The Indian Public Sphere: Readings in Media History [1 ed.] 019806103X, 9780198061038

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The Indian Public Sphere

The Themes in Politics series presents essays on important issues in the study of political science and Indian politics. Each volume in the series brings together the most significant articles and debates on an issue, and contains a substantive introduction and bibliography. OTHER BOOKS IN THE SERIES Language and Politics in India Asha Sarangi (ed.) Globalization and Politics in India Baldev Raj Nayar (ed.) Hindu Nationalism and Governance John McGuire and Ian Copland (eds) (Oxford India Paperbacks) Civil Society and Democracy A Reader Carolyn M. Elliott (ed.) (Oxford India Paperbacks) Parties and Party Politics in India Zoya Hasan (ed.) (Oxford India Paperbacks) Democracy in India Niraja Gopal Jayal (ed.) (Oxford India Paperbacks) Gender and Politics in India Nivedita Menon (ed.) (Oxford India Paperbacks) Secularism and its Critics Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) (Oxford India Paperbacks) State and Politics in India Partha Chatterjee (ed.) (Oxford India Paperbacks)

The Indian Public Sphere Readings in Media History

edited by

Arvind Rajagopal

1

1 YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in India by Oxford University Press, New Delhi © Oxford University Press 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Oxford University Press. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN-13: 978-019-806103-8 ISBN-10: 0-19-806103-X

Typeset in Minion 10.5/13 by Eleven Arts, Keshav Puram, Delhi 110 035 Printed in India at Pauls Press, New Delhi 110 020 Published by Oxford University Press YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110 001

4 Contents

List of Illustrations, Tables, and Charts

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgements

xv

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

xvii

List of Abbreviations

xix

Introduction The Public Sphere in India: Structure and Transformation Arvind Rajagopal

1

PART I: FORMATION OF A COLONIAL PUBLIC SPHERE 1. Transmission Ranajit Guha

31

2. The Indian Ecumene: An Indigenous Public Sphere C.A. Bayly

49

3. The Politics of Popular Images: From Cow Protection to M.K. Gandhi, 1890–1950 Christopher Pinney

65

vi

Contents

4. Obtaining Moral Consensus in a Law and Order Society: Indian Responses Rajeev Dhavan

88

PART II: THE NATIONAL POPULAR 5. Redefining Obscenity and Aesthetics in Print Charu Gupta

101

6. The Hindi Political Sphere Francesca Orsini

121

7. ‘Women-Oriented’ Narratives and the New Indian Woman Purnima Mankekar

135

8. Who is it that is Singing? Shot–Music–Speech Aniket Jaaware

151

PART III: NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MEDIATIC INFRASTRUCTURE 9. The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why it Matters: Indian Broadcasting Policy, 1920s–1990s Robin Jeffrey

171

10. ‘Subliminal Charge’: How Hindi-Language Newspaper Expansion Affects India Peter G. Friedlander, Robin Jeffrey, and Sanjay Seth

188

11. A ‘Split Public’ in the Making and Unmaking of the Ram Janmabhumi Campaign Arvind Rajagopal

207

12. Forging Public Opinion: The Press, Television, and Electoral Campaigns in Andhra Pradesh G. Krishna Reddy

228

PART IV: EMERGENT ORDERS: LOCALIZATION, CONSUMERISM, DIGITAL CULTURE 13. Close Distance: Constructing ‘the Indian Consumer’ William Mazzarella

247

Contents

vii

14. Local News Gatherers Sevanti Ninan

260

15. Globalization, Sexuality, and the Visual Field: Issues and Non-issues for Cultural Critique Mary E. John

278

16. Internet in India K. Gopinath

291

17. Call Centre Conundrum D. Wood

312

Appendix: Literacy, Print, Radio, and Television Growth 1941–2006

320

Select Bibliography

329

Notes on Contributors

337

4 Illustrations, Tables, and Charts

ILLUSTRATIONS 3.1:

3.2:

3.3:

3.4:

3.5:

Photographic montage of Gandhi embodying other figures of political potency, c. mid-1940s, central India Jay Hind, photographic montage of Subhash Chandra Bose, Gandhi and others, c. mid-1940s, central India Gandhi reveals his true allegations to B.K. Dutt, c. 1931. Just as Hanuman, the monkey-god tears open his chest to reveal his allegiance to his master, the god Ram, so here Gandhi tears open his (inferior) peaceful exterior to reveal his faith in revolutionary struggle Mata ka Bandhan Mochan, late 1940s. Rising Art Cottage, Calcutta. Bose accepts Bhavani’s sword, repeating earlier imagery in which Shivaji received the same sword The ten avatars of Subhash Chandra Bose, c. 1950

78

79

81

83

86

x

Illustrations, Tables, and Charts

TABLES 4.1: 10.1:

Offences by Publication in the Indian Penal Code Daily Newspaper Circulation, Literacy, and India’s Population, 1961–98 12.1: Population Change in Andhra Pradesh and Newspaper Change in Telugu, 1961–91 A Table 1: Literacy and Media Growth, 1941–2006

96 190 233 324

CHARTS A Chart 1: Readership Growth versus Television Viewership Growth, 1977–2001 A Chart 2: Growth in Print, Radio, and Television and in Literacy, 1941–2001 A Chart 3: Growth in Population versus Growth in Literary, 1941–2005 A Chart 4: Growth in Readership and in Literacy, versus Population Growth, 1941–2005 A Chart 5: Growth in Newspaper Readership and Television Viewership versus Growth in Population and in Literacy, 1941–2005 A Chart 6: Growth in Newspaper Circulation versus Estimated Readership, 1941–2005

320 321 321 322 322

323

4 Preface

I

n early 2008, victims of the Union Carbide gas disaster in Bhopal, together with some of their supporters, about fifty in all, embarked on a padayatra or march to New Delhi to place their demands for relief and rehabilitation before the Prime Minister.1 The 800 kilometre journey went through scores of villages and towns. Amenities were scarce en route. Small towns were the worst in offering access to toilets, and running water and electric power were intermittent where they were available. One convenience, however, was never in short supply. Every few miles there was a wireless transmission tower, and at no point during the march were cellphone calls interrupted.2 No account of modern India can be complete without a consideration of its communication industries, which are growing at a rate significantly higher than other sectors of the economy. For instance, cellphones, which were introduced relatively recently, are many times more numerous than landlines, which were established decades ago.3 1A

chemical explosion at Union Carbide’s pesticides plant in Bhopal in 1984 led to an estimated 25,000 deaths over time. The event is regarded as the world’s worst recorded industrial disaster. 2I owe my information to the filmmaker Bala Kailasam, who accompanied the padayatra and filmed the events. 3Cellphones in 2008 numbered 296 million and are increasing by approximately 6 million per month; the number of landlines in 2008 was estimated at only 39 million. The figures

xii

Preface

To take another example, television reaches more than a third of the population on a regular basis and in parts of the country, has come to be regarded as a basic utility.4 In apparent confirmation of such a development, the Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (DMK) Party in Tamil Nadu came to power in 2006 promising voters free colour TVs, and had distributed sets to over 5 million residents by 2008.5 The result is sometimes described as a leapfrog effect, with latecomers arriving at relatively advanced levels of technological use, alongside or ahead of developed countries. But the uneven character of development has distinct consequences. Basic physical needs of the population are not met, including relief from toxic contamination by a multinational company, and infrastructure for basic sanitation and well-being is inadequate. Meanwhile, the national communications infrastructure has grown exponentially, giving a new prominence to claims made for and on the country as a whole. Those who are otherwise ignored or unheard, attempt to register their presence in the marketplace of publicity and demand restitution for their grievances. Commentators have described the result as a rising ‘democracy tax’, implying it needs reducing like other taxes, although it is the people and not the state that press for it.6 The growth of ‘media’ leads to greater emphasis not simply on the material infrastructure of communication but also on non-material elements of mediation such as language, culture, and history. Political are related: increase in mobile phones diminishes the need for landlines. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone. See also CIA World Factbook, https:// www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/in.html (accessed 20 December 2008). 4Television reached an estimated 38% in 2007 and the readership of daily newspapers, in 2005, was estimated by the National Readership Survey at 24%. The television industry is projected to grow at 22% over the next five years or at more than double the estimated rate of growth of the economy as a whole. See Appendix. Data also compiled from Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce of India and Price Waterhouse Coopers, The Indian Entertainment and Media Industry: Sustaining Growth. Report 2008, New Delhi, 2008, p. 26; ‘An elephant, not a tiger’, The Economist, Special Report on India, 13 December 2008; http://allindianewspapers.com/ India-newspaper/national-readership-survey.htm (accessed 20 December 2008). See Appendix in this volume for figures on growth of media in India after 1941. 5http://www.tn.gov.in/pressrelease/default.htm. See Press Release No’s 948 and 951 for 4 and 5 November 2008. In fact, 5,134,326 TV sets have been distributed so far, and the Tamil Nadu government has decided to procure another 4,162,500 TV sets at a cost of Rs 2,321 per set. My thanks to Bala Kailasam for the reference. 6‘An elephant, not a tiger’, The Economist, ubi supra.

Preface

xiii

mobilization activates the experience and rhetoric of the freedom struggle; few demonstrations and marches are complete without nationalist slogans—surprisingly radical to a contemporary ear—such as Inquilab Zindabad, Lal Salam, and Lad ke Lega.7 Hidden histories of struggle rise in the vortex of publicity, and offer vernacular inputs into existing models of globalization. The disproportionate development of communications, thus, leads not simply to faster and more efficient information exchange but also to greater demands for participation and increasing challenges to the existing terms of social inclusion and exclusion. The virtual publics formed by mass mediation challenge the publics of regional and nationalist imaginaries, with the resulting contradictions resolved through the contingencies of political struggle. Due in part to the velocity of change, most accounts of the Indian public today dispense with historical inquiry and offer narratives of the present that are independent of the past, or bear an unexamined relationship to it. Emphasizing the novelty of ongoing developments, much of the explanation being circulated tends to be drawn from places where similar technologies are already in evidence, assuming that their outcomes will be similar, despite evidence that the price of ignoring local histories is usually to increase their implications. Consequently, the essays chosen here seek to redress this tendency towards presentism, and are attentive to the historicity of mediatic form and the collision of different temporalities as multiple communication technologies overlap and interact with each other. In the end, I would like to emphasize that preparing a volume of essays on so broad a topic as the public sphere, covering both the colonial and post-colonial periods in India, is a perilous task. It has been undertaken principally as a volume for students, selecting articles that straddle the historical transition from colonial to post-independence periods. The selections are unavoidably limited. Taken together, however, they help disclose some key cultural dynamics within these periods and over time. Except for one essay on film music, chosen to illuminate an otherwise ignored aspect of public sphere formation in India, the subject of cinema is treated as beyond the scope of this volume. 7My thanks to Xavier Dias of BIRSA in Ranchi, for sharing with me his eloquent essay on this subject.

4 Acknowledgements

M

y thanks are first of all to Robin Jeffrey for his unfailingly generous advice and support. And at Oxford University Press, my thanks to the editorial team for their patience and diligence in shepherding this book through. In the compilation of this book, my debts are too numerous to comprehensively acknowledge here. A partial list of people who have helped would include: Pritham and Venkatesh Chakravarthy, Xavier Dias, Bonnie Dixson, Darryl D’Monte, Vikram Doctor, Naresh Fernandes, Radha Hegde, Ammu Joseph, Bala Kailasam, Gautam Mody, K. Narayanan, M.G. Parameswaran, P. Sainath, Satinath Sarangi, Amrita Shah, Kalpana Sharma, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, and Paromita Vohra. My special thanks to Bonnie Dixson, who helped compile the relevant data and drew the graphs presented in the Appendix.

4 Publisher’s Acknowledgements

T

he publisher acknowledges the following for permission to include articles/extracts in this volume.

Duke University Press for Ranajit Guha’s ‘Transmission’, in Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Durham, NC, 1999, pp. 220–77. Cambridge University Press for C.A. Bayly’s ‘The Indian Ecumene: An Indigenous Public Sphere’, in C.A. Bayly’s Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 180–211. Reaktion Books for Christopher Pinney’s ‘The Politics of Popular Images: From Cow Protection to M.K. Gandhi, 1890–1950’, in Christopher Pinney’s Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, London, 2004, pp. 105–44. Manohar Books for Rajeev Dhavan’s ‘Obtaining Moral Consensus in a Law and Order Society: Indian Responses’, in Rajeev Dhavan’s Only the Good News: On the Law of the Press in India, New Delhi, 1987, pp. 273–339. Permanent Black for Charu Gupta’s ‘Redefining Obscenity and Aesthetics in Print’, in Charu Gupta’s Sexuality, Obscenity, Community:

xviii

Publisher’s Acknowledgements

Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, Delhi, 2001, pp. 30–84. Oxford University Press for Francesca Orsini’s ‘The Hindi Political Sphere’, in Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, New York, 2002, pp. 309–22. Duke University Press for Purnima Mankekar’s ‘“Women-Oriented” Narratives and the New Indian Woman’, in Purnima Mankekar’s Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham, NC, 1999, pp. 104–64. Sage Publications, UK for Robin Jeffrey’s ‘The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why it Matters: Indian Broadcasting Policy, 1920s– 1990s’, in Global Media and Communication, 2 (2), 2006, pp. 204–24. Media International Australia for Peter G. Friedlander, Robin Jeffrey, and Sanjay Seth’s ‘“Subliminal Charge”: How Hindi-Language Newspaper Expansion Affects India’, no. 100, August 2001, pp. 147–66. Cambridge University Press for Arvind Rajagopal’s ‘A “Split Public” in the Making and Unmaking of the Ram Janmabhumi Campaign’, in Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics after Television, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 151–71. Sage Publications for G. Krishna Reddy’s ‘Forging Public Opinion: The Press, Television, and Electoral Campaigns in Andhra Pradesh’, in Bernard Bel (ed.), Media and Mediation, New Delhi, 2005, pp. 315–45. Duke University Press for William Mazzarella’s ‘Close Distance: Constructing “the Indian Consumer” II’, in William Mazzarella’s Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC, 2003, pp. 250–87. Sage Publications for Sevanti Ninan’s ‘Local News Gatherers’, in Sevanti Ninan’s Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 113–42. Kali for Women Press for Mary E. John’s ‘Globalization, Sexuality, and the Visual Field: Issues and Non-issues for Cultural Critique’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India, New Delhi, 1998, pp. 368–96.

4 Abbreviations

A&M ABC AIADMK AIR AP ARPU BBC BCs BDO BHU BJP BSNL BSP CDMA CSC DMK DoE ERNET fps GATT GSM

Advertising and Marketing Audit Bureau of Circulations All India Anna Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam All India Radio Andhra Pradesh average revenue per user British Broadcasting Corporation Backward Classes Block Development Officer Banaras Hindu University Bharatiya Janata Party Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited Bahujan Samaj Party code division multiple access Common Service Centres Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam Department of Electronics Education and Research NETwork frames per second General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Global System for Mobile Communication

xx

Abbreviations

HSRA INA INC IP IPR IPv4 IPv6 IRS ISP MLAs MNC MTI MTNL NCST NGO NIC NRIs PCs R&D RFC RJD RSS SIP SNA SP STP TCP TDP UNDP UP UUCP VHP VoIP VSATs VSNL WWW

Hindustan Socialist Republican Army Indian National Army Indian National Congress Internet Protocol Intellectual Property Rights Internet Protocol version 4 Internet Protocol version 6 Indian Readership Survey Internet Service Provider Members of the Legislative Assembly multinational corporation mother tongue influence Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited National Centre for Software Technology non-governmental organization National Informatics Centre Non Resident Indians personal computers Research and Development requests for comments Rashtriya Janata Dal Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh session initiation protocol Systems Network Architecture Samajwadi Party software technology park Transmission Control Protocol Telugu Desam Party United Nations Development Programme Uttar Pradesh Unix to Unix Copy Programme Vishva Hindu Parishad voice over Internet Protocol Very Small Aperture Terminals Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited World Wide Web

4 Introduction The Public Sphere in India Structure and Transformation Arvind Rajagopal

U

ntil not long ago, ‘communication’ could refer to the act of letter writing, the technology of conveying information, or the event of transportation. Annual reports of the colonial government in India used the term to refer to the movement of goods, assessed for the purposes of state revenue. It also referred to the movement of people. Using it to refer to the delivery of information, even after the invention of the telegraph, was not so common.1 Communication was embedded within issues of political economy and revenue collection, and its precise meaning had to be spelled out according to context rather than treated as a subject in its own right. By contrast, nowadays the word is usually separated from the context of its use. Indeed, ‘communication’ itself usually provides the context and significance of an event. ‘Print revolution’, ‘television era’, or ‘digital age’ work as shorthand descriptions of historical periods. To use such terminology appears to offer a degree of verbal mastery over events, while granting technology a determining status in historical change. A modernist emphasis is typically built into such an understanding; each new medium puts its own stamp on a period, in this view, as the older media are reduced to merely functional status. 1See Sir Arthur Cotton, Public Works in India: Their importance. With suggestions for their extension and improvement, London: Wm. H. Helm, 1854, passim.

2

The Indian Public Sphere

However, according to the context and dynamics of politics, broadly conceived, a range of things may be rendered into salient ‘media’. For example, the colonial ban on the drum and the buffalo horn during the Pabna bidroha (revolt) of 1873, acknowledged that musical instruments had become instruments of peasant insurgency for a non-literate rural population. The Salt March of 1930 successfully made a household staple into a nationalist symbol of mobilization, against the British government’s assumption that nothing was to be feared from a demand to make salt into a swadeshi good. More recently, during the Mandal debates, many dismissed the idea that caste was a relevant medium for expressing individual capacities, demanding merit-based assessment and rejecting caste-based reservations. A focus on what was considered a relevant medium or vehicle of expression (for example, the public rally, the legal petition, or ‘merit’) would miss the ways in which historical and political dynamics might be mediated through other channels than those anticipated (for example, the drum and the horn, salt, caste). Mediation is a social process that extends beyond ‘the media’ and must be understood in larger and more dynamic terms, not as a power emanating from a specific object, technology, or institutional practice. The term ‘public sphere’, which refers to the space in which publicity is said to operate, is useful because it points to a definable effect, namely, publicity, rather than presuming a cause, for example, ‘media’. Of course, publicity is itself only a means to a larger end, which can vary according to the political interests it serves. The literature on the subject is now vast, but the term is most associated with Jurgen Habermas. In his work on the nineteenth century bourgeois public sphere in western Europe, Habermas offered a historical argument about how letter writing, novel reading, and critical discussion prepared the ground for individual participation in modern democracy. Few scholars today would accept his argument without extensive revision, but it is the questions Habermas posed that have been most influential, not his answers. Rather than assume that modern communication technologies help create enlightened, democratic conditions, Habermas asks: what is the relation between a communicational form such as print and its socio-political context? What kinds of popular participation are made possible in a given

Introduction

3

context of publicity, and whose interests are best represented in a particular public sphere? Habermas’s sociological account of political formation through communicative practices is important in its effort to locate the possibility of democratization outside the realm of the state, and potentially independent of it. However, in most parts of the world, it is not through individuals as such but through groups and national communities that political identities have been shaped and expressed. The creation of markets for print commodities in a given language creates an imagination of that market as a linguistic community, Benedict Anderson has suggested, and such an ‘imagined community’ creates the basis for nationalist mobilization. Isolated individuals who have no connection to each other conceive of themselves as related in some subtle but essential way, not dependent on ties of ethnicity, race, or religion. Anderson thus points to something previously unnoticed. Although modern nations appear to be based on objective legal and technical institutions, their distinctive ingredients are not only subjective but shared across populations.2 In linking the nationalist imagination to print capitalism as Anderson does, however, he tends to homogenize the mediatic context of a given public sphere. But, print does not, in fact, eclipse older media; the evidence suggests the opposite. In colonial contexts, the attempt to discredit native modes of communication as lacking credibility, for example, rumour, only confirmed them as favoured means of mobilization. ‘Old’ media could, in this way, experience a reinvigoration with the entry of print media, especially where literates were in a minority, and mass movements occurred. Ranajit Guha has indicated how the colonial state could feel threatened by rumour and by the transmission of cryptic aural or visual signs (for example, using a drum or a horn) and thereby, tantalize a somewhat literal-minded bureaucracy 2If

popular nationalism achieved the goal of state formation, institutions such as the census, the map, and the museum created a framework that could anchor the perception and understanding of citizens, Anderson argues. Print capitalism is then joined by state technologies of identification, to establish a frontier for the ‘unbounded seriality’ of the imagined national community, as befits a modern nation-state. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso, 1991, 2nd edn; and his The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World, London: Verso, 1998.

4

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(see Guha’s essay in this volume). The oral tradition was far more difficult to control, and with its ability to connect at key points with literati who could give new force to rumours through print, its effects could be deadly, if erratic. Similarly, Christopher Pinney has shown how the images of Indian calendar art present a counterpoint to received secular nationalist historiography, drawing leaders as diverse as Gandhi and Bhagat Singh into a similar iconography that emphasized religiosity, violence, and martyrdom rather than civic republicanism (see Pinney’s essay in this volume). The context of anticolonial nationalism, with its redeployment of colonial categories and the use of indigenous forms and practices, shows how communicational contexts cannot be reduced to technology or to ‘information’, but require an assessment of the relevant historical and political conditions as well as the materials and practices through which certain things are rendered as information, as figure rather than background. But, it is by paying attention to the background that we can understand the conditions under which information becomes visible. Since the onset of satellite television and the end of government monopoly over the airwaves in India, which happened in 1990 and 1995 respectively, there has been a transformation in media ownership and control.3 State agencies no longer dominate broadcasting, and privately-produced and domestically-owned content dominates the scores of channels. Yet the chorus of optimists, at least in the academy, is mute. A hundred flowers should be blooming, but more media has not necessarily meant more enlightenment. Nor has autonomy from government control improved programme content in the way it was expected to. The era of government monopoly programming often aimed at a far wider audience, while privately-owned media have presented an upper middle-class lifestyle that is both glamourconscious and traditional as the platform for audience engagement. Increased consumer choice hasn’t necessarily translated into people’s power, partly because the perceptions and tastes that would express 3See Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 1–44 and passim.; Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 73–86 and passim.; Shanti Kumar, Gandhi Meets Prime Time: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television, ChampaignUrbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006, pp. 23–54.

Introduction

5

alternative views are often marginal or underdeveloped. We are moving towards a changed ordering of media vis-à-vis political power, and it appears clear that earlier models are inadequate in understanding the character of all the changes involved.

THE COLONIAL PUBLIC SPHERE AND THE EMERGENCE OF A NATIONAL-POPULAR Hardly three decades before independence, less than 3 per cent of the population was ‘under instruction’, and less than 6 per cent of the population was literate. 4 Yet, there had long existed dense communication networks in which writing existed at strategic nodes, even if it was not widespread. Information was conveyed through native runners or daks, traders, pilgrims, wedding parties, soldiers, and wandering ascetics and artistes, among others. Across a region with extensive social networks, news was known to move quickly from Persia to Benares,5 and rumour was acknowledged to be a political weapon. Indian rulers discouraged the use of print, fearing it could erode the already slender bases of their legitimacy. But the evidence indicates that even in the absence of printing, vigorous public discussion could occur.6 The outbreak of the 1857 Mutiny showed that the British had failed to appreciate the complexity of this indigenous mediatic habitus (or what C.A. Bayly calls an Indian ecumene; see his essay in this volume), with its heterogeneous actors, more informal mechanisms, and its greater reliance on word of mouth. Thereafter, the colonial state was watchful for any hints of sedition, and prosecuted those suspected of circulating views adverse to their rule. For example, Bayly describes the fate of a Bengali folk singer, Mukunda Lal Das, whose most popular item was titled, ‘The White Rat Song’, about an otherwise unnamed, ruinous presence in the country. The singer was sentenced to one year 4L.F. Rushbrook Williams, India in the Years 1917–18. A report prepared for presentation to Parliament in accordance with the requirements of the 26th Section of the Government of India Act, New Delhi: Anmol Publications, 1985, p. 108. 5C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 200. 6Ibid., pp. 180–211.

6

The Indian Public Sphere

for seditious writing, and two years for his songs, because the latter reached many more people.7 The overwhelming majority of the population could not read or write but there were dense indigenous communication networks that could be used to galvanize the population, as was proven during the Mutiny and later, for example, during the Cow Protection Agitation in the late nineteenth century. At the nodes of these networks were traditional figures, including astrologers, clerks, doctors, peddlers, pandits, sadhus, and travelling performers, who interacted with literacy-aware circles that could reach far and wide. The British drew on these networks and sought to surveil them with its own system of native informers and spies, successors to the harkaras and kasids, or intelligence-gatherers and runners, whose information had helped to run the Mughal Empire.8 Oral, written, and printed communications were practiced side by side, and often in anticipation of effects across these divisions. The relationship between colonial rulers and native subjects was justified in pedagogical terms, but disparate influences intersected in these interchanges, including the authority of local big men, religions and sects, cultural and linguistic convention, as well as different kinds of political surveillance. The colonial state sought to contain these disparate influences—natives translated indigenous idiom, while knowledgeable ‘India hands’ processed this intelligence to advise the colonial government and help monitor the population. This reliance on native intermediaries and indigenous languages of authority9 introduced a distinct form of instability within colonial power. When popular mobilization challenged colonial authority, the perception of challenge was, therefore, accompanied by cognitive uncertainty and a basic fear of what the Indian public might do. The channels of expert communication were not wide or swift enough to respond to British perception of a native uprising, and to help distinguish between native reactions to colonial epistemic norms and cultural prejudices, and 7The case is from P/8153, pro. nos 112–31. Cited in Robert Darnton, ‘Literary Surveillance in the British Raj: The Contradictions of Liberal Imperialism’, Book History, vol. 4, 2001, pp. 133–76 (167). 8Bayly, Empire and Information. 9Bernard Cohn, ‘Representing Authority in British India’, in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds), Inventing Tradition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Introduction

7

native rejection of their rule as such. Hence, the colonial phenomenon of the ‘moral panic’, where a relatively small event, for example, the unsubstantiated allegations against an Indian of misconduct towards an Englishwoman, as in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, quickly telescopes into a mobilizing campaign for both sides, and latent antagonism turns into open conflict. Colonial society was structured as a one-way communication system, justified in moral terms and backed by force. When subaltern populations behaved, or were perceived to behave, in unexpected ways, the British lacked the discursive capacity to process the response; this resulted in confusion, and a reliance on coercion to reassert authority (see Rajeev Dhavan’s essay in this volume). This structure of perception was replicated within indigenous society. In the nineteenth century, educated middle classes launched moral crusades against native mores, which were declared to be effete, licentious, and socially corrupting. With a decadent aristocracy on the one hand, and religious texts and practices that dwelt on the amorous dalliances of gods on the other, Victorian prudery offered an appealing set of standards by contrast. Control over women, expressed as purified upper caste Hindu norms, became a crucial way in which an indigenous process of ‘improvement’ was sought to be carried out, with middle classes thereby replicating a one-way communicational style towards fellow natives regarded as socially inferior (see Charu Gupta’s essay).10 A national–popular domain arose that drew on elements of this Victorian-style moralizing and at the same time, created a mirror image of colonial perception. If, for English-speakers, native society was backward and unredeemable, and required to be written over with their civilizing mission, nationalists presented native culture as the true bedrock of Indian society. By extension, the Indian language press became not simply a medium for elite and middle-class politicians and writers to exchange ideas but the representative of the real India, against which the truth claims of the English language press were suspect (Naregal 2001; Orsini 2002). The demand of actually including the whole community of Hindi-users was of course unrealizable, and a variety of containment strategies allowed the literati to claim to speak for the masses at large (see Orsini’s essay in this volume). 10Also see Sanjay Joshi, Fractured Modernity: Making of a Middle Class in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001.

8

The Indian Public Sphere

The dichotomy established during the British period, between a dominant colonial power and a subordinate indigenous society, produced an enduring structure of opposition, despite their mutual influence and interaction. The character of this opposition shifted over time, with the introduction of a limited degree of native representation in government, beginning in 1919 and more prominently, with independence in 1947, which saw the onset of a national developmental state, with elected representatives. Yet, key elements endured. Crucially, the legal and political structure of the colonial state was largely retained, while English language dominance actually expanded in importance. As a result, the public continued to be positioned as a deficient entity to be contained, improved, or transcended, rather than one to be meaningfully engaged with by the state. Following independence, the Indian government sought to establish the identity of the public sphere with the national–popular, albeit with uneven success. A restrictive colonial legacy and an underlying fear of the public undoubtedly accounted for much of the reserve towards mass communications; to these can be added a residual Gandhian suspicion towards modern media. Broadcasting was, therefore, deprived of funds and little attention was given either to programme development or to cultivating audience interest (see Robin Jeffrey’s essay). Over time, ‘pro-developmental’ soap operas began to be broadcast (Gupta 1998; Mitra 1993; Rajagopal 2001; Shah 1997; Singhal and Rogers 1989), including ‘women-oriented’ serials, which sought to affirm traditionally undervalued identities, but within an unchanging national community (see Purnima Mankekar’s essay). In terms of national media, it was in the cinema that popular attachment was most manifest. The film industry was obliged to conceive of a national audience independently, without paying the price that government subsidies would no doubt have extracted. Disillusionment about the general betrayal of national ideals was pervasive, but films still offered narratives where Indian traditions could continue to be asserted and practiced, while submitting to their formal enclosure within the modern state (Chakravarty 1993; Dwyer and Patel 2002; Dwyer and Pinney 2001; Ganti 2000; Mazumdar 2007; Pendakur 2003; Prasad 1999; Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999; Virdi 2003). In this way, it was one of the few institutions that stitched together ideas about culture, politics, and

Introduction

9

economy for mass consumption, turning the prose of national developmentalism into song as it were (see Aniket Jaaware’s essay). In surveying the literature relating to the public sphere in India, we can distinguish between two possible approaches. What dominates the scholarly writing is an event history approach, tracing important episodes from the colonial period, during which time the nationalist movement develops, to the post-independence phase, in which developmentalism is eventually overtaken, after some decades, by market liberalization. If this is the axis of historical time, along which the progress of the nation can be tracked, however, we can draw a perpendicular axis along which variations on the structure of historical events can be plotted. Here, the underdeveloped character of the literature is noticeable: transformations in the structure of the public sphere are invariably presented as misfortunes or calamities, rather than as variations requiring analysis. The implicit purpose of the growth of the public sphere was understood to be the propagation of nationalist mobilization; once national independence was achieved, the graph flat-lined, since the basic goal was thought to be achieved. With the exponential expansion of the public sphere in recent years, the quality of debate is widely considered to have declined, however.11 This meant that the structure of the national public itself required to be assessed, rather than viewing it as subject to a series of invasions, whether by communalism, corporate interests, globalization, or some combination of these.12 Through what forms of consensus and confrontation was a given public sphere defined as truly representative of the nation, and for whom? How might the balance of forces change within this public, and with what effects? 11See, for example, T.N. Ninan, ‘The Changing Media Scene’, Seminar, 561, May 2006, pp. 14–19; P. Sainath, ‘The Moral Universe of the Media’, in Asha Rani Mathur (ed.), The Indian Media: Illusion, Delusion and Reality. Essays in Honour of Prem Bhatia, New Delhi: Rupa and Co., pp. 191–201; Sukumar Muralidharan, ‘The Times of India’s Final Frontier’, Himal Magazine, August 2006, http://www.himalmag.com/2006/august/essay.htm. In this context, see also B.P. Sanjay, ‘Press History in India’, in Mathur, The Indian Media, pp. 13–26. 12The dilemma is nicely outlined in Robin Jeffrey’s ‘Media Revolution & “Hindu Politics” in North India, 1982–99’, Himal Magazine, July 2001; see also his India’s Newspaper Revolution, New Delhi: Oxford, 2000. On disciplinary divisions and their responses to globalization, see Radha Hegde, ‘Disciplinary Spaces and Globalization: A Postcolonial Unsettling’, Global Media and Communication, 1(1), 2005, pp. 59–62.

10

The Indian Public Sphere

NATIONAL DEVELOPMENTALISM AND ITS TRANSFORMATION: THE TENSIONS OF A NATIONAL MEDIATIC INFRASTRUCTURE I suggest we can discern the reproduction of what can be called a ‘split public’, that is, a public in which an internal social division is accompanied by an ideological division that justifies the divide while claiming to overcome it (see my essay). In the Habermasian public sphere, rational–critical discourse is held to precipitate political decisions, in an idealized quest for realizing a greater or more valid truth. By contrast, politics is internal rather than external to the split public, and works through a structure of perception arising from colonial intervention, one that is reproduced, willy-nilly, in nationalist and post-colonial movements. In the colonial era, organized coercion presents the possibility of a closure to the political process, for example, by virtue of British intervention into a tautological dynamic that otherwise tends only to reproduce itself. After independence, the claim of national development legitimated the state’s authority to foreclose debate and assert what it defined as the national interest, sometimes violently, for instance, as occurred in Telengana and Naxalbari. With the crisis of the inherited form of secular nationalism, and the growing agnosticism about the legitimacy of the state’s monopoly on violence, we can observe a greater interest in not taking the triumph of Congress nationalism as desirable and necessary, but instead as a discrete, if crucial, historical event, rather than as an overarching telos. In the post-independence period, with a fortified nation-state on the one hand and mass franchise on the other, as well as the expansion of a mediatic infrastructure, each side of the split public appears strengthened. If there is a point of agreement, it is on the existence of a split, for example, between who or what truly represents the modern nation, and what it is that requires correction, or between means of improvement and means of corruption (for example, caste and religion appear on one or other side of this split for different groups), rather than about where the split exists, and what its character or significance are. Conflicts over the status of women, the place of religion and relations between religious communities, and disputes over ascribed forms of status such as caste as against merit, reveal a logic identifiable across these periods, even as the manner in which they are sought to be resolved shifts over time. Broadly, we can discern a body of literature concerned to document key historical tendencies and shifts within

Introduction

11

colonial or post-independence periods; successive thematic emphases prominent in the literature are nationalism, developmentalism, and public sphere formation. The current volume draws on this latest emphasis and seeks to extend its insights.13 Perhaps, not surprisingly, Indian nationalists saw the establishment and enhancement of the Indian nation as the aim of the media, and as the principal criterion for assessing it. Their attentions centred on the press, in whose development the most important milestone was the winning of independence. The press was understood as a weapon in the battle for freedom, whether against colonialism or against repressive government measures more generally. The battles within the independence movement over how the nation ought to be defined tend to be sidelined in these accounts, whether by lower castes such as Ambedkar or by champions of Hindutva such as V.D. Savarkar. As a result, such histories tell their story from the viewpoint of the victor, namely, the Indian National Congress (for example, Narain 1970; J. Natarajan 1955, S. Natarajan 1962). But, the losing sides in history do not disappear even if their leaders change. On the contrary, they remain and in some cases, gain in strength, as has arguably been the case both with lower caste interests and with religious orthodoxy in postindependence history. In other words, the focus on nationalism and its triumphs increasingly appears to obscure more than it reveals and hence, more recent studies have preferred a more specific thematic or analytic approach. It is noteworthy that the character of nationalism changes after 1947, when the Congress Party takes charge of the government. During the freedom struggle, Gandhian values of ahimsa, satyagraha, and the village republic helped to mobilize the majority; after independence, Nehruvian development struck a different note altogether, focused as it was on modern state-building rather than spiritual struggle and political justice. A second emphasis then, noticeable in studies that address the period following 1947, is that of development. The task of the media, once national independence was achieved, was understood as fulfilling the mission of education and information, in terms defined by the 13In this connection, see Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘The Imaginary Institution of India’, in Partha Chatterjee and Gyanendra Pandey (eds), Subaltern Studies VII, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp. 1–39.

12

The Indian Public Sphere

Indian state. ‘Development’ comprised a phased, state-led approach to modernization that involved cultural and institutional change, and the introduction of carefully-selected catalysts that could promote such change leading to modernization.14 Well-meaning and often well-funded, what was striking about many ‘developmental communication’ initiatives was their optimism that media users would align in favour of modernization as planners themselves understood it. In other words, modernizers’ empathy with forms of modernization other than their own was scarce. Overwhelmingly, developmental programmes fell short of their target and thus, the literature in this category tends to be prolix in its discussion of plans and laconic on outcomes.15 Audience research, which should have been the cornerstone of developmental communication, was neglected. The little that is available indicates that educational programmes were often hard to understand or perceived as irrelevant (see, for example, Hartmann et al. 1989; Sarkar 1969; Singhal and Rogers 1989, 2001). A related but distinct and critical focus includes analysis of women’s issues, of gender bias in media institutions, news and entertainment, and of the intersections of feminist politics with mainstream media culture (see, for example, Balasubrahmanyan 1988; John and Nair 1998; Joseph and Sharma 1994; Krishnan and Dighe 1990; Mankekar 1999). A third emphasis concerns the formation of a publicity-oriented social grouping, often regional or sectional, for example, a colonial or an Indian language public. In this group of studies, we notice an agnosticism about received colonial or nationalist narratives, and an interest in historical specificity. Conventional accounts have attended to intents and consequences, while giving actual processes the status of a vanishing mediator. It is in pinpointing the significance of mediating processes, with the interaction of technological and social processes leading to unexpected outcomes, that this body of literature 14 See Ian Roxborough, Theories of Underdevelopment, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1979; Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘Foreword’, in Daniel Lerner and Wilbur Schramm (eds), Communication and Change in the Developing Countries, Honolulu: EastWest Center Press, 1967. 15Binod C. Agrawal, ‘Social Impact of SITE on Adults’, Ahmedabad: Government of India, Space Applications Centre, Software Systems Group, Research and Evaluation Cell, Indian Space Research Organization, 1977. See also Binod C. Agrawal, Television in Kheda: A Social Evaluation of Site, New Delhi: Concept Publishing Company, 1986.

