intention of terrorism is to drive a wedge between the law and its representation, and unsettle our understanding of the relationship between violence and visibility, state responses to terrorism such as in Mumbai confirm that public spaces can become zones of suspended legality.

On Media and Politics in India: An Interview with Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

John Maynard Keynes once wrote that practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist. It is through ideas that the world is influenced, and of course not all ideas are good ones. ‘Media’, that is, the technological means of communication of ideas/information, is itself an idea that has only recently begun to provoke serious attention. To the extent that the media were studied, they were usually assumed to be part of the superstructure, and therefore as secondary or epiphenomenal in conventional social science theories, including most Marxist theories. It is fair to say that we are the slaves of defunct economists if we continue to believe that today. South Asia at the time of decolonisation in the mid twentieth century was largely rural and illiterate, like most of the non-Western world. The mass media of communication in 1947 were mainly an elite phenomenon in India. British colonialists had feared the power of the media and therefore placed strenuous curbs on them. The Indian national government continued colonial restrictions through licencing, control of newsprint and providing advertisement revenue—the various departments of the Indian government, all told, were and very likely still are the largest advertiser in the country. Taken together, the media probably helped to extend the dominance of an Anglophone elite after Independence, even after the states were reorganised around linguistic majorities. The national press reflected a two-tier system with vernacular languages below and English above, to the detriment of both. Broadcasting was a government monopoly until 1995, and for many years was the target of criticism for its political censorship, and for the limited range of its radio and television programs. Over half a century or so, the government did not get very far in using communication for its stated developmental mission, but it did create a national media system—one that witnessed a role reversal from the secular, quasi-socialist polity of the Nehruvian period, and has in fact actively participated in that reversal at least since the late 1980s. The ironies of the changed relationship between the media and politics in India today are many. So-called independent media today have become like a shadow state, defining