Srirupa Roy

Media Pluralism Redux: Towards New Frameworks of Comparative Media Studies “Beyond the West”

A new form of “entertaining news,” accessed by most through television, has become a privileged domain of politics for the first time in countries “beyond the West” in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. What are the political consequences of this development: What is the relationship between media and politics in these regions? We answer these questions through a case study of India, the worlds largest democracy, where two decades of media expansion and liberalization have yielded the largest number of commercial television news outlets in the world. We show why prevailing theories of media privatization and commercialization cannot account for the distinctive architecture of media systems in places like India. In this article, we first provide an overview of the historical and contemporary dynamics of media liberalization in India and the challenges that this poses to existing models and typologies of the media-politics relationship. We then present a new typology of media systems and a theoretical framework for studying the relationship between television news and democratic politics in India, and by extension in the global South. In the concluding section, we reflect on the broader comparative insights of the essay and discuss directions for future research. We believe that our alternative comparative framework captures more meaningfully the diversity and complexity of emerging media systems and their relationships to democratic practice in these regions.

Seeing a State: National Commemorations and the Public Sphere in India and Turkey

Through a comparative discussion of public rituals of national commemoration in India and Turkey, this essay examines the relationship between the formation of the public sphere, the production of national identity, and the establishment of state sovereignty. The central organizing principle is the notion of the “creation of the public” as a historically specific political and cultural project. This departs from the evolutionary understanding of the public sphere as a derivative byproduct or “unintended, rolling effect” 1 of social, economic, and political “structural transformations” that took place in the course of the longue duree of European history. 2 By theorizing the formation and reproduction of the Indian and Turkish public spheres as deliberate projects or strategies of nationalization and etatization, 3 I draw attention to several significant aspects of political modernity that have been obscured in prevailing theories of public sphere formation and transformation.

Mr. Modi Goes to Delhi Mediated Populism and the 2014 Indian Elections

This essay introduces the theme of the special issue. While elections across the globe today are mediated in the sense of being pervaded by the ambient presence and explicit deployments of varied media, the Indian national elections of 2014 showcase a specific logic of mediated populism that has become globally influential of late. To understand this logic, we examine the contexts and lineages of the present moment of mediated populism, i.e. the wider political-economic dynamics and contexts that shape and embed the Modi phenomenon. We focus on the changing relationship between privatized media across platforms, political elites and conceptions/productions of “the people” that these particular political historical dynamics have effected and enabled.

Television news and democratic change in India

This article examines the impact of India’s ‘television news revolution’, or the rapid growth of privately owned television news channels, on substantive democracy, or the ability of ordinary citizens to access social, political, and economic power. Existing scholarship has largely relied upon content analysis (or textual interpretation) and reception studies to address this question. In contrast this article examines media practice, drawing upon ethnographic field research on the social and political worlds of television news production in contemporary India. Through a specific focus on the experiences of freelance stringers in the news industry, one main argument is advanced: television news expansion has had a ‘provincializing effect’ of enabling the social, political, and economic empowerment of small-town, non-metropolitan, or provincial actors. This finding nuances and unsettles the common conflation of television news media with the interests of the urban middle-class elite in India. At the same time however, a detailed exploration of the political dynamics and consequences of ‘provincialization’ cautions against its reading as empowerment, subversion, or resistance to extant patterns of power and privilege: practices and structures of exclusion and inequality persist within these newly mobile social worlds.

Moving pictures: The postcolonial state and visual representations of India

The article examines visual representations of the nation produced by state and non-state actors in postcolonial India. Through an examination of how ‘moving pictures’ of Indianness have been produced and deployed over the past 50 years, I explore the formation and transformations of the postcolonial nationalist imagination. I focus on the genre of non-commercial film and video and compare the image-making efforts of the Nehruvian developmentalist state with those of the contemporary liberalised state, and also with images of Indian identity produced by non-state actors. The first section examines the states vision through the documentary films produced by the state-owned Films Division of India and the audiovisual fillers and shorts produced by the Department of Audio-Visual Publicity. The state and the activities that it undertakes on behalf of the nation are foregrounded in these visual representations of Indianness, which is depicted as a relation between an enlightened, transcendent state and a diverse, infantile nation. The second section examines popular-patriotic visions of India through a discussion of the music videos produced for television in recent years by Bharatbala Productions, an independent media organisation based in Mumbai. Although these visual representations are significantly different in terms of form, they do not supplant or subvert the official nationalist imaginary in any significant way. Both state and non-state actors continue to illuminate—and obscure—Indianness in similar ways.

Angry citizens: civic anger and the politics of curative democracy in India

This article examines the emergence of the angry citizen as a legitimate political actor in post-colonial Indian democracy. Approaching such ‘civic anger’ as a historically constituted and socio-politically embedded formation rather than as a subjectively and individually experienced feeling, I show that the rise of the angry citizen was linked to the consolidation of a distinctive politics of curative democracy in the ‘long 1970s’. The lineages of the civic anger of twenty-first century India may be traced to this older formation of curative democracy. The point here is not to offer a chronological revision of the origins of ‘new India’, but to consider the generalisable political implications of the idea of curative democracy, and to identify the distinctive forms of political agency that are associated with the call to cure, reform or renew democracy.

Media, activism and the new political: ‘Istanbul conversations’ on new media and left politics

Held in October 2013, ‘Istanbul Conversations’ was the first public event organized by the Social Science Research Council’s Transregional Virtual Research Initiative (TVRI) on media, activism, and the new political. The TVRI brings together scholars from a range of disciplines and world regions to examine the interrelationship of media and politics within and across ‘InterAsia’, a spatially and historically networked expanse stretching from the Middle East through East Asia. In recent years there has been much interest in media and activism, focusing primarily on the role of new media and its potential to mobilize social and political change. For the most part, current discussions explore the mediated dynamics of mass mobilization and collective action. Thus, a central question concerns how the new networks of mobile, social and digital media alter capabilities of physical amassment and amplification – the spontaneous scaling up of conversion of individuals into collective, visible, and audible

Temple and dam, fez and hat: the secular roots of religious politics in India and Turkey

This essay offers a comparative examination of the historical processes through which secularism was adopted and consolidated in India and Turkey. It examines the historical choice and the ideological practices that worked to establish secularism as an essential component of national identity in each country at their time of founding (Turkey in 1923 and India in 1947) and shows how this reinforced rather than defused the political salience of religion in both cases. The rise of religious political movements in later years is related to the presence and persistence of these pre-existing, secular repertoires. As the article argues, in India and Turkey, the ascendancy of religious politics is built on secular foundations.