Introduction

13

is distinct (see, for example, Gupta 2002; Jeffrey 2000; John and Nair 1998; Mankekar 1999; Naregal 2001; Ninan 2007; Orsini 2002; Rawat 2003; Stahlberg 2002). An influential view assumes that older media are subsumed as content within the form of new technological innovations; thus, oral media become the content of print, print is the content of electronic media, and so forth.16 Such an account assumes a synchronized shift across society with the development of new technologies, whereas historical change is uneven and non-synchronous. For example, oral forms of literacy and distinct forms of visual culture can flourish in the absence of widespread print literacy. Blind spaces exist between new and old technologies of communication, which can themselves become important means of mediation. For example, rumour coexists alongside print and electronic media and may be used as a counterpoint to established channels of communication. If the medium is the message, which medium provides what message and how these media may interact cannot be told in advance. Assuming a fixed sequence and a hierarchy, with oral succeeded by print and then by electronic media, ignores the fact that there is no necessary boundary between these media; each has an imagination of the other and responds to it. Older media and older communication practices tend to be read through newer mediatic forms by those who embrace the latter, so that, for example, internet users may assume not only that their information is superior to what illiterates know but that they deserve to be superior too. Such an assumption can obviously be highly problematic, especially in a complex multilingual society like India.

EMERGENT MEDIA ORDERS AFTER THE NEHRU ERA: LOCALIZATION, CONSUMERISM, DIGITAL CULTURE A key aspect of the Nehruvian ethos was its emphasis on developing the productive capacities of the nation, postponing issues both of distribution and of consumption. A residual Gandhian proscription was attached to consumption, which was to be regulated by strictly utilitarian needs. The national movement had after all, involved the 16See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 (First published in 1964).

14

The Indian Public Sphere

boycott of foreign goods, an emphasis on swadeshi, that is, indigenous economy, and personal austerity. In short, the negotiation of different moral orders involved in modernization was no mere abstraction, but had a vivid relevance in this context. Consumption was a social act in a specific sense; the individual had to be mindful of national constraints, avoid waste, and refrain from self-indulgence. The domestic economy no doubt benefited from these strictures, as selfsufficiency in industrial infrastructure was substantially achieved. But, it was under such a governmental dispensation that the domestic market itself grew in its first three or more decades. A very different dispensation was required to overcome the discourse of frugality and the Gandhian critique that viewed consumption as a colonization of the Indian mind, if the market was to grow. There were different ways it could have grown, to be sure, but the historic forces pressing in the direction of a market stimulated by middle-class consumption, in the American style, were considerable. What was accomplished in the decades following independence, against all intentions, was made to serve in the emergence of a consumer society. The focus on a planned economy, on industry rather than agriculture as the basis of modernization, and on a reciprocal modernization of personal habits through new forms of commodity consumption appropriate for urban lifestyle, led to forms of awareness that were alert to the possibilities of further consumption. Commodities had always been symbols that adorned and confirmed ascriptive determinants of social rank; now, it began to be possible to compensate for the latter through consumption, and partially to replace them. With government policy increasingly determined to promote middle-class consumption, the domestic consumer market did indeed grow. If we have considered two main terms, media and politics, the importance of a third term, the market, previously latent, thus becomes more patent, especially after the Emergency. The rise of Indian language media both benefited from and reinforced this growth, aside from opening the political field in ways that were not anticipated.

Expansion of Indian Language Media The scaling back and divestment of the public sector, and Rajiv Gandhi’s declaration in 1985 that the middle class was going to be the

Introduction

15

engine of growth, however unsatisfactory or misleading this was as a policy, suggested that the government could not be the centre of public attention to the same extent or in the same way that it had been before. The expansion of the media industry, and its focus on catering to the consumption tastes of the middle class, meant that the media increasingly began to consider itself as representing this class and by extension, the society as a whole, although both assumptions were questionable. The growth of media can be treated as a symptom of the kinds of change occurring in the society. In 1978, for the first time, Hindi dailies’ sales outnumbered those in the English language press. By 2001, nine out of ten were Indian language dailies, whereas in 1954, only one of the ten top dailies was in an Indian language. Assessing the effects of this shift is not easy, so great is the hegemony of the English language, whose power is constantly being reinforced at the same time by greater exposure to global culture, for which English has tended to be the medium in India. One sign of the difficulty in assessing the impact is the frequency with which commentators remark on the ascendancy of the Indian language press. It is an observation that has been regularly made since 1978 without any diminution in surprise and with little advance in understanding. In scholarly work, Robin Jeffrey’s path-breaking research has been the exception in this respect (see also Sevanti Ninan’s essay).17 Alongside this shift has occurred the growth of television, which was a luxury good in the late 1970s and might be considered as a utility by the majority today. The growth of television has depressed the scope for serious journalism; print media increasingly cater to the shorter attention span of television viewers, and focus more on entertainment than on news or comment. But, the growth of television has occurred alongside increasing literacy, economic growth, and technological change, leading to the growth of the press as well. 18 Now, the establishment of a visual field across barriers of literacy has altered the media context, tilting the demographic balance towards Indian language audiences and neo-literates, and away from the Englishlanguage educated classes. The right set of visual appeals can thus find 17See, for example, Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian-Language Press, 1977–99, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000. 18Ibid.

16

The Indian Public Sphere

an audience via television that immeasurably dwarfs that of any previous media platform. Here, we have an apparently unified televisual public that is nevertheless internally divided by language and literacy, to say nothing of other divisions. For the first time since independence, a plausible claim could be advanced that the nation existed as one cultural entity despite its heterogeneity. With the broadcast of the Hindu epics, it was as a Hindu unity that this televisual public came to be celebrated. The only avenue for exploring these issues via television occurred via video news magazines started at this time, circulated through lending libraries. Doordarshan itself provided limited news coverage of such controversial topics. Thus, it was through the press that the effect of the tele-epics worked themselves out. Given the deepening of the divide after independence between the English and the Indian language press, it was perhaps not surprising that an issue championing Hindu identity exposed the split between these elements of the press. Here, the colonial legacy of politicized religious identity, and the nationalist decision to placate orthodoxy on the question of social reform, came home to roost (see my essay in this volume). The growth of a visual medium received in the privacy of the home posed an interesting challenge to a communication agenda that was both national and developmentalist. The growth of advertising helped to create a more globally-oriented consumption culture (see William Mazzarella’s essay), and a new way in which the developmental agenda itself was conceived, as about consumer pleasure rather than as an onerous duty (see Mary E. John’s essay). The period of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, brought into sharp relief a crucial set of forces that had taken shape over some time. Earlier, the need for investment in the public sector was considered selfevident, whereas the private sector was suspect, requiring to be tightly controlled lest it indulge in profiteering and waste. By 1991, these meanings were reversed, at least for government planning authorities. Thereafter, it was the private sector whose promotion required no argument, whereas the public sector was by definition corrupt and inefficient. If the old Nehruvian public stood discredited as a proxy for all-embracing state power, a new one appeared ready to take its place however—a Hindu public in which the symbols of the majority

Introduction

17

religion became included as sanctioned and even proud indicators of national sensibility. If in the Nehruvian era, popular participation was theoretically included but in practical terms considered an interference, then in the era of market liberalization, private consumption not only defined but legitimated the sanctity of the new dispensation. Only twenty years ago, the total circulation of newspapers was 22 million and TV coverage reached 11 million households or about 55 million people. By 2006, TV coverage had expanded to 40 million households. By 2004, the media industry had become the fastest growing sector of Indian business, and nearly a fifth of the population lived in a television household. This represents an extraordinarily rapid increase. How can we understand the effects of this rapid growth? We might say, there are two models of globalization operating: one that conceives it as coming from above, and from without the country; and the other, as from within the country, albeit in interaction with forces from outside. The first is English language led, and convinced of its place in the forefront of Indian modernization and globalization. Meanwhile, it is not always well-informed on historical or domestic issues; it is upper caste dominated and western-oriented.19 The other is Indian language led, more often mofussil in location, and harkens back to indigenous questions, interests, and styles, even as these are changing. This too is upper caste dominated, but it has an audience that is exponentially larger, and shares language and culture with its audience in a way that is not true for the former. The growth of the English language domain in India puts it in closer contact with an international audience, whereas an Indian language audience always appears like a constraint besides such global opportunities. A senior journalist, for instance, remarked that while his desire was to be read in Indian languages, every Indian language reporter he knew would prefer to be writing in English.20 Assuredly, the result will be further interaction between these two models. The question is, to what extent will there be intervention that accentuates a process of mutual learning. More often we have witnessed strategically enhanced forms of incomprehension, leading to violence, 19For a well-written discussion, see Amrita Shah, Hype, Hypocrisy, and Television in Urban India, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1997. 20P. Sainath, Personal interview, 11 November 2006, Washington DC.

18

The Indian Public Sphere

such as with the Babri Masjid demolition, Mandal-1, or Mandal-2, with copious news and negotiation resulting in few insights brought to the next encounter with such problems. The ineffectiveness of media suggests a deeper problem regarding the role of public criticism under conditions of market liberalization. The kinds of pedagogy evolving in the wake of market liberalization and the eclipse of old-style state authority require to be understood, as they can hardly be told in advance. Since the Emergency, political criticism has increasingly occurred in a variety of public realms, reflected in some form via the press. However, the focus of this criticism was principally the state and its failures or defects in policy and implementation. After liberalization and the growth of privatelyowned media in its wake, the targets of criticism should logically have extended beyond the state to business and the new forms of globalization resulting from it, but such criticism has been scarce indeed. The institutional space for criticism has shrunk, but this is not the only reason. The expansion of the private sector has presented itself, courtesy of the major media, as a desirable phenomenon, driven not by corporations so much as by popular demand. Here, the difficulty is that the single party dominance of the Congress over several decades has bred a state-centric mode of critique, where the political nuances of opposition have tended to be submerged in the fact of opposition itself. Locating an oppositional stance squarely in the realm of the popular has been difficult, given the dominance of caste, religion, and other factors that could not easily be accommodated within a progressive form of politics. Hence, the persistent evasion of questions about the ground of criticism within Indian public discourse, and the invocation of state-like forms of authority, with labels such as ‘modern’ and ‘secular’. In short, the modalities for a durable form of public criticism remain to be worked out. What we see meanwhile is the emergence of a new elite press within the English language media, the so-called ‘pink press’, comprising business and financial dailies printed on imported paper, and becoming the badge of a new technocracy, whose power is undergirded by this symbol of knowledge. The agrarian leader, Sharad Joshi, has been critical of the journalism practiced in this section of the press, observing that it demands incentives and subsidies for private business and lenience for government employees:

Introduction

19

When it comes to government officials, indulgence is the slogan. Thus when the Fifth Pay Commission proposed an additional burden of Rs 8,000 crore [there was no criticism], although this was a bonus for the inefficient and corrupt, most of whom would not get jobs elsewhere. When it comes to agriculture, well, the pink press has no agrarian readership. Kulak-bashing, raucous humour and crocodile tears for the landless are what can be seen in the editorials on agriculture. But antipathy to logic and indifference to facts is harder to understand. Thus for instance, the Economic Times had this to say when government declared a bonus of Rs 60 in addition to the procurement price of Rs 415 per quintal of wheat: ‘What was the hurry...?... Farmers do not have much holding power. Once they saw the government was not likely to raise the procurement price they would have sold their produce.’ Meanwhile the international market price for wheat was Rs 650/quintal, and if private traders were to make commercial imports, the landed price would be 750– 800/quintal.21

It is true that such attitudes to farmers are complemented by an increase in the newspaper editions devoted to rural districts, where local issues can be vented and campaigns pursued. An interesting effect of the technological revolution in the newspaper industry, however, is that the increase in district coverage has not immediately led to a wider audience for district issues. District editions have instead become compartmentalized from each other so that neighbouring districts do not read about each other. One activist has described the result as, ‘peacocks dancing in the forest’. Issues are publicized but no one necessarily notices.22

Audiences and New Media Genres A media professional has remarked, ‘[Earlier] the market was driving media, by the late 80s media started driving the market.’23 The statement expresses something about the way in which the power of the media has been perceived as both quantitatively and qualitatively different. From being considered a passive instrument of policy, media have taken on a life of their own, in this perception. The capacity of 21Sharad

Joshi, ‘Pink Journalism’, Outlook, 21 April–4 May, 1997, p. 42. Rathi, cited in Sevanti Ninan, in this volume. 23G. Krishnan, cited in Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business, New Delhi: Response Books, Sage Publications, 2003, p. 28. 22Gopal

20

The Indian Public Sphere

television to generate consumption in areas that marketers had previously ignored, and the sense that further growth will multiply the wealth to be reaped, has led to a kind of gold rush. With media industries growing at more than twice the rate of the Indian economy as a whole for the last several years, the reasons are of course obvious.24 Economic success is not the whole story, of course, although in some accounts it may seem to be the case. Assessments of the content and quality of the media are more sober, and often pessimistic, as the businesses involved appear to have joined in a ‘race to the bottom’,25 engaging in sensationalism and trivialization of all and sundry news, led by the august The Times of India. The effects on an Indian mass audience that is hardly well educated are obviously feared. What kinds of effects? To explore this adequately would require a separate volume. If we define our question in terms of the politics of media, we notice, for example, a new symbiosis between the police and the media with the rise of live action news, with the police often scripting stories that do not withstand logical scrutiny but are designed to provide vivid footage that will assuredly draw audiences. In return, crime reporters may be richly rewarded with gifts from police officers, in addition to advancing in their own careers.26 Police encounter killings have received a boost with the prospect of television glory, and since the victims are always designated as criminals, it may appear a win-win proposition for both the police and the media. One Meerutbased reporter described the police–media relationship as choli–daman ka rishta, each showing the other to its advantage as it were.27 But the symbiosis goes deeper than this. Pictures and stories cannot be chosen arbitrarily, but must conform to reporters’ judgement of news values.28 As the realm of publicity 24Price WaterhouseCoopers, The

Indian Media and Entertainment Industry. Sustaining Growth. Report 2008, p. 164, 3 June 2009. Accessed at http://www.pwc.com/in/en/publications/ the-indian-entertainment-and-media-industry-sustaining-growth.html. 25The phrase is from P. Sainath, Personal interview, 11 November 2006, Washington DC. 26Vartika Nanda, ‘Television Crime Reporting in India’, in Uday Sahay (ed.), Making News: Handbook of the Media in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 189–200. 27The quote appears in the research transcript of a 2007 documentary film, Morality TV Aur Loving Jihad: Ek Manohar Kahani, written and directed by Paromita Vohra. My thanks to Paromita Vohra for sharing it with me. 28See Stuart Hall, ‘The Determinations of News Photographs’, in Working Papers in Cultural Studies No. 7.

Introduction

21

expands, the worldview that media professionals have, which they assume their audiences share, tends to be reinforced. Scandals and other episodes that violate the shared norms receive copious coverage, often sensational, but the moral is always evident, and meant to assure audiences of the rightness of their own views, even if the threat to these views is constantly presented. Publicity as a realm where the lowliest person may stage a virtual meeting with the highest, takes on a different quality with 24-hour TV news stations, especially when there are dozens of competing channels. Thus, we are told that a killer wanted by the police recently offered to surrender live in a television studio; one channel head declined the offer and to his regret a competitor jumped at the chance.29 Here we see a keen awareness of the media’s political effect, and of publicity as a way of generating capital from previously non-negotiable events, for classes that earlier had little access to it. It is the comprehension of broadcast news that is challenged in the process, as the existing conventions of publicity retain fairly orthodox conceptions of good and bad events, reputable and disreputable characters, and so on. The increasing resort to publicity by non-conventional actors is hardly surprising when the media are clearly far more open to popular issues than government institutions are. The reliance on a law-and-order frame is the received frame of reference, inherited from colonial times, and applied to all events concerning collective association of any kind. Thus, for example, the poor or low castes are not able to be perceived as political actors; they are typically treated as victims or as requiring uplift, when they appear at all in the news. Any form of action on their part may, thus, appear as aberrant and threatening, even when it involves a reasonable assertion of their rights, and it is the police rather than, say, community leaders or academics, that are called in to offer expert comments. By contrast, the sympathy of the media for students and professionals striking against government-mandated reservations for lower castes has been striking.30 29Rajdeep Sardesai, ‘Ghosts in the machine’, 8 January 2007, http://www.ibnlive.com/ blogs/rajdeepsardesai/1/30339/ghosts-in-the-machine.html#. 30This new symbiosis may explain why, when bureaucrats publish volumes on the media these days, they are not from the Information and Broadcasting Service, as used to be the case, but from the Indian Police Service. See Uday Sahay (ed.), Making News: Handbook of the Media in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006.

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The Indian Public Sphere

If the media continue to be dominated by political coverage, the space given to non-political subjects in the media has also expanded greatly. The demarcation of a sphere as ostensibly separate from politics, which occurs alongside the liberalization of the economy, is significant; needless to say, the very act of separating a non-political domain imbues it with a political significance. To address it, however, we need to acknowledge the new institutionalization of different kinds of political spheres, which are themselves linked within the same organizations and engaged with by the same audiences. Television channels have talk shows and viewers participate through telephone, text messages, and email (see K. Gopinath’s essay on the internet), and also, in person. Magazines are now available for a host of non-political interests, and these interests are also reflected on television. A host of informal means of censorship continues to exist and perhaps, has even grown, and government institutions from the police to the Ministries of Home and of Defence expect their press releases to be treated as sacrosanct. At the same time, social norms have widened somewhat in their scope, at least on the media if not in the country; the ban on the kiss has faded away, for example, and a wider range of public expression, less constrictive to personal desires but often less tolerant to minorities. The genre of Indian soap operas is no doubt in its early stages of growth. At present, many of the production values of Hollywood soap operas appear to have transferred to India: ostentatious sets and costumes, photogenic actors, melodramatic treatment and an exclusive focus on intimate, personal life as opposed to public life, and an infinite expansibility of plot. There are also some differences, however. The saas– bahu serials, for example, typically feature an upper-caste Hindu undivided family whose members live together, in overtly traditional roles. For example, women work only at home and appear intent on serving the men of the house. Family and community identity appear to be valued above individual identity, but the conflicts that occur—ostensibly over divergent perceptions of duties and responsibilities—become a way of projecting individual aspirations. Aimed at middle and lower socioeconomic categories rather than at the premium segment, these soap operas tend to revolve around tensions between strong female figures, while the men become ancillary to the key conflicts, even if they are theoretically dominant. Those involved in producing the serials assert that personal desires are meant to be asserted more clearly and explicitly

Introduction

23

over time.31 It seems more safe to say, however, that the soaps seek to accommodate ambivalent and contrary feelings towards both traditional family structures and unfettered individual expression. What are some of the salient factors and trends we can discern and distil from the plethora of developments in the media? There are several. With state regulation having proven unaccommodating to popular voices and bottom-up pressures, it is difficult to propose the need for a cultural policy without appearing to ask for a return to a bygone era, with all the accoutrements of a licence–permit raj. Clearly, a dictatorial form of policy prescriptions is impractical where the most influential players are private, and the race to establish the main players in the media market is under way, with dozens of channels targeting relatively small audiences. In 2007, for example, one newscaster counted thirty-six 24-hour news channels, far more relative to the existing audience size than anywhere else in the world. Nor is the quality of news improved by the contest; if anything, there is a pressure for greater sensationalism and a clustering around the same topics, themes, and angles. Market competition generates its own forms of censorship, clearly, in ways that are harder to detect because they are self-imposed. Precisely because market pressures may generate non-rational solutions to existing problems, however, it seems that some kind of oversight by an advisory body would be important. After several decades of resisting challenges to government autonomy over broadcasting, numerous foreign television channels are received in millions of Indian homes, with the tacit consent of the Indian government. From a tightly regulated situation, in which ‘education, information, and entertainment’ were supposed to represent the priority in broadcasting values, there appears now to be a free-for-all contest to corner the most lucrative segments of the Indian market by any means necessary. When half or more of the population does not even own a radio set and more than a third cannot even sign their names, a reliance on market forces is not adequate since this segment of the market is not guaranteed to attract businesses. Government controlled television still retains the majority of the audience; this section of viewers cannot afford the nominal charge required to receive cable and satellite channels. The quality of the 31Personal

interview, Shailaja Kejriwal, Star TV; Nivedita Chatterjee, Balaji Telefilms, November 2004, Mumbai.

24

The Indian Public Sphere

programming in government broadcasting seems to be a carry-over from the past, with insufficient attention to audience needs and interests. Meanwhile, the entry of the private sector into broadcasting appears to have been received enthusiastically, judging by audience ratings and growing business revenues. What is striking is the rapidity with which an obsession with secrecy and rigid supervision of programming content—all justified by a developmental mission—has given way to an apparently exclusive interest in generating revenue. The irony is that decades of investment have gone to establish the government’s own broadcasting infrastructure, which is unparalleled in size and reach, whereas apparently revenue is almost exclusively being sought from new, private entrants into the market. Thus, when radio broadcasting was opened for competition in 1999, the licence fee was at such a high level that it ruled out any non-commercial ventures from contemplating entering the market.32 Chanchal Sarkar remarked on the media ownership patterns emerging in this environment: The Indian public is as yet not protected by any rules on cross-ownership. There are no public interest tests anywhere, and no delicensing by a public body. In 2005, the I&B Minister said he was seeking counsel on the matter, and said also that there would be a body to license foreign channels. From when he didn’t say and they have been broadcasting for some time. Like the 44 families who controlled Pakistan’s economy, seven families in India control 70 percent of the newspaper circulation. Some of them have already ventured into television and radio, and more might join them.33

At least two issues can be mentioned that could benefit from policy intervention of some kind. First is the continuing need for a genuinely autonomous public media, at least partially insulated from market pressures. The familiarity of this demand has perhaps dulled the awareness of its importance. We have witnessed decades of criticism about the abuse of government control of the broadcast media. Now that private forces are free to operate, there is strikingly little discussion of the new forms of censorship and control existing in the media, via 32Sevanti Ninan, ‘This Signal is Faint’, Media Pulse, The Hindu, 21 November 1999. On community radio, see Vinod Pavarala and Kanchan K. Malik, Other Voices: The Struggle for Community Radio in India, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2007. 33Chanchal Sarkar, ‘Has Media Liberalisation A Price?’, Mainstream, 29 March 1997, revised and repeated 4–10 November, 2005, pp. 13–15.

Introduction

25

more informal mechanisms of business practice, including judgements about audience taste that use ratings as the sole evidence, and the need to enhance advertising revenue. The market provides no inherent guarantee of competition between alternative programming formats; if anything, we notice a diminution of choices and a tendency to replicate market leaders. Meanwhile, developmental needs have not disappeared; if anything, they are more pressing with economic growth.34 However, there is reason for optimism. For instance, the cinema industry has shown a surprising expansion in its own creative range over the last decade, partly aided by affluent multiplex audiences, where smaller, niche projects can circulate, and overseas markets. The difficulty of replicating this in broadcast media is due to the size of the potential audience and the resultant increase in commercial pressure; hence, the need for some kind of institutional buffer. Second, and more specifically, amid the euphoria over the expansion of the media and the growth of Indian language media in particular, the divide between English and Indian languages is unlikely to disappear simply via market proliferation of Indian language media. Given the continued reliance on bilingual mediators whose ability to interface with a more cosmopolitan English language world reinforces the status of English (see D. Wood’s essay on call centres; also see Chakravartty 2008), an automatic transition to equal opportunity for Indian language users seems unlikely without conscious political intervention.

CONCLUSION The plurality of Indian media culture is greater than any individual can describe. Several scholars have sought to encompass its enigmatic diversity by invoking the distinction drawn by Partha Chatterjee, between civil society and political society. For Chatterjee, the latter term stands for the terra incognita of not just the mofussil and the rural but also the urban hinterland, populated not by ‘People Like Us’ but by ‘People Like Them’, whose lives tend to remain in discreet obscurity. The importance of Chatterjee’s argument hinges on its expansion of the domain of analysis legible to scholarly scrutiny, providing a 34Ibid.

26

The Indian Public Sphere

framework within which otherwise theoretically aberrant characteristics of a diverse country can be incorporated. Civil and political societies stand in a one-to-one relation with ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ realms respectively, in his conception; the ‘informal’ realm has typically been treated as residual.35 By naming it as political society, Chatterjee seeks to bring visibility to this below-the-radar domain, of which no ready archive exists, of the fugitive and often paralegal transactions by which the majority secures its livelihood. ‘Political society’ should be an invitation to further inquiry. If it is treated as a mere descriptor instead, it becomes a terminological cloak, one that requires to be lifted if we are to understand what the civil/ political, formal/informal separation means and how it is actually performed. Those inhabiting the ‘formal’ domain tend to perceive it as inevitable, while those in the ‘informal’ domain see it as unjust. Thus, the distinction is hardly self-evident, but requires explanation in itself. Indeed, the media cuts across this divide and refashions it for consumption, in ways that would have to be inquired into. So we can ask, what might the illuminated screens of the media look like from the informal domain itself, for example, from the side of the older and now neglected folk arts? The cinema is beyond the scope of this volume, but in addition to television, it is the cinema that is routinely invoked as an emblem of the modern mediatic arts. It is useful, therefore, to confront the prejudices for and against it, in understanding the media’s impact. Here is a view of the cinema expressed by a Kolhati, member of a Rajasthani nomadic community that has migrated to western Maharashtra, and engages in tamasha performances, dancing, and singing by women before an audience of men. Practiced as a hereditary art, tamasha earns the women money but brands them amoral at the same time, effectively ostracizing them from respectable society. ...Dancing is our business and our art. But, these days all kinds of women indulge in blatant prostitution under the guise of dancing. If our pallu slips even a few inches off our chest it causes a commotion. But heroines in movies dance with bodies exposed, with a different hero each time and it is called 35See Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (University Seminars/Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures), New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.

Introduction

27

art. They go to Delhi and win awards for it. It is all a joke played on us by shameless people.36

The statement is drawn from the autobiography of a Kolhati boy, Kishore Kale, whose aunt, Rambha maushi, is protesting the unjust treatment she receives as a kind of historic irony. The disparagement of Kolhatis is anachronistic when compared to the liberal sexual mores of the cinema and yet, there appears to be no ripple effect of change from the popularity of the cinema. Rather, the success of films and film stars looks to be in a self-enclosed world, in which membership is not open to all. The special status accorded to cinema is shared to some extent by television, and their performers are able to be popular and celebrated, while the same arts when performed off-screen can ‘cause a commotion’. When seen from the side of the media, this enchantment effect tends to be understood simply as an aspect of modernization and popular awakening. We are accustomed to treating technology as instrumental to the ends it is meant to serve, but something more complex may be going on here. By way of an answer, let us consider a different example, this time from the cinema itself. A 2006 film, Lage Raho Munnabhai (directed by Rajkumar Hirani), both a popular and a critical success, offers some reflections on the topic of mediation in general. In this film, Mahatma Gandhi returns as a ghost; his charismatic presence is channelled through a radio talk show host, to a growing audience thirsting for ethical guidance. The ubiquitous statues and public portraits of Gandhi signify nothing to people any more, and a public library dedicated to preserving his memory stands empty and ignored. It is the magic of his spoken words, heard, remembered, and retold, that has the power to change people. Here is a nation, increasingly reliant on technologies of mediation and yet, ever more distrustful of their artifice. The older technologies of stone, canvas, and paper have become hermetic and ineffective in their ability to communicate, perhaps not from any innate deficiency. For example, when the protagonist, Sanjay Dutt, spends three days 36Spoken by Rambha maushi, in Against All Odds (in Marathi, Kolhatyache Por, Kolhati Boy, Granthali Publishers, 1994), by Kishore Shantabai Kale. Tr. Sandhya Pandey. New Delhi: Penguin, 2000, p. 152. Although the statement is not dated, it was probably made in the 1980s or in the early 1990s at the latest.

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The Indian Public Sphere

and nights at the Mahatma Gandhi Library, the great man appears before him, moved by his prayerful attention when all else have forgotten his memory. However, the newer technology of radio has a radiant energy, able to convey the force of Gandhi’s wisdom through the obstacles not only of bricks, mortar, and physical distance but of human obtuseness and moral turpitude as well, that obviously foil the simpler device of print. Here the spectre of Gandhi inspires the nation to come together again, after decades of corrupt and divisive government. Here is an apparent solution to the problem of visualizing the nation in an inclusive way today.37 Is the radio, here, merely a tool, whose effects make people weep (as radio does in the film)? Can we separate the radio from the effects that apparently only it can achieve? Perhaps the power of the visual media, discreetly omitted in the film’s treatment, can be considered as well. Is the magic of electronic technology merely the indispensable accompaniment, or instead the real and durable basis of a vibrant national community today, bypassing the impersonal monuments and writings, the domes and tomes, that no longer serve as the focal points of identity? If the access to and identification with media technology is involved here, as I believe it is, does this not become a criterion of membership, a factor that decides who belongs and who does not, whom we can have ‘real’ and honest intimacy with, and who is excluded? In Rambha maushi’s comment to Kishore Kale, mentioned earlier, we notice someone whose tacit social exclusion is reflected vividly on the screen. As this worship of technology proceeds unchecked, and technology itself develops rapidly, it will perhaps only be around the ghosts of the past that the nation can imagine itself as united, despite all the power of the new media.

37It bears mention in this context that Sanjay Dutt spent several months in jail as a coaccused in the Bombay blast case of 1993, and was, in July 2007, sentenced to six years rigorous imprisonment for possessing illegally acquired weapons during the anti-Muslim riots that preceded the blast. As the son of a Muslim mother (the actress Nargis), Sanjay Dutt claimed he had acted with a view to self-defence. In November 2007, the Supreme Court granted him bail, but since then has refused to suspend his conviction. Lage Raho Munnabhai’s play on the issues of mediation and social inclusion thus has obvious resonances, suggested not only by its idealization of Gandhi, but also by Dutt’s own life.

PART I

FORMATION OF A COLONIAL PUBLIC SPHERE

1 Transmission* Ranajit Guha

W

hile the peasants regard rebellion as a form of collective enterprise, their enemies describe it and deal with it as a contagion—which goes to show again how such violence tends to evoke contradictory interpretations from its perpetrators and its victims. ‘Contagion’, the word occurs so often and so persistently in the official and pro-landlord accounts of agrarian uprisings in so many different places and times that it has acquired almost the status of a convention, that is, of a stereotyped figure of consciousness among those least likely to sympathize with disturbances of this kind. It was considered by ‘clergymen, overseers of the poor and others not notably identified with the labourers’ as one of the causes of the riots of 1830 in rural England.1 In colonial India, the authorities acknowledged its power in no uncertain terms. The spread of the sepoy and peasant rebellions of 1857–8 was often described as a function of contagion and infection in official statements. ‘Most of the mutineers from Azimgurh, Jaunpore and Benares’, wrote Lieutenant-General McLeod Innes in his account of the events in Awadh, ‘had...moved on Fyzabad and spread the contagion there.’2

*Originally published as ‘Transmission’, in Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 220–77. 1E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing, London, 1969, pp. 81–2. 2In this paragraph the references are as follows: to the Mutiny—Freedom Struggle in UP (hereafter FSUP): IV 78, 1366; to the Kol insurrection—Board’s Collections: India Office

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The Indian Public Sphere

...A rebellion—any rebellion—is, in the eyes of its adversaries, a disease. The words of a provincial chief of the military police bear witness to this view of politics regarded as a pathology. ‘The mutiny [of 1857] spread through the Bengal Army (already in a highly excited and dissatisfied state) like any infectious disease in a vitiated atmosphere’, he wrote about a year after the event. ‘The contagion being allowed to spread from Meerut unchecked and without the prompt and stern retribution the exigencies of the case required, even the cutting off root and branch of the diseased member, corps after corps caught the infection.’3 The analogy of the corps consumed by an uncontrollable virus could hardly be stretched further. When, therefore, the virus hit the countryside, it was almost invariably regarded by the gentry as a morbid poison bound to destroy the peasant’s healthy sense of loyalty to his master and thus undermine the moral edifice of the latter’s authority. As the Officiating Commissioner of the Burdwan Division remarked on the way the Santal jacqueries had been enveloping the western districts of Bengal in the second week of July 1855, ‘This shows that distant parts of the country inhabited by the Sonthals, to which I hoped the evil would not extend, are already tainted’.4 There is a distinct suggestion here in the emphasized words—emphasized as in the original—of a spiritual defilement as well as of the externality of its agent. It is being insinuated that the peasants, even those in the remotest areas, have lost their innocence thanks to the irruption of outsiders— an idea on which it is easy to hang both a conspiracy theory and the image of an uncorrupted tenantry blissfully reconciled to landlord rule. Clearly, too, the metaphor carries with it the notion of irrationality.... The suggestion of irrationality in this metaphor has yet another moment made up of the closely related notions of suddenness, speed, and simultaneity. From the days of Jacques Bonhomme and Wat Tyler to those of Kanhu Santal and Birsa Munda, no peasant revolt has ever failed to shock its upper class contemporaries by its abrupt beginning and rapid thrust. Some of that trauma, as registered in the evidence Library 1362 (54223): Metcalfe & Blunt to Court of Directors (25 September 1832); to the Santal hool—Judicial Proceedings, West Bengal State Archives (hereafter JP), 8 Nov. 1855: Ward to Government of Bengal (GoB) (13 October 1855); Minute by the Lt.-Governor of Bengal (19 October 1855). 3FSUP: V 20. Emphasis added. 4JP, 19 July 1855: Elliott to Grey (15 July 1855).

Transmission

33

(often the only available evidence) originating from elite sources and representing the elite point of view, tends to filter into the historian’s discourse as well. And it is thus that imageries based on the destructive forces of nature are used as a common literary device for the description of rural uprisings. The Birsaite movement in Ulgulan is said to have been ‘spontaneous, sudden in its eruption, elemental in its character like a volcanic outburst’, the Kol insurrection to have spread ‘like wildfire’, and so on.5 From the notion of spontaneity and speed, it is but a short step to that of simultaneity. In many, though by no means all cases, the rebellions coursed through their respective territories very quickly indeed. It was only a matter of three to four weeks before the greater part of Chota Nagpur and Palamau was overrun by the Kols, and most of Damin-i-Koh and Birbhum by the Santals. Such phenomenal spread, involving people geared to an unhurried pace of life, in an age of relatively slow communication, generated among observers outside the rebel communities the illusion of a levee en masse everywhere at the same time in a given region. Co-territoriality thus came to acquire a semblance of contemporaneity.... ‘Once it had been decided’, writes Lefebvre, ‘that the Great Fear must have broken out everywhere at the same time, it followed logically that everyone should think it the work of secret agents working together in a general conspiracy.’6 It is not difficult to see how this idea has its source in the psychosis of dominant social groups confronted suddenly by a revolt of those whose loyalty had been taken for granted. Yet, there is perhaps an element of truth in this fantasy of ‘preconcertation’, as Gramsci calls it.7 It reflects an intuitive recognition of an organizing principle behind what looks like the world being turned upside down. However, this is not an intuition which can overcome the constraints of elitist outlook and it ends up inevitably with a false attribution, that is, by blaming the inversion on a pre-existing plot. What the pillars of society fail to grasp is that the organizing principle lies in nothing other than their own dominance. For it is the subjection of the rural masses to a common source of exploitation 5Suresh Singh, Dust-storm and Hanging Mist, Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1966, p. 193; J.C Jha, Kol Insurrection in Chota-Nagpur, Calcutta, 1964, pp. 65, 80, 179. 6G. Lefebvre, The Great Fear, London, 1973, p. 137; ibid, pp. 52–6, 141. 7Mao Tse-tung, Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 1, Peking, 1907, p. 93.

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The Indian Public Sphere

and oppression that makes them rebel even before they learn how to combine in peasant associations. And once a struggle has been engaged, it is again this negative condition of their social existence rather than any revolutionary consciousness which enables the peasantry to rise above localism and unite in opposition to their common enemies.... The drum, the flute, and the horn were the instruments most used for the aural transmission of insurgency. They formed a class apart from verbal media in the sense that they helped to realize what Jakobson has called transmutation, that is, ‘an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’.8 As such they acted as a surrogate of human speech and were independent enough of the latter to permit the decoding of messages directly rather than through linguistic symbolism.... The colonial government, on its part, was far from indifferent to the power of these rustic means of transmission. It is not merely that in times of trouble they broadcast messages of defiance but their ‘language’, known only to the members of the community which produced it, was itself evidence of the failure of an alien authority fully to understand, hence control, the native population under its rule. An instance cited by Burridge of official hostility to certain uses of the slit-gong in a region of New Guinea under Australian control illuminates the attitude of colonialists everywhere. Here, a community of Kanaka people known as the Tangu used this instrument customarily to communicate among themselves by sound signals not generally intelligible to outsiders. After the district passed under Australian administration, they were for some time forbidden to sound the slitgongs when a white officer approached any particular neighbourhood. ‘In this way [so ran the theory] he could see what the villages were like when he was not there. The villagers would have had no warning of his approach.’9 In other words, the ban on a vital medium of indigenous communication was for the authorities an essential condition of their knowledge of that society, and a system of aural signs thus came to symbolize at once an epistemological and political opposition between the rulers and the ruled. When such opposition matured to the point of provoking mass peasant violence, as it often did under the Raj, even 8Roman

Jakobson, Selected Writings, vol. 2: Word and Language, The Hague: Mouton, 1971, p. 261. 9Kenelm Burridge, Mambu, London, 1960, p. 48, and pp. 128–9.

