Sharika Thiranagama

Introduction - South Asian diasporas and the BBC World Service: contacts, conflicts, and contestations

This article sets out the analytical framework of this special issue and outlines the development of BBC radio broadcasting in South Asia. It analyses the ways in which the BBC in South Asia is integrally and indissolubly intertwined with ‘critical events’ and shifting geopolitical priorities: from the imperial and diasporic imaginings of the Empire Service, to its dissolution and the expansion of South Asian language services during World War II for the purpose of countering ‘enemy broadcasts’; from independence, partition and decolonisation, including the BBCs subsequent role in mediating postcolonial conflicts and wars and Cold War tensions, to its most recent ‘war on terror’ phase with its unspoken aim of promoting a British version liberal democracy around the globe. The article highlights how the often intimate engagements of diverse audiences in South Asia and its diasporas with the BBC have changed in response to technological innovation and geopolitics. We emphasise the distinctiveness of the BBC voice, especially the ‘right kind of diasporic voice’, and its acoustic power and presence in South Asia. We highlight how the rapid expansion of South Asian mediascapes – especially in India is unsettling the privileged position that the BBC South Asian services have enjoyed for nearly eight decades. Digital technologies are facilitating the emergence of ‘digital diasporas’ as South Asians across the world log on to consume news with alternative perspectives to news providers in South Asia and to engage in diasporic debates, often with unintended and unforeseen consequences.

Ethnic entanglements: The BBC Tamil and Sinhala services amidst the civil war in Sri Lanka:

The BBC has a major presence within the Sri Lankan media landscape and is a critical commentator on its long-standing ethnic conflict. In this article, the BBC’s two regional language services in Sri Lanka, BBC Tamil and BBC Sinhala, are examined. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in BBC Tamil and Sinhala Services at Bush House in London, and archival research at the BBC’s Written Archives Centre (WAC) in Caversham, UK, the article suggests that the BBC, far from being a global dispassionate observer, is imbricated in Sri Lanka’s fractured ethnic landscape. It argues that the two services became both ethnicized and also ethnicizing ‘love objects’. The two audiences, and the exchange of confidences between diasporic journalists and audiences, are analysed as constituting separate ‘knowable communities’, in Raymond Williams’ terms. Through an analysis of a mutual mirroring — or the ways in which BBC journalists imagine Sri Lanka, and how Sri Lanka’s ethnically segmented audiences imagine the BBC — I explore how the BBC World Service both mediates and is structured by local cultural and ethnic identities.

Introduction: Whose civility?

This article is an introduction to this special issue on civility. It asks what can anthropological insights contribute to debates about civility? We propose to understand civility as a “worldly concept.” We mean this in two senses. First, it is a concept that has traction in the world: a concern with civility and incivility can be found equally in public debate as in academic work. Second, civility is worldly in a more Arendtian sense. For Hannah Arendt, politics is about what it is between people – to act politically means to construct and enter a space which allows multiple people to be present. Civility is a concept that involves talking about how people relate to each other within non-familial settings and where people are fundamentally different from each other. We use the concept of civility as a lens that allows us to focus on moments where people try to understand what respect and restraint for each other might mean in the face of potential, and maybe radical, disagreement. In this introduction we begin to explore the key theoretical issues associated with civility, in order to examine the ways anthropology can benefit from these debates, as well as contribute to them. In particular, we ask the following questions: When do claims of civility move from a conservative stifling dissent to a radical call for change? When does civility move from being conformist to dissenting, and what are its limits? What are the specific histories that mark the ways in which people are civil or uncivil to one another? What are the cultural codes through which civility is expressed and understood?

The civility of strangers? Caste, ethnicity, and living together in postwar Jaffna, Sri Lanka

The question asked by this article is as follows: How do different kinds of people live together in a hierarchical world that has been challenged and transformed through the leveling effects of deep ethnicization and war? I examine two different kinds of relationships in contemporary postwar Jaffna: first, an inter-ethnic, external Tamil/Muslim division that has led to people relating to each other as categorical strangers; and second, an intra-ethnic, internal caste relationship through which different castes relate to each other as intimate strangers. These inter-ethnic and intra-caste distinctions have been forged through recent histories of violence and struggle, and indicate key tensions and transformations around postwar life on the Jaffna peninsula, part of the former warzone during the Sri Lankan civil war and long considered the ideological heart of Tamil nationalism. When ethnic mobilization—the possibility of egalitarian mutuality and solidarity as well as the pain, trauma and sacrifice of war, and ethnic cleansing—emerges within deeply hierarchical worlds that continually produce modes of distinction, what kinds of struggles arise within inter-ethnic and intra-caste relations? Given that public life is historically built on unequal participation, and that living together has been a historical struggle, we need to ask how we understand the particular embedded civilities that have made living together such a problem over time. Rather than see civility as an abstract code of prescriptions in relation to the maintenance of non-violent order, I suggest that it is possible to see different modalities of civility produced with regard to specific others/strangers. These modalities can conflict with each other, given that civility can be either hierarchically produced or governed by an egalitarian drive toward public forms of dignity and equality. I propose that civility has a social location, discourses, and understandings in hierarchical worlds that are necessarily different depending on who is speaking.