Transmission

35

the most innocuous means of aural transmission among the people could assume, in the eyes of the regime, the status of instruments of rebellion and were treated as such. It was thus that the drum and the buffalo horn, especially the latter, came to be an object of official hostility during the Pabna bidroha. In some parts of the district the local administration resorted to the Indian Penal Code, forbidding ‘the use of musical instruments for the purpose of invoking assemblies, intimidating union, or causing terror’. At least six peasants were sentenced to three months of rigorous imprisonment each, on a charge of forming, at Ghasgali, ‘an illegal assembly in which horns were blown to make a demonstration and intimidate a village which had not joined the combination’.10... Another class of nonverbal transmitters used for the propagation of insurgency was made up of a number of visual signs: iconic and symbolic. The best known example of the former was the arrow of war used by the Kol. Its role as a means of rebel mobilization was made widely known by Dalton in his Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, published forty years after the event: ‘An arrow passed from village to village is the summons to arm and sent to any one in authority it is an open declaration of war.’11 On the eve of the 1832 uprising, such arrows circulated ‘like the fiery cross’ in that region, so that by the time it got under way by the middle of January that year, ‘the Mundaris and Oraons had all entered with zeal into the spirit of the insurrection’.12 A reference to the primary sources can help us with an insight into this mode of communication from a new angle. Major Sutherland who investigated the causes and course of the uprising even before it had been completely suppressed mentions how he was told by the Maharaja and other knowledgeable informants ‘that this system prevailed among the Larka Coles of Singhbhoom, but it had never before extended to the Danger Coles of Nagpoor and its dependencies’.13 He was to take up the point again in a detailed statement prepared for Metcalfe, the Vice-President of the Council. ‘This is a custom of the Lurka Coles 10Judicial Proceedings, Police Department, West Bengal State Archives (hereafter JP (P)): Nolan to Pabna Magistrate, Letter no. 321, 1 July 1873, ‘Pubna Riot Case’, case no. 850. 11Edward Tuite Dalton, Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, Calcutta, 1972, pp. 171–2. 12Ibid. 13Board’s Collections: India Office Library 1363 (54227); Sutherland’s Note, 11 March 1832; Note from Major Sutherland enclosed in Metcalfe’s Minute, 27 March 1832.

36

The Indian Public Sphere

and had never before been generally adopted by the Dangar Coles’, he wrote, and ‘In the present instance it seems to have extended throughout the country of the Dangars.’14 In other words, the latter had borrowed it from the Larka Kols of Singhbhum and used it, for the first time, in the course of this insurrection, beginning with Sonepur Pargana and then elsewhere in Chota Nagpur and Palamau. The pressure of insurgent mobilization appears thus to have helped a sign to extend its domain beyond its traditional boundaries. The fact that it was still in circulation in that region in 1857, according to Dalton,15 indicates how it struck root in the adopted community and continued to function as an integral part of its ‘vocabulary’.... None of the signals discussed so far helped more to spread an insurrection than anonymous speech in its classic form, that is, rumour. This was, of course, by no means a uniquely Indian experience. One would perhaps be quite justified in saying that rumour is both a universal and necessary carrier of insurgency in any pre-industrial, preliterate society. An unmistakable, if indirect, acknowledgement of its power is the historically known concern for its suppression and control on the part of those who, in all such societies, had the most to lose by rebellion. The Roman emperors were sensitive enough to rumour to engage an entire cadre of officials—delatores—in collecting and reporting it, while in 1789, the French farmers found it to their advantage to want ‘to put a stop to the rumours, excitements and seditious chatter on the part of the lower orders in the market place’.16 In India, governmental anxiety about rumours can be traced as far back as the Kautilyan state. ‘Spies shall also know the rumours prevalent in the state’, prescribes the Arthashastra.17 Many centuries later, gathering rumours was still a routine chore with the colonial bureaucracy, especially in periods of war and unsettled political conditions as witness that familiar rubric in the weekly and fortnightly intelligence reports in the Home (Political) Series at the National Archives of India. Vigilance such as this on the part of the authorities was, of course, fully justified from their point of view. For, in no country with a 14Ibid. 15Dalton,

Descriptive Ethnology of Bengal, 1972, p. 171. Lefebvre, The Great Fear, London, 1973, p. 27. 17Gordon W. Allport and Leo Postman, The Psychology of Rumor, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965, p. 159; Lefebvre, The Great Fear, 1973, p. 27; Kautilya, p. 23. 16Georges

Transmission

37

predominantly illiterate population has subaltern protest of any significant strength ever exploded without its charge being conducted over vast areas by rumour. The phenomenon has indeed been found to be so common and its incidence so large as to look like ‘a law of social psychology’ to some scholars. As Allport and Postman have put it in their well-known study of the subject, ‘No riot ever occurs without rumours to incite, accompany and intensify the violence.’18 All historical accounts of violent crowd behaviour, from Livy to Lefebvre, would tend to confirm this. But, for our present purpose, it may suffice to represent the spirit of them all by an extract from Lefebvre’s great work on the power of rumour as manifested in the uprisings in rural France, in 1789. He wrote: The vast majority of the French people depended entirely on oral tradition for the dissemination of news...But for the government and the aristocracy, this means of transmission was a great deal more dangerous than freedom of the press. It goes without saying that it favoured the spread of false reports, the distortion and exaggeration of fact, the growth of legends...In the empty silence of the provinces, every word had the most extraordinary resonance and was taken as gospel. In due course, the rumour would reach the ears of a journalist who would imbue it with new strength by putting it into print... Indeed, what was the Great Fear if not one gigantic rumour?19

In many respects, the panic that spread in the wake of some of the rural uprisings in colonial India, too, was the work of a series of gigantic rumours. Clearly the panic caused by rumour during any demonstration of peasant militancy cuts across ethnic lines. However, to emphasize only the alarmist aspect of rumour would be to miss its positive and indeed, more important function in mobilizing for rebellion. In each of the instances mentioned earlier, the anonymous verbal signal helped not merely to frighten those against whom a particular insurrection or jacquerie was directed but above all, to spread the message of revolt among the people. This was certainly true of the rebellion of 1857, which to many of its contemporaries was nothing but a direct outcome of the rumours that had preceded it throughout northern India. 18Allport and Postman, The Psychology of Rumor, 1965, p. 193. Emphasis as in the original. 19Lefebvre, The

Great Fear, 1973, pp. 73–4.

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The Indian Public Sphere

Typical of such an oversimplified view of what was indeed a complex happening were causal explanations of the kind mentioned next. Previous to the outbreak, rumours to the following effect generally prevailed: 1. That 2,000 sets of irons were being made by the sepoys. 2. That by order of government, attah mixed with bones was to be sold. 3. That the sepoys were to be deprived of the charge of their arms and ammunition. These reports caused the disturbance. With all its naivety, this deposition by Mohur Singh, a Deputy Collector of Meerut, came close to identifying what, by all accounts, was one of the most powerful factors in the mobilization of the subaltern masses for that event. For current after powerful current (to use Lefebvre’s aquatic metaphor) of unfounded and unverifiable reports about greased cartridges, flour polluted by bone meal, and forcible conversion to Christianity; about the disarming of native soldiers and official prohibition of agricultural work; about the coming end of British rule and the advent of a deliverer—about issues touching on indigenous sentiment at profound depths— merged into ‘one gigantic rumour’ and transformed the many disparate elements of popular grievance against the Raj into a war of sepoys and peasants. In this respect, 1857 was no exception. The statements of some of the Maratha peasants convicted of rioting against local money lenders in 1875 illustrate the role of rumour in inspiring jacqueries. Here are a few extracts: News came from Aligaon about a riot against the Wanis. People [of Supa] said that if we go to the Wanis they will give back our bonds. The first rumour was that they would give back a Rs. 100 bond and take one for Rs. 50... The villagers [of Ghospuri], hearing that the residents of the neighbouring villages have got back from sowkars their bonds by force, they also one day collected themselves and went to the shop of Moolchand Hakumchand and demanded from him all the bonds... About 5 or 6 days before the row in my village [Sonsangwi] the villagers had heard that the residents of Kurdi Nimone have got back by force their

Transmission

39

bonds from the banias, and since then the villagers were thinking of doing the same in my village, which they ultimately did...20

No wonder that the commission appointed to investigate these disturbances came to the conclusion that ‘in almost every case the riot is stated to have commenced on news arriving of bonds having been extorted in some neighbouring village with the usual story that the Government approved of the rioters’ action’.21 In most other instances, too, of rural insurgency during the period under discussion, rumour proved to be a powerful vehicle of the hopes and fears, of visions of doomsdays and golden ages, of secular objectives and religious longings, all of which made up the stuff that fired the minds of men. It is precisely in this role of the trigger and mobilizer that rumour becomes a necessary instrument of rebel transmission. The necessity derives, of course, from the cultural conditions in which it operates. For, the want of literacy in a pre-capitalist society makes its subaltern population depend almost exclusively on visual and non-graphic verbal signals for communication among themselves, and between these two again, rather more on the latter because of the relatively greater degree of its versatility and comprehensibility. But, it is also by virtue of its character as a type of speech that rumour serves as the most ‘natural’ and indeed, indispensable vehicle of insurgency. This point needs some emphasis, for it is only by working out its implications for an agrarian disturbance that one can come fully to appreciate the contribution of rumour in developing it into a mass event and influencing its ideology. Rumour is spoken utterance par excellence, and speaking, as linguists say, differs from writing not merely in material, that is, by the fact of its acoustic rather than graphic realization, but in function. It is this aspect of the difference which is the ‘more profound and more essential’ according to Vachek. Speech, he says, responds to any given stimulus more urgently, emotionally, and dynamically than written 20Report of the Commission Appointed in India to Inquire into the Causes of the Riots which took place in the year 1875 in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the Bombay Presidency [DRCR], Cmd. 2071, London, 1878, vol. 3; ‘Depositions of Convicted Rioters at Present in the Poona and Yerauda Jails’ in DRCR Appendix B: 3, 9, 14. 21DRCR: 3; ‘Depositions of Convicted Rioters at Present in the Poona and Yerauda Jails’ in DRCR Appendix B: 3, 9, 14.

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utterance.22 It is this functional immediacy which develops in rumour its characteristic drive to seize upon important issues in periods of social tension23 and create a large public audience for them. Prasad, in his well-known study of the reactions to the Bihar earthquake of 1934, noticed how anyone who heard a rumour at that time had an ‘almost uncontrollable impulse to pass it on to another person’, and Schachter and Burdick too, working on American material, have found rumour to be ‘a chain pattern of communication’, in which the ‘possession of the item of information’ by an individual ‘seems to create a force to communicate further’.24 This force or impulse is what makes rumour bring people together. ‘Passing on a rumour involves a desire on the part of the transmitter to affect other people’s behavior, to bring their perspectives in line with his own, or, at the very minimum, to share a valuable bit of information.’25 That is, ‘the communication of a report to other members of the group implies an underlying bond of community among the members’.26 It helps to evoke a ‘comradeship response’ which, as was observed during the Bihar disaster, made the community ‘less one in which superiors confronted inferiors and more one in which all people were pretty much on an equality’.27 The solidarity generated thus by the ‘uncontrollable’ force of its transmission confers on rumour two of its characteristic tendencies as realized in time and space. First, it is precisely to this socializing process that rumour owes its phenomenal speed.... Since it is at the market-place where, perhaps more than anywhere else in a preindustrial society, people gather regularly, at frequent intervals and en masse, for trade and certain forms of folk entertainment, the socializing process of rumour too tends to operate most actively there. It is thus 22Josef Vachek, ‘Some Remarks on Writing and Phonetic Transcription’, in E.P. Hamp et al., Readings in Linguistics II, Chicago, 1966, pp. 153, 154. 23Allport and Postman have identified importance as one of the two essential conditions of rumour, the other being ambiguity. See Allport and Postman, The Psychology of Rumor, 1965, pp. 33–4, 36 et passim. See also Schachter and Burdick, p. 296. For the prevalence of rumour during social crises, see Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition: A Study in Historical Methodology, London: Routledge and Paul, 1961, p. 118. 24J. Prasad, ‘The Psychology of Rumour’, British Journal of Psychology, vol. 26, no. 1, July 1935, pp. 1–15. 25K. Lang and G.E. Lang, Collective Dynamics, New York, 1963, p. 65. 26J. Prasad, ‘The Psychology of Rumour’, British Journal of Psychology, vol. 26, no. 1, July 1935, pp. 11, 14. 27J. Prasad, ‘The Psychology of Rumour’, 1935, pp. 11, 15.

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that the verbal exchange which, as discussed earlier, constitutes the transitive function of rumour, comes to affirm its own identity as a type of popular discourse by virtue of its intimate association with economic exchange so essential to the life of the people. Lefebvre, whose keen eye missed nothing that was significant in inciting the jacqueries of the year of the Great French Revolution, emphasized the importance of this association. The tales taken back by the country labourers from the markets, especially after outbreaks of riot there, and told in their own villages, would often, he wrote, ‘spread revolt among their fellows and fear among the farmers’.28 In India, the bazaar was clearly identified in colonialist thinking with the origin and dissemination of rumour. As the intelligence records of the Raj so amply testify, official espionage kept its ears firmly glued to the bazaars throughout India and at all levels from the village upwards. For, much more than in the council chambers and lecture halls ringing with elite voices, it was there that the government could get ‘some idea of the standpoint from which they [the masses] regard the actions of their foreign rulers’.29 Sensitivity to ‘bazaar gup’ was, of course, at its most acute among the officials when the regime felt seriously threatened by enemies abroad, as in times of war, or by those within, as in times of popular revolt. No wonder therefore that this is mentioned so often and indeed, so obsessively in Kaye’s celebrated history of the rebellion of 1857, written from a point of view identified with imperialist interests. The talk of the market-place, he insists, was an authentic register of a great deal of the most useful intelligence, ‘especially if the news imported something disastrous to the British’.30 So, in his narrative, he draws liberally on material linking the rumours in circulation at the local bazaars with the spreading disaffection in sepoy ‘lines’ on the eve of each of the series of massive explosions—at Barrackpore, at Meerut, at Kanpur, and so on—which reverberate throughout that monumental work.31 We have, thus, in the life of that great rebellion as well as in its reconstitution in historiography, a clear 28Lefebvre, The

Great Fear, 1973, p. 27. Campbell Oman, Cults, Customs and Superstitions of India, Delhi, 1972, p. 218. 30J. Kaye and G.B. Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, New Edition, vol. 1, London, 1897, p. 361. 31The instances are far too numerous to cite, but see ibid., pp. 394–5, 415, 417–18 et passim. 29John

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acknowledgement of the correspondence between the public discourse of rumour and the popular act of insurrection, that is, of the collaterality of word and deed issuing from a common will of the people. To regard rumour as lying is not merely a measure of the distance between a typical site of collective discourse and an ideal seat of official truth—between the bazaar and the bungalow, so to say. But it is also the result of an ill-conceived assimilation of rumour to news. Kaye, in characterizing the former as ‘a certain description of news’, shares with other elitist writers the fairly common error of lumping these together and identifying one as merely a corrupted version of the other. In fact, however, no two kinds of verbal communication could be more different. They differ in two important respects.32 In the first place, the source of news is necessarily identifiable: its message is open to verification by being retraced to the point of its origin and the bearer is considered accountable for its accuracy in most cases. By contrast, rumour is necessarily anonymous and its origin unknown (even though on occasions, as we shall presently see, an active source may be assigned to it). Hence, its message cannot be authenticated by any reference to a source nor can its purveyor be asked to guarantee its accuracy or answer for its effects in any way. Second, the process of transmission implies, in the case of news, a necessary distinction between the communicator and his audience. No such distinction exists in the case of rumours which are passed on ‘from a teller to a hearer who himself becomes a teller’— an instance of absolute transitivity. In other words, the encoding and decoding of rumour are collapsed, unlike news, at each point of its relay. Quite clearly rumour belongs to a class apart from news. An autonomous type of popular discourse, it may perhaps be more properly regarded as one of those ‘intermediate forms’ which lie, according to Levi-Strauss, between the two poles of tale and myth.33 The characteristic they all have in common is ambiguity. This, it has been said, is essential to the making of a rumour;34 a generalization amply confirmed by 32There is a fairly elaborate discussion of the distinction between rumour and news in K. Lang and G.E. Lang, Collective Dynamics, New York, 1963, pp. 58–64. My understanding of the distinction agrees with theirs on the question of source; however, what they describe as a distinction of channel is perhaps more of a distinction of process. 33Claude Levi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology, vol. 2, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978, p. 130. 34Allport and Postman, The Psychology of Rumor, 1965, pp. 33–4 et passim; Schachter and Burdick, p. 296.

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the experience of some of the great insurrectionary movements in the colonial world. The story which spread, for instance, on the eve of the Maji Maji Rebellion about a wonder drug passed on by a snake-like spirit to a medicine man of Ngarambe was apparently ‘understood in a rather hazy way by the many people who made pilgrimage to the medicine man’.35 There was much the same kind of ‘cognitive unclarity’, too, about the ‘vague reports of some coming danger which no one could define’ as they circulated in northern India just before and during the Mutiny and the peasant revolts detonated by it. Kaye mentioned the ‘expressive’ vernacular saying, ‘It is in the air’, as an index of this elusive but inflammable haziness. ‘It often happened’, he writes, ‘that an uneasy feeling—an impression that something had happened, though they “could not discern the shape thereof ”—persuaded men’s minds.’36 Ambiguity such as this is, indeed, what makes rumour a mobile and explosive agent of insurgency, and it is a function precisely of those distinctive features which constitute its originality, namely, its anonymity and transitivity. Anonymity gives rumour its openness, transitivity its freedom. Being of unknown origin, rumour is not impaled on a given meaning for good in the same way as a discourse with a pedigree often is. ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.’ This perceptive comment, which we owe to Roland Barthes,37 is of course true of spoken utterance as well. It explains why rumour, by contrast, is not sealed off by any ‘final signified’ emanating from a primal source, but remains open as a receptacle of new inputs of meaning. This openness is indeed the objective basis of that spontaneity which is exploited so well and so naturally by speech. For, as Vygotsky has observed, ‘The speed of oral speech is unfavourable to a complicated process of formulation—it does not leave time for deliberation and choice. Dialogue implies immediate unpremeditated utterance. It consists of replies, repartees; it is a chain of reactions.’38 This could be said of rumour too. Indeed, it has all those qualities of speed, immediacy, disposition for unreflecting 35G.C.K. Gwassa and J. Iiffe (eds), Records of the Maji-Maji Rising, Part 1, Nairobi: East African Publishing, 1968, p. 12. 36Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. 1, 1897, pp. 355, 361. 37Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, Glasgow: Fontana, 1977, p. 147. 38Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Thought and Language, Cambridge, Mass., 1967, p. 144.

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response to stimulus, etc., developed more fully within it than perhaps in any other type of spontaneous discourse. And the ‘uncontrollable impulse’ which drives any of its interlocutors to pass it on to the next person in the relay, makes it a most perfect ‘chain of reactions’. Thanks to such transitivity and the social tension in which it operates, rumour functions as a free form, liable to a considerable degree of improvisation as it leaps from tongue to tongue. The aperture which it has built into it by virtue of anonymity permits its message to be contaminated by the subjectivity of each of its speakers and modified as often as any of them would want to embellish or amend it in the course of transmission. The outcome of all this is a plasticity that enables it to undergo transformations similar to, though perhaps not to the same extent as, those which occur, according to Propp, in fairy tales.39 The importance of these for the spread of mass disturbances can hardly be exaggerated. The additions, cuts, and twists introduced into a rumour in the course of its circulation transform its message (often just minimally) by such degrees as to adjust it to the variations within a given ideology or mode of popular expression and by doing so, broaden the range of its address. In other words, improvisation contributes directly to the efficacy of rumour for rebel mobilization.... Rumour has also been known to propagate the mentality which makes the rebel have recourse to the type of mediation characterized earlier as sacerdotal in the broadest sense of that term. It included the functions of the priest, saint, healer, preacher, prophet, etc., some, if not all, of which the insurgents would ascribe to their leaders at critical moments just before or in the actual course of an uprising. This again was symptomatic of a consciousness that proved far too feeble to cope with its own project and left it to be completed by the intervention of a superior wisdom. The African peoples’ struggles against foreign rule in many parts of that continent provide some outstanding examples of such mediation. Isaacman has documented the crucial importance of spirit mediums in the tradition of peasant resistance in Mozambique. The miracles, charms, and prophecies they produced were, in many 39Some aspects of the transformation of rumour are described in Allport and Postman: passim. But these are not as numerous or varied as those analysed in Vladimir Propp’s classic study, ‘Les Transformations des Contes Fantastiques’, published in T. Todorov (ed.), Theorie de la Litterature, Paris, 1965, pp. 234–62.

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cases, among the most powerful influences in inspiring and sustaining the peasants’ fight against the Portuguese. Again, in Tanzania, it was Kinji-kitile’s prophecies and his eponymous medicine which helped as much as anything else to convert anti-German feelings into the Maji Maji uprising.40 In colonial India, this particular type of mediation played a relatively less conspicuous part in mobilizing for rebellion but was by no means unknown. A certain amount of sanctity and prophetic vision was attributed by rumour to both the Santal brothers who led the hool. But it was in the career of Munda that the functions of the seer, saint, healer, and preacher were all clearly and comprehensively combined.41 From that moment on a mid-summer day in 1895 when, as a Munda song had it, ‘deep amidst [the] wild forest on [a] burnt and cleared upland Singbonga entered [his] heart’, the word went round about his being the repository of a revealed wisdom, a miracle man who could walk on water and cure by incantation, a preacher with the message of a new cult, a prophet who spoke of the coming deliverance of his people from the demon-queen Mandodori’s yoke. Saintly rather than miraculous was the function that mediators of this type had in the non-tribal risings of our period, which may perhaps have something to do with the importance of the sadhu and the fakir in the Hindu and Islamic traditions respectively. The fracas which occurred at Fyzabad in February 1857 between the military authority and a fakir, Maulvi Ahmadullah Shah, who said ‘that he prepared to wage a holy war with the help of Mussulmans Hindoos against the English’ and the peregrinations of a sadhu in the spring of that year between Meerut and Ambala—of the many emissaries who were moving about the court—were to be mentioned later on as possible influences on the break of the Mutiny and the civilian disturbances in regions.42 One of these holy men, Hasan Askari, ‘a Muhammadan of the Hereditary Priesthood’43, who lived near Delhi Gate, made a name 40See Gwassa and Iiffe; Allen F. Isaacman, The Tradition of Resistance in Mozambique, London: Heinemann, 1976. 41All information on this particular point is based on Singh, Dust-storm and Hanging Mist, 1966, Ch. II and Appendix H. 42FSUP: I, pp. 381–8, 397–9. 43Quoted from Kaye and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, London, 1897, vol. II, p. 28, 27n.

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for himself, in 1857, by prophesying that the Shah of Persia would conquer India and restore the Mughals to power. He even performed ‘propitiatory ceremonies to expedite the arrival of the Persians and the expulsion of the Christians’.44 A variation of this, according to which the would-be liberator was an Arab rather than a Persian, was ascribed to a saint called Shah Mamat-ullah. ‘After the fireworshippers and Christians shall have held sway over the whole of Hindustan for a hundred years and when injustice and oppression shall prevail in their Government’, he predicted, ‘an Arab prince shall be born, who will ride forth triumphantly to slay them.’45 However, it was not merely Islamic fantasy which forecast the end of the Raj in its hundredth year. Hindu speculations to the same effect were also in currency before and during the Mutiny. Harvey, Commissioner of Agra, referred to a ‘Hindoo prophecy limiting British rule to a centenary of years’.46 Again, the mediating functions of the partly deified leaders of the Santal and Munda rebellions were also known to have included predictions about imminent encounters with the Raj in chiliastic terms. ‘Fire will rain from Heaven’, declared Sido and Kanhu in their parwana; and Birsa caused a stampede into his village Chalkad and a run on the stocks of cloth in the local markets when he announced that on a specified day fire and brimstone would pour down from heaven and destroy all on earth except those who were with him at that time and remembered to put on new clothes for the occasion as advised by him.47 Prophecies of this kind, whether based on what saints, oracles, or quasi-divine leaders actually said or (as it often happened) fabricated by the collective imagination of the rebel community, were a concomitant of popular uprisings in many other pre-industrial societies too. On the eve of the Maji Maji rebellion in east Africa, they spread by the dozen, charged with the foreboding of doom and deliverance: a great flood to destroy everything; the sea to overflow and ‘devour all whites on the coast’; the earth to open up and ‘swallow all whites inland’ together with their native collaborators; a messiah 44Ibid. 45Kaye

and Malleson, History of the Indian Mutiny, vol. II, 1897, pp. 28, 27 n. see FSUP, vol. 5, p. 9. 47JP, 4 Oct. 1855 (no. 20); Singh, Dust-storm and Hanging Mist, 1966, p. 48. 46FSUP, vol. 1, p. 392. Also

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soon to appear in the guise of an ape, or a chicken, or a man riding a dog; or even the advent of a god—the god of the Saramo—believed to have set up an empire at Kisangire, ‘8 hours from Maneromango’, as an alternative to the German colonial regime and a refuge for all from the hated rule of foreigners.48 Europe, too, was no stranger to this genre of discourse. Keith Thomas has shown how England seethed with prophecies in periods of heightened social tension, both in the Middle Ages and early modern times. These were powerful enough to make the circulation of such utterances by medieval Welsh bards and the Lollards a penal offence under various governments. Later on, the Tudors were to be constantly on the look out for political prophecies of all kinds in order to suppress them by acts of parliament, Privy Council orders, instructions to Judicial Proceedings (JPs), etc., for ‘prophecies of one kind or another were employed in virtually every rebellion or popular rising which disturbed the Tudor state’. In fact, the association between prophecy and insurgency continued through the entire series of sixteenth century rebellions—the risings in the North and East Ridings in Yorkshire, those led by Robert Kett in Norfolk, and so on—until the Civil War. The authorities were never far from the truth in describing ‘vain prophecies’ and ‘seditious, false or untrue rumours’ as ‘the very foundation of all rebellion’.49 Rumour was, of course, an ideal instrument for making the sacerdotal function of the mediators known to the masses. For miracles, spiritual healing, revelations, etc., lent themselves more easily to being talked about than experienced in real life. Supernatural and occult phenomena, they lived only in words. As a part of the semiotic of insurgency, they were realized not in terms of the visuality which imagination endowed them with, but only verbally. However, in one particular instance, that is, prophecies, the sign of the sacerdotal function was not transubstantiated in any sense: the material which constituted 48Cyrillus Wehrmeister, ‘Reisebilder aus Deutsch-Ostafrika vor und wahrend des Aufstandes’, Misionsblatter von St. Ottilien, 1906, pp. 70–3, 88; Christian Schumann, ‘Die Schreckenstage auf der Missionsstation Jakobi’, Berliner Missionsberichte, 1906, pp. 62–76. Berliner Missionsberichte, ‘Der Ostafrikanische Aufstand’, Berliner Missionsberichte, 1905, pp. 406–13, 462–3. 49Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1973, pp. 470–2, 478–9, 505, and Ch. 13 passim.

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it did not alter by propagation. The mediator’s words predicting a golden age or an imminent end to the world, the coming of a messiah or an apocalypse passed from mouth to mouth exactly as they originated, that is, as verbal messages. Yet, if such utterances were subjected to no material change in the course of transmission, they were still modified in another way. Rumour separated them from all the other linguistic messages circulating in the rebel community, attributed to them an authoritativeness derived from the elevated status of their speakers, and bestowed on them the significance of truth—in short, textualized them.50 Distinguished thus from the mass of all other discourses—non-texts—current within that collective, these were represented as ‘displaying traits of an expressiveness that [was] complementary and meaningful in the cultural system’. According to Lotman and Pjatigorskij, this distinction between text and non-text corresponds to that between ‘closed’ and ‘open’ cultures. A text acquires meaning in the latter ‘because it has a definite sense that defines its functional value’ and results in an ‘absolutization of historical experience’. By contrast, in ‘closed’ cultures, a text tends to be ‘meaningful’, ‘sacred’ because it is a text and is characterized, accordingly, by ‘an absolutization of prophecy and hence of eschatology’. Indeed, the contrast becomes quite evident when with the transition of a culture from a ‘closed’ to an ‘open’ state the notion of cyclical time begins increasingly to yield to that of linear time and prophecy declines with the growth of historical criticism as it did in England by the end of the seventeenth century.51 By its ahistorical character, prophecy is thus ideally adapted to religious thinking in which man’s destiny appears not as what it is, that is, a product of his own activity but as determined for him by forces standing outside history, as a future beyond his own control but programmed in the prescience of saints and seers mediating for him. The circulation of prophetic rumours in the course of the events discussed was thus symptomatic of self-estrangement on the part of the typical peasant rebel of our period: it testified to that false consciousness which made him look upon his own acts of resistance as a manifestation of another’s will. 50The notion of text and non-text and its implications for the study of culture as used in this paragraph is based on Lotman & Pjatigorskij. 51Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 1973, pp. 507–14.

2 The Indian Ecumene An Indigenous Public Sphere* C.A. Bayly

S

o far this study has centred on the relationship between British intelligence establishments and indigenous informants, clerks, and runners. By contrast, this chapter is mainly concerned with communication and debate within the Indian population. India was a literacy-aware society, if not yet a society of mass literacy. The elites and populace both used written media in complex and creative ways to reinforce oral culture and debate.1 Here the effort is to describe the institutions, tone, and scope of the controversies about politics, religion, and aesthetics which existed across north India in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Colonial ideologues and leaders of Indian opinion sought to draw on this tradition of communication and argument when ‘public instruction’ and ‘useful knowledge’ became slogans after 1830. These Indian debates were much more than religious polemic; they were both popular and political. The issues in contention related to religion, but in its public manifestation. They also concerned the *Originally

published as ‘The Indian Ecumene: An Indigenous Public Sphere’, in C.A. Bayly’s Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 180–211. 1 Cited from R. Finnegan, Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication, Oxford: Blackwell, 1968.

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interpretations of history and the obligations of indigenous and colonial rulers. Many of the diplomats and munshis that have been encountered in Company service played a part in them. Rather than being collaborators with colonial rule, they regarded themselves as mediators between the people and the government, cajoling both towards correct conduct. These discourses on rights and duties informed a sphere of patriotic, public activity, which long predated the consciously nationalist public of the years after 1860, and was to determine its character to a considerable extent. The Indian nationalism of the later nineteenth century needs a longer perspective. There is a need to soften the sharp break between tradition and nationalist modernity, and between East and West, which still impoverishes the historical literature. Excellent studies have shown that Indians passionately debated religion before the mid-nineteenth century.2 Other histories reveal how Indians represented shifts in political power through festivals and cultural performances,3 but historians, following anthropologists, have often over-emphasized the importance of broad ideological principles such as segmentation and hierarchy; this has blighted intellectual historiography. Public opinion—the weight of reasoned debate—was not the preserve of modern or western polities. Ironically, as European observers occasionally admitted, the support of British military detachments tended to make Indian magnates less, not more, amenable to the opinion of their subjects. The Indian versions of degenerate Roman emperors—the ‘Caligulas and Commoduses’4, whom Sir Henry Elliot scornfully denounced—were products of British tutelage rather than avatars of the Indian past. Many publicists of the later nineteenth century were drawing on techniques of communication, debate, and persuasion, which owed as much to Indian norms as they did to Comte or Mazzini. Even after 1885, western public debates had not altogether subsumed indigenous discourse about rights, duties, and good kingship as some studies have argued.5 2Kenneth W. Jones (ed.), Religious Controversy in British India: Dialogues in South Asian Languages, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992. 3See the contributions in S. Freitag (ed.), ‘Aspects of the Public in Colonial South Asia’, South Asia, vol. 14, no. i, June, 1991. 4Friend of India, 26 April 1849, extracts from Biographical Index to the Historians of Mahomedan India. 5Cited from D. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of Public Culture in Surat city, 1852–1928, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

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Recent polemics against the ‘derivative’ character of modern Indian political ideology have not even begun to characterize indigenous political theory and practice. This chapter considers political theory, individuality, rationality, and social communication in the Indian context. These, of course, are all essential elements in the concept of critical politics which developed in the West and they all find a place in Jurgen Habermas’s influential discussion of the ‘public sphere’.6 All had analogues within the north Indian ecumene. I use the word ecumene to describe the form of cultural and political debate which was typical of north India before the emergence of the newspaper and public association, yet persisted in conjunction with the press and new forms of publicity into the age of nationalism. For classical writers, ecumene conveyed the sense of the inhabited or civilized world. In Christian times, it came to mean a universal, godly civilization embodied in a community of affection and constantly renovated through a discourse of worship, rights, and obligations. Thus, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘the head of the Christian family or oikoumene was the Emperor in Constantinople’. Similar critical ecumenes existed in most complex civilizations of the era before print, as an ideal of the ‘godly city’ and as a set of actual political processes. Their relationships to the later imagined communities of print and nationhood need to be examined with greater care.7 6Cited from J. Habermas (trans. T. Burger), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991; cf. A.L. Kroeber, ‘The ancient Oikoumene as a historical culture aggregate’, The Nature of Culture. Chicago, 1952, pp. 379–95. For Byzantium, the term ecumene denoted an aesthetic, religious, and political community. It expanded the ideal of oikos (household) into koine (commonalty) (cf. ibid., pp. 4–5). While retaining some sense of patrimonial power derived from the emperor and patriarch, it came to mean ‘our common home’. Power here was ‘representationally public’ (ibid., p. 13), but this does not exhaust the meaning of public, because there was also public, political debate between clerics, philosophers, and administrators. This was ‘critical’ and ‘reasoned’ in Habermas’s sense (ibid., p. 24), though within broad cosmological assumptions (this is also true of the ‘modern’ West). In some ways, the Indo-Islamic world had a clearer sense of ‘public’. The ulama and other learned acted as public ‘jurisconsults’ and ‘censors’, giving a sense of public beyond the medieval Christian priesthood which was more ‘corporate’ and introverted in character. In India, however, no single word encapsulated this notion of ecumene; instead, it is a composite of communities and groupings of male adults and their dependents: shura or umma, the body of ‘believers’; dar, ‘homeland’ (as in dar-ul Islam); badshahi (the common home of the emperor’s subjects); or sarkar which implies ‘public authority’ (Kroeber 1952, pp. 18–20), but comes to mean ‘commonweal’, implying an entity independent of the incumbent dynasty. 7B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, revised edition, London and New York: Verso, 1991.

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The ecumene of Hindustani-writing literati, Indo-Islamic notables, and officers of state (which included many Hindus) fought its battles with a well-tested arsenal of handwritten media. The guardians of the ecumene represented the views of bazaar people and artisans, when urban communities came under pressure. Their connections spread across religious, sectarian and caste boundaries, though they never dissolved them. A common background in the Indo-Persian and, to a lesser extent, Hindu classics enlightened them. The theme of highminded friendship animated the poets, scholars, and officials who conversed along these networks and set the tone for them. Though suffused with pride of country, the ecumene remained cosmopolitan, receiving information and ideas from central and west Asia, as well as from within a dimly denned ‘Hindustan’.8 In this sense, it was closer in spirit to the groupings of philosophers, urban notables, and officials in the world of late antiquity—the Christian–Greek ecumene—than it was to Habermas’s modern public. His public sphere is more sharply separated from the world of intimate social relations; people’s judgement is represented through marketed print in an almost mechanical way. The Indian ecumene, however, does bear comparison to the modern European public in the sense that its leaders were able to mount a critical surveillance of government and society. How was this possible in a world supposedly encompassed by religious principles and despotic kingship?

IDEOLOGIES AND SOCIAL CRITIQUE In political theory, the western public emerged from ideological debates which had contested and confirmed authority since the beginnings of Christendom. The dual inheritance of Roman law and feudal liberties blunted the authority of both the king and the Pope. The Reformation encouraged personal interpretation of scripture in accordance with conscience. Superficially, ‘Islam’ and ‘Hinduism’ appear to weave seamless webs of authority, leaving no ideological space for the emergence of any species of critical public. Islamic law was both canon and secular law, pre-empting the kind of contestation which developed 8F. Robinson, ‘Scholarship and Mysticism in early 18th century Awadh’, in A.L. Dallapiccola and S.Z. Lallemant (eds), Islam and Indian Regions. Stuttgart, 1994, pp. 377–98.

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inside Christendom. The Hindu order, at least as it is interpreted by Louis Dumont, subsumed the political order.9 The individual will was subjected to the collectivity through the institution of caste, and the pragmatics of purity and pollution. Yet, even in theory, still more in practice, authority within these Indian conceptual systems was actually quite friable and ambiguous. In Muslim thought, the authority of the sultan was most uncertain and, in the Twelver Shia tradition, even verged on the illegitimate.10 The sultan’s power was not only limited by Islamic law and the interpretation of the learned but also by the collective authority of the tribe and the general assembly of believers. Sayyids and Sheikhs, who in India were supposedly immigrants from the Prophet’s Arabia, claimed special status, whether they were learned in scripture or not.11 Sufi mysticism, which emphasized esoteric religious knowledge, also acted to limit the authority of rulers and clerics. Many Sufis distanced themselves from political power. Their tomb–shrines, headquarters of spiritual provinces, became alternative sources of social power.12 They took on the title of shah or king, and secular kings tried to absorb their charisma. Though little is made of this in studies of the western public, the notion of individual property right (as an electoral qualification, for instance) lies close to the idea of the public. In India, hereditable proprietary right (watan, zamindari, milkiyat) was not subject to appropriation by the state as Enlightenment thinkers averred. This error was a consequence of the European obsession with ‘Oriental Despotism’, which confused the rights of office-holders with the rights of patrimony.13 Religious donations also functioned as a realm of liberties outside the state’s purview, in a manner not unlike ‘mortmain’ 9L. Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and its Implications, London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1970. 10S.A. Arjomand, The Shadow of God and the Hidden Imam, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. 11For example, Shaikhs and Sayyids said the fateha (Muslim confession of faith) to the dying Charles Masson, Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan and the Punjab, London, 1842, p. 240; G. Ansari, Muslim Caste in Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow, 1960, pp. 38–9. 12R.M. Eaton, Sufis of Bijapur 1300–1700: Social Roles in Medieval India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. 13B.R. Grover, ‘Land Rights in Mughal India’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, vol. 1, 1963, pp. 1–23.

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in Christendom. It is within the religious corporation that some latterday Weberians see the beginnings of both transcendent bureaucracy and civil society in Europe.14 India does not seem to be an exception here. Most important, the notion of government (sarkar) came to hold a virtue beyond the will of the king of the moment, so becoming an equivalent to European ‘public authority’. 15 This Indo-Muslim conception of government embodied sophisticated concepts of just and unjust rule, zulum (oppression), which could be introduced into popular debate on the merits of rulers through poetic satire, handbills, speeches, and by ironic visual displays during popular festivals. Even the authority of Islamic law (Shariat) was ambiguous enough to leave room for personal judgement. The ‘doors of interpretation’ (idjtihad) of the Koran and sayings of the Prophet were thrust ajar on many occasions in Islamic history. As more rationalistic and legalistic schools of jurisconsults emerged, the independent judgement of the massed doctors of law came to take precedence over both traditional interpretations and charismatic authority. The monolithic appearance of Islamic law was also limited by the concept of custom (dastur). This could be extended to the customary law of Muslim tribes, the kanun or royal law, or even the customs of the infidel subjects.16 In India, the local law officers adjudicated cases according to Islamic precepts, but Hindus were not bound to submit to their jurisdiction. As Ernest Gellner has shown, the interaction of tribal custom and mystical, embodied Islam (Sufism) created both a theoretical and a historical dialectic, which underlay political change in Muslim societies.17 The theory of the Hindu dharmic order was fragile to a similar degree. The purity of the Brahmin and hence, his authority was compromised by his position in society. He could withdraw and preserve his purity, like the Sannyasi or renouncer,18 or he could participate in society and its rituals, and risk pollution. Both in theory and in practice, therefore, the Brahmin became a tricky, dangerous commodity, a thorn 14Randall Collins, Weberian Sociological Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1986. 15Habermas, Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1991, pp. 18–21. Encyclopaedia of Islam, new edition, IV, pp. 556–62. 17Ernest Gellner, Muslim Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 18J.C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays on Indian Ritual, Kingship and Society, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. 16‘Kanun’, in

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in the flesh of both the king and the layman. The non-Brahminism of the late nineteenth century public possessed a deep historical lineage in the popular critique of Brahmin pretensions in earlier centuries.19 The authority of the king was also compromised. Killing made him unclean; yet, he could only uphold righteousness with the sword. Many verses written in interpretation of the classic political theories are implicit warnings to the king not to transgress the very limited bounds of his authority.20 The king’s authority, as Heesterman argues, was a conundrum; it was also friable. These structural ambiguities of the key figures in the Indian hierarchy were compounded by two more general concepts which compromised the coherence of authority in general. First, there was the notion of Apadharma, or those conditions under which the ideal, righteous dharmic order ceases to function. To a greater or lesser extent, this idea was used to explain the world as it really existed in the present Age of Iron.21 Apadharma could be introduced to legitimate violations of caste rules, the suspension of religious ceremonies, the abandonment of hereditary occupation, or the commission of unrighteous deeds by kings and Brahmins. Second, influential teachers preached personal devotion to God (bhakti) and proclaimed the irrelevance of all worldly hierarchies.22 Though they were not ‘revolutionary’ in a modern sense, bhakti movements encouraged people to question social and political authority, and in many cases, they prescribed rational rules for social life.23 Since all power in India was ideologically compromised, the learned and respectable ‘middling sort’ took it upon themselves to maintain a constant, critical vigilance over the doings of state and society. 19E.F. Irschick, Tamil Revivalism in the 1930s, Madras: New Century Book House, 1986,

pp. 13–20; R. O’Hanlon, Caste, Conflict and Ideology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 16–35. 20Professor Heesterman remarked that slokas in commentaries on shastric texts on kingship often limited the role of kings even more closely than the rules of the Arthashastra. Personal communication, 1992. 21P.V. Kane, History of Dharmasastra, vol. II, no. i, Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1974, pp. 118ff. 22Jayant K. Lele, Tradition and Modernisation in Bhakti Movements, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1981. 23A sect such as the Sadhs outlawed the use of astrology, and the concept of auspicious and inauspicious times. Their ‘creed’ was set out in a number oihukm or adhikar (rules or orders), see, LH, I, pp. 342ff.; W. Allison, The Sadhs, Calcutta: YMCA Publishing House, 1934.

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NORMS AND CONTEXTS OF DEBATE Though authority and sanctity weighed heavily in these Indian debates, they might still reflect ‘the critical judgement of a public making use of its reason’.24 Some Europeans saw India as a ‘dream society’. Others, however, noticed the existence of rational sciences and modes of debate within Indian traditions.25 For Hindus, the legends of the Puranas were confronted with the mathematical precision of the Siddhantic star charts. The almanacs of civil and religious events (panchangs), which were produced by astronomer–brahmins, formed a widespread vehicle for precise, popular knowledge. The existence of the Nyaya system of logic and the formal debate with its emphasis on proof and true testimony refutes the prejudice that magic and trial by ordeal permeated all ‘Hindu’ systems of adjudication.26 Several scholars have also noted the steady rise of the rational sciences of jurisprudence, medicine, and mathematics among the international Indo-Muslim intelligentsia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.27 Finally, what Peter Burke has called ‘literal-mindedness’, even seems to permeate the world of theology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when matter-of-fact, but authoritative Persian and Urdu began to oust the prolix and flowery writing of earlier periods in works such as Muhammad Ismail’s key text for the ‘Wahhabi’ reformers, the ‘Refuge of the Faith’ (Taqwiyat al-Iman).28 What was the context for these debates on politics and society? Assemblies and places of debate (sabhas, kathas, panchayats, and samajs) represented more than the blind sense of collectivities denominated as tribes, castes, or religious sects.29 Heesterman has argued that the 24Habermas, Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1991, p. 24. A History of Indian Literature, ed. J. Gonda, (Wiesbaden 1977, vol. VI, 2; cf. L. Wilkinson, ‘The Use of the Siddhantas in Native Education’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, vol. 3, 1834, pp. 504–19. 26The shastrartha form continued to be used in Brahminical debates at the major centres in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Indian commentators stressed the experiential, empirical, and rational face of Indian knowledge; see Babu R. Mukherjyea, ‘Hindu Philosophy’, Bethune Society, pp. 227–58. 27Francis Robinson, ‘Ottomans-Safavids-Mughals: Shared Knowledge and Connective Systems’, Journal of Islamic Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 151–84. 28C. Troll, ‘A Note on an Early Topographical Work of Sayyid Ahmad Khan: Asar-al Sanadid’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1972, p. 143. 29R. Inden, Imagining India, Oxford, 1991, passim. 25B. Matilal, Nyaya-Vaisesika,

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term sabha (association), itself, originally indicated a meeting in which different qualities of people and opinions were tested, rather than the scene of a pronunciamento by caste elders.30 A similar point has been made forcefully by Mattison Mines in his recent critique of Dumont.31 Mines argues that the politics of south India, from the early times, should be understood in terms of the interplay of the ‘public reputations’ of ‘big men’ among peasants and commercial people, in competition with each other and sometimes, in conflict with the authorities. Even the fabled temple-building of the south represents, in Mines’s analysis, not the agency of castes and corporations, but the individual aspirations of patrons expressed through institutions. Thus, the words for association—samaj and sabha—which become part of the westernstyle debate of the later nineteenth century, were not simply communities. Such words could be used to designate collectivities which spilled over the boundaries of social and religious groupings and represented temporary collections of individuals engaged in debate or judgement.... In the cities of north India, the office-holders, jurists, Sufi elders, and community counsellors were the key people who represented the ‘opinion of the locality’ to the authorities. They also acted as a critical audience for the rulers’ policies. Historically, the learned, the local office-holders, and the ‘honourable’ (ashraf) had acted as a check on the ephemeral ruling elites of the Muslim world. The learned and office-holders were drawn from the same families as the urban property holders and merchants. Their functions were not limited to matters of religion until the colonial powers restricted them to this role. They were doctors, healers of the mind, poets and writers, astronomers, and advisors of citizens. These officers were Islamic in form but non-Muslim people referred to them for adjudication and leadership, and they continued to nourish even in regions where Mughal rule had given way to Hindu or Sikh dynasties in the eighteenth century. Without doubt, the question of the representation of Hindus within the ecumene is a complex one. 30Cf.

S. Vidyabhusana, A History of Indian Logic, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1971, pp. 22, 27, 263–4, 378–9; for later variations on sabha, see Ram Raz on ‘Trial by Jury’, JRAS, 3, 1836, pp. 252–7. 31Mattison Mines, ‘Individuality and Achievement in South Asian Social History’, MAS, vol. 26, no. I, 1992, pp. 129–56.

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But, the model of two opposed ‘religious communities’ is certainly wrong. Though the religious establishments of the two major religions continued to keep their distance from one another, well-tried procedures of arbitration, joint representation, and mutual consultation between Hindus and Muslims had evolved over a long period. Imbalances and asymmetries there were, but the same can be said of the participation of Catholics, Protestants, and Jews in the emerging western European public sphere....

COMMUNICATIONS AND POLITICAL DEBATE Historians agree that in the West the public sphere was a domain of communication, given form by printed media and the market.32 Evidently, this key component was lacking from the north Indian scene before the introduction of lithography in the 1830s and 1840s, but the reasons for this remain obscure. Politics may have played a part; several Indian rulers at the turn of the nineteenth century continued to discourage the use of the printing press because it threatened their authority.33 Rather than being testimony to passivity and the absence of political debate, however, the evidence suggests exactly the opposite conclusion, that is, royal authority was already too fragile to support this further dissemination of ridicule and lese majeste. This in turn points to a wider reason for the late start of printing. Indians had created a highly effective information order in which strategically placed written media reinforced a powerful culture of oral communication; printing in this sense was not needed until society itself began to change more radically under colonial rule. In the ecumene, written media and oral communication complemented each other. Francis Robinson has made a strong case for the dominance of oral exposition and importance of the physical presence of the reputed teacher within the pre-print culture of Islamic north India.34 Oral exposition, presence, 32Habermas, Structural

Transformation of the Public Sphere, 1991, pp. 57ff. example, the case, in 1849, where the King of Awadh destroyed the Lucknow presses because they had displeased him—A. Sprenger, A Catalogue of the Arabic, Persian and Hindustani Manuscripts in the Libraries of the King of Oudh, Calcutta, 1854, p. vi; or an equivalent case in Punjab, Emmet Davis, The Press and Politics in British West Punjab, 1836– 47, Delhi, 1983, p. 184. 34F. Robinson, ‘Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 229–51. 33For

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and memory were no doubt critical in philosophical debate, and among Hindus and Jains, no less than among Muslims. They were also important in poetic and aesthetic discussion. Ghalib, for instance, is said to have rarely purchased a manuscript or book, as he committed to memory anything that he needed. 35 Written media were, nevertheless, an essential part of north Indian critical debate, and could create eddies and flurries of opinion distant from the immediate presence of their authors. Ghalib’s proficiency as a letter-writer was as striking as his memory. While the dismal picture conveyed by Europeans, and by Indian reformers, was of a society where the communication of knowledge was stunted by hierarchy, there is much evidence to the contrary. We have already noted the speed with which information from the northwest or from Persia was conveyed to Benares. The combination of harkara information, newsletters, and public recitations in bazaars or near the platform of the kotwal’s station spread news very quickly across country. During the Nepal and Burma wars, during the Afghan and Sikh campaigns of 1838–52, and during the Multan revolt of 1848, anti-British information and rumour was determinedly spread by these means.36 At the height of the Burma War, Malcolm warned that ‘there was a dangerous species of secret war against our authority carried on by numerous tho’ unseen hands—the spirit of which is kept up by letters, by exaggerated reports, by pretended prophecies, etc.’37 Though, as late as 1836, Auckland discounted the influence of the indigenous press itself, he believed that news was still widely disseminated by newswriters and agents of powerful people in whose newsletters ‘anything may be inserted...without scruple’. The north Indian case indicates that critical debate within a broad political class could be spread through personal and institutional letter writing, through placarding, and public congregation. In Rajasthan and adjoining areas, the bardic tradition and the written stories to which it gave rise also proved capable of carrying subversive political 35Ralph Russell and Khurshidul Islam, Three Mughal Poets. Mir, Sauda, Mir Hasan, London, 1969. 36Englishman, 12 January 1835; material on Burma, etc.; Banaras 1852, Reade, Contributions, fn., pp. 67–8. 37Marginal note to Auckland’s minute on the press, 8 August 1836, Auckland Papers, Add. Mss. 37, 709, f. 91b, British Library.

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messages. James Tod noted the prevalence of ‘licence’ and satire, the dissemination of ‘truths unpalatable’, and ‘the absence of all mystery and reserve with regard to public affairs’38 in the Rajput principalities. All this gives a picture of a lively social and political debate, whose existence was reluctantly acknowledged when colonial officials made disparaging references to ‘bazaar rumour’. ...In contemporary west Asia, political debate was carried on in smoking dens and coffee shops.39 The same was true in India, though here druggists’ stalls, selling betel nut, tobacco, or medicaments,40 and sweetshops41 served as more important forums of gossip and news. In west Asia, again, more resolute protests were made by seizing control of that pre-eminently public place, the mosque, at a time just before the muezzin’s call to prayer and making statements critical of the authorities from the minaret. The regularity of this procedure suggests that it was sanctioned by the community, and even reluctantly tolerated by rulers. In India, too, political demonstrations were made at or near mosques. The shrines of saints, or of deceased rulers popularly revered as just men, were also the venue of demonstrations—an indication of the relative importance, for the subcontinent, of tomb worship and Sufism in both elite and popular life. In Lucknow, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for example, ‘oppressions’ by the police chief of the city brought together thousands in the garden of the tomb of the late ruler, Shuja-ud Daulah. The crowd called out, ‘andhera! andhera, “darkness!, darkness!”, that is “tyranny!”’42 In other incidents, people affixed handbills to points on or near the Friday mosque or royal temple. We have already noticed the use of placards during the celebrated affair of the British resident, James Achilles Kirkpatrick and the Hyderabad lady.43... 38J. Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajast’han, or the Central and Western Rajpoot States of India, London: Smith, Elder and co., 1829–32, repr. 1950, Introduction, p. 16; cf. V.N. Rao, D. Shulman and S. Subrahmanyam, Symbols of Substance: Court and State in Nayaka Period Tamilnadu, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992, pp. 1–22 and passim. LH, I, 10. 39Note by Professor Halil Inalcik, in author’s possession. 40An observation of Professor Ravinder Kumar. 41‘Bankas and swindlers’, Delhi Gazette, 18 December 1839. 42Faiz Baksh, Memoirs, II, pp. 285–7. 43Report of an investigation instigated by direction of H.E. the Most Noble Governor General, 7 November 1801, Home Miscellaneous Series, Oriental and India Collections, British Library.

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As has been seen, the newsletters written from the courts of rulers, across the country, were copied by hand in relatively limited numbers. As in the case of later printed newspapers—which were read to large groups of people and handed around in the bazaar for several days— the information they purveyed seems to have become public property very quickly. Pages of newspapers were lent by one family to another.44 Whole copies of newspapers were read out to crowds in the streets in the evening.45 Professional newswriters moved between the world of the written newsletter and the printed newspaper. Some of these writers also kept lists of subscribers to whose houses they would repair daily in order to read the news from their own manuscript compilations.46 A combination of these instruments could create a formidable blast of publicity, even before the rise of the press. When, in the early 1850s, the King of Delhi was maliciously reported to have become a Shia, a whole arsenal of written, lithographed, and memorized refutations cannoned back. Ghalib, then poet laureate, was himself asked to write an ode in refutation.47 The ecumene was led by respectable men, who could draw limits to the actions of government and also, seek to impose their standards of belief and practice on the populace. Meanwhile, dense networks of social communication could bring butchers, flower-sellers, bazaar merchants, and artisans into political debates and demonstrations. This has been thoroughly demonstrated by the many studies of the taxation riots and religious disputes of the early nineteenth century.48 These events, however, are evidence of a continuing ecumenical critique; they should not be seen as sudden upsurges of resistance from tyrannized and voiceless subalterns.... Such standard patterns of political representation and debate embraced Hindus as well as Muslims. Several historians have given us analyses of the political movement in Benares, in 1810, against the new British system of house taxation, emphasizing its popular 44Rahbar, Ghalib, pp. 94, 205. 45Friend

of India, 4 April 1850. of Chuni Lal, newswriter ‘for the public’, ‘Trial of the King of Delhi’, Parliamentary Papers, 1859, 1st session, pp. xviii, 84. 47Rahbar, Ghalib, p. xxxiii. 48See, K.H. Prior, ‘The British administration of Hinduism in north India, 1780–1900’, Unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1990. 46Evidence

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character.49 From our perspective, what is striking is that a vigorous and effective public opinion could express itself in the public arena, across the boundaries of caste and religion. Here, the ecumene spoke in a Hindu idiom, though Muslims were also active. The protesters presented petitions against the assessment as discrete communities. One particular market–gardener caste leadership sent a ‘letter of righteousness’ (dharmapatra) to mobilize its rural supporters, in what was probably an adaptation of the normal method of raising temple funds or seeking adjudication in cases of infringements of caste rules.50 The action of the Benares citizens was, however, carefully coordinated between groups. All the demonstrators took a common oath of resistance and congregated in a single spot. Petitions argued the case against taxation not only in terms of the sanctity of Benares but also the past and present usage of ‘the country of Hindoostan, preferable to the kingdom of the seven climes’, acknowledging a sense, both, of charismatic place and of wider patria.51 Ultimately, too, they accepted the good offices of the Maharaja of Benares as an intermediary with the British....

THE LIMITS OF THE ECUMENE The north Indian critical ecumene, as has been described, spilled over the bounds of caste, community, and sect; it encompassed a dialogue between elite and popular political culture. It stands as a reminder that Indian minds and Indian social life cannot be reduced to the behaviourist simplicities of hierarchy and segmentation. It takes us beyond the limited and monolithic concept of ‘resistance’ to the realm of political critique and intellectual history. Yet, this is not to say that the ecumene was a seamless web. On the contrary, there were significant breaks and discontinuities in it. For example, while Hindu noblemen, poets, and specialists took part in the wider debate and wrote in its 49R. Heitler, ‘Hartal’, p. 251; cf. Actg Magt. to Govt, 28 January 1811, Bengal Crim. Judl, 8 February 1811, 5, 130/28, OIOC. ibid., 27. 50Actg Magt. to Govt, 8 Jan 1811, Bengal Criminal Judl Procs., 8 February 1811, 1, 130/ 28, OIOC. 51Petition of Mohulla Seedhesree, Bengal Criminal Judl Procs., 5 January 1811, 25, 130/ 27, OIOC.

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languages, Persian and Urdu, the Brahmin establishments stood relatively aloof.52 Ghalib could say that ‘Benares was the Mecca of India’, but it is difficult to imagine him participating in the pandits’ ritual debates (shastrarthas) in the same way that Khattri Hindus participated in the Persian poetry circles. Even Ghalib had relatively few Hindu literary correspondents. In the case of one of the most prominent, Munshi Hargopal Tafta, it seems that the poet hoped to touch him for money;53 elsewhere, he says he employed ‘bunya-language’ (shopkeeper talk) with a leading Delhi banker.54 As a token of the assimilative power of public doctrinal debate, some learned Hindus became Muslims, but the process did not take place in reverse, even though poor and unlettered Muslims sometimes venerated Hindu deities.55 Muslim scholars showed interest in the Hindu classics and literature, but learned Hindus do not seem to have analysed and critiqued the Islamic corpus until Dayananda Saraswati set out to ridicule it. Khairuddin Khan’s debate with the Benares pandits in the 1770s occurred precisely because he had heard that a rich Bengali ‘held no communication whatever with Mussulmans, and avoided even the shadow of a Mahomedan’.56 Ritual pollution created hairline fractures in crosscommunity debate. Khairuddin tried to reconcile the genealogy of Adam with the story of the Pandavas of the Hindu epics, and some of the Brahmins went along with this. Even so, he asked in irritation, ‘what do you know of the Mahomedan religion?’57 An overlapping debate did not mean equal participation. In fact, when a critical public sphere using the newspaper finally emerged, these inequalities of participation were reinforced by the desire of editors to grasp and hold abstract constituencies of readers’ opinions, now more distant from the face-to-face, or pen-to-pen, relations of the ecumene. Amongst the less privileged, too, social and even economic discourse was still, to some extent, constricted within what was called 52‘Mahommedan

Festivals in India’, ibid., p. 16, 1835, 52.

53Rahbar, Ghalib, p. 380, n.l. 54Ibid., Ghalib

to Nawab Husain Mirza, 29 October 1859, p. 207. de Tassy, Histoire de la Litterature Hindouie et Hindoustanie, 1, pp. 63–4. 56Khairuddin, Balvantnamah, p. 87. 57Ibid., p. 88. The Bengali eventually shook Khairuddin’s hand and said, ‘You are a pandit of my religion’, but the author clearly took it as the victory of Muhammadan learning! 55J.H. Garcin

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the ‘opinion of the caste’, even if, as in the Peshwa’s territories, the authorities intervened to adjudicate and advise.58 Among the upper castes, extra-caste opinion and debate appears to have influenced these insider debates. So, for instance, social transgressions by an Agarwal banker might have been dealt with by the caste assembly, but it had severe repercussions within the wider multi-caste arena of the market and its rumours, since social and commercial credit were closely bound up. But, nobody worried much about what went on amongst the leather workers or liquor distillers. Only bhakti devotion bridged these divides of status, and the sects started becoming increasingly respectable and market-centred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.59 The ecumene had always worked unevenly beneath the network of the most enlightened intelligentsia. In this, India was not qualitatively different from other societies with emergent public spheres.60...

58G.C. Vad (ed.), Selections from the Satara Rajas’ and the Peshwas’ Diaries, Bombay, 1907–11, makes it clear that the rulers’ courts acted a role as a kind of ‘public tribunal’ for intra-caste disputes. 59D. Gold, ‘What the merchant-guru sold; social and literary types in Hindi devotional verse’, Journal of the American Oriental Society, vol. 112, no. 1, 1992, pp. 22–36. 60As is made clear by C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

3 The Politics of Popular Images From Cow Protection to M.K. Gandhi, 1890–1950* Christopher Pinney

COW PROTECTION

I

n the later phases of the Cow Protection agitation, locally-produced images were mobilized through collective action in a manner that prefigured the use of the ubiquitous Hindu chauvinist images of the 1980s and 1990s. The historical record is unusually rich in the detail it provides of the consumption of visual images...The cow, an enormously potent and sacred sign, was to emerge as a symbol of the nation, and visual symbols were to play a vital role in the organization as well as the ideology of the Cow Protection movement. Cow Protection involved a struggle not only over a ‘sacred symbol’ but also, locally, over ‘sacred spaces’, and the specificity of local struggles also forged new senses of community: ‘the common experience of being incorporated in a “process of sanctification” defined group solidarity’.1... In much of the visual imagery the cow encompassed all the gods, but was also depicted as succouring all the diversity of India’s *Originally published as ‘The Politics of Popular Images: From Cow Protection to M.K. Gandhi, 1890–1950’, in Christopher Pinney’s Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, London: Reaktion Books, 2004, pp. 105–44. 1Anand A. Yang, ‘Sacred Symbol and Sacred Space in Rural India: Community Mobilization in the ‘Anti-Cow Killing’ Riot of 1893’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, vol. XXII, no. 4, 1980, p. 582.

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communities. In practice, however, and in the use made of these images, a more discriminatory message was stressed in which the cow came to represent a Hindu identity and nationality that required protection from non-Hindus...

WORKING WITH THE 1910 PRESS ACT The colonial state’s response to the ‘increasing activity of controversy’ was the 1910 Press Act, which would become the chief means of controlling the ‘native press’, and the huge upsurge of topical broadsheets and visual images.2 The colonial state’s paranoia about the representational genii it had unleashed was expressed not only through the proscription of complete images but also in a prohibition of individual elements of images, in an attempt to mitigate their power. However, although the colonial state could quite easily prohibit, it could not interdict, since it could not unsay what it had itself helped to create and authorize. Proscription, thus, operated within a double-bind in which every denial was simultaneously a reinscription of representational potency: to proscribe was also to specify a powerful abject seemingly more powerful in its absence....

NATIONAL ALLEGORY AND THE RISE OF NATIONAL FIGURE ...if it is through the historian one learns of national destiny, the paradigmatic figure of the national community is the artist.3

In early Calcutta, from lithography (for instance, depictions of Nala– Damayanti), and in the disputed Ravi Varma Press, cow protection images described earlier, it is clear that the nation was invoked primarily through allegory. This was an allegory open to ‘linguistic’ decoding and was highly susceptible to colonial control. Within a few decades, however, it was superseded by what we might term ‘figure’ or the affective. In part, this history was determined by a dialectical constraint: figural 2See Gerald N. Barrier, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India 1907–1947, Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1974, p. 46; and Graham Shaw and Mary Lloyd (eds), Publications Proscribed by the Government of India: A Catalogue of the Collections in the India Office Library and Record and the Department of Oriental Manuscripts and Printed Books, London: British Library Reference Division, 1985, p. viii. 3John Hutchinson, ‘Cultural Nationalism and Moral Regeneration’, in John Hutchinson and A.D. Smith (eds), Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 123.

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affective intensities required the semiotic infrastructure of allegory and other political significations, which, of necessity, had recourse to substitution. Once allegory has done its laborious work, figure could transform these associations into immediate identifications. Allegory offers the theoretical possibility of closure. ‘Meanings’ can be specified and secured: producers and consumers can agree (or rather attempt to agree) that under the prevailing code a particular sign stands in for another sign. This is the basic mechanism of allegory, which the Oxford English Dictionary explains as the ‘description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance’. ...Allegory’s referentiality was certainly presumed by the colonial state, and its method of surveillance was (to use Dan Sperber’s term) ‘crypotological’4, that is, predicated on the assumption that signs could be decoded for their ‘true’ meanings. Thus, Kunja Behari Gangopadhyaya’s early twentieth century Bengali drama, Matri Puja, was ‘a seditious allegory on the present political situation of the country’, despite being ‘ostensibly founded on a well-known incident of Hindu mythology’. 5 But, the colonial state was also ethnographically concerned with audiences’ reception of signs, seeking confirmation in the ability of the wider audience to decode the ‘message’: ‘It will be clear from the newspaper criticisms printed at the end of the book that it has been generally understood as referring “to many present day political and social ideas”’.6 Many Home Political Department proscription orders describe pictures under a crypotological rubric,7 assuming that the image can be disassembled and its signs checked off against their presumed referents. Alongside court judgements on the ‘meanings’ of contentious images, there are a number of remarkable adjudications on seditious poems and plays in which colonial judges turn their hands to practical 4Dan Sperber, On Symbolism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974, where he

uses the term in relation to anthropologists’ (misguided) attempts to analyse the meanings of symbolic and ritual action. 5National Archives of India. Home Pol. 1909, 110–117A, p. 7 6Ibid., p. 8. 7For example, No. h661-2-S.B., 17 February 1931, ordered to be forfeited every copy, wherever found, of a picture entitled, ‘Struggle for Swarajya’, depicting: soldiers with a canon and rifles, representing the bureaucracy; a ditch in which several leaders are immersed, representing jail; a portion of the ditch in which several people are immersed, representing bloodshed; policemen beating and arresting congressmen who are shown as preaching the boycott of liquor and foreign cloth...

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criticism, minutely analysing the possible intentions and effects of words and phrases.... My use of ‘figure’ here loosely follows the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard’s use of it to connote a domain where ‘meaning is not produced and communicated, but intensities are felt’.8 Lyotard invoked ‘figure’ as the opposite of ‘discourse’, a domain of the knowable characterized by ‘linguistic–philosophical closure’. My own usage of ‘figure’ differs from Lyotard, however, in not assuming the same ontological independence that he grants it. I use it to invoke, in a deliberately flexible manner, the densely compressed performative and the affectively and libidinally charged domain that escapes conventional signification.

GANDHI VERSUS BHAGAT SINGH I opened this book9 questioning whether there might be a ‘visual’ history, that is, a history constituted by the visual in which the visual was something other than simply a reflection of something already established ‘by other means’, to recall Carlo Ginzburg’s phrase. This question, with its implicit possibility of alternative historiographies, acquires its greatest saliency when thinking about the histories of two Indian freedom fighters, Gandhi and Bhagat Singh. M.K. Gandhi is, of course, an internationally recognized name, one of the few figures to have made it into the sanctum of global saintliness. Bhagat Singh is, on the other hand, probably an obscure name to many readers of this account. If indeed he is so, it could not be said that this necessarily reflects my readers’ ignorance of Indian academic history, for in that version of history the reader will find very few clues as to the nature and actions of Bhagat. When I first started research in India, I was fascinated (but mystified) by the presence of a figure whom I often glimpsed in images for sale on vendors’ stalls, or hanging in the offices of radical lawyers, or of certain trade unions. In some of these images, he seemed to wear a trilby. In others, he seemed to wear a Brahmanic sacred thread across 8This summary comes from David Carroll’s excellent account, Paraesthetics, New York: Routledge, 1987, p. 31. 9Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods: The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India, London: Reaktion Books, 2004.

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his bare chest, clutching a pistol while nonchalantly twiddling his moustache. It was only after many, many months that I managed to grasp that these were in fact two quite separate persons—Bhagat Singh and Chandra Shekhar Azad—despite the fact they seemed to be presented with an identical physiognomy. Subsequently, I have read what I have been able to find about these two individuals and the movement of which they were a part, but I have remained acutely aware that their historical trace has largely existed in India’s public spaces rather than in institutional archives. Official history has diverged so fundamentally from the popular narrative that it has left us few tools with which to understand a figure such as Bhagat Singh. His pictures are, as we shall see, the greatest resource we have and can give us some insight into the ways in which hugely significant visual traces can endure in the gaps between official forms of knowledge. Once we start to examine the figure of Bhagat Singh, however, we will discover that his trace is one element in a longer train of signs and events that runs through the history of those who chose violence in their attempts to end British colonial rule. Bhagat’s historical moment ineluctably tightens us to a chain of connecting events that seem to be locked into each other with a grim retributive inevitability. The echoes that resonate through this long chamber impel us to move back as far as 1908, when a series of events start to unfold. On 30 April of that year, in Muzaffarpur, Khudiram Bose threw a bomb at a carriage that he believed contained Chief Presidency Magistrate Douglas Kingsford. In fact, the carriage contained two women, a Mrs and Miss Kennedy, who were both killed. Within two days Khudiram was arrested. His accomplice shot himself dead on arrest; the following year, the sub-Inspector who arrested him would be shot dead (in Serpentine Lane, Calcutta) in revenge.10 The naive Khudiram, who further implicated himself as he tried to defend himself at his trial, was found guilty and then executed on 11 August 1908. Chromolithographs of his trial and execution, issued in the 1930s and 1940s, powerfully evoke the retributive technology of the state with its complex infrastructure of telephones, temporality, and slow death. It is likely that these are later renditions of images that were circulating 10Sedition

Committee Report [also known as Rowlatt Report], Calcutta, 1918, p. 32.

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shortly after Khudiram’s execution, but these are the earliest to have survived. They provide a powerful sense of the resonances that colonialism’s techno-rational grid had acquired by the early 1940s. A Calcutta image depicting Khudiram Bose’s trial shows Khudiram in the dock, but the grid here is more than simply the wooden cage that contains him. It is also made up of the coercive paraphernalia of the state: its personnel such as the judge and court officials; systems of knowledge and communication signified by the judge writing and the telephone to his right; and above all, by systems of temporal regularity—the clock and calendar hanging on the wall behind Khudiram. The image presents what is literally a carpentered universe—the perspectival regularities of the judge’s desk expand to trap Khudiram within its wooden constraints, and this space of colonial jurisdiction is further defined through linear rigidities of the background wall and the door, which are arbitrarily truncated by a photographic framing. Unlike the Nathdvara idealized landscapes, whose completeness curls up and around the picture frame, the realist framing of ‘Khudiram’s Trial’ suggests its relation to a continuum of other hostile spaces, and this linkage is further suggested by the telephone, whose wire leads out of the bottom of the picture; the recipient of the letter the judge is writing; and the ‘meanwhile’ of all the other colonized spaces in which similar clocks tick away in this barbarous and violent ‘empty, homogeneous time’. Lithographs of Khudiram’s execution continue to explore this confrontation with the ‘calculating analytic’11 of colonialism. Brojen’s image traces the causal connection between the judgement shown in the top-right corner and the execution that is the main subject of the image, and counterpoises this on the left with an open doorway. The main part of the Brojen image shares much with a Rising Art Cottage lithograph: the retributive state technology of death is represented in detail, with Khudiram suspended from a wooden frame and his noose controlled by a complex system of pulleys. Other foundations of the colonial state (the gun and the bible) are shown, and controlling the 11Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, p. 65.

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whole event is a red-uniformed, sola-topied English soldier who looks at his watch, synchronizing this particular act of barbarity with a ‘meanwhile’ of countless other brutalities. In the Rising Art Cottage print, the techno-rationalist grid of this barbarity is mapped by the chequered floor and the striations of the brick wall over which, nevertheless, an Indian sky can be seen and thus, the immortal can be contrasted with the temporal and corrupt. The Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA), which had been founded two months earlier in September 1928,12 then targeted J.A. Scott, the Senior Superintendent of Police in Lahore, who was held to be guilty of Lala Lajpat Rai’s death. On 17 December, the HSRA assassinated Assistant Superintendent Saunders, whom they mistook for Scott; Rajguru fired at him, causing him to fall from his motorbike, and Bhagat Singh shot Saunders several times as he lay on the ground. Chandra Shekhar Azad killed Head Constable Chanan Singh as they made their escape. Posters subsequently appeared (in Bhagat’s handwriting) announcing that ‘Saunders is dead, Lalaji is avenged’. Following this, Bhagat Singh went to Calcutta, seeking instruction in explosives technology from Jatindra Nath Das. Further HSRA actions included Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt throwing bombs into the Legislative Assembly in April 1929. Bhagat was arrested, sentenced to death by a Special Tribunal, under Ordinance No. HI of 1930 and, together with Sukhdev and Rajguru, hanged on 23 March 1931. The images of Bhagat Singh’s execution complete, with Khudiram, the circle along the other arc of which lies Lala Lajpat Rai and Tilak. Bhagat Singh’s popular appeal was (and still is) enormous, and this is usually presented as an intriguing anomaly: Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography is usually cited noting Bhagat’s ‘sudden and amazing popularity’. The Terrorism in India 1917–1936 report also commented on this remarkable popular acclaim: Public opinion, unsettled by the Civil Disobedience Movement, ran wild and was further excited in favour of the revolutionaries under trial by most of the nationalist newspapers, which painted the accused as oppressed martyrs placed on their trial by an Imperialistic Government for purely patriotic acts. Bhagat 12See Terrorism in India 1917–1936, Intelligence Bureau, Home Department, Simla, Government of India, 1937.

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Singh especially became a national hero, and his exploits were freely lauded in the nationalist press, so that, for a time, he bade fair to oust Mr Gandhi as the foremost political figure of the day. His photograph was to be met with in many houses, and his plaster busts found a large market.13

Bhagat Singh has also been the subject of numerous chromolithographs, since 1931, and of several films: Jagdish Gautama’s ShaheedE-Azam Bhagat Singh (1954); K.N. Bansal’s Shaheed Bhagat Singh (1963); S. Ram Sharma’s famous hit, Shaheed (1965), starring Manoj Kumar; and most recently, Rajkumar Santoshi’s The Legend of Bhagat Singh (2002). At the time of writing, there were a further three films on Bhagat due for release. Bhagat remains prominent in many South Asians’ consciousness: I.K. Gujral’s speech on the fiftieth anniversary of India’s independence commenced with his ‘gratitude [to] those innumerable martyrs who suffered in jail’, and he then listed Ashfaq, Bismil, Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev.14 The Tamil Tiger leader, Velupillai Pirabakaran, interviewed by a Jaffna literary magazine in April 1994 and quizzed as to what had impelled him to take up arms against oppression, replied that ‘I developed a deep attachment to the Indian freedom struggle and martyrs like Subhash Chandra Bose, B[h]agat Singh and [Balgangadhar] Tilak’.15 This celebration by national figures has been reciprocated consistently at a grass-roots level. Thus, for instance, in November 1998, the Chandigarh Bharatiya Vidyalaya celebrated its Annual Day (with Finance Minister Kanwaljit Singh presiding) by staging a play: Bhagat Singh, Prince among Martyrs.16 Continuing buoyant sales for H.R. Raja’s images (see Pinney 2004: Chapter 7) suggest that this popular enthusiasm is pervasive, especially in the Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.17 Bhagat Singh’s huge popularity is, on the face of it, very surprising; indeed, it is one of the puzzles of twentieth century Indian history. 13Ibid., p. 78. 14Cited

from www.india50.com/speech.html. from www.tamilnation.orgilvp/vp94velicham.html. 16Indian Express, 25 November 1998, www.indian-express.com/ie/daily/199S1125/ 32951584.html. 17One interesting study also indicates his popularity in Saurashtra (Gujarat). Cf. Peter Maddock, ‘Idolatry in Western Saurashtra: A Case Study of Social Change and Proto-Modern Revolution in Art’, South Asia, no. xvi, 1993, pp. 101–26. 15Cited

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The HSRA represented the antithesis of Gandhianism not only because of its commitment to violence but also in its militant atheism. This, as Sumit Sarkar notes, was most marked in Bhagat Singh (the HSRA member who most captured the popular imagination), who was ‘marked by an increasingly deep commitment to Marxian socialism and—equally remarkable, perhaps, given the strong Hindu religiosity of the earlier terrorists—militant atheism’.18 Bhagat Singh’s remarkable prison notebooks, which have been published recently, provide ample testament to his rigorous materialist mind.19 But, this puzzle can be partly unravelled by attending to the images themselves and their chief feature, the trilby. In so doing, we will find an echo of Tilak’s trope of the bomb as ‘a practice of knowledge’ in Bhagat Singh’s audacious mimicry. The trilby will emerge as the chief sign of Bhagat’s ability to ‘pass’.

FROM BHAGAT SINGH TO DURGA Just as Bhagat’s images have proliferated in the proscribed files in the archives, more images by Rup Kishor Kapur (1893–1978) appear in the proscribed sections of the India Office and National Archives than those by any other single (known) artist. Born in Sambal, he moved to Kanpur, where he worked as an art teacher in a middle school and was active in Congress. This was the period when the city was known as ‘Lal Kanpur’ (Red Kanpur) and Rup Kishor played his part in revolutionary activity. Then, as his grandson phrases it: ‘The day Bhagat Singh was hanged, he painted in a day [a picture] of Bhagat Singh beheaded, giving his head on a plate to Bharat Mata. Bharat Mata is weeping. He painted it and [displayed it in Sambal] and shouted Bande Mataram and he was taken by the police and was imprisoned for one or two years’.20 Rup Kishor would later move to Dehradun, and then to Mussoorie, where his studio in Mall Road was to be gutted by fire. The images produced in his Kanpur period include many images of the martyrs 18Sumit

Sarkar, Modern India: 1885–1947, 2nd edition, Basingstoke, 1989, p. 268. Jail Notebook and Other Writings by Bhagat Singh, edited by Chaman Lal and Bhupendra Hooja, New Delhi: LeftWord Books, 2007. 20Interview with Kamal Kapoor, Mathura, 1996. 19The

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of the Lahore Conspiracy Trial. Sardar Bhagat Singh’s Wonderful Presentation depicts Bhagat Singh (behind whom stand Rajguru and Shukhdev) giving his head on a plate to an enthroned Mother India; Three Heroes in the Prison depicts the three ‘under-trials’ chained and behind bars; another image depicts B.K. Dutt in prison; and Azad Mandir, one of Rup Kishor’s most complex images, arranges vignettes of Bhagat, B.K. Dutt, Rajguru, Sukhdev, and four other martyrs around a portrait of Chandra Shekhar Azad and the scene of his killing in Allahabad.21 Azad Mandir is a fascinating assemblage of images whose dissemination was originally authorized, in many cases, by the colonial state through the press. The single portraits (with the possible exception of the corpse of Roshan Singh) were all police portraits and only in the public domain because they had been made available officially.22 The Home Department contemplated court action against The Pioneer, the Hindustan Times, and Bande Mataram (Lahore) for printing pictures of Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt, but this was only on the grounds that they did so before a second identity parade had been held and that this might potentially have been used by the defence to invalidate the parade (in fact, they didn’t and the Home Department’s interest waned).23 It is unclear whether the photograph of Azad’s corpse under a tree in Allahabad was released by the police (as seems possible) or was taken by a newspaper photographer and disseminated directly by the press. Whatever its origins, it quickly became potent propaganda once linguistically framed. The Home Political files in the National Archives in Delhi record, in exceptional detail, a public meeting held in memory of Chandra Shekhar Azad, under the auspices of the Naujawan Bharat Sabha, on 13 March 1931.24 Songs and poems were sung and recited, and printed copies of the photograph of Azad’s body under the tree 21All

four images described here were published by Shyam Sunder Lal, Cawnpur.

22For instance, Bhagat Singh’s portrait was reproduced in the centre of the front page of

The Tribune [Lahore] for Wednesday, 25 March 1931, under the headline ‘Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev Executed’. 23See National Archives of India, Home Pol., 1930 2SA, pp. 284–284A and photographic annexures. 24National Archives of India. KVV to 159/1931, pp. 1–10.

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were sold ‘for one anna a copy’. These foolscap sheets reproduced the photograph with two lines of Urdu text above and below reading: ‘On the place of sacrifice for freedom We shall have our name included in the List of these living whilst dying we shall save the honour of India’.25 Rup Kishor Kapur undertakes a similar captioning in Azad Mandir,26 but instead of words, he frames the central image with other images, other celebrations of martyrdom, which create what Eco calls ‘chains of syntagmatic concatenation imbued with argumentative effect’.27 The argumentative effect is such that the image would surely have been immediately identified as seditious, even in the absence of the didactic title Azad Mandir (temple of freedom). My conversations with the picture publishers and Rup Kishor’s grandson (Kamal Kapoor), and the evidence of those Rup Kishor images lodged in the proscribed section of the India Office Library, indicate that nearly all his early politically motivated images were proscribed and that he was imprisoned. In 1937–8, he met Kalicharan, the son of a blacksmith, with whom he would paint (under the imprimaturs, ‘Chitrashala Kanpur’ and later, ‘Chitrashala Dehradun’). In Chitrashala Kanpur and Chitrashala Dehradun images, there is a striking transformation of the explicitly political and topical into the divine. But the powerful evocations of divine potency that Rup Kishor and Kalicharan jointly conjured, seem to pursue politics by other means, a means that evaded the proscriptional net of the state. I do not wish to negate other factors that may have been at play...However, by the late 1930s, a substantial anti-colonial allegorical and metaphorical infrastructure was sufficiently in place for politics to be articulated through ‘religious’ images. Thus, Rup Kishor/ Kalicharan’s Sudarshan Chakra, depicting Krishna on the battleground, operated in a field conditioned by Tilak’s discussions about political action and the Mahabharata, and their Mahamaya Shakti belongs to a long line of political manipulations of the Mahishasuramardini 251

am indebted to Vinay K. Srivastava for translating this. originally by the United Provinces No. 288-/VIII-1340, 3 October 1931. 27Umberto Eco, ‘Critique of the Image’, in V. Burgin (ed.), Thinking Photography, London, 1982, p. 38. 26Proscribed

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(Goddess Durga) trope. These resonances, however, would have operated at the level of narrative and motif identification (that is, Krishna on battlefield equals political action by Hindus). In Mahamaya Shakti, and other images, there is a repertoire of figural effects that works much more subtly and builds upon an apocalyptic expressivity. One of the earliest mass-reproduced forms to demonstrate this quality is the Calcutta Art School lithograph of Kali (c. 1879). I am suggesting that part of Mahamaya Shafeti’s power lay in its ability to evoke a (by now easily recognizable) apocalyptic scene of destruction and cleansing by means, for example, of the shadowy sword-wielding armies in the background and the ominous clouds of smoke illumined by a (blood?) red sun. And all this, of course, in a securely ‘religious’ image, whose apparent lack of political content placed it beyond the reaches of the 1910 Press Act and its definitions of sedition. As with many Nathdvara images, it was the figural (a certain range of colours, a certain sweep of the brush, a particular kind of stippling) that acquired the power to evoke an affective intensity. The informational flows that had so concerned many in the colonial state were not only proliferating beyond control, but changing in their modality into new forms that were simply not recognizable to those seeking to police their flow.

GANDHI, NEHRU, BOSE The historian, Shahid Amin, has shown in wonderful detail how Gandhi was treated, by many, as a god. In one Bihar village, a 104year-old woman reportedly told Gandhi that ‘Just as we had Ram and Krishna as avatars, so also Mahatma Gandhi has appeared as an avatar’. The Mahatma found himself trapped, to an extent, within ‘existing patterns of popular beliefs’. 28 In 1921, the Pioneer newspaper commented on his ‘unofficial canonization’. The rural public demanded to see and be seen by the great soul: ‘The sight and sound of uncouth peasants invading the train carrying Gandhi, rending the sky with cries of “jai” and demanding darshan at an unearthly hour, 28Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 1–61.

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could be annoying and unnerving.’29 Shahid Amin concludes his study by noting that, in eastern Uttar Pradesh and north Bihar, peasants’ ideas about Gandhi’s ‘powers...were often at variance with those of the local Congress-Khilafat leadership and clashed with the basic tenets of Gandhism itself ’.30 Amin also stresses the way in which much of the nationalist press sought to distance itself from this popular messianism. In popular visual culture of this period, a similar split is apparent. The majority of colour prints produced by the larger presses generally depict Gandhi in a rational and empty space, whereas a very different engagement is apparent in some locally-produced photographic montages. The earliest chromolithographic Gandhi images are simple elaborations of the sort of photographic portraits used frequently in newspapers. The Ravi Varma Press’s Mahatma Gandhi, which probably dates from about 1931, depicts him with a staff in hand. Two portraits published by the Modern Litho Works, Bombay, and dating from about the same time, are also clearly modelled on photographs. Similarly, Chitrashala Press’s image of a thoughtful, seated Gandhi, inscribed ‘D.B. Mahulikar. Artist. Ahmedabad.’, is without doubt an over-painted photograph. The most famous image of this period, Brijbasi’s exquisite lithograph printed in Germany, was prepared by the artist M.C. Trivedi from a photograph taken as Gandhi left Karachi en route to the Round Table Conference. All these images establish Gandhi’s purity and simplicity. Apart from the garlands in the Modern Litho Works’s example, there is nothing ostentatious in the images; indeed, there is, in fact, almost nothing else apart from Gandhi. Only one of the images has any figurative backdrop (Chitrashala’s Mahatma Gandhi), and this is simply a cushion propped against a wall. Some, especially Trivedi’s wonderful image, have an auratic potency attached to them, but there is no obvious sense in which we might say—except with hindsight— that this was the beginning of a process of deification. With a few odd exceptions, this appears to be the case until Gandhi’s assassination. There are isolated images that suggest his avatar-like 29Ibid., p. 2; cf. also his Event, Metaphor, Memory: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, p. 167. 30Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma’, 1989, p. 55.

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Illustration 3.1: Photographic montage of Gandhi embodying other figures of political potency, c. mid-1940s, central India

status, but these are rare. For instance, one image in a 1930s booklet, a Gandhi panegyric detailing the Round Table Conference, depicts the ‘S.S. Rajputana which carried Mahatmaji to London’ and is captioned ‘THE LUCKY SHIP’.31 The perception of this vessel as some sort of peculiarly 31Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s Case (or Swaraj: Being Selected Speeches. Writings. Interviews. Etcetera of Mahatma Gandhi in 1931. ed. Wamn P. Kabadi (Bombay, n.d.). p i. opposite p. 16.

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fortunate vahan (divine mount) suggests something of the aura that, by this time, surrounded Gandhi. It is also apparent in two photographic montages, probably dating from the mid-1940s and made in central India, possibly in Mhow.32 One of these depicts a central figure of Gandhi, blessed from above by Krishna, and a flag-waving Mother India, whose body is infused with signs of political potency (Illustration 3.1). These take the form of the montaged heads of contemporary national and international political leaders, including Nehru, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Subhash Chandra Bose, Hitler, Mussolini, Bhagat Singh, Tilak, and many others. This unlikely cohort clearly share a common concern with power and efficacy, rather than ethics. A further montage from the same source, beneath the slogan ‘Jay Hind’ (victory to India) shows Gandhi on the right of the image pointing towards the central figure of Subhash Chandra Bose.

Illustration 3.2: Jay Hind, photographic montage of Subhash Chandra Bose, Gandhi and others, c. mid-1940s, central India 32These were purchased by the author in Ujjain, in the mid-1990s, from a framing shop whose proprietor believed them to have come from the town of Mhow.

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Bose, as is customary in such images, is attired in the uniform of the Indian National Army (INA), with whose forces he hoped to free India (Illustration 3.2). His auto-beheaded figure (of the sort we have seen commonly used for Bhagat Singh) is captioned, ‘Subhash balidan’ (Subhash’s sacrifice), and he kneels amidst the severed heads of others who have suffered or died in the struggle. Underneath the figure of Mother India, who is receiving Bose’s gift, is a garlanded monument. Barely readable, this would have been immediately recognizable to Bose admirers as the INA martyrs monument to Bose, following his probable death in an air crash on 8 July 1945. Other figures included in this astonishingly complex montage are Chandra Shekhar Azad and Sardar Patel. We are confronted with an interesting paradox: during Gandhi’s lifetime, chromolithography generally positioned him within the ‘empty, homogeneous time’ of the documentary photographic image.33 But local photographic practice, at least as evidenced by the two Mhow prints, was much more able to discard a disenchanted chronotope and inhabit a messianic space. The technology of production and its economic/ideological constraints may supply the answer to this: the artisanal montage techniques of the local photographer were more likely to reflect the popular messianism of the streets than the capitalintensive products of national colour presses. An overview of local print culture suggests, however, that the ‘official’ vision of Gandhi as an inhabitant of an empty, homogeneous space is—in the broader scheme of things—the exception to the general messianic rule. We have already noted the prevalence of pictorial affirmations of Bhagat Singh’s violent actions. Even more striking are the images that question the relationship between what we might term ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ nationalism. Images commonly suggested the indebtedness of official nationalism to revolutionary terrorism. Among the Bhagat Singh related images proscribed in the early 1930s were some that depicted B.K. Dutt tearing open his chest to reveal the face of Bhagat Singh and other co-revolutionaries. This gesture, signifiying devotion to one’s personal master, has as its visual archetype the monkey–deity Hanuman’s cleaving of his chest to reveal his master, the god Ram. Circulating alongside these images of B.K. Dutt, were 33Though

see the earlier example of Bharat Uddhar.

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Illustration 3.3: Gandhi reveals his true allegations to B.K. Dutt, c. 1931. Just as Hanuman, the monkey-god tears open his chest to reveal his allegiance to his master, the god Ram, so here Gandhi tears open his (inferior) peaceful exterior to reveal his faith in revolutionary struggle

even more astonishing ones that position B.K. Dutt opposite Gandhi (Illustration 3.3). Gandhi, who has cast down his staff, is himself tearing open his chest to reveal Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev. In a similar way,

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an image by Sudhir Chowdhury, Shaheed Smirity (Remembrance of martyrs), dating from about 1948 and published by the Calcuttan ‘S.N.S.’, shows Nehru as the recipient of the blessings of a free Mother India, made possible only through the sacrifices of revolutionary terrorists (including Bhagat Singh), whose severed heads are placed alongside a lota and puja lamp. Official nationalism may have decried the activities of revolutionary terrorists, but popular visual culture asserted the nation’s debt to those prepared to kill and be killed in the cause of freedom. A similar principle of the accession of non-violence to the power of violence is apparent in the Calcutta Rising Art Cottage’s Mata Ka Bandhan Mochan (Mother’s deliverance from bondage; Illustration 3.4). This depicts Mother India giving (on either side) a spinning wheel to Gandhi, and the flag of Independent India to a crouching Nehru. But, in the centre, she bestows the talvar (sword) of freedom on Subhash Chandra Bose. For consumers of this image, conditioned by similar images that show figures identified along the continuum of Bhavani/Bharat Mata giving a sword to Shivaji (the narrative that Tilak had propagated; see Pinney 2004: Chapter 3), there could have been little doubt that this was the same sword, given once again. The doubling of Pratap/Shivaji and Bhagat Singh/Chandra Shekhar Azad (sometimes replaced by their Hindu rightist antinomies, K.B. Hedgewar and M.S. Golwalkar) and the occasional interpolation of a mediatory Subhash Chandra Bose, establishes a messianic time in which persons and objects leap across empty, homogenized time. Mata Ka Bandhan Mochan establishes a commensurability between Gandhi’s freedom through spinning, Nehru’s freedom through conventional statist politics, and Netaji’s liberation through the sword. The major presses’ unwillingness to affirm Gandhi as an avatar during his lifetime rapidly decayed with the grief of his assassination on 30 January 1948. The images issued after this event are radically different in style and substance, and can be divided into ‘apotheosis’ images and ‘avatar cycle’ images. The former depict Gandhi ascending to heaven in the manner of eighteenth century European Imperial heroes, and the latter present a central atemporal form around which a biography in the form of ‘descents’ appears.

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Illustration 3.4: Mata ka Bandhan Mochan, late 1940s. Rising Art Cottage, Calcutta. Bose accepts Bhavani’s sword, repeating earlier imagery in which Shivaji received the same sword

Brijbasi’s Gandhiji ki swargyatra (Gandhiji’s journey to heaven) shows Gandhi hovering above the heads of Nehru and Patel as he is borne up to heaven in a celestial rath drawn by two apsaras. This mode of locomotion is also present in a similar image (probably by Sudhir

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Chowdhury), but here the Buddha and Jesus take the places of the apsaras, waiting to welcome Gandhi into a realm of renunciatory beatitude. Gandhiji ki swargyatra was painted by the great Nathdvara image-maker, Narottam Narayan Sharma, and in the intriguing detail of the image, he conveyed much about the nature of the relationship between the Brijbasi business and Gandhi. Narottam Narayan’s image...provides a remarkably accurate record of the individuals present at the cremation. We may presume that he relied on some photographic reference34 for most of this: Nehru and Patel are given prominence on either side of the pyre, and in the background, we can see the Mountbattens, Baldev Singh, and others. Among these, however, there is a curious, though familiar, interpolation: the face of Shrinathdasji Brijbasi can be seen peering between the Chinese Ambassador and Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. Narottam here, perhaps inevitably, conjoined two men who were arguably equally dependent on each other: Srinathdasji, the businessman who found in Gandhi a saleable icon and who also animated the divine landscape that his images constructed; Gandhi, who in Srinathdasji unknowingly found the ideal liaison officer in the production of the poetic landscape of a morally pure and independent India. Brijbasi images also depicted Gandhi’s arrival in the world of the gods. Devlok, painted by the Nathdvara artist, K. Himalal, shows Gandhi at the front of a group of deceased nationalists who are being honoured by a group of ancient rishis (sages). All this takes place under the benign watch of the three major deities: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiv. The formal symmetry of the image is accentuated by the framing arch that contributes to the creation of a meaning-saturated space, which stands in sharp contrast to the empty, homogeneous time of elite nationalist politics. Ashis Nandy has argued that Gandhi was, in many respects, as much ‘Christian’ as ‘Hindu’.35 This provocative and troubling suggestion seems to have been taken as axiomatic by painters in the late 1940s, for a recurring theme is that of the parallelism between Gandhi and 34The Nehru Memorial Library, Delhi, has an image depicting all these figures in conversation during the immolation (neg. NML 27943). 35Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983, pp. 49–51.

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Christ and between Gandhi’s assassination and the crucifixion of Christ. This visual metaphor occurs in a painting by B. Mohar, distributed by Hem Chander Bhargava, which depicts Gandhi seated on top of the world. Behind his manifest fleshy form is a shadow in which the yogic contours of the Buddha encompass the silhouette of the crucifixion. This morphological similarity was also used by the prolific artist, M.L. Sharma, in an image in which Gandhi’s posture and raised hand are mirrored by those of the Buddha behind him. Some images do posit a divine Hindu identity. In one image, he is shown standing on top of the world in a pose associated with Hanuman. Other images make the association more explicit: an anonymous print from Tower Half Tone, Calcutta, positions Gandhi in front of a celestial Om—the transcendent syllable—above the clouds. This connotes Gandhi’s absorption into the void of Brahma, but it also draws on a long tradition of similar imagery dating as far back as Ravi Varma and, more recently, two Narottam Narayan portraits of Krishna depicted within the sacred syllable. Perhaps the most revealing images, however, are those that suggest Gandhi’s status as an avatar through their appropriation of the pictorial forms of avatar representation. Since the 1880s, prints have been in circulation depicting Vishnu and his avatars. All of these have a common pictorial structure: Vishnu is depicted at the centre and around this, usually in a clockwise order, are represented his various avatars (most commonly ten but sometimes, twenty-two or twentysix). The same structure is also used to reveal the narrative of a particular avatar: Krishna may be given the central place and his biography then unfolds in a clockwise set of vignettes. These images give form to the notion that the enduring abstract form of Vishnu is periodically made manifest through different incarnations who descend to play their role in the affairs of man. This established template has been used to document the lives of many major nationalist figures, following their death. Several images by different publishers position Gandhi within this avatar template.36 36Subsequently, the template was applied to improbable figures such as Nehru and Indira

Gandhi. The Mahatma’s aura seems to have provoked the first use of this structure, and once established, it was pirated for others to whom it was less obviously suited.

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Illustration 3.5: The ten avatars of Subhash Chandra Bose, c. 1950

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In the artist Dinanath’s Evolution of Gandhi, published by Kananyalal Lachoomal of Delhi, the circle of Gandhi’s life is mediated by his corpse shrouded in a flag (bearing his last words, ‘Hare Ram’) at the bottom of the picture. At the start of the circle, at the bottom left, we see his birth from a lotus, his early years as a suited barrister, the Dandi salt march at the top, and so on. The same circular biographical visualization is apparent in a late 1940s image of Subhash Chandra Bose, in which, instead of his corpse, we are shown the plane in which he mysteriously disappeared (Illustration 3.5). To the left of this, he is shown as a baby in a cot, in a style suggestive of popular imagery of the baby Krishna. On the right, above the last scene in which he salutes his INA troops, we are shown him meeting Hitler (Hitler milan). Taken together, these images serve to show, in a powerful form, that, as Ranajit Guha has written, ‘Indian nationalism of the colonial period was not what elite historiography had made it out to be...it derived much of its striking power from a subaltern tradition going a long way back before the Mahatma’s intervention in Indian politics...or Nehru’s discovery of the peasantry of his home province’.37 That historiography privileged certain kinds of textual archival sources. A new historiographic practice, grounded in the study of popular visual representations, reveals with startling clarity the powerful presence of radically different preoccupations.

37Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 335.

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4 Obtaining Moral Consensus in a Law and Order Society Indian Responses* Rajeev Dhavan**

P

ublic order has always been both an excuse and a reason for imposing restrictions on the press. It looms large as a justification for many of the restrictions that are imposed on the exercise of ‘free’ speech. By virtue of what has come to be recognized as a Hobbesian argument, a threat to public order is seen as threatening the very basis of society. And, at least this is how the argument runs, what could be worse than that? On this basis, an apparatus of control is created, which is only partly connected with the maintenance of public order and largely concerned with opposition to the government or a particular regime. In India, the Imperial government of the Raj was less troubled by the problems of democratic management than its parent regime in England. After the embarrassment of the early Calcutta papers in the eighteenth century, like Hicky’s Gazette, and some vacillation amongst the authorities about the system to be imposed, a pincer strategy was worked out to deal with the press. Various pre-publication requirements were accompanied by an extremely strong penal law, which was *Originally published as ‘Obtaining Moral Consensus in a Law and Order Society: Indian Responses’, in Rajeev Dhavan’s Only the Good News: On the Law of the Press in India, New Delhi: Manohar Books, 1987, pp. 273–339. **For references, see R. Dhavan, Only the Good News: On the Law of the Press in India, New Delhi: Manohar Books, 1987; and his Publish and Be Damned: Censorship and Intolerance in India, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2008.

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gradually strengthened over the decades of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Parliamentary government in England, based on an increasing adult suffrage, forced the authorities in power to seek compromise to accommodate competing pressures before they could facilitate their needs. Every policy had to be explained in the language of democracy and liberalism. The regime in India was less troubled by such pressures, based its calculations on the new found philosophy of utilitarianism, and sought to set a system of controls which would prevent ‘constructive critique’ from expanding into revolution. Yet, we cannot make too much of the British having a free hand in India because of the absence of parliamentary government. Quite apart from adhering to a rock bottom ‘minimum natural law’, there were other constraints. Using the broad argument of the public interest, the British appealed to the ‘rule of law’ and argued that public order must be maintained at all costs. It was the secret success of Imperial jurisprudence to reduce all questions of freedom of speech and expression into questions of public order. By this token, any expression of free speech—ranging from street demonstrations and pamphlets protesting the effects of the Raj to armed revolts—were all interconnected as constituting an integrated threat to public order. A complex preventive and penal system was set up to control both peaceable and violent assemblies of people. From 1870, the Indian Penal Code was systematically extended to cover ‘constructive’ threats to public order through the press. It was not long before these powers were used to cover any kind of imaginary threat to the political administration system as a whole. Such a policy made a mild reformist seem like a criminal and a provocative pamphleteer like a dangerous revolutionary. This ‘public-order-at-all-costs’ argument gained acceptance as public policy, and won considerable support from landed and commercial interests who saw its potential uses against those they oppressed. It helped to steer the emerging polity towards a ‘government by institution’, by insisting that the only acceptable form of influence on government had to come through the properly designated institutional and social channels. The success of this policy can be seen from the fact that even the Congress party of the early twentieth century gave the title of ‘extremists’ to its less compromising members. The policy of public order was also projected as a neutral policy in that a lot of ‘natural’ strife was attributed to communal, caste, and

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regional differences. Problems of public order were not deemed to arise from the policies of the Raj or forms of oppression arising out of the new economic order. They were alleged to be the product of endemic conditions pre-existing in the fabric of India’s complex and excitable social polity. This method of classifying tensions, entrenched perceptions of public order had helped to justify the Raj’s interventions as timely, necessary, and just. Among other things, it also assisted the British in their quest to discover a conservative consensus morality, which would be imposed on the political economy as a whole. The morality that was thus discovered would offend nobody. Since something always offends somebody, notions of public morality became more and more restrictive. The laws of public order and the laws of public morality formed the twin basis on which the morality of the Raj rested. It was argued that were it not for this part of the public law, India would collapse into its natural internal tensions. A sophisticated design was presented as practically necessary. The whole system was justified on pragmatic grounds in a way that the intrepid intrusions of liberal principles were easily shot down as academic and unworthy of consideration. This important paradigm of British public policy has remained an important feature of Indian public law. Even as the constitution was being drafted, the framers juxtaposed the threat of violence as the prime reason for restricting freedom of speech. The need for restraint was always regarded as more fundamental than the fundamental right to free speech. The Supreme Court of India had no difficulty in not questioning this paradigm, either in relation to preventive detention or freedom of speech. Occasionally, the court would remind the government to use their powers to prevent ‘public order’ and not just ‘law and order’. Assuming they ever wanted to, the judges could not dislodge the firmly entrenched conventional wisdom about the primacy of public order. The American test of asking if there was a clear and present danger was sacrificed to a much more liberal test, and the existence of any potential threat was enough to justify the use of extended preventive and penal power. The unquestionable supremacy of the strong public order paradigm proved a useful vehicle to deal with all forms of oppositional resistance. The first step in this process was to depict any threat to public order as a natural ‘effluence’ of India’s complex structure. This enabled the state

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to claim that it entered into the fracas as a well-meaning third party. The next step was to translate all civil liberties and socio-economic claims to some point on the public order scale, which would form the sole basis for their evaluation. All forms of protest were deemed to be a threat, which was susceptible to restraint. There were to be few—or no—‘trade-offs’ against competing values. In this way, the public order paradigm could be used against political opponents and social adversaries without pin-pointing their polarity to the regime. They were depicted as being caught up in a social affray which could disturb the peace rather than as opponents with a cause. Contemporary India has not redressed its emphasis on public order by looking at the nature of social and political protest. They have reified public order so that it represents a self-contained and irrefutable logic. Such a process of reification has its roots in the nineteenth century, when the public law of British India sought to create a system that would legitimate itself and camouflage political repression as publicly desirable legal action in the name of the rule of law. ...This excursus into history is important because it illustrates the importance that successive governments have attached to public order and the lengths to which they were prepared to go in order to control the press. Thus, we see the total control licensing system (1823–35; 1857–8), a registration system (1835 and then, since 1867), the forfeiture-deposit system as a special system (1878–82; 1908–22; 1931– 51; 1951–7; 1975–7), a less rigorous security system as part of the ordinary law (introduced in 1898 and strengthened in 1926), a specific offence approach (suggested by Macaulay in 1837 and introduced with ever increasing zest from 1870 and strengthened in 1898, 1927, and 1972), and a pre-publication ban system which has been declared to be constitutional since 1957. All this represents quite a formidable array of powers against the press. Although the special forfeituredeposit system has been used only on special occasions, the rest of the techniques continue to be part of the control of the press. They are all presented in an absolutist form. The functional needs and requirements of the press as an institution are never really considered. All this has cast quite a gloom over the press. Journalists feel that they are being caught in a network of control, in a spirit of total distrust. Some of these controls with respect to the forfeiture system apply specifically to the press. It is in this context that the Press Commission reported

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an unequivocal outburst from the submissions that were made to them: ‘As one of the senior and respected journalists asked in the course of his evidence: “Are we criminal tribes that there should be a special law for us?”’ This puts the issue rather succinctly. The British tended to regard the press as a collection of criminal tribes. Much of their legislation was designed on this basis. Since the broad strategy of this legislation has been continued, the conclusion that the attitude of the Government of India remains the same is really quite irresistible.... This brief survey of the manner in which the laws relating to public order have applied to the press tells us many things. To begin with, it is clear that the British used the idea of public order as a legitimating device to devise extensive control over the press. There were two schools of thought about this in the British administration in the nineteenth century. One school, led by Sir Thomas Munro, took the view that the press was not to be trusted at all, and must be controlled with great zest and in exacting detail. Another school, led by Sir Charles Metcalfe, seemed to be of the view that the press should be allowed to function freely, subject to some control with respect to registration and the restraining effect of some penal offences. Over the years, these controversies became stylized and unnecessary. In time, the British administration saw that it would have to use a conglomerate of devices to control the press. The essence of such a policy was rooted in a total distrust of the press and what it was capable of doing. This conglomerate of devices included a wide-ranging system of fairly severe penal offences, many of which were strict liability offences. In other words, they concerned themselves with what judges thought was the effect of an article rather than the intention of the writer. And, this liability was made to stretch in most cases to the printer, the editor, and the publisher as well. This was partly the result of the registration system and partly the consequence of judicial decisions. Then, there were powers of control and forfeiture, and the right to demand securities from allegedly errant writers and publishers. So far, we are talking of an apparatus of ‘ordinary’ powers designed for everyday use. Superimposed on all these were the much more massive emergency powers of control and prevention. It is significant that independent India has picked up this entire apparatus of power and virtually incorporated it as a part of its laws in toto. Very few

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modifications have been made. Very few concessions have been given. The essential paradigm that forms the basis of contemporary India’s public order laws with respect to the press has not altered. This wholesale acceptance of the British imperial model was done for various reasons. Neither the British nor its successor Indian government had given serious thought to a new relationship with the press. In the eyes of the government, the press has always consisted of a corps of people who were to be distrusted and who were always up to mischief. Undoubtedly, some of this is well founded. The Indian press has always operated at multiple levels of responsibility and irresponsibility. Its standards vary, and it often reflects caste, communal, regional, and other tensions with an unbridled ease. Successive governments have used the worst journalists as a model, and an excuse, in drafting laws. Laws have been evolved on the basis of a policy of distrust. And, it is this distrust that continues to this day. No attempt to work out a new equation with the press has been made. Even the Press Commission, which submitted its report in 1954, seems to have made recommendations on the basis that the old equations had to be revised but not reconsidered. Successive governments have pointed to difficult law and order situations to show that this elaborate apparatus of control is necessary. This mood was self-evident in the minds of the framers of India’s Constitution. When the freedom of speech clauses came to be debated in the assembly, the demands of public order occupied the minds of those in the assembly greatly. Undoubtedly, the first amendment to the constitution reflects these demands. The amendment itself became necessary because the Supreme Court seemed to have argued that the original constitution did not permit restrictions in the interests of public order but only in the interests of security of state. The implications of all this alarmed at least a minority of members on the Press Commission (1952–4). The defence of public order has also been a favourite theme with the higher judiciary, and especially, the Supreme Court. The judiciary has upheld the constitutionality of a large number of these extensive powers, including the power of pre-censorship. Some overall judicial control has been retained. In at least one non-press case—initiated by the famous politician Ram Manohar Lohia—the Supreme Court made it clear that such powers should be used to deal with problems of public

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order and not just ordinary law and order problems, but these distinctions are often wasted on the government, which uses its vast powers indiscriminately. The picture that emerges is that the entire ‘establishment’, including the legislature, executive, bureaucracy, and the judiciary, has given an overriding and virtually absolute priority to the notional demands of public order. It is important to use the word ‘notional’ here. There is very little information on how these laws are actually operated. The cases that come to the courts seem to confirm the feeling that there is a considerable amount of indiscriminate use. These powers are used in ordinary situations and in emergency situations with the same alacrity. Often, the use of these powers can only be fully explained after one has understood the political subterfuges that accompany the exercise of such powers. Often, small party newspapers with small circulations are picked upon. This is either done for straightforward political reasons, or in the context of local situations, or by way of political over-reaction. ...Even where the laws are quite strict, India’s litigation system operates in a way vulnerable to manipulative use. People who have learnt to use this litigation system know exactly how it works and how it can be used for a multitude of purposes, in a multitude of ways. An editor running a campaign may, in certain cases, be quite willing to be drawn into a controversial prosecution, and then to get out of it as lightly as possible. This was certainly the strategy of Tilak and Gandhi, and it continues to be vigorously used in social and political situations. If we look at the cases on enmity between classes or incitement of religious tension, some very interesting patterns emerge. In many of the cases, public order questions are not really an issue. They are simply taken as read. The real issue is that the community which has been attacked in the press seeks to take public revenge in the law courts. The law courts become the public forum for further quarrels, not to enforce public order or to procure justice. Persons and groups have learnt to use these provisions to further their quarrels. ‘Government officials’ and ‘ministers’ have been described as a class and action has been taken under these provisions, by their supporters, against their detractors. The fact that these cases were not successful cannot obscure the fact that the opposite party was at least drawn into the litigative

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arena and subjected to all the problems of a law suit. The more adept a particular person or group is at using the law, the greater the chance of him using it. ...Beneath the facade of public order lies the real world of group conflicts, seeking to entrench their gains in the legal and political system. There has never been enough legal research done on who uses existing public order powers, against whom, and for what? There is every reason to believe that the government in India has been using its public order powers to silence politicians from opposition groups. Yet, the debate has never really progressed beyond the public order situation and the equities of the case being discussed. India’s Press Commission (1982) did collect a considerable amount of information to demonstrate that the press had become a public (and political) arena, subjected to a huge range of pressures from various quarters. But, it was not able to place all this evidence in a conceptual framework. The government itself was not absolved, but in the end, only accused of inactivity. The usual law and order prescription was suggested. But, the government is a major participator in political and public affairs. By using public order as the reason for its interference, it is able to cloak the use of its powers against opponents. Some of these opponents are regarded as opponents of the regime. But many opponents are not depicted as opponents to a regime but to the system as a whole and in certain cases, to ‘civilized’ life as portrayed in the notion of the ‘rule of law’. It was precisely this kind of use of public order powers that surfaced in the famous Bihar Bill controversy of 1982. Much of the controversy was devoted to, what must on analysis be regarded as, the wrong issue. The Bill made publishing ‘grossly indecent or scurrilous matter or matters intended for blackmail’ an offence. This was punishable by imprisonment for up to two years (five years for second and subsequent convictions), or fine, or both. When the Indian Law Institute examined the provisions of the bill, on behalf of the Press Council of India, it was not able to assert more than that the offences created were ‘vague’. In a supplementary note, the institute recanted its earlier view that persons would be tried under the bill by an executive magistrate, but stressed, in the alternative, that the cognizability and non-bailability of the offences were unusual features, except:

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in such cases...which disturb the peace of the community or affect the law and order, or which constitute a serious threat to...life and property; and also offences in which there is a likelihood of the offender escaping the clutches of (the) law; and (cases where) if the suspect is not immediately arrested it may frustrate investigations of the case.

The government argued that the bill fell within some of these categories. However, that is—in a sense—besides the point. The nature of the offence that was created was not the real nub of the controversy. An examination of cognate offences in the Indian Penal Code will show that the Bihar Bill was consistent rather than inconsistent with the basic strategy of the Penal Code to deal with newspaper offences. Table 4.1 analyses the offences against newspapers in the Indian Penal Code. Table 4.1: Offences by Publication in the Indian Penal Code Year of Introduction & Offence Section (1) 1870. S. 124 A

(2) Sedition

Punishment

Cognizable

(3)

(4)

(5)

C

NB

C C

NB NB

C

NB

C

NB

C

NB

C

B

Life and fine; or 3 years and fine; or fine 1898 & 1969. S. 153A Promoting enmity 3 years and/or fine between classes or both Promoting enmity 5 years and fine between classes in place of public worship 1927. S. 295A Deliberate insult 3 years and/or and outrage of fine or both religious feeling 1972. S. 153 B Imputations, 3 years and/or assertions prefine or both judicial to national integration If committed in a 5 years and fine place of worship 1860. S. 292 Sale of obscene 1st Offence: 2 books, etc. years and Rs 2,000; 2nd and other offences: 5 years and Rs 5,000

Bailable

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It is clear from Table 4.1 that the Bihar Bill was, in fact, not different in various material particulars from the offences created in the code. In fact, before 1973, the Indian Penal Code operated so that the executive magistrate tried—or committed for trial—many of these offences. Far from deviating from the paradigm underlying the Indian Penal Code, the Bihar Bill was a classic affirmation of this paradigm. If anything, the Bihar Bill was a comment on the basic strategy of Indian Law. To the extent to which the Bihar Bill controversy contrasted the bill against provisions of the Indian Penal Code, it aired a non-controversy. The Bihar government argued that such provisions were necessary and could hardly be regarded as part of a strategy that was alien to the Indian legal system. The press, which had mobilized solid support, began a civil disobedience campaign, demonstrated in the streets, lobbied extensively, and picked on the arbitrary nature of the bill. But, by Indian standards, the bill was not arbitrary. The real controversy was about whom the bill would be used against. It was suggested that, like the Tamil Nadu and Orissa legislation, the bill would be used against political opponents and those papers which criticized the unscrupulous Jagannath Mishra regime in Bihar. If the experiment worked in Bihar, it would be used as a Congress (I) strategy in all the states they governed. At the root of the Bihar Bill lay a policy about political opposition. Public order and public morality offences sustain a framework within which political mobilization and discourse must take place. Successive Indian governments have been careful to organize this disciplinary framework so that it is justified and accepted by the people at large as the only sensible thing to do. This framework has been questioned twice in the last ten years. During the Emergency, no one seriously believed that the imposition of a new framework of censorship controls could be justified on any basis other than the personal and political needs of Mrs Gandhi’s regime. The Bihar Bill was the second occasion when the credulity of the public could not be strained into believing that the bill was pro bono public. Yet, these two instances are treated as episodic examples rather than the visible tips of an existing iceberg. More instances have followed. Mercifully, Rajiv Gandhi’s Defamation Bill 1988 died a tumultuous death. In the next two decades, criminal law has been used by Hindu fundamentalists against artist M.F. Husain, James Laine, and writer Ashis Nandy, amongst scores of others. This

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shows the ambivalence of the criminal law, the diversity of its use, and the attempt to impose a Hindu consensus on India’s law and order. This is surely worse than the imperial Raj and can only provoke force. India stands as a striking contrast to western legal systems where pressure has been put to make real advances for individuals (and groups) against the public interest. This has been most successful in the area of public morality, and has had some impact on the area of public order. In India, the public order and morality argument has had an unassailable victory. This has acquired more and more insidious implications as the privatization of the Indian state has increased. India’s political economy has encouraged more and more parts of the Indian state to be directly controlled by private individuals, groups, and classes. Indian politicians are enabling power brokers who either own and control parts of the State directly for themselves or, operate on behalf of others who are corrupt. The complexity by which this process works should not blind us to the gradual accumulation of public power into private hands. It is difficult to say when this process will stop. A matured corporate sector may prefer a power structure which they manipulate better than others to a power structure which can easily be corrupted by anyone. At present, the distinction between private and public power is getting blurred in all respects, other than the form in which the latter is expressed. That being the case, our real starting point of analysis must be to look at the private abuse of public power. The Indian debate on public order and the press is a false debate, which is trapped in a historically precipitated, but ideologically impregnable, paradigm. The real controversies concern the use of the press as a political arena and the extent to which the government poses as the biased umpire of the ground rules under which this political arena operates. As more and more government political institutions are subjected to direct manipulative control, the Indian press is becoming not just the prime but the only political arena for discussion and debate. It is not surprising that it is depicted as a kind of permanent threat to public order and the safety of the realm.

PART II

THE NATIONAL POPULAR

5 Redefining Obscenity and Aesthetics in Print* Charu Gupta

I

n the early twentieth century, a moral panic of sorts gripped a section of the British and Hindu middle classes, creating anxieties regarding questions of sexuality.1 Hindi literature and advertisements make this panic apparent. The creation of a ‘civilized’ and ‘appropriate’ literature paves the way for a new kind of aesthetics, and for the fashioning of a modern collective Hindu identity. At the same time, the attempts to cleanse literature of all its perceived obscenities face a serious challenge from more commercial forms of print literature. The sale of erotic, ‘obscene’, and semi-pornographic works, and the publication of advertisements for aphrodisiacs, indicates an increasingly popular demand which feeds the female and male sexual fantasies and desires. Such works reveal literary pluralities, and the complex and contested terrain that was Hindi literature. *Originally published as ‘Redefining Obscenity and Aesthetics in Print’, in Charu Gupta’s

Sexuality, Obscenity, Community: Women, Muslims and the Hindu Public in Colonial India, Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001, pp. 30–84. 1It has been argued that in particular historical moments, widespread social fears and anxieties may result in ‘moral panics’ around sexuality, especially among the middle classes. See Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, London: MacGibbon & Kee Ltd., 1972, p. 9; Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, London: Longon, 1981, pp. 14, 92.

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Any discussion on obscenity is closely linked with the debate on elite and popular literature. Some scholars argue that in India, new elite literary sensibilities marginalized popular traditions, and that print displaced performance. Standardized and sanitized literary norms became a marker of modern national identity and culture for the educated middle classes.2 However, the strong continuity between the age of the manuscript and that of print has been emphasized. Printed texts could be transmitted in varied idioms—educational, oral, and performative; read and staged—each offering different meanings.3 In pre-revolutionary France, the canon of great Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire and Rousseau was read only by a limited public. The bestsellers of the time were the forbidden, salacious, and pornographic books, sold clandestinely.4 In Uttar Pradesh (UP), print stimulated new expressions of vernacular literature. Not only did oral–performative traditions, scribal cultures, and spoken languages continue to hold sway but also genres like nautankis and sangits, qissas and kahanis. Languages like Braj and Avadhi adapted themselves to the new commercial forms. Print gave them a wider diffusion. It was an arena where printed, oral, and visual media criss-crossed, leaving their imprint on each other. A complementary line of analysis has drawn sharp distinctions between high and low literature, between small popular presses and writers, and big elite ones.5 The Hindu literati attempted to discipline 2Sumanta Banerjee, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Calcutta, Calcutta: Seagull Books, 1989; idem, ‘Marginalisation of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History. New Delhi, 1989, pp. 127–79; idem, ‘Bogey of the Bawdy: Changing Concept of “Obscenity” in Nineteenth Century Bengali Culture’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 22, no. 29, 18 July 1987, pp. 1197–206; Svati Joshi (ed.), Rethinking English: Essays in Literature, Language, History, New Delhi: Indian Social Institute, 1992; Tapati Roy, ‘Disciplining the Printed Text Colonial and Nationalist Surveillance of Bengali Literature’, in Partha Chatterjee (ed.), Texts of Power: Emerging Disciplines in Colonial Bengal. Minneapolis, 1995, pp. 30–62. 3Roger Chartier (ed.) (trans. Lydia G. Cochrane), Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988; idem (trans. Lydia G. Cochrane), The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989, esp. pp. 1–5; idem, ‘Publishing Drama in Early Modern Europe’, The Panizzi Lectures, British Library, London, 8–10 December 1998. 4Rustom Bharucha, In the Name of the Secular: Contemporary Cultural Activism in India, Delhi: Orient Longman, 1998; Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of PreRevolutionary France, London: HarperCollins, 1996. 5Anindita Ghosh, ‘Cheap Books, “Bad” Books: Contesting Print Cultures in Colonial Bengal’, SAR, vol. 18, no. 2, 1998, pp. 173–94.

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writing, but reading practices and the market led them to borrow some popular elements in their work. It has been argued that in early modern Europe, the upper classes did not wholly withdraw from common culture.6 Similarly, popular literature selectively appropriated certain values of elite literature. It has also been suggested that popular sex literature could sometimes be a medium through which the dominant culture, under the guise of breaking taboos, actually reinforced them.7 ...Such ‘all or nothing’ readings deny contradictory meanings, as popular culture and literature are by themselves neither reactionary nor liberating. They do not simply reflect or create particular values. However, in specific historical moments, even when falling under the dominance of patriarchy and male hegemony, they can offer a variety of interpretations. In colonial UP too, popular licentious literature helped, at times, in reconstituting and delegitimating conventional values. At the same time, the high Hindi literary canon was itself not homogeneous. Colonial perceptions of obscenity need to be understood, as do similar ideas within the literati. Commercially popular literature, specially ‘dirty’ books, are a fruitful source, as are notions of brahmacharya and printed advertisements for aphrodisiacs. Questions of sexuality, and how these too changed the moral contours of the period, are better understood by a close look at this body of writing.

COLONIAL PERCEPTIONS OF OBSCENITY In much of the missionary, ethnographic, recruitment, and official policy discourse, Indian traditions and practices were denigrated as barbaric, involving women in important ways.8 Such writings then went on to see western knowledge as an enabling and civilizing agency for the improvement of natives. In UP, for example, a number of tracts published by the North Indian Christian Tract and Book Society, Allahabad, disapproved of many Hindu customs for their obscenity. One such tract stated: 6Peter

Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, London: Temple Smith, 1978.

7Meryl Attman, ‘Everything They Always Wanted You to Know: The Ideology of Popular

Sex Literature’, in Carole S. Vance (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984, pp. 115–30. 8Especially see James Mill, The History of British India, Vol. I, 5th edn, London, 1858, pp. 310–15, with notes and continuation by H.H. Wilson.

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We all know the kinds of evils and indecency prevalent during Holi. However, if the Government puts a stop to these bad things, it is regarded as an interference...There are a large number of Hindu temples which have such obscene portrayals that anyone seeing them would feel impure and still people say that to go to such temples is a matter of religion...When Krishna committed all indecent things with gopis, was he not evil?9

...The weakness and depravity of Hindu women, and their visibly low status in contemporary Indian society, were emphasized by many observers. Sexual obsession was seen as one of the problems. The secluded zenana woman typified India’s moral degeneracy. Not only did she live a life of idleness in closed and unhealthy rooms, her entire existence was seen as suffused with sensuality. The sexuality of the Indian woman was in sharp contrast to that of the English woman who, veiled in modesty, remained vigorous but delicate, active but demure.10 ...Obscenity and backwardness took on a more serious connotation with notions of decadence and the lascivious lifestyle of medieval Muslim rulers, with attacks on ‘degeneration’ in religious practices and literary forms in the medieval period.... Many Britons had clear notions of propriety and respectability. Observations from different perspectives counterposed concepts of ‘state’ and ‘civil society’ to notions of vulgarity in aspects of Indian religion, culture, and literature, especially in medieval times. They revealed an interest in demarcating what was obscene and what was permissible in present-day civic order, showing not only their concert with Victorian notions of sexual morality and chastity but also aesthetic tastes and anxieties over public health and decency.

‘OBSCENITIES’ IN HINDI LITERATURE There were parallel trends within contemporary indigenous assessments, though for different reasons. The Hindi literary sphere not only 9North Indian Christian Tract and Book Society, Hindu Dharma ke Phal, 2nd edn, Allahabad, 1905, pp. 26–7. Also see North Indian Christian Tract and Book Society, Hinduon ki Nirdhanta, Allahabad, 1909; A.C. Clayton, Preacher in Print: An Outline of the Work of the Christian Literature Society for India, London, 1911. 10Thomas R. Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 107–9.

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contested and selectively appropriated some of these observations it also influenced and left its impact on colonial perceptions.

The Indigenous Elite and Literary Concerns A vocal and influential section of the Hindu middle-class literati of UP was trying to fashion a new collective identity for itself, especially from the late nineteenth century. The period saw a rapid development of public institutions, libraries, and print culture, with growing numbers of publishing houses, presses, newspapers, and books.11 Saraswati, a Hindi magazine, started from Allahabad in 1900, and its editor, Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, were to become extremely influential over the next twenty years, adopting the role of educators of the Hindi literati.12 Educational institutions like the Kashi Vidyapeeth, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), and Allahabad University argued for the standardization of syllabi and textbooks in schools and colleges. Kamta Prasad Guru (1875–1947) wrote the first authoritative Hindi grammar.13 Ramchandra Shukl, Professor of Hindi at BHU, composed his landmark, Hindi Sahitya ka Itihas, in 1929. It was to become a reference point for future generations.... Literary creation became a more widespread activity, and the impact of the printed word extended beyond the literate level. The attempt made by the Arya Samaj to use Hindi to develop the selfperception of a Hindu community among urban educated groups made a significant contribution to the association of Hindi with Hindu. These processes aided the demarcation of the Hindi literary and linguistic canon in syllabi, schoolbooks, and university departments. This important strand of Hindi literature was strategically tied to the nation, and to the assertion of civilization and pride. Endeavours at linguistic standardization were combined with attacks on any hint of eroticism and obscenity in literature, these being seen as hallmarks 11C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 338; idem., Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 427–30. 12Krishna Kumar, ‘Quest for Self-Identity: Cultural Consciousness and Education in the Hindi Region, 1880–1950’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 25, no. 23, June 1990, pp. 1247–55. 13Nandi Bhatia, ‘Twentieth Century Hindi Literature’, in Nalini Natarajan (ed.), Handbook of Twentieth Century Literatures of India, Westport: Greenwood, 1996, pp. 137–8.

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of a decadent, feminine, and uncivilized culture. There was a growing fear of romance, of sexual and bodily pleasure: these were seen as a transgression of the ideals of the nation. The assertion of a nationalist Hindu identity became associated with the formation of shared notions of morality and respectability. In the process, tradition was redefined to work out a new modernity.14 There was a deliberate distancing from the ‘uncomfortable’ traditions of the past, and an attempt was made to establish a monolithic, high textual cultural norm. In this quest for a new and ‘proper’ Hindi literature, embodying new aesthetic values, the image of women in late medieval literature, particularly, was declared unfit for public consumption.... The debate on obscenity was largely a debate on sex for pleasure and recreation versus sex for reproduction. In the discourse of the nation, non-reproductive and hedonistic sexual behaviour came under extraordinary pressure, resulting in the near exclusion of all nonreproductive sexuality. Thus, Kalidas’s Kumarsambhav was considered ‘legitimate’ in spite of its detailed erotic descriptions because the activities ultimately led to the birth of a male child.... From a predominantly aesthetic category, the image of woman became a stiflingly moral one. Sensuousness, passion, and emotion gave way to concerns with social depravity, reform, chastity, and morality. Prose and poetry acquired a new purpose. The pathos of child marriage and widowhood, a glorification of motherhood and service to the nation, became frequent motifs under the considerable influence of the Arya Samaj. Virtuous women, struggling to devote themselves to lord and husband against all pressures, became the new carriers of the cultural authenticity and integrity of the Hindu nation. Women became paradigms of marital duty; marriage itself came to be primarily a devotional, hierarchical relationship. Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi highlighted this respectable, ideal woman: she wears a sari, puts on a bindi, and decorates herself with flowers. She goes to the temple, prays for her husband, is educated, goes to sabhya meetings and, upon coming back, wins the heart of her husband.15 14This was visible in other regions as well. See Pragati Mohapatra, ‘The Making of a Cultural Identity: Language, Literature and Gender in Orissa in late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1997. 15Mahavir Prasad Dwivedi, Rachnavali, vol. 13, pp. 248–9. Also see Sridhar Pathak, Manovinod, Benares, 1917, pp. 25–9.

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Gupt waxed lyrically: ‘Arya kanya man leti svapn mein bhi pati jise, bhinn usse phir jagat mein aur bhaj sakti kise?’ (If an Aryan woman recognizes someone as her husband even in her dreams, she cannot ever think of worshipping anyone but him).16 The woman was invested with new values, at once nationalist and Hindu. The dominant image of women as sexual beings was reversed and transformed into an ideology of female ‘passionlessness’, thereby framing an oppositional womanhood against colonial designations of derelict sexuality. The recast chaste wife was an emblem of femininity, purity, and sublimated sexuality—which colonial discourse had denied Hindu society. The taboos on her behaviour were aimed to enclose and discipline all female bodies, to ensure a new social and moral hierarchy of power, and to integrate chastity with middle-class identity. Sexual pleasure, thus, came to be regarded with extreme suspicion, and modern Hindu cultural discourse, even from its diverse angles, converges on the gender question: there is now a clear demarcation between the aesthetic and the obscene, the ennobling and forbidden. However, this was not all. The feminine ideal did not merely involve restraint and the suppression of pleasure. Rather, respectable womanhood in the literary canon was actively defined around a notion of pleasure that encompassed notions of self-sacrifice, ‘positive’ missions, and the wider good. Aesthetics became an exercise in ethics.

‘Dirty’ Literature: Contesting the Logic of Morality! However, the ‘canon’ of Hindi literature was not entirely clear-cut. There were a variety of aspirations, motivations, and contexts of literary production. Just as the devotional rasik movement increased in popularity despite the attacks by puritanical apologists,17 so, too, popular tastes and reading practices resisted and reinterpreted the high Hindi literary norm. Print facilitated the widespread production of 16Maithilisharan

Gupt, Rang Mein Bhang, 9th edn, Jhansi, 1927, p. 23.

17For further details, see C.J. Fuller, The Camphor Flame: Popular Hinduism and Society

in India, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992, pp. 155–69; Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the ‘Ram-charitmanas’ of Tulsidas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, pp. 309–21; Bhagwati Prasad Sinha, Ram Bhakti mein Rasik Sampraday, Balrampur, 1957; Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth: The Management of Religious Experience and Identity in a North Indian Pilgrimage Centre, London: Athlone, 1988, pp. 159–72;

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ashlil material as a commodity, and erotic consumerism became a part of the publishing boom in UP, surreptitiously disturbing the dominance of ‘clean’ literature. These different alternative genres—erotic sex manuals, popular romances, entertaining songs, texts offering advice on sexual relationships—were often indiscriminately conflated by their critics: ‘obscenity’ could be a catch-all category.... Printed sex manuals in Hindi made up a genre that saw substantial growth in early twentieth century UP. Aligarh and Moradabad appear to have been thriving centres of publication.18 Here, the lines between sexual science, erotic art, and obscenity were often blurred. Many of them used a highly Sanskritized language and ran into numerous pages, signifying that they catered to an elite Hindu audience, though this may also have been a means for escaping censure. At the same time, there were popular, thin, cheap versions written in colloquial Hindi. However, all of them claimed to have been inspired by classical works on kamshastra and almost all stressed in their introduction that they were not ashlil. The fear of being banned on charges of obscenity was constantly referred to and thus, most such books camouflaged themselves with the language of sexual science, claiming their authenticity by highlighting the scientific ‘facts’ of sexual life. Many claimed to be prescriptive texts, essential for sexual compatibility and fulfilment. At the same time, to make their books attractive for their audience, they stressed the erotic element—especially the presence of colour pictures— in advertisements carried by prominent papers and magazines.... Other books offered pure erotic pleasure. Chumban Mimansa, published by S.S. Mehta and Brothers of Kashi, was the translation of a Gujarati book describing the history, development, and methods of kissing. On its cover it said it was meant only for private circulation.19 Babu Haridas Vaidya translated Shringar Shatak, categorically stating in the preface: 18Kanhaiya Lal Agarwal, Kamrahasya, Allahabad, 1932; Jagannath Sharma Agnihotri, Asli Kok Shastra arthat Kamikastraka Vrihad Granth, 2nd edn, Benares, 1935; Channulal Dwivedi, Chumban Mimansa, Kashi: S.S. Mehta and Brothers, 1929; Jaidev Nirbhay Ganesh (trans.), Ratimanjari, Moradabad, 1906; Ganga Prasad Gupt, Gupt Prachin Kok Shastra, 2nd edn, Aligarh, 1916; Mohan Lal Gupta, KokSagar, 2nd edn, Aligarh, 1908; Kanhaiya Lal Sharma, Kok Shastra athva Yauvan Bilas, Moradabad, 1900; Ramchandra Vaidya Shastri, Kamya Yogavalt, Aligarh, 1939. 19Channulal Dwivedi, Chumban Mimansa, Kashi: S.S. Mehta and Brothers, 1929.

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I am proud to say that I write all my books for second and third grade citizens, since I am also one among them... Pandit Mohanlal Nehi of Prayag sees a lot of faults in my book, like the degeneration of women...But in our Puranas and even in Ramcharitmanas, there are many lines against women...Should not the Hindus ask publishers of these as well to burn their books?...If we are critics of women, why have we written thousands of pages in her praise?20

There were other, slightly different genres which made eroticism popular. In early twentieth century UP, thin, cheaply-priced pamphlets of songs and satires in Braj greatly outnumbered those which maintained educational and reformist literature.21 Babu Baijnath, a book-seller of Benares, brought out innumerable such tracts, centring around Holi songs and themes of Krishna and his gopis. Most of these adopted a raslila format. Urdu and Persian poetry and phrases were used freely in these. Largely designed for a popular audience, this fictive literature dealt one way or other with sex, offered ephemeral pleasure, and could be highly erotic.22 Qissas and romances in Hindi were printed in pamphlet form, year after year, in huge quantities.23 A large number of sangits and nautankis have been traced in north India, which, besides being performed, were published and widely read.24 These pamphlets, though not especially innovative, extended their consumption via print and in a sense replicated riti poetry, though in a more popular form. They captured the contemporary popular imagination and made profits for their publishers. Many books and pamphlets went into multiple editions and impressions, reflecting easy availability and increasing demand. These ‘obscene’ pamphlets created fresh anxieties among British officials and Hindu moralists, who felt they had a serious 20Haridas Vaidya 21Statement

(trans.), Shringar Shatak, 3rd edn, Mathura, 1933. of Particulars Regarding Books and Periodicals Published in UP (SPBP),

1900–30. 22Also see Brijbasi Das, Braj Bilas, Benares, 1939; Kaviram, Aurat-Mard ka Jhagra [A Pornographical Poem], Allahabad, 1921, SPBP, March 1922, p. 62; Bhudeo Rasad and Sheo Sharan, Rasiya Rasilon ki Bahar (The Pleasures of Merry Beaus), Agra, 1914, SPBP, March 1915, p. 32; Sham Sundar, Joban ki Dhum (The Heat of Youth—Erotic Songs), Mathura, 1910, SPBP, March 1910; Bindeswari Prasad Tiwari, Chautal Champakali, 3rd edn, Gorakhpur, 1932. 23Frances W. Pritchett, Marvellous Encounters: Folk Romance in Urdu and Hindi, New Delhi: Manohar Publications, 1985. 24Kathryn Hansen, Grounds for Play: The Nautanki Theatre of North India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

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and dangerous potential. The authors of these contemporary popular writings had the advantage of mass print, photographic technology, and a commercial press. They could reproduce images, publish their books in substantially large numbers, and ensure good sales; they were, therefore, bringing ‘obscenity’ from the ‘court’ to the ‘masses’, and they had a higher visibility and reach than the Riti Kal poets had ever had. Their market was not limited to the literati—who also bought them despite the scriptures—but extended to an increasing class of functionally literate people, including clerks, shopkeepers, traders, and students. Embracing the hugely commercial trajectory of the eroticized spectacle, such literature could now be found in the newly emerging book markets, local kiosks, and railway stations. These authors tested the boundaries of decency and were thought incompatible with the new ideals of nationhood and civilization; they wrote what some thought should remain unwritten. Shringar was acceptable if it belonged to a fantasy world, or if it was restricted to the elite. The trouble with eroticism was that people, in general, wanted it and liked it, and it seemed to get everywhere. And the trouble with such mass eroticism was its subversion of the usual rules of order and propriety. The possibilities of wider access to such sexually explicit literature made the need for policing it more urgent. Grierson, while carrying out his linguistic survey, wrote a confidential letter in 1925, wherein he expressed concern over the widely published galaxy of erotic works in UP: Up to 1900, the existence of such books was known, but they were rare and impossible to get except through secret channels. They were print and sold simply for their indecent contents for young people whose tastes went that way...But now these books are openly advertised and published, with full accounts of their contents, that leave no doubt as to their nature.25

The British took an increasingly interventionist posture towards such material. They passed orders for the prevention of sale of ‘objectionable’ literature at bookstalls on railway platforms.26 There was confiscation of sexually explicit material in the form of books, pamphlets, magazines, postcards, and pictures, combined with regular prosecution 25669/1925, Judl, Home 26134/May

Deptt (NAI). 1917, Judl, A, Home Deptt (NAI).

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of presses, publishing houses, and booksellers on charges of obscenity. Book stores were often searched for licentious and sexually explicit material. A warning was issued to certain book depots not to keep copies of Kamasutra. A large number of publications, coming in from France and Germany to India, were legally banned.27 The association for Moral and Social Hygiene in India, founded initially in England by Josephine Butler in 1870, was especially active in campaigns against obscenity through its central organizer, Meliscent Shephard, in India. These crusaders regulated representations of sexuality and sex, often by censoring sexually-oriented books, pamphlets, and magazines.28 ...The charge of obscenity was levelled most strongly against Ugra’s book, Chaklet, published in 1927, which dealt with sodomy, sexual acts between adult males and adolescent boys, and aspects of male homosexuality.29 Chaklet (that is, Chocolate) was a collection of eight short stories, variously titled, ‘He Sukumar’ (Oh, Beautiful Youth); ‘Vyabhichari Pyar’ (Transgressive Love); ‘Jail Mein’ (In Jail); ‘Hum Fidaye Lackhnau’ (I am a Fan of Lucknow); ‘Kamariya Nagin si Bal Khaye’ (The Waist Twists like a Female Snake); etc. Written in a titillating fashion, these stories were against sodomy and homosexuality, and claimed inspiration from real-life incidents. However, via the processes they condemned they also acknowledged the prevalence of such practices, especially in UP, where beautiful young boys were called ‘chocolate’, ‘pocket-book’, and ‘money-order’.30 Chaklet claimed that men were becoming more feminine.31 It hinted at homosexual tendencies between Krishna and Arjun, Ram and Tulsidas, and Krishna and Surdas.32 It proved a commercial sensation and within six weeks of its appearance two impressions were sold out.33 The guardians of morality launched militant criticism against this book, and through it against many writings such as Ugra’s Dilli ka 27361/1937, Judl, Home Deptt (NAI); 372/1937, Judl, Home Deptt (NAI); 131/1939, Judl, Home Deptt (NAI). 28831/1933, Judl, Home Deptt (NAI); 29/52/1937, Home Poll (NAI); 136/1940, Judl, Home Deptt (NAI). 29Pandey Bechan Sharma ‘Ugra’, Chaklet, 3rd edn, Calcutta, 1953. 30Ibid., pp. 56, 101, 125–35, 156. 31Ibid., p. 102. 32Ibid., pp. 76, 117. 33Ibid., cover.

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Dalai and books like Vyabhichari Mandir and Abalaon ka Insaf.34 Such works were referred to as ghasleti sahitya, and a movement against this literature, known as ghasleti andolan, was sustained for twelve years.35 Banarsidas Chaturvedi, the editor of Vishal Bharat, took the lead and was largely backed by the new Hindi loci of authority— university departments, literary associations, and important journals. In UP, the magazines, Chand and Sudha, published material against such literature, and the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan and Kashi Nagari Pracharini Sabha adopted resolutions against these books.36 Gandhi initially wrote against Chaklet without reading it, but later, after going through it, did not find it obscene. He wrote a letter to this effect (which, however, was brought to light only in 1951).37 The point is, why did a book like Chaklet, which actually attacked sodomy and homosexuality, lead to such a hysterical reaction? The campaign against it was at once paternalist and moralist, and deployed to ‘protect’ the public from ‘unhealthy’ influences. However, its reach hints at there being something more volatile at stake than the offence given to ideas of purity and respectability. Ugra wrote on a taboo subject, an unmentionable act, and spoke the unspeakable.38 Critics claimed that the actual effect of Ugra’s writings was to titillate and excite his readers and thus, to encourage, not discourage, homosexual desire.39 The colonial presence, the growing nationalist movement, and the emerging high literary trends and their links with Hindu identity gave the campaign a specific colour in north India. The attack on Chaklet was also part of a nationalist critique, for the de-gendered male was one stereotype of colonial domination. Chaklet seemed to cast doubt on the stability of the heterosexual regime, on procreative 34Sphurna 35Ratnakat

Devi, Abalaon ka Insaf, 3rd edn, Allahabad: Chand Press, 1936. Pandey, Ugra aur Unka Sahitya, Varanasi, 1969, pp. 255–73; Ugra, Chaklet,

1953, pp. 1–12. 36Pandey, Ugra aur Unka Sahitya, 1969, pp. 260–6. 37Ibid., pp. 271–2;Ugra, Chaklet, 1953, p. 1. 38Sodomy and homosexuality have aroused hysterical reactions in various other cultures and in different historical moments. See Christopher Craft, Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English Discourse, 1850–1920, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe (eds), Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History and Literature, New York: New York University Press, 1997. 39Ruth Vanita, ‘The New Homophobia: Ugra’s Chocolate’, in Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, New York: Palgrave, 2000, pp. 246–52.

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imperatives, on modern monogamous ideals of marriage. It dared to mention the stigma and disgrace of effeminacy, of sexual inversion in male behaviour, which dominant traditions preferred unmentioned. Ancient texts and medieval court customs reveal a history of homosexual relationships.40 However, Chaklet highlighted the fact that there were new institutions and sites for increasing male–male bondings such as schools, colleges, hostels, cinemas, theatres, social service organizations, parks, clubs, fairs, and jails.41 Chaklet brought into public view emergent urban male attachments and alternative sexualities, posing a danger to ‘civilization’ at a time when the imagery of a strong, masculine Hindu male was a concern of the nation. It opened an epistemological gap, a sort of Freudian void in maleness itself. The consequences of this conflict, which pitted critics against popular literature and by extension, against entertaining fiction, was a long-lasting rift in the Hindi literature that was enshrined in a large part of the canon. Reading such books was considered a crime among students, and critics made sure that they were never included in the syllabus; indeed, in the history of Hindi literature. But this literature survived, thanks to its popularity. The conflict continued well over the coming period and saw many debates in the 1940s as well—over Jainendra Kumar’s Sunita,42 Yashpal’s Dada Comrade,43 and Ismat Chugtai’s Lihaf. 44 To complicate the picture, popular literature was not a monolithic category. There were popular works on mythological and historically chaste wives; figures like Savitri, Sita, Sukanya, Gandhari, and Damyanti occupied prized places45 within a whole genre of conduct books46 40Giti Thadani, Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India, London: Cassell, 1996; Vanita and Kidwai (eds), Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, 1996. 41Ugra, Chaklet, 1953, pp. 53–4, 87–95, 102, 125, 137. 42Jainendra Kumar, Sunita, Delhi, 1935. 43See Madhulika Pathak, Yashpal ke Katha Sahitya mein Kam, Prem aur Parwar, Bombay, 1992. 44For the case launched against it, see Ismat Chugtai (trans. Javed Iqbal), ‘Ek Mukadme ki Dastan’, Hans, vol. 11, no. 4, November 1996, pp. 29–34. 45For example, see Yashoda Devi, Saccha Pali Prem, Allahabad, 1910; Chandrabali Mishra, Adarsh Hindu Nari, Benares, 1930; Lalita Prasad Sharma, Bharatvarsha ki Sacchi Deviyan, 5th edn, Bareilly, 1923. 46Janardan Joshi, Grh Prabandh Shastra, 2nd edn, Prayag, 1918; Jivaram Kapur Khatri, Stri Dharma Sar, Mathura, 1892; Gupt ‘Pagal’, Grhini Bhushan, 2nd edn, Kashi, 1921; Ganga

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which aided the new moral literature. Many of these can be classified with various Christian missionary tracts which appeared around the same time.47 Print opened vast avenues with contradictory messages and meanings. It was not easy to make sexual pleasure a victim of the moral panic. On the other hand, even male sexual fantasies and desires were a challenge to the moral–aesthetic literary categories of the period. This came out sharply in advertisements.

BRAHMACHARYA, KALIYUG, AND THE ADVERTISEMENT APHRODISIACS

OF

...Brahmacharya has long been one of the core doctrines of Hindu dharma. Hindu tradition emphasized the preservation of semen as essential for male empowerment and energy.48 At the same time, there is a history of sexual celebration within Hinduism; in brief, sensuality and celibacy coexist in a religion which is well acknowledged for its ability to accommodate such heterogeneity and contradiction. Within this, the image of the brahmachari remains the ideal and a high cultural value is placed on sexual continence. In the colonial period, this ideal of brahmacharya was infused with new meanings and transformed into a modern discourse. It has been shown how brahmacharya operates among the wrestlers of north India. The power of sex is supposedly turned away, in the akharas, from the chaos of passion into disciplined masculine strength.49 More recently, Alter has examined the medical mechanics. Prasad Upadhyaya, Mahila Vyavahar Chandrika, Prayag, 1928.; A similar point has been made in the context of late nineteenth century Bengal: Tanika Sarkar, ‘Hindu Conjugality and Nationalism in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in Jasodhara Bagchi (ed.), Indian Women: Myth and Reality, Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1995, pp. 98–115. 47For example, the Christian Vernacular Education Society, Allahabad, regularly published Ratanmala, a reading book for women, advising them on the domestic management and training of children. First edition was published in 1869. I saw continuous reprints of it, with slight modifications. 48Gananath Obeyesekere, Medusa’s Hair: An Essay on Personal Symbols and Religious Experience, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, New Delhi: Penguin, 1989. 49Joseph S. Alter, The Wrestler’s Body: Identity and Ideology in North India, Delhi, 1993; idem, ‘Celibacy, Sexuality and the Transformation of Gender into Nationalism in North India’, JAS, vol. 53, no.1, February 1994, pp. 45–66; idem, ‘The Celibate Wrestler: Sexual

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...Print brought a flood of cheap self-help guides on brahmacharya. Age-old instructions were repeatedly stressed and infused with modern definitions. The Hindu male was inundated with treatises on brahmacharya,50 against masturbation and for the preservation of semen.51 The gurukul prospectus stressed complete brahmacharya till the age of twenty-five, and remarked on present woes: Adulterous tendencies...have been refined and exalted by being characterized as ‘sowing wild oats’, ‘free love’...The supreme need of the age is therefore moral self-control...The system of education must be radically changed if society is to be rescued from dissolution, decomposition and disintegration... The Gurukul at Kangri is the first earnest attempt made in this age to revive dharma and train students on spiritual lines...We all know that youngsters, hardly out of their teens, read stupid novels, instinct with an immoral tone and catch-penny newspapers full of slapdash [material]...This state of affairs is impossible in the Gurukul...Students...are permitted to read only such portions of a newspaper article as...are in harmony with the ingredients which go to form their mental structure and intellectual upbuilding.52

Instructions to the Hindu male were endless. He was to make an allout effort to control his sexual urge from a very young age. Hast maithun, svapn dosh, guda maithun, homosexuality, and fornication were all encompassed as the major evils of male sexuality. Anything seen as involving orgasms and emissions was taboo, and seen as leading to disease. Semen was the essence of life and its discharge was a loss of vital energy, regardless of how it happened. To ensure male purity, to see that not a drop of precious semen fell waste upon barren soil, the Hindu male was drilled into keeping rein over his fantasies, passions, and imagination. He was to desist from masturbation completely. He Chaos, Embodied Balance and Competitive Politics in North India’, in Patricia Uberoi (ed.), Social Reform, Sexuality and the State. New Delhi: Sage, 1996, pp. 109–31. 50Lala Bhagwandin, Brahmacharya ki Vaigyanik Vyakhya, Kashi, n.d.; Gaurdas Maharaj, Brahmachari Bano, Agra, 1928; Goswami Brijnath Sharma (comp.), Haridwarasth Rishikul Brahmacharyairam ki Niyamavali, Agra, 1914; Pannalal Sharma, Yuva Raksbak, Agra, n.d.; Suryabali Singh, Brahmacharya ki Mahima, Benares, 1928. 51Ganeshduit Sharma Gaur ‘Indra’, Svapn Dosh Rakshak, Benares, 1929; Ramchandra Vaidya Shastri, Balopyogi Virya-Rahasya, Kanpur, n.d.; Chimmanlala Vaishya, Virya Raksha, 10th edn, Meerut, 1928. 52Ram Deva, ‘The Claims of the Gurukula on the Civilized World’, in Prospectus of the Gurukul Kangri Mahavidyalaya on the Civilized World. Hardiwar, 1911, pp. xiii–xx.

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was asked to keep his heart and mind at peace, it being fondly supposed that these results would be achieved by abstinence. All descriptions of women and any desire to touch them had to be shunned. Man was never to sit alone with woman, nor even sit where woman had sat before. Man was not to wear bright and dark clothes. Watching women dance; frequenting the theatre—raslila, nautanki, and cinema; listening to songs or music—especially those sung by women during marriages—and reading novels related to romance and shringar ras were all proscribed. Men were asked to stop singing, playing instruments, and dancing. Contact and conversations with lower-caste and lower-class women were prohibited. He was not to ride on horses or camels; presumably, these activities would stimulate his manhood. He was not to eat spicy food, not to dream of women, and not to employ language or expression which might increase sexual desire. He was to even give up wearing shoes, carrying an umbrella, using scented unguents and flowers, and sleeping on a soft bed.53 ... By contrast, advertisements for aphrodisiacs were printed in large numbers in ‘respectable’ newspapers and magazines, especially from the early twentieth century. Given the times, when new concepts of brahmacharya were evolving and changing to serve new purposes, advertisements such as these, which whetted the fantasies of Hindu males by offering a pleasure as divine as unattainable, proved extremely popular.54 Though traditional aphrodisiacs had thrilled Indian lovers for centuries, printed as advertisements they literally took on new contours and shapes. Advertisements transformed the secrets of sex into a public spectacle. They brought aphrodisiacs into the open market; low prices made them accessible to the general public. Many traditional remedies could now be sold in attractive packages, number of quacks and companies were floated, freely publishing their advertisements everywhere and every day, largely catering to male consumers, actively selling invigorating and vitalizing medicine. 53Kangri, Gurukul, pp. 1, 10–11;Anonymous,’Brahmacharya’, Gurukul Samachar, April– May 1910, pp. 2, 9–10, 24–5; Anonymous, ‘Navyuvakon ka Kartavya’, Kushwaha Kshatriya Mitra, vol. 15, no. 1, January 1928, pp. 3–8; Vaishya, Virya, pp. 25-ilal 46; Indra, Svapn, pp. 5–10; Singh, Brahmacharya, pp. 9–11, 88–90; Maharaj, nik Brahmachari, pp. 11–12. 54See Lori Anne Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. iii–viii.

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B. Pandey of Shivram Aushadhalay in Allahabad, in his advertisement of ‘Kamdev Vati’, claimed his powders gave immense physical power, increased the formation of semen, made it thicker, and would benefit even old men.55 Advertisements for ‘Madan Manjari’ and ‘Kamratan Goliyan’ declared cures for impotence, premature ejaculation, and nocturnal emissions, enabling the enjoyment of an improved sex life.56 These advertisements occupied large spaces: on a single page of Vartman of 6 August 1938, there were five such advertisements. Kailash and Company of Kanpur, and Vaidyaratan Saryadevji of Rupvilas Company at Etawah, advertised extensively for their ‘Kailash Viryavrij Churn’ and ‘Kamsundari Vati’. They offered remedies for laziness in seven days, restoring the man to his full power and glory, ensuring that he was instantly attracted to his kamini. ‘Tila Mastana’, another aphrodisiac, was said to have a lightning effect on the body.57 ‘Shiv Mohini Surari’ claimed refreshment of mind and body.58 Another advertisement, for ‘Mohini’, claimed that those who divined its secret would compel their sweethearts to present themselves within eleven days.59 Dr S.K. Burman and Sitaram Vaidya of Calcutta advertised extensively in UP’s newspapers and magazines, again promising abundant energy and the enjoyment of life at its fullest. With their medicines, even the weakest and the oldest man would relish the pleasures of life.60 Almost all such pills extensively deployed words like kam, with various suffixes, and other erotic titles; these served nicely to attract people, making sex a spectacle and a commodity.... The advertisements opened a new public space for sexual information. They were seen as signifying a general breakdown of sexual morality and posing serious threats not only to notions of brahmacharya but to civilization itself. Their tremendous visibility and use of picturesque language created a moral panic, which made it hard for many British and Hindus. The British government mounted a campaign and expressed its desire ‘to take action to purify the 55Abhyudaya, 11 April 1925, p. 36. Such advertisements appeared almost every day in all the leading newspapers and magazines of UP. 56Abhyudaya, 20 January 1923, pp. 6 and 10 respectively. 57Vartman, 6 August 1938, p. 8. 58Vartman, 24 January 1925, p. 4. 59Anis-i-Hind, 9 November 1898, NNR, 15 November 1898, p. 601. 60Vartman, 22 January 1925, p. 4; Madhuri, pp. 3, 2–6.

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tone of advertisements in the public press’.61 The use of ‘obscene’ language, taken as a sign of moral corruption, illicit intercourse, and unclean thought, combined with fears of public health and eugenic arguments, and these were the usual reasons cited to justify their banning. The Calcutta Missionary Conference submitted a memorandum to the Viceroy and Governor-General of India in 1890, which stated ‘that your memorialists, as persons deeply interested in the moral welfare of the people of the country, have frequent cause to deplore the publication or circulation of advertisements of a corrupt and degrading kind.’62 Many newspaper editors in UP were prosecuted and convicted for publishing obscene advertisements for aphrodisiacs.63 In 1890, when several editors of Moradabad were convicted and fined on the charge, some of them resolved to submit a memorandum to the local government with a view to discover what comprised ‘obscene’. They argued that the advertisements were not published to encourage immorality or outrage the public decency but were intended for the public good. ‘Obscene’ words, after all, were to be found even in legal and medical works.64... For many Hindu publicists, the advertisements reflected fears of unbridled sexual collapse in the age of Kaliyug, and revealed the limits inherent in sexual discipline. They made a mockery of brahmacharya. Though these advertisements upheld strong patriarchal notions, they were, at the same time, a challenge to the moral order of that very same patriarchy. They were icons of a world of deviant sexuality, of disorder, of the potential loss of rational Hindu male self-control. The ‘good’ brahmachari could be controlled, whereas ‘bad’ male desire was beyond control. Thus, there arose a discourse of fear and condemnation. An article in Gurukula Samachar, entitled ‘Vigyapan’ (Advertisements), began by emphasizing how aphrodisiac advertisements were an important source of money for newspapers and for companies selling such medicines, but that this money was earned by selling dirt and not by good means.65 61174–6/June

1911, B, Home Poll (NAI). 1890, Public, A, Home Deptt (NAI). 63Koh-i-Nur, Native Newspaper Reports (NNR), 28 February 1888, p. 154. 64Dabir-i-Hirtd, 10 January 1890, NNR, 20 January 1890, p. 32. 65Anonymous, ‘Vigyapan’, Gurukul Samachar, no. 2, April–May 1910, pp. 9–10, 27–32. 62229–32/January

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But the problem was that the advertisements for aphrodisiacs were a source of revenue for a press that was short of resources. Markets have their own logic. Several newspaper editors, who were otherwise staunch supporters of the Hindu cause, defended such advertisements. And so, in spite of the concerted campaign against them, manufacturers of aphrodisiacs continued to find ways to market their products. ...Hindu moralists wished to establish their identity and a civilized modern nation by propagating a particular kind of literature, distancing themselves from notions of obscenity and sexual pleasure. There was unease in relation to shringar ras in the late medieval elite literature and even more so, in relation to an eclectic print culture and popular publishing, these being seen as providing eroticism to the masses. Control and order were necessary for ‘good’ and ‘useful’ literature, for the moral authority of an aspiring Hindi literati and a Hindu nationalist identity. Literary ethics was linked to the morality of the nation. To a large extent, these ‘high’ literary trends were successful. Salacious works were no longer considered a part of literary culture. Textbook Hindi literature of the Dwivedi period, specifically, was largely aimed at creating a new aesthetic taste, wherein the chastity of the Hindu woman was an essential element. This literature was important and influential, but naturally it did not occupy the whole field of social identities. The picture is more complex if one looks at other Hindi publications. The bulk of these were indifferent to sanitized literary taste and nation-building. What actually sold in the market and brought profits were a vast variety of sex manuals, romances, songs, and advertisements. Old forms—erotic Braj bhasha songs, qissas, nautankis, and sangits—were printed in huge quantities. New commercial genres such as romantic novels and thrillers provided entertainment and even dealt with taboo subjects. Advertisements catered to sexual anxieties. Sex manuals adopted a ‘scientific’ garb while offering titillation. This literature was not on the margins, it was at the centre of an emerging subculture where patriarchal and moralistic notions were partly reconstructed and partly contested. A simple distinction between high and low, elite and popular, does not take us very far. There were reformers who thought sexual fulfilment essential in marriage; moreover, the writers and readership of erotic material were themselves part of the Hindu middle class. The ‘high’ sanitized literature had only a limited readership.

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There has been a more or less timeless abundance of risque verses, songs, saws, and galis among Hindi-speaking communities. There were popular genres like the nautanki in north India. Too nebulous and yet, too universal to be called a ‘tradition’, still less part of any canon, this popular oral arena became another sphere of regulation by Hindu publicists. Its special aim was to control and regulate women.

6 The Hindi Political Sphere* Francesca Orsini

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n the history of political culture in India, the year 1920 marked the beginning of a new phase in the nationalist movement. Mass politics, indigenous languages, popular participants, counter symbols, and counter authority began to play an unprecedented role. The ‘public’ that was the target of nationalist rhetoric seemed finally to be physically there. New leaders and a new Congress party emerged from this phase of the movement, and by the end of the 1930s, an indigenous political leadership was ready to inherit the reins of the country.1 Many of the activists and leaders, who emerged in north India during the campaign of 1920, came from the world of Hindi journalism. Writers also believed that they were serving the movement, by fighting with their pens. Literature, the press, and politics were seen as a continuum, a joint effort to liberate the country. Yet, the relationship between the literary and the political spheres was far more complex than most accounts would have us believe. Indeed, as we shall see, it was a difficult and often, very bitter one.

*Originally published as ‘The Hindi Political Sphere’, in Francesca Orsini’s The Hindi Public Sphere 1920–1940: Language and Literature in the Age of Nationalism, New York: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 309–22. 1For political histories, Gyanendra Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in the Uttar Pradesh, 1926–34: A Study in Imperfect Mobilization, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978; Francis Robinson, Separatism among Indian Muslims, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974; Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, 1885 to 1947, Delhi: Macmillan, 1983.

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This had partly to do with the predicament of Hindi as a language, snubbed by non-Hindi politicians and yet picked as the national language. Other difficulties stemmed from the peculiar development of the nationalist political sphere. In order to understand the relationship between the Hindi literary sphere and this expanding political sphere, several angles are needed. First of all, that of ‘institutional’ spaces and activities, both within and outside the spaces allowed by the colonial state—what I have termed ‘constitutional’ and ‘non-constitutional’ domains. There are several questions to be asked. Who had access to political institutions? Was language a barrier and, if so, how was it circumvented? Did ‘constitutional’ and ‘non-constitutional’ politics imply two different attitudes to the state and to the public?

CONSTITUTIONAL AND NON-CONSTITUTIONAL DOMAINS How can we get svarajya with the Boards? Srikrsnadatt Palival How can we get svarajya by leaving schools? Sumangal Prakas’s father2

In the literary sphere, autonomous activism and institution building went side by side with pressure on, and cooperation with, the colonial state. Literary associations from the nineteenth century onwards not only pursued their autonomous literary agenda, they were also convinced that independent activities were always best enhanced by state support; even when the colonial state had long ceased having the semblance of a benevolent agency, the presence of nationalist-minded officers, sensitive to the Hindi project, always left open a channel of communication. One finds a similar double track in the political sphere. The nationalist movement was concerned both with entering colonial institutions, gradually occupying the state in order to change it from within, and with autonomous activism, mobilizing an increasing number of popular groups, antagonizing the state, and creating a counter authority. Both aspects need to be taken into consideration when analysing the political culture of Indian nationalism. 2Srikrsnadatt Palival, ‘Kaunsilorh dvara svarajya’, Visal Bharat, February 1936, p. 449; ‘Sri Sumangal Prakas ke samsmaran’, in Krsnanath (ed.), Kasi vidyapith hirak jayanti. Abhinandan granth, Benares: Jnanmandal, 1983, p. 185.

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In this section, then, constitutional and non-constitutional politics signify two styles of politics, of mediating within society and between society and the state. By constitutional politics, I mean a political culture that was largely shaped by colonial expectations and by the spaces offered by the colonial state, and which reproduced those expectations in the vernacular. By non-constitutional politics, I signify a political culture which tried to grow more autonomously, with an original cultural content and independent institutions that provided spaces where colonial culture could be replaced by a national one. This does not mean that it was not influenced by the colonial context, of course, only that in its self-representation, it self-consciously emphasized autonomous genealogies and alternative idioms. It was here that non-literate sections of society gained access to the political sphere and made their presence felt to literate elites, as we shall see. Some of the peculiarities of the state that these political actors had to face need to be recalled.3 The European bourgeois public sphere, described by Habermas, struggled to impose an impersonal notion of political power and to gradually transform the absolutist state into a limited constitutional one, subject to public scrutiny, pressure, and (however partial) influence. The institutions, language, and discourses of the public sphere emerged from the social terrain of this struggle. In India, these institutions and discourses were introduced into a different social universe and under different structural arrangements: they had to contend with different pressures from the British and the colonial state itself, and from different groups of Indian subjects. The colonial state that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Hindi intellectuals faced was an ostensibly benevolent and liberal state which appeared amenable to reasonable arguments and claimed to be equally neutral towards all its Indian subjects. Under colonial rule, all Indian citizens, irrespective of status, were subjected to the same set of impersonal laws and public courts. Thus, any complaint against the law or against other citizens had to take the same form of public procedure, through formal complaints and petitions, magistrates, and courts of law. 3The following discussion is heavily indebted to Sudipta Kaviraj, ‘On the Construction of Colonial Power: Structure Discourse Hegemony’, in Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks (eds), Contesting Colonial Hegemony, London: British Academic Press, 1994, pp. 19–54.

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Yet this state, which swore by liberal principles, pursued interests that were subordinate to those of the mother country, even when they differed from the interests of the colonial subjects. The British colonial state in India contended with several conflicting demands of accountability and different needs for legitimacy. First and foremost, it was accountable to the regime in England and to British public opinion. But, and in this lay the first paradox of the colonial state, it was far more powerful than the state was in the mother country, and not bound by the democratic rules, restraints, and demands that restricted elitist politics there. On the other hand, it was an Indian state, that is, it had to respond in an intelligible and effective way to the pressures and the social logic of India. In its interaction with the dissimilar and largely unrelated publics of Indian society, and in its discourse of legitimacy both in India and in England, colonial rule adopted different attitudes and idioms. In Sudipta Kaviraj’s words, ‘In its dialogue with British public opinion it adopted a tone of reasonableness; with the indigenous middle class, it carried on a dialogue through education and legislation; while vis-a-vis the sullenly distant popular masses, it adopted primarily a monologue of force.’4 Without relinquishing its first vocation of economic extraction, the post-1858 Indian state became more of a ‘strong’, national state. It intervened to restructure the economy, social processes (through education, bills of social reform, etc.), and relations between the state and society, thus opening new grounds of public confrontation with Indian subjects. Bilingualism—the hierarchy of English and Indian ‘vernaculars’—was written into all the relations between the colonial state and its subjects and became duplicated in Indian society. Finally, although power under the colonial regime was public in the sense of being at least a formal and impersonal set of laws and institutions, however iniquitous to large sections of the population, it was heavily ‘personified’ in local figures of authority—landlords—who usually had at least some control of the impersonal and ‘legal’ state machinery, the police, and the courts. However, to the extent that colonial state power was impersonal and public and, at least formally, not absolute, it potentially implied a democratic discourse, which both imperialists and nationalists 4Ibid., p. 21.

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tried to exploit to different ends.5 This fostered a culture of petition and of confidence in state patronage that was a direct consequence of state publicity: if the state claimed that its laws applied to all, and that subjects could and should appeal by public means, colonial intellectuals believed that changing the letter of the law would bring about actual change. However limited, the colonial state did open some spaces for Indian participation, and encouraged the formation and expression of ‘Indian public opinion’ to a certain extent. Indians co-opted through nomination belonged to two groups: they were either ‘native chiefs’, who were supposed to command the natural obedience of the masses; or western-educated, bilingual civil servants and professionals, often lawyers, who formed a bourgeoning educated public opinion.6 Since these limited constitutional proceedings were carried on in English, bilingual professionals had an advantage over local notables who did not know the language.7 They became familiar with the official ‘public idiom’, both in speech and in writing, in order to understand and interact with the state machinery. These first politicians, of whom Madan Mohan Malaviya is an excellent example, then translated such concepts and language into the vernacular, and publicly held the state up against its own rules.8 This was a creative process; in Malaviya’s case, for example, it meant espousing Britain’s colonizing mission to demand that the rule of the liberal state be applied to the Indian state, 5See the section on ‘The Colonial Context’, a chapter in Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat city, 1852–1928, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 6Restricted franchise structurally limited participation in ‘constitutional politics’, before 1920, to landed and moneyed elites and to educated professionals, the latter often tied to the former as clients. Being an honorary magistrate or sitting on the local boards became a mark of prestige and a way of securing a new venue of patronage and influence. Nomination was also considered a sign of official benevolence and was one way of showing the kind of ‘public commitment’ British authorities so appreciated; see C.A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics: Allahabad, 1880–1920, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 and Douglas Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial India, 1991. 7Actual participation at meetings was usually low, and it was occasionally remarked that the notables or their courtiers who sat on them sometimes did not know English. 8For example, each year the Chairman of the Municipal Board submitted an annual report to the Commissioner for comment (samalochna). In 1920, The Kashi Central Ratepayers’ Association submitted a similar detailed report ‘on behalf of the general public’ (sarvasadharan ki aur se), which the Benares daily, Aj, translated into Hindi and published over several issues in September. Aj, 12 September 1920 and ff.

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and refuting Indians’ incapacity for self-government. He adduced textual evidence to argue that, in fact, self-rule had existed in ancient India, that is, the demand for it by modern Indians was not imitative of British democracy. Constitutional politicians spoke in the name of the ‘general public’ (sarvasadharan), yet, as with Hindi reformist intellectuals, the public they claimed to represent was only vaguely defined and intrinsically restricted. As Malaviya’s case shows, constitutional politics raised their claims only in the spaces allowed by the colonial state; even svarajya was envisaged as a gradual reform and paternalistic democracy. Despite the occasionally fiery tones, the kind of popular participation Malaviya requested was very limited. It was more important that the dialogue and cooperation with the government should not halt. Thus, Malaviya invited the Prince of Wales to BHU in 1929 and conferred upon him a degree honoris causa, while the Congress in the whole province boycotted the visit and staged black-flag demonstrations. This style of constitutional politics self-consciously upheld boundaries between different areas of life: there was the official public sphere of the board–assembly–law court, there was the civic public sphere, which could overlap with that of the community in religious and political terms, and there was the sphere of the family biradari (brotherhood), each with its distinct idiom, ideology, and behaviour. To take Malaviya again: in the parliamentary arena, he used a strictly constitutional idiom; at the same time, he worked to create a Hindu constituency around symbols like the cow and Hindi, and yet, he strongly opposed official and unofficial interference with personal and family practices and beliefs. Successive constitutional innovations, motivated by the twin requirements of financial devolution and the need for a wider circle of Indian collaborators, partially enlarged this constitutional space, first at the local and then at the provincial level. Gradually election supplanted nomination.9 However inconsequential, elections turned 9For constitutional reforms, see Sarkar, Modern India, 1983. Briefly, the 1916 UP Municipalities Act and the 1922 UP District Boards Act introduced election at the local level and had important consequences, especially in terms of expectations and opportunities. The 1919 Montagu-Chelmsford constitution introduced partly elective provincial legislatures; despite the extended franchise, its bias in favour of land-owning classes ensured the return of a loyal majority. The act also provided representation without responsibility:

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constitutional politics into more of a political arena and forced candidates to turn to ‘the public’ and develop proper idioms in the vernaculars, carefully nuanced to match each particular audience.10 Even ‘traditional leaders’ favoured by the policy of nomination, now had to make active efforts to ensure their erstwhile influence,11 while separate electorates favoured the politics and idiom of community interests. When Congress activists and leaders, legitimized by the nonconstitutional movement, were elected to the boards and provincial councils, this was saluted as a popular victory in that they seemed to ‘occupy the state’. Although they insisted on certain signs of change (dress, the use of the vernacular, and of course ideology), the Congressmen broadly adapted to the constitutional style. This involved a certain formality of countenance, obeisance to parliamentary rules, and the ability to use the official idiom, albeit in the vernacular. In fact, the ability to master the idiom of constitutional politics remained a fundamental skill, a symbol of the bilingualism Indian politicians had to command. The first time Sampurnanand spoke in the UP Legislative Council, after the 1926 elections, he began his speech in Hindi: The Speaker, Dr Sita Ram, pulled me up, the rule being that unless a member was unable to speak in English, he must use that language. In my heart, I was thankful to the President, because I was anxious that what I was going to say should be understood by the English members opposite. But as a Hindi writer certain matters remained ‘reserved’ (‘diarchy’); governors had special powers of veto and ‘certification’ (that is, to enact legislation refused by the Legislative Assemblies); and ministers were responsible to the governors and not to the assembly. See Pandey, 1978, pp. 24 ff. 10For example, it was difficult for C.Y. Chintamani, the renowned editor of The Leader, to campaign for a seat in Jhansi in 1920 without knowing any Hindi; finally, he had to utter a few sentences in a restricted public meeting just to disavow criticism on this point. See Vrindavanlal Varma, Apni kahani, Delhi: Prabhat Prakashan, 1993 (First published in 1962), pp. 55 ff. 11The real quandaries brought about by this process are poignantly captured in the following incident, reported in the pro-Congress daily, Aj, in 1920, as ‘A fight between kshatriyas and non-kshatriyas’. A local zamindar had called a ‘public meeting’ to ensure peasant support for his anti-Congress candidate, who tried to play the card of the solidarity between rural classes. However, since the meeting was public, it was open to local Congress supporters. One of them stood up in protest and mentioned the satyagraha Gandhi had undertaken for the peasants in Kheri and Champaran. The villagers started rumbling in agreement. At this point, the chairman of the meeting declared it a private meeting: ‘We have spent Rs 1000’, he said, ‘this is our praivet miting. It is we who decide whether to allow others to speak if we want to’ (Aj, 22 September 1920, p. 6). At this, other local activists stood up in protest and said that it was a public meeting and it was extremely despicable for them to stop or threaten anyone.

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I had to show preference to Hindi. I, therefore, protested mildly against the President’s order and continued in English.12

In the constitutional arena, then, Hindi was a symbol, while English was the language of substance. Expectations from Congress participation in constitutional politics were always likely to exceed what circumstances allowed. With the emergence of popular, non-constitutional politics led by Gandhi, however, criticism of the boards became structurally different. Whereas earlier criticism tended to focus on individual malpractice, now it was the structure itself that came under fire. Hindi editor and Congress leader, Srikrisnadatt Palival, noted in 1936 that popular opinion was very much against the Legislative Council, which it ‘rightly’ considered the ‘temple of Maya’: The Councils are temples of Maya because ostensibly (pratyaks men) they are there to help people rule, to put the strings of power in the hands of their representatives; but actually they are there to fulfil the interests of the ruling and capitalist classes! The whole electoral procedure is a demonic Maya (raksasi maya) from the beginning to the end. In our country not everybody has yet the right to vote. Those who have it do not control the registration of names. As a result, there is quite a bundle when the list of registers is made. This malpractice has reached its peak in the Municipalities...13

Besides, constitutional boards only appeared to make power public, in other words, transparent and accessible: ‘In councils and assemblies one meets power and wealth face to face...[but] the rulers’ rights are kept safe in a temple where representatives, like untouchables, are denied entry’.14 Yet, after denouncing the serious limitations on political activity within the assemblies, and agreeing with the popular perception that they were a travesty (svang), Palival concluded that to ‘enter the enemy’s fortress’ was a necessary part of the overall strategy for winning svarajya.15 12Sampurnanand, Memories and Reflections, Bombay: Asia Publishing House, 1962, p. 46. It is significant that this major Hindi politician chose to write his autobiography in English, probably aiming at a pan-Indian audience. 13Palival, ‘Kaunsilon dvara svarajya’, Visal Bharat, February 1936, pp. 449–52. 14Ibid. 15‘There is no other way. Even Lenin reached this conclusion, even Gandhi has reached it now...We neither have or should have any hope in the councils; but we should also stop talking of boycott. Council-entry is a necessary evil, and with this in mind we should put up with them;’ ibid.

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Disappointment over the performance of elected Congress boards could even be turned into an indictment of the conflict between ‘our boards’ and the alien state. When the Benares Municipal Board was threatened (and then met) with suspension for corruption in 1932, Premchand wrote that the boards were still to be valued as a political space, open for the public to exercise some degree of activity and power in the administration. Its achievements (for example, in the field of education) should not be belittled, and enthusiastic non-official members could always open the possibility of reform. ‘Whatever progress there has been in Kasi Municipality’, he wrote, ‘it has happened during the period of the non-official (gair-sarkari) board, and in my opinion the administration of a non-official board is always the best; at least it is not unrestrained (nirankus)’.16 Implied in Palival’s critique was the notion that legitimacy rested with the ‘people’, the ‘true’ nation shut outside the ‘temples of Maya’. Taking on the fictitious persona of a ‘shack-dweller’ (jhonpra vala), editor, poet, and Congress activist Makhanlal Chaturvedi voiced a plea to the ‘travellers on the national path’ (rastriy path ke pathik) entitled, ‘Ham jansadharan hain’ (We are the common people). Through mimicry of the stereotypical deferential attitude of the subordinate to the powerful, he measured the distance between constitutional nationalists and the aspirations of common people. This is the voice of a wretched man, a common, ignorant man, only proud to serve. You are the leaders, strongwilled and wise. [...] Your Reform Bill has been passed, very well. We also speak your praise with great joy, but in our huts our wives ask us: ‘Will this new law bring us food to fill our stomachs?’ We also believe that education is necessary, but education cannot fill an empty stomach!...Therefore, mahatmas with lofty ideals, we salute you. We thank you, all we have got is tears and we wash your feet with them, but nobody listens to our cry. You are clearing the road at the top. It will take centuries to reach the bottom. We don’t have food to eat tomorrow, how can we wait patiently for centuries?17 16Jagaran, 21 November 1932, in Premchand, Vividh Prasang, vol. 2, p. 515. See also Paripurnanda Varma’s articles on the history of Kasi Municipal Board since the Bhagvan Das-led Congress board of 1923, revealing instances of official responsibility in sabotaging the elected board; Aj, February 1933. 17Makhanlal Chaturvedi, ‘Ham jansadharan hain’, Karmavir, 14 February 1920, in S. Joshi (ed.), Makhanlal Chaturvedi Racnavali, vol. 2. Delhi: Vani Prakasan, 1983, pp. 13–14.

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This critique of constitutional politics, and the acknowledgement of the non-constitutional domain as the true sphere of the public, had several implications. First of all, it emphasized the importance of the institutions of the public sphere—from the press to book publishing and education—as political activities, and of literary figures as nationalist actors. Writing or teaching were ‘constructive’ activities, and were as important as any other in ‘serving’ the nation and furthering the cause of the nationalist movement. Premchand’s political stories, written during the campaigns of 1920 and 1930, provide the ideal example: for the writer they were a way of putting his pen at the direct service of the movement and of propagating its message; for the readers they were a way of making sense of radical political slogans through realistic human stories. Typically, they climax at moments of ‘conversion’ to the nationalist cause, almost helping the reader to take the same step.18 Second, non-constitutional politics emphasized the political role of the press as a vehicle of popular public opinion. It was especially the duty of the vernacular press to mirror the real nation. The Hindi political press actually changed from being ‘journals of ideas’ for the educated few, to newspapers rooted in local society, reflecting and addressing the ‘sadharan samaj’: Now the time has come for our political ideology and movement not to be restricted to the English-educated, and to spread among the common people (samanya janta), and for Indian public opinion (lokmat) to be not the opinion of those few educated people, but to mirror the thoughts of all the classes of the country. When we agitate for svarajya we should not forget the principle of a famous political thinker, that democratic rule is actually the rule of public opinion. And one very important way of creating a wide informed public opinion is to use Indian (svadeshi) languages along with English for our political interactions and debates.19 18See Premchand’s stories such as ‘Lagdant’ (The Competitors, July 1921); ‘Chakma’ (‘A Little Trick’, Prabha, November 1922); ‘Julus’ (‘The Procession’, Hams, March 1930); Samaryatra (The Battle March), Benares: Saraswati Press, 1930. The collection Samar-yatra was published in 1930, in the heat of the Civil Disobedience campaign, at the specially low price of two and a half annas; see Statement of Publications, Allahabad: Government Press, 1930. 19Vidyarthi’s editorial on the forthcoming Lucknow Congress, Pratap, 3 July 1916, in Radhakrishna Avasthi (ed.), Kranti ka udghos. Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi ki kalam se, vol. 1. Kanpur: Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi Shiksha Samiti, 1978, p. 240.

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Hindi editors such as G.S. Vidyarthi in Kanpur, Srikrsnadatt Palival in Agra, Makhanlal Chaturvedi in Jabalpur, Dasarath Prasad Dvivedi in Gorakhpur, and Baburao Visnu Pararkar in Benares were at the forefront of this change. Prosecuted and even jailed when censorship and repression grew stricter during mass campaigns, they often became local heroes. With such events, the press became even more clearly identified with the political movement, and it was the Hindi press that first voiced the need to include larger sections of society in the movement, primarily peasants and women.20 ‘Let’s go to the villages’ (chaliye ganvon ki taraf), urged G.S. Vidyarthi, ‘Whoever wants to work should turn to the villages. Work in the towns has already been done.’21 This popular leaning inspired direct criticism of the pre-Gandhian Congress: if it really claimed to be the ‘voice of the whole of India’ (samyukt bharat ki avaz) ‘now...those doors must be open which for some reason have been kept closed so far’, wrote Vidyarthi.22 Another implication of non-constitutional politics was that the politics of the street came to be valued above the ‘politics of the library’.23 Even before 1920, there had been clear signs of dissatisfaction in the United Provinces24 with the moderate, constitutional Congress of the province.25 During the Non-Cooperation movement, joining the movement was expressed in terms of a battle (larai, sangram), an arena which one ‘jumped into’, with akhara-style metaphors. It was 20For an informative study, see Brahmanand, Bhartiy svatantrata andolan. For information on censorship and repression of the Hindi press after Civil Disobedience, see editorial note in Sudhd, IV, 1, 3, October 1930, pp. 434–5. 21Editorial, Pratap, 19 January 1925, in R. Avasthi (ed.), Kranti ka udghos, vol. 2, 1978, p. 767. 22G.S. Vidyarthi’s editorial, Pratap, 11 January 1915, in R. Avasthi (ed.), Kranti ka udghos, vol. 1, 1978, p. 103. 23For an excellent example of an early satire on the nature and limitations of constitutional political culture as ‘politics of the library’, see the fifth scene of Bhartendu Harishchandra’s play Bharat durdasa (1880), in S. Misra (ed.), Bhartendu Granthavali, vol. 1. Benares: Nagari Pracharini Sabha, 1974. 24After independence, the United Provinces were renamed Uttar Pradesh. 25Hindi editors looked elsewhere, to Bengal and Maharastra, for radicalism and heroic terrorism. Tilak’s popularity among students, Hindi scribes, and future politicians proves the case. For example, both G.S. Vidyarthi and Narendra Deva claimed Tilak as the greatest political influence before Gandhi; see M.L. Bhargava, Ganesh Shankar Vidyarthi, Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1988, p. 53; and B.V. Keskar and V.K.N. Menon (eds), Acharya Narendra Dev: A Commemoration Volume. New Delhi: National Book Trust, 1971, p. 25.

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there that the nationalist struggle was to be fought. Yet, the crowd at nationalist demonstrations awakened mixed reactions, even among Congressmen. On the one hand, it was celebrated as a visible symbol of the ‘true nation’ and its power; from the point of view of the common participants, the experience of the crowd was one of exhilarating empowerment, in which it defied colonial authority and claimed legitimacy and authority for itself ‘in the name of Gandhi and Nehru’.26 In Hindi literature, the crowd is often both the stage for heroic nationalist acts and the audience before which the brutality of the British and their lackeys is exposed.27 For women in particular, after svadeshi had provided them with ways of being nationalist at home, crossing the threshold to take part in picketing, meetings, and demonstrations was a hugely liberating experience, and it was the presence of a crowd, its emotional charge, and its self-asserted legitimacy that allowed individual women to take the first step and face the consequences. Similarly, the peasant leader, Sahajanand Sarasvati, learned to take advantage of the emotional impact generated by massive peasant rallies and demonstrations. On the other hand, crowds were feared by Congress politicians for their ‘unruliness’ and their potential to disrupt the exemplary tactics of Congress volunteers, and were sometimes despised for their naivete. Here, elite and popular perceptions tended to come into conflict.28 As the concept of svadeshi showed, implicit in the non-constitutional style of politics was the tendency to cross boundaries and conflate publics. There were many ways in which one could be ‘nationalist’, many possible symbolic changes one could make in things ranging 26See Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22’, in Ranajit Guha (ed.), Subaltern Studies III, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 1– 55; also his Event, Metaphor, Memory, Chauri-Chaura 1922–1992, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. 27See, for example, Premchand’s story ‘Julus’ (1930), with its different crowds: the welldisciplined body of volunteers, their sympathizers, and the idle passers-by who are transformed into a nationalist crowd by watching the ‘martyrdom’ of the old Muslim man leading the volunteers, at the hands of a cruel loyalist policeman. The same crowd then witnesses the defiant nationalism of the policeman’s wife and, ultimately, his own change of heart. 28Gyan Pandey, ‘Congress and the Nation, c. 1917–1947’, Occasional paper no. 69, Calcutta: Centre for Studies in the Social Sciences, October 1984; Vinita Damodaran, Broken Promises: Popular Protest, Indian Nationalism and the Congress Party in Bihar, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995, p. 230.

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from clothing to speech, work to commensality, relations within the family and with fellow volunteers. The reversal of values that Gandhi’s idiom and ideology brought about—the overturned hierarchy and the centrality of the sarvasadharan, the common people, his emphasis on self-sacrifice over worldly success, and on Indianness versus modern/foreign culture—enhanced the sense of importance of Hindi activists and intellectuals. At least in words, English was devalued in favour of the vernacular; the very ordinariness of Hindi writers seemed to place them closer to the ‘true nation’ and give them an advantage in communicating with the masses. In practice the question of popularity was a thorny one for Hindi writers, for the taste of ‘the people’ often did not match their expectations. They also discovered that Congress rhetoric about the true nation was, in fact, mainly rhetoric. If we compare constitutional and non-constitutional political styles, we notice a number of interesting differences in the relationship between Hindi and English, and in attitudes to colonial and traditional authorities, to the public, to the Hindi literary intelligentsia, and to political and social change. Constitutional politics translated English political vocabulary into Hindi but fostered Hindi as a political language only within a bilingual hierarchy; non-constitutional politics tended to refuse (at least symbolically) the bilingual hierarchy altogether and to replace English with the vernacular. A certain success was achieved in this direction, although in their enthusiasm for Hindi as rastrabhasa, the Hindi intelligentsia fuelled the conflict with Urdu and overlooked the difficulties in actually replacing English at the supra-regional level. In its relationship with colonial and traditional Indian authorities, despite the occasionally fiery rhetoric, constitutional politics took a mediatory, compromising stance. Non-constitutional politics, instead, tended to adopt a confrontational attitude and establish counter institutions and figures of counter authority within the movement. Also, whereas constitutional politics upheld boundaries between separate spheres, trying to contain, so to speak, the consequences of political awareness from spilling outside the official or civic domain, non-constitutional politics conflated boundaries and politicized literature, the household, gender, and social practices. Thus, while constitutional politicians aimed at political change without social change, at least for the bottom rungs of society, non-constitutional

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politicians placed social change at the heart of their political agenda. Constitutional politicians tended to accept that the Indian public was divided into hierarchical layers and saw their own role as being mediators between the elites and the masses as well as between the colonial state and Indian society, and as educators and guides of the popular public. Politicians and intellectuals who believed in nonconstitutional politics saw their own role and that of the nationalist movement as one of ‘breaking the chains’ within Indian society itself, of forging new relationships, and of empowering new subjects. In the case of women and of peasants, it was in the non-constitutional domain that these subjects enthusiastically joined the fray, while their constitutional participation and representation remained negligible. ‘Tokenism’ is the term sometimes used, for example, to describe women’s presence within the top rungs of Congress. These are, of course, simplifications. In practice, the two styles blended and overlapped: constitutional boards became a necessary evil and even Malaviya envisaged a measure of social change. During the two decades the two streams intertwined; at different times one was more prominent than the other. In the end, bilingualism acted as a kind of bottleneck for vernacular politicians, and parliamentary style was acknowledged as the prerequisite for rule. The trajectory of Congress in the two decades under study, in fact, shows two opposite but concomitant trends. Non-constitutional politics became an important locus of legitimacy, and of osmosis between the literary and the political sphere; it allowed access to new subjects and new publics. At the same time, constitutional politics remained the path to tread. In the Hindi political sphere, this is mirrored in the fact that Hindi editor– and activist–politicians did manage to become prominent local and regional leaders. They were also elected to legislative assemblies, often defeating traditional men of influence. Once they became entrenched in the constitutional arena, however, they espoused the logic of constitutional politics and forgot their role as representatives of popular aspirations and public opinion.

7 ‘Women-Oriented’ Narratives and the New Indian Woman* Purnima Mankekar

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had just returned to New Delhi for fieldwork and was explaining my project to a colleague. When I told her that I was going to study the role of Doordarshan in the reconstitution of Indian womanhood, she responded wryly: ‘You should have no problem finding programmes to analyze. We’ve been asking ourselves, “Is this Doordarshan or stridarshan [woman-watching]?”’1 She explained that viewers were currently being subjected to a ‘virtual blitzkrieg’ of ‘women-oriented’ programmes. As during the encounter between colonial administrators and the indigenous male elite in the nineteenth century, there now seemed to be an ‘incitement to discourse’ (Foucault 1978: 18) on women in official and popular nationalist discourses. Yet, it was clear that the representations of Indian womanhood that proliferated in the late 1980s and early 1990s were not simply an extension of colonial and early nationalist ideas of gender. ...This article continues my examination of the reconfiguration of family by focusing on representations of women’s ‘uplift’ and *Originally published as ‘“Women-Oriented” Narratives and the New Indian Woman’, in Purnima Mankekar’s Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999, pp. 104–64. 1Significantly, darshan also connotes worship.

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emancipation in Doordarshan’s women-oriented narratives. I explore what these narratives reveal about the post-colonial state’s attempts to reshape gender politics within the Indian family, and examine how these discourses intersected with women’s experiences in their families and communities. Notions of ‘Indian culture’, as formulated in womenoriented narratives, created specific ambivalences and anxieties regarding women’s place in the home and the world. My analysis of women-oriented narratives in post-colonial India, thus, focuses on the centrality of family, in particular ‘the Indian family’, in discourses of Indian culture and, therefore, of nationhood....

MODERNITY, NATIONHOOD, AND INDIAN WOMANHOOD ...When I asked producers and Doordarshan officials why they had been so intent on telecasting women-oriented programmes, many replied that (middle-class) women constituted a large part of their target audience and they felt that Doordarshan’s programmes would have to resonate with those women’s experiences.2 Further, bureaucrats and policy makers in Doordarshan were aware that women’s issues were an intrinsic part of the state’s project of nation building. A former director-general of Doordarshan revealed that the ‘uplift’ of women had formed an important part of the agenda of Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, who claimed that he wished to take India into the ‘twentyfirst century’. During the mid-1980s, the state launched comprehensive strategies to modernize not just economically, but also technologically, through the import of computers and communications infrastructure, and culturally, through the formulation of careful and detailed cultural policies. The ‘uplift’ of women became a crucial component of the state’s agenda to construct a modern national culture. The ‘Woman Question’ of Indian nationalism was thus recast in terms of the construction of the modern Indian woman, who would participate in the nation’s entry into the ‘twenty-first century’. But, what kind of gendered subject was being created? On what elisions and renegotiations 2It is necessary to underscore the influence of advertisers and sponsors in the formulation of Doordarshan’s programmes. Since women were subjects as well as objects of consumption (that is, because their desires to purchase commodities were constructed by television), advertisers and producers perceived them as an important target audience.

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of class, caste, and religious identity was the modern Indian woman of post-colonial nationalism predicated?...

WOMEN-ORIENTED NARRATIVES: SOME COMMON THEMES Significantly, almost all women-oriented narratives shown on Doordarshan in the late 1980s and early 1990s were set in the family. Some serials drew on the Hindi film genre of the ‘family drama’.3 The first of these to be serialized was Hum Log. Spanning 156 episodes, Hum Log ran for seventeen months during 1984–5. Set in a neighbourhood very much like Vikas Nagar, Hum Log narrated the dreams and anxieties of a lower-middle-class family struggling to find a foothold in urban India. Hum Log’s family consisted of Basesar, a self-employed carpenter who spends most of his money on alcohol, his parents, his long-suffering wife, and their five children. They all live together in a tiny two-room flat. Every episode ended with a commentary by popular octogenarian Hindi film actor, Ashok Kumar, who drew out the moral of the story and responded to the letters of viewers who commented on story lines or advised characters on how to solve the latest crisis in their lives.... Ironically, although one of Hum Log’s purported objectives was to bring about a change in the status of women, its most important women characters are all depicted unsympathetically. The grandmother, Dadi, contrasts with Dadaji (the grandfather): where he is wise and selfless, she is vain, greedy, and lacks ‘common sense’. More important, while Dadaji often takes up the cause of his granddaughters and daughterin-law, Dadi is insensitive to their suffering. Basesar’s wife is a docile doormat who never asserts herself and is unable to protect her daughters from their father’s tyranny: at the end of one episode, the commentator, Ashok Kumar, criticizes her for not protesting Basesar’s 3Before

the advent of women-oriented serials, several Doordarshan plays focused on the family and the status of women. During the days of black and white television, noted Hindi playwright and poet, Kamleshwar (then Doordarshan’s director-general), produced a magazine programme called Parikrama, many episodes of which dealt with relationships and conflicts within middle-class family. A precursor to feminist activist Nalini Singh’s Hullo Zindagi, a 1992 magazine programme that also focused on relationships within the middleclass family, Parikrama was one of the first ‘non-fictional’ programmes that attempted to analyse relationships within the family.

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injustices to her and her daughters. Majhli’s ambitions blind her to the predatory intentions of the men who promise her a break in films. Kamya, Nanhe’s friend, is a rich, spoiled young woman who is ruthless in her pursuit of power. Badhki and Chutki, the eldest and youngest daughters, are somewhat redeemed by their strength of character and their ability to stand by their respective principles; yet they are completely marginalized by the politics of their family. Chutki comes into her own only when she leaves her biological family and is adopted by a childless doctor and her husband. Badhki’s battle for self-respect is a lonely one: she is committed to feminist activism, but after she gets married, her political commitments lead to conflicts with her husband.... Close on the heels of Hum Log was Rajani, a sitcom series telecast in 1985. Shown every sunday morning, it was about the reformist efforts of its upper-caste and middle-class heroine, Rajani. The series, set in Bombay (Mumbai), portrayed Rajani fighting against corrupt bureaucrats, dishonest cab drivers, brutal wife batterers, and so on. As the strong-willed, socially conscious New Indian Woman, Rajani epitomized the confluence of liberal discourses of women’s agency with ideologies of reformist nationalism. Buniyaad (The foundation), telecast in 1987, was another milestone in Doordarshan’s discourses on women and the family. Haveliram (remembered by viewers as Masterji), the younger son of a wealthy family in pre-Partition Punjab, is a freedom fighter, who is frequently imprisoned for his participation in anti-colonial struggles. He is thrown out by his extended family when he marries a young widow, Lajoji. The core narrative of the serial relates Masterji and Lajoji’s attempts to hold their family together, despite the turbulence of the times in which they live.... Television critic Iqbal Masud commented that Buniyaad ‘showed the rotten foundations of our polity’ and was ‘more ambitious than Hum Log’. The serial was, indeed, ambitious in its attempts to construct a social history of the post-Partition conjuncture. Significantly, Buniyaad did not dwell on the brutality of the violence surrounding the Partition; Partition is merely the backdrop for the saga of the survival of Lajoji’s family.... Hum Log, Rajani, and Buniyaad set the stage for the other womanoriented programmes that followed, the most notable of which were Stri, Adhikaar, Swayamsiddha, Udaan I, Pukaar, Udaan II, and

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Humraahi (which was supposedly modelled on Hum Log). Stri (Woman) was actually a docu-drama, depicting the life narratives of women, famous and unknown, who had triumphed over adversities, and Adhikaar (Rights) aimed explicitly at informing women about their legal rights. What subject positions did the described programmes create for women viewers? Next, I examine viewers’ interpretations of women-oriented narratives by focusing on the convergence of class and discourses of gender, the position of women (especially young daughters and daughters-in-law) in the family, and the problematic value of higher education for women. I am particularly interested in the overlaps and disjunctures between Doordarshan’s discourses and viewers’ relationships and everyday practices.

Gender and ‘Middle-classness’ An overwhelming majority of Doordarshan’s women-oriented programmes focused on middle-class families and their struggles to acquire or maintain upward mobility and middle-class respectability.4 With a few exceptions, Doordarshan’s images of Indian womanhood were almost entirely middle class.5 The narratives of these serials held tremendous significance for the men and women I worked with, all of whom were struggling to acquire and retain middleclass status. 4 The New Indian Woman of post-colonial nationalism reveals some traces of nationalist representations of Indian womanhood. For instance, in the nineteenth century, the New ‘Woman was constructed by the “new patriarchies” of nascent nationalism partially in opposition to stereotypes of the coarse, sexually promiscuous, disorderly, workingclass woman who was a victim of the brutality of men’ (Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question,’ in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 224–5). See also Sumanta Banerjee, ‘Marginalization of Women’s Popular Culture in Nineteenth Century Bengal’, in K. Sangari and S. Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1989, pp. 127–79, for an excellent analysis of the relationship between the ‘cleansing’ of women’s popular culture in nineteenth century Bengal and the middleclass and upper-caste constitution of the bhadramahila (respectable woman). 5There were two notable exceptions to Doordarshan’s focus on the middle classes. Nukkad (Street Corner) was unique in its portrayal of the lives of the inhabitants of a slum and was hailed as the Hum Log of the poor; however, its middle class bias surfaced in its depiction of a middle-class teacher who mediates the conflicts among street people. Basanti was the tale of how a poor girl who lives in a slum fends for herself. Not surprisingly, despite their high production values, these serials received very low viewership ratings.

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How were these struggles for upward mobility and ‘middleclassness’ enacted in the self-conceptions and daily practices of families? Jagdish and Shakuntala Sharma were Brahmins and were firstgeneration migrants from a Himalayan region of Uttar Pradesh. I vividly remember the evening that Sarojini (an informant) first took me to their home in Division III of Vikas Nagar. Sarojini was keen that I meet them; she was impressed with their children and wanted to get to know them better so she could introduce them to her daughter, Lata. I gathered that the Sharma children had a reputation for being very studious, and it was plain that Sarojini thought they would be a good influence on Lata, who, she alleged, ‘didn’t study hard enough’.... The Sharmas’ home embodied their aspirations towards upward mobility and their desire to create a middle-class world of their own. We walked past a kitchen filled with stainless-steel cooking utensils so shiny that they sparkled. A second curtain separated the kitchen from the inside room where a man and a young woman sat sipping tea and reading. The windows were shut and lined with curtains. It was a pleasant October evening...and I could not understand why, unlike their neighbours sitting in the courtyards outside, this family chose to be indoors. As in most other homes in Vikas Nagar, the space in the inner room was arranged around the television set.... Nothing seemed out of place: the old magazines and books stacked on the shelves against one of the walls were held from spilling into the room by a faded muslin curtain; the kitchen was one of the neatest I had ever seen; and the floor shone as if it were scrubbed every day. When I entered the inner room, Jagdish was leaning back on the divan reading a newspaper as he drank his tea. Their daughter, Poonam, about 20 years old, was curled up in a chair reading a Hindi novel by the famous nationalist writer Saratchandra. That night I wrote in my notes that if there was ever an image that embodied dreams of middle-classness, this was it. The neatness of the home; the inner room, separated from the rest of the neighbourhood by layers of curtains; the books and magazines lining the walls; the stainless steel utensils gleaming in the kitchen; and a man and his daughter reading.... It was clear that the Sharmas felt that they were more respectable, more middle class than their neighbours, and considered themselves superior to them. They expressed contempt for most of their neighbours,

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who, Shakuntala alleged, ‘did not know how to live’. Shakuntala and Jagdish were particularly critical of how their neighbours allowed their children to loiter about the streets. They expressed a very strong sense of being ‘different’ from their neighbours. Nowhere was this difference more marked than in the way they brought up their daughter.

Unmarried Women as Daughters The sexuality of daughters was an important concern in many Doordarshan narratives that focused on the position of women.6 For instance, as noted earlier, in Hum Log, the middle daughter, Majhli, ‘ruins’ her life because of her ambition to work in Hindi films. A disobedient daughter, she defies her parents by seeking fame and fortune in Bombay, where she becomes fair game for men who sexually exploit her. She returns to Delhi a ‘fallen woman’, chastened and deeply depressed. In the rest of the serial, she remains a symbol of what happens when daughters defy their parents’ authority and parents are unable to control their daughters’ sexuality.... The discourses of sexuality articulated in Buniyaad, as well as in other women-oriented narratives, resonated with themes that pervaded conversations I had with viewers in Vikas Nagar and Basti, where the place of daughters in the family was inextricably tied to aspirations to middle-class respectability. It was most marked in the case of the Sharmas. The intimate relationship between notions of middle-class and upper-caste respectability and discourses of gender, honour, and sexuality was evident in the manner in which they had raised their daughter. More significant, Poonam’s own everyday practices enacted middle-class notions of femininity and modesty. Even though her mother complained that she was sometimes ‘too sharp-tongued’, she was soft-spoken, polite, and reserved in public; she did not mingle with ‘outsiders’, she dressed modestly, she stayed indoors. Shakuntala frequently claimed that daughters had to be ‘extra careful’ because their sexuality made them susceptible to dishonour: as unmarried women, daughters had to live under the protective control of their families. How did lower-middle-class families, experiencing similar dilemmas, respond to portrayals of ambitious, single women like 6On

the ‘paradoxical’ significance of women’s sexuality in dominant Hindu traditions, see Susan Wadley (ed.), The Powers of Tamil Women, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1980.

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Kalyani (Udaan) who apparently transgressed their culturally sanctioned place as obedient daughters? Although Poonam and her mother criticized Majhli of Hum Log for being ‘too ambitious’ and not keeping to her ‘place’ as a daughter, they praised Kalyani for her ‘courage’ in fulfilling her ambitions and joining the police. The moral framework in which the two serials portray ambitious women gives us a clue to these viewers’ contrasting responses to Kalyani and Majhli. For one thing, Majhli’s ambitions are depicted as self-centred; after all, it is her desire for personal success that drives her to show business. Further, and perhaps more important, her parents are unable to control her sexuality. Once in Bombay, she is outside their surveillance and is predictably, sexually exploited by sleazy film producers. In contrast, Udaan’s Kalyani is portrayed as an ideal daughter and citizen. Early in Udaan I, after Kalyani’s father is beaten up by his enemies, she realizes, ‘what it is like for people from the lower and middle classes’, who have to struggle to seek redress for the injustices committed against them. She resolves to make her father’s battle her own; her father’s struggles are synecdochic of the struggles of the disempowered ‘lower and middle classes’ of India.... As in the social reform discourses of the colonial era, women’s struggles for access to education appear in post-colonial discourses to be accommodated and subsumed within master narratives of family and nation. Further, at the same time that ‘the family’ is configured as essentially Indian, discourses of modernity (the modern nation, the modern Indian woman, the modern Indian family) provide new norms for social governance. A form of subjectivity is created for the New Indian Woman, who participates in the nation’s march to modernity and at the same time, preserves all that is unique and authentic about ‘Indian culture’.

THE CONTAINMENT OF WOMEN’S ENERGIES: A LOOK AT UDAAN Unlike the late nineteenth century, when the Woman Question was ‘resolved’ by demarcating the private sphere (of women) from the public sphere (of men), late twentieth century constructions of the New Indian Woman complicated notions of women’s agency by valorizing ‘emancipated’ women, who dexterously straddled the ‘home’ and the ‘world’. In this section, I trace the figuration of the

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New Indian Woman of post-colonial nationalism by analysing the discourses of the script writer and director of two of the most popular serials shown in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Udaan I and its sequel, Udaan II. The core narrative of the two serials portrayed the efforts of Kalyani, a young, lower-middle-class woman, to qualify for the police force and later, to function as an honest, conscientious officer in a corrupt environment. In presenting my discussion with Kavita Choudhry, the script writer and heroine of Udaan, it is not my aim to reify authorial intention (Foucault 1978: 113–38) but, on the contrary, to situate her interpretations within larger discourses of nationalism and gender. Udaan I began with a depiction of a feudal family in which one of the sons is determined, at the risk of incurring the wrath of his father, to give his daughter the same educational opportunities as his son. As a result of his defiance, he and his wife and children are thrown out of their ancestral home and cheated of their rights to the family property. They move to the city, where they struggle to make ends meet and educate their children. Their daughter, Kalyani, is sensitive and intelligent. She sees that her father is unable to seek legal redress for the injustices perpetrated on him by his brothers. In a crucial episode, her father is beaten up by hired hoodlums, and she goes to a local police chief to seek justice. He refuses to see her. At that moment, she resolves to join the police so that she can sit ‘on the other side of the table’ and have the power to help people who have been cheated of their rights. Udaan II showed her as a police officer struggling to retain her idealism and her commitment to her job in the face of pressures put on her by corrupt senior officers, politicians, and landlords. Udaan had a tremendous impact on the viewers I worked with.7 Men and women alike were impressed with Kalyani’s idealism and self-confidence, and many described with admiration her courage in fighting corruption. Kalyani became a household name during the time that the serial was aired; the actress was so deeply identified with her television persona that when I asked for directions to her flat in Bombay, the little boy who ran up to help me pointed to it, saying, ‘That is where Kalyani lives’. 7When I discuss their discourses of gender in more general terms, I will refer to these serials as Udaan.

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I met Choudhry in the flat she shared with her brother and his family in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in Bombay. We had our interview in a somewhat austere living room, where we sat on an old, faded sofa. The other furniture consisted of a couple of old armchairs, a coffee table and two small end tables, a television set, and an old dining table. Choudhry herself was very casually dressed. Without makeup she looked much younger than she did on screen, and in a plain, long black skirt she looked anything but glamorous. I found her more straightforward (and certainly a lot more introspective) than the other film industry professionals I had met during the course of my fieldwork. We talked all afternoon and I came away struck by her candour and perspicacity. My discussions with Choudhry helped me to appreciate the constraints faced by activists who choose to intervene through mass media. Moreover, Udaan was exceptional in its construction of a complex and introspective protagonist, Kalyani, whose observations on corruption in the police force coexist with the pleasure she derives from her own ascent to power. However, even though I do not subscribe to the dichotomous view of texts as either subversive or dominant, I continue to feel disturbed by Udaan’s participation in the hegemonic construction of Indian womanhood through its valorization of Kalyani’s father, its discourses of middle-class citizenship, and, in particular, its role in the containment of oppositional subject positions that it might have created through its story about a courageous and idealistic woman police officer. Looking back now, four years after my meeting with Choudhry, I see how my ambivalence towards Udaan mediated our conversation and continues to frame my analysis. ...[A]t the time that I was doing this research, the popular film industry was facing a serious recession caused, in part, by the success of entertainment serials on Doordarshan. Since the state exercised monopolistic control over television production, Doordarshan was the only means available of reaching a ‘mass’ audience. State-appointed review committees carefully scrutinized proposals for all entertainment programmes (and, in the case of programmes depicting ‘sensitive issues’, screened every episode before it was telecast). Udaan was produced at the crest of the wave of women-oriented narratives. I was curious to know how Kavita Choudhry, as director and script writer,

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had negotiated with the state, with the politics of feminism, and with dominant discourses of family and nation.

Gender and Family in Udaan Kavita Choudhry was candid about the fact that, because she was working with Doordarshan, she had made a conscious decision to ‘soften’ her critique of gender politics in the family. She added that she aimed to situate gender inequality in the context of other social and political inequalities, acknowledging that confronting ‘gender issues’ head-on was difficult because ‘in India we’re very proud of our heritage. To touch that is very sensitive [because] chauvinism is there everywhere. [It is] especially difficult with regard to gender. Therefore, I did not frontally tackle gender.’8 Choudhry, thus, expressed a dilemma confronting other activists and feminists attempting to work with Doordarshan.9 On the one hand, working with television was critical to their political project because it gave them access to a huge, captive audience. On the other hand, engaging with mass media compelled them to craft a message that would appeal to a cross section of viewers. Often, making their programmes accessible and acceptable to an audience consisting of a broad spectrum of viewers meant having to ‘blunt’ the critical edge of their work. Clearly, there were advantages as well as disadvantages in working with such a medium. What made Choudhry’s task still more delicate was the fact that the discourses of gender that she wanted to ‘tackle’ were, as she suggested, deeply embedded in notions of Indian culture. Hence, Choudhry felt that she had to be cautious; critiquing gender relations, especially within the context of family, was a ‘very sensitive’ matter because it was perceived as an attack on ‘our heritage’. Yet, she aimed to focus explicitly on the role of the family in the normalization of gender inequalities at an everyday level. She was 8Personal interview, 17 April 1992, Bombay. All quotes from Kavita Choudhry are from the same interview. 9See Vimal Balasubrahmanyam, Mirror Image: The Media and the Women’s Question, Bombay: Centre for Education and Documentation, 1988, pp. 81–3, for a discussion of dilemmas expressed by media women.

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particularly concerned with the ‘upbringing’ of ‘the girl child’ and the ways that women were raised to assume certain roles in the family. In comparing the socialization of girls with that of boys, her objective was ‘to show that the discrimination is there everywhere’. She wanted viewers to ‘feel’ the discrimination girls faced ‘through the narration’ of her story; instead of engaging in overt feminist polemic, she aimed to make the discrimination against girls so ‘transparent’ that the viewers would ‘feel that rather than hear’ her critique. She pointed out that when Kalyani’s father resolves to educate her, her grandfather responds that it is not her fate to receive an education because she is a girl (sab kismat ki baat hai). This, according to Choudhry, was ‘the dialogue heard in every Indian home; putting it that way makes one see the fallacy of the sentence’. Her objective was to ‘make the viewer feel it [gender inequality within the family] through emotion’. Alluding to what she termed the ‘emotional reservoir’ of narratives, she felt that certain emotions ‘could be used to communicate’ one’s political ideologies and, in fact, had to be constructed or evoked in order to bring about social change. Udaan’s representation of the family is complex. Kalyani’s father breaks away from a ‘feudal’ extended family to establish a nuclear family, which he tries to run according to the ostensibly ‘modern’ principles of equality and democracy. His moral authority over his family is not only left intact, however, but, as we will see shortly, valorized. Choudhry decided to ‘soften’ her critique of the family because: ‘the family being so dear to us, we see him [the father] also as a devoted son. So [we were] toeing the line, yet making room for progressive ideas without being too radical.’ Choudhry also pointed out that Kalyani’s father is committed to giving her the same educational and career opportunities available to his son. She reiterated her position on the importance of expressing ones political ideas indirectly rather than explicitly: ‘The viewer must see it before you put it into words.’ The most explicit expression of the way Udaan softened its feminist critique was its depiction of Kalyani’s relationship with her mother. Like Kalyani’s father, her mother is also a very idealistic, strong person. But, while her father is presented as her inspiration and role model, her mother is represented as a supportive companion. When I asked her if she had deliberately

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sidelined the mother’s role in Kalyani’s life, Choudhry initially responded that she was ‘not making a statement’ by showing the mother as ‘less passionate’ than the father. Later in our conversation, however, she mentioned that she had wanted to foreground the father’s role and not make Udaan ‘an out and out women’s film’ because she did not want to ‘make it too radical’. My objective in interpreting the discursive terrain in which Udaan was conceptualized was to present an example of how the Woman Question was accommodated and subsumed in a liberal, nationalistic framework. Udaan was made by a reflective media activist, who strategically chose to ‘soften’ her political message in order to reach a mass audience because she was apprehensive about constructing an explicitly feminist serial (‘an out and out women’s film’). Choudhry chose to ‘blunt’ the critical edge of her narrative. At the same time, Maithili Rao’s comments bear repeating: rather than representing a ‘compromise’ on the part of the director, the resolution of the serial’s narrative demonstrates the traps inherent in liberal feminism and nationalism. The oppositional energies of feminism are contained within the discursive frameworks of discourses of family and nation; as a result, the narrative is ineffective in critically engaging dominant discourses of family and national culture. The serial ended by reinforcing liberal notions of political activism and nationalist discourses of citizenship. The moral of Udaan’s narrative is that, rather than struggle to change existing relations of power, ‘emancipated’ women must join mainstream struggles to fight for their rights. They must ‘work within the system’, not as women or as disempowered social subjects but as citizens of the Indian nation. According to Udaan’s narrative, dissent can (and should) be domesticated within discourses of citizenship that enable ‘emancipated’ Indian women to negotiate both ‘the home’ and ‘the world’. Udaan exemplified Doordarshan’s discourses on the New Indian Woman. In its search for heroines, Doordarshan created new stereotypes of women who managed to rise above adversity, achieve success in fulfilling their individual goals, and channel their energies towards selfless social activism. Feminist Vibhuti Patel describes this trend as the ‘valorization’ of the patriotic New Indian Woman; instead of depicting strategies for mobilizing women as a collectivity, such

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programmes advocated their ‘upliftment’ in terms of discourses of liberal–nationalist politics and citizenship.10

THE NEW INDIAN WOMAN: CUSTODIAN OF THE NATION’S INTEGRITY I have argued that with the establishment of the nation-state, women were to be constituted as citizen–subjects who would participate in the task of nation building. In order for this to occur, they had to be unyoked from those aspects of ‘tradition’ that potentially impeded the nation’s predestined march towards modernity. However, at the same time that women were to be ‘uplifted’ and modernized, they also represented the spiritual core, the authenticity of Indian culture. Representations of the New Indian Woman in post-colonial nationalism drew on notions of Indian womanhood in anticolonial nationalism. Partha Chatterjee describes how westernized women were pilloried in anticolonial nationalism as dangerous because of the threats they posed to the Indian family and therefore, to Indian culture.11 Many Doordarshan narratives also predicated discourses of ideal Indian womanhood on the essentialized construction of the westernized woman as Other. The women I worked with had clearly been interpellated by ideologies of cultural nationalism. For example, [my informant] Renuka Sengupta’s conception of the attributes of the ideal woman was explicitly cast in terms of Indian womanhood: ‘An ideal woman, an ideal Indian woman, will...generally, the way she respects the husband, the elders, the way she blends into his family [usi mein 10Pukaar, shown in the summer of 1991, was a bit of an exception. An episodic series, it consisted of cameos of women who fought the injustice they faced in the workplace, family, and community. Again, however, the few episodes that depicted women’s efforts to organize as a collectivity were superficial and simplistic. Perhaps part of the problem stemmed from the episodic series format, which did not permit the writers to present women’s struggles in any depth. But, an important reason for the superficial treatment given to women’s collective struggles for empowerment was that the institutional structures in which serials were produced and telecast, that of a state-controlled entertainment medium, did not permit a serious engagement with the cultural and socio-economic factors underlying women’s oppression. 11Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993, pp. 122–3.

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rangjaati hai]...But in joint families, if the daughter-in-law doesn’t understand her husband, if she doesn’t fit into his family and upsets his parents, then the family is shattered. That’s how it happens. It shouldn’t be like that.’ According to Chatterjee, in nineteenth century discourses on Indian womanhood, the authenticity and cultural superiority of the New Woman lay in her difference vis-a-vis both the ‘westernized women’ and the ‘common women’ of the lower castes and classes.12 Chatterjee adds that the ‘attainment by her own efforts of a superior national culture was the mark of woman’s newly acquired freedom. This was the central ideological strength of the nationalist resolution of the women’s question’.13 Renuka’s views on women’s education seem to illustrate a similar perspective on modernity: the New Indian Woman had to be modern but non-western. Essentialist discourses of national culture surfaced again when we talked about why families ‘broke up’. I asked her why she thought women were responsible for the disintegration of families. Renuka insisted that ‘outside influences’ were responsible for families breaking up. At first, I could not follow what she meant, so I pushed her to clarify. She replied, ‘Foreign influence and higher education’. Indeed, some of what she said resonated with what I had been hearing all my life: that westernization (what she glossed as ‘foreign influence’) was responsible for women ‘going astray’ and ‘breaking up’ families. Her representation of families was fundamentally essentialist in its opposition of ‘the Indian family’ with ‘foreign’ or ‘western’ families.... Renuka’s notion of ideal womanhood was clearly embedded in her conception of the united Indian family as a symbol of the uniqueness and strength of ‘Indian culture’. Similarly, in Buniyaad, the nationalist Lajoji, contrasts with her westernized daughter-in-law Sulochana, who neglects her duties to her family and is disrespectful of Indian culture. Sulochana is full of contempt for the traditional joint family; she speaks Hindi with an English (convent school) accent; she is full of admiration for all things foreign. Sulochana’s ostensible lack of loyalty to her family is coterminous with her lack of loyalty to ‘Indian culture’: she is a foil 12S. Banerjee, 1989, pp. 127–79. 13P. Chatterjee, 1993, p. 54.

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to the khadi-clad Lajoji, whose devotion to the nation is matched only by her loyalty to her family. In addition to embodying all that was authentic and pure in Indian culture, the New Indian Woman was made actively responsible for preserving the unity of the post-colonial nation. When the unravelling of the nation seemed imminent, the New Indian Woman was entrusted with actively protecting its integrity. The representation of the New Indian Woman as custodian of the nation’s integrity was effected through the metonymy of family and nation.

8 Who is it that is Singing? Shot–Music–Speech Aniket Jaaware

PRELIMINARIES

I

would like discuss here some aspects and implications of the Hindi film song, with a view to understand the interaction between technology, image, language, music, and character psychology. As is quite evident, the one feature that distinguishes Hindi cinema (and Indian cinema by extension) from cinema the world over is the structured song sequence. It is this which prevents a number of viewers from other cultures from viewing Hindi cinema sympathetically: the sudden eruption into song; the unexpected changes in space–time; the ‘lack’ of musical, semantic, or metrical continuity across stanzas, interludes; and so on. It seems to me that in spite of the large number of writings on Hindi cinema that have emerged within the Indian academy and the intellectual realm in general, the song sequence is still under-examined, and I shall argue that it is worth examining, systematically and methodically. Indian cinema, it seems to me, provides an interesting example of the interaction between a technology developed somewhere else, quickly learnt, and fundamentally, and dominantly, used by Indians.1 Such an examination then might 1It is well known that cinema is one technology that suffered the least time lag in its transfer from the west to India. The only other technologies that had very little time lag

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also provide us with an opportunity to think about Indian use of film technology. There are purists who maintain that the coming of sound strangled the visual potential of film as a medium. As the microphones and the sound recording equipment were not what they are today, actors’ movements had to be arranged in such a way that they never went out of the recording range of the microphones; outdoor shoots became very difficult to manage; most people preferred to shoot inside studios; and so on. Nevertheless, I think it is now time to accept that notwithstanding the innovativeness and power of silent cinema, it is sound cinema that is really cinema for all of us. It is also time that we acknowledged that sound recording technology has made greater advances than film recording technology—this is partly indicated by the fact that movie cameras are still hovering around 24 frames per second (fps), whereas in computer games technology, 48 fps or around has become the standard, the difference very visible in whip pans.2 There are multi-directional microphones, but no multi-directional cameras, not even in computer games.3

CINEMA: SILENT AND SOUND Like painting, sculpture, and still photography, silent cinema could only represent the exteriors of characters, situations, and objects. Like these three other arts, silent cinema represented characters that were already impoverished by the lack of speech.4 The supplementarity of were sound recording, and, with a brief hiccup of little over a decade, computation. It is also well known that the Indian film industry is one of the biggest film industries. 2It must be admitted though, that it is no longer very difficult to make cameras that will record at, say, 48 fps, but the whole film industry, and especially the projectors, will have to change for that standard to be operable. 3Computer games are coming closer and closer, though. Most current shoot’em-up games give the camera the capacity to pan 360 degrees (but these are still directional). It is, therefore, not surprising that directionality, intention is mainly metaphorized through the visual sense. Several non-human animals seem able to direct their auditory organs. This is very briefly and in passing explored in a Hollywood film called Wolf, dir. Mike Nichols, 1994. 4I am acutely aware that questions about the difference between speech and writing, and the self-presence associated with speech that is perhaps the distinguishing feature of classical (Indian and Western) metaphysics raise their head here. Without denying the rigorous validity of deconstructive argumentation, I would like to state that in my use of the word ‘speech’, that word could very well be replaced by the word ‘writing’—in the general

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inter-titles is something that we need to keep in mind here; they supplemented the intelligibility of the scenes and they also supplemented the lack of speech by giving an image of speech. Those amongst the audience as are illiterate, are incapable of deciphering that it is a representation of speech. It is important to note that the inter-titles supplement speech, and cannot ever be mistaken for audible speech as such (this is clearly evident in the possible mis-attribution of utterances represented in the inter-titles, and, it is perhaps here, as never before, the need to supplement speech by writing is most evident—the cause for this supplementation being the inadequacy of recording technology). These three arts represented human beings in their exteriority, and in an essentially impoverished condition—human beings without speech. In that sense, these stand opposed to literature, which is marked by a super-abundance of represented speech and writing. It is not unexpected, I think, that literature as an art-form has time and again sought the interiority of human existence; sometimes degenerating into emotionalism, or amateur psychology, or simple ethical judgement on actions performed by characters. I think it is a remarkable feature of human existence that human interiority (whether coded or not coded through the notions of individuality, or possession, or subjectivity) is accessible predominantly, if not only, through the thoroughly social phenomenon of language. The representation of the interiority of human existence is, without doubt, the strongest aspect of the art of literature, and the weakest aspect of theatre and film. The case of literature and theatre is, in a certain sense, understandable, since there are ancient conventions which narrative and theatre can employ (without these conventions interiority cannot be represented at all; for narrative, one can bring to mind the study by Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds,5 for example, and sense. This is one way of admitting that the duality of, and opposition between, speech and writing has been rigorously undone (most notably, by Derrida). I am not using the word speech or the word writing in their general sense. That sense is accessible only to intellection, while the phenomenal difference—the non-general and historical difference—depends on the difference between hearing and seeing. As has been pointed out many times over, the movement between the general sense of ‘writing’ and the limited, historical sense of writing is tricky, and often unpredictable. Therefore, I seek a beginning in a simple question: what is the difference between seeing and hearing? 5Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978.

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for theatre, all those asides and soliloquies). These conventions are by now naturalized, and unless pointed out, unnoticeable. The case of film, on the other hand, is not similar. It represents interiority basically through the three linguistic conventions of monologue, dialogue, or voice-over, precisely the techniques that were not available to silent cinema. This fact should minimally sensitize us to the link between speech and interiority, a paradox that might be resolved by some future filmmaker. All visual media must necessarily represent exteriority, since without photons bouncing off from surfaces and interacting with organic and electro-chemical properties of the human eye, there would be no visual experience in the first place, whereas all one has to do is shake the match-box to see if there’s any match-sticks inside. There is a physics problem here which I find myself unable to understand, far less explicate. Thus, in a silent film, one can see characters mouth words, but no speech/language comes forth. This is something that we must note: that acting in silent cinema also meant, among other things, mouthing the words which might, or might not, be put on the inter-title cards. This is of some significance, in terms of acting style. This mouthing of words is most evident, for example, in Franz Osten’s film, A Throw of Dice.6 However, the more familiar example would be one of Charlie Chaplin’s silent films. The impoverishment I mentioned earlier is clearly evident—one keeps wishing that the mouthed words could actually be heard. That, however, does not happen. It follows that acting had to be of a certain kind, in order to ‘communicate’ the interiority of characters. Thus, facial expressions became exaggerated, gestures came to substitute words, and the content came to be exteriorized. The difference between this kind of exteriorized expression and linguistic expression must be noted. Lacking the sound, sentences like ‘I love you!’ had to be acted out. It is not surprising that elements from dance and mime were adapted. My argument here is that not only do dance and mime contribute to the development of cinema, and not only do popular 6Also known as Prapanch Pash (1929), Franz Osten (dir), British Instructional Films, Himanshu Rai Film, Universum Film AG (UFA). Restored a few years ago by the National Film Archive of India, Pune. This, and all subsequent information on films is from www.imdb.org.

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forms of entertainment contribute to the development of cinema historically,7 but that there is a formal, perhaps even a structural, requirement for that. Another observation must be made: silent cinema was very rarely truly silent, since most screenings were accompanied by live music (it is not clear whether songs were sung; there was music, but possibly, a lack of speech, still).8 This nomenclature, ‘silent cinema’, is curious. It is misleading, but it misleads us to the importance of speech. It’s called silent because there is no speech in it, only graphic representation of utterances, and other kinds of language use, but there was sound in theatres that could afford musicians. It is clear that silent cinema was mainly visual, it depended almost entirely on the visual faculty, the visual syntheses, if I may use that Kantian word here. Let us be clear on this issue: when Kant talked of synthesis, he talked of all the senses together, as if they were all the same, or at least could be talked of as if they were the same. He did not talk about how the visual sense is articulated onto the auditory, olfactory, gustatory, and haptic senses.9 He lumped them all into one zone, called sensory experience. Then he talked of how these had to be synthesized to be understandable, and knowable, to render them as phenomena. He was, after all, more interested in showing how sensory experience is by itself meaningless unless there are a priori syntheses operative, with the mind, or subjectivity as the operator. He was more interested in the difference between the sensible and the intelligible, and so did not care too much about the differences within the realm of the sensory. It is only with the coming of cinema that we began to identify and understand the relationship between sight and sound. These matters are of some significance to cinema, and in this 7See, for example, Michael Chanan, The Dream That Kicks: The Pre-history of British Cinema, London: Routledge, 1995. 8This needs further investigation. When the early screenings sought to compensate for the lack of sound in the representation of human beings, it was music that was used, and not actors. In principle, it is entirely possible to arrange a few actors who would ‘dub’ the shots ‘live’. The emergence of ‘playback’ singing in India, and elsewhere, has similar complexities. 9I am arguing, modestly, that the senses themselves are doubly articulated. The temporally differentiated data that the visual and the auditory senses give are articulated, at another level, onto each other, and produce the apparently cohesive picture. Notoriously, the second level of articulation has five dimensions (and I use the word dimension in its mathematical sense). It is perhaps here that one can find a bridge that connects phenomenology and structuralism.

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case, the Hindi film song as well. If earlier cinema had fed only the visual faculty, with the coming of sound/speech and music incorporated into the film itself, cinema began to feed the auditory faculty as well, and as far as western cinema—more particularly western narrative cinema—was concerned, the auditory syntheses were subsidiary or supplementary to the visual syntheses. It is obviously necessary to exclude the western musical from the scope of this observation. However, the point is obvious that in western cinema, the musical developed as a separate genre, with its own conventions and devices, etc., whereas in Indian cinema, the narrative and the musical are usually inseparable. In a generic sense, almost all Hindi films have songs in them. By itself, of course, the song is separable. I shall come back to some implications of this later. The addition of sound—this especially means speech—added the input from the auditory sense, thus rendering more detail. This detail was always metonymic of character and hence, the addition to the sense of ‘this is so realistic’. Thus, one can imagine how it might be in the future when inputs from other senses will be recorded, and mechanically reproduced.10 Because the addition of speech merely added to the realism of cinematic experience, film theory continued to be guided by the visual experience, which is what the tradition of film studies and film analysis remembers of its own attempt to understand films. The visual experience in cinema thus continues to guide, if not dominate, our study, and understanding, and analysis of cinematic experience. A lot of film theory still continues to speak about the spectacle, of scopophilia, of spectation, monstration, of Lacanian captation. What the co-ordinated experience of sound (speech/music) does in cinema remains to be considered. It is my modest suggestion that one might begin to think about this co-ordination on the basis of the Hindi film song. What is to be noted in many song sequences is how characters position themselves when they ‘sing’, and how in early sound cinema they ‘pause’ for the connecting orchestration to finish, and then start singing the next line. My argument is that this is one very good example of where the visual is constructed in such a way that the music, voice, 10Contemporary differences between illusion and reality and between appearance and reality will disappear!

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and lyric are foregrounded, thus allowing me to suggest that here the visual sequence is entirely subservient to the auditory sequence. The visual is mere background to the music. My argument is exaggerated for clarity and emphasis. Naturally, even in Hollywood or other kinds of films, there are moments when the visual is entirely subservient to the auditory sequence, especially when characters are talking intensely to each other, and that it is entirely possible to construct the visual sequence of a song in such a way as to make it inherently and in itself exciting and interesting. But this sequence, and many other sequences from the black and white period show a clear tussle between the visual and the auditory. I must remind the audience of the film called Phir Subha Hogi,11 and the famous song in it, written by the incomparable Sahir Ludhiyanvi, ‘wo subah kabhi to ayegi’, and how in the song sequence large chunks only have the incredibly static mid-shots of Raj Kapoor and Mala Sinha. One could point to a very large number of films here, so I shall not instantiate further. Allow me to remind you how the ‘characters’ are positioned, for example, in the song sequence ‘awaaz de kahan hai’ from the film Anmol Ghadi.12 Chander (played by Surendra) is reclining. No vocal music of any quality can issue from a reclining human body. The anxious Lata (played by Noor Jehan), on the other hand, is sitting up in a position that would allow music to issue. Please remember here that the audience is having a tough time co-ordinating their own visual and auditory senses. Sound films are only over a decade old at this time. Here, obscurely, arises one of the most significant questions of Indian cinema. Whose emotion is it that is represented? Who is it that is singing? I shall take up this question later. I would like to remind ourselves here that Hindi film music spread in India as much through films themselves as, if not more, through the medium of radio, especially after the establishment of the radio as viable medium, around 1940s, and increasingly after that. It is remarkable, I think, that state radio itself mainly survived because of 11Ramesh Saigal (dir), Phir Subha Hogi, 1958. Starring: Raj Kapoor, Mala Sinha; Music:

Khayyam; Lyrics: Sahir (this film is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment). 12Mehboob (dir), Anmol Ghadi, 1946. Starring: Surendra, Noor Jehan, Suraiyya; Music: Naushad; Lyrics: Tanvir Naqvi.

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Hindi film music, and there cannot be much doubt that television lives in India because it feeds on content generated within the film industry. The TV serials are entirely dependent on 1960s and 1970s film industry content: pre- and extra-marital relations, divorce, rapes, crimes, family, mutilations, amputations, love and hate, and, of course, death, and of course, marrying someone while loving someone else, and the consequent moral satisfactions or oblique sexual satisfactions. I will merely remind you of the gramophone industry here. The most famous radio serial, the ‘Binaca/Cibaca Geet Mala’, was organized on the one hand, by whatever was meant by ‘sales charts’ in those days and on the other, by Amin Sayani’s Urdu/Hindi overtones. We must remember that these charts were not of the most successful films, but of the most successful songs. The song was, in principle, right from early sound cinema in India, detachable from the film itself. Most of the music industry would collapse if it were not so. This autonomy of the song, the structural and structured possibility of detaching it completely from the flow of shots and cuts makes it a unit. This unity and consequent independence is what distinguishes the Hindi film song from other aspects of Hindi films. It must also be remembered that the recording industry could make use of this autonomy and market the recordings of these songs in film-based anthologies of songs. There was another form of entertainment operative in Bombay and other parts of Maharashtra, the Sangeet Natak, from which too songs could be detached, in the same sense that they could be marketed separately and independently of the play itself. This detachability is significant for the simple reason that one cannot sing the whole film, but one can always sing a song, provided that one is not overly mindful of tunefulness.

SPEAKING: LISTENING: SEEING: BEING SEEN It is possible to see one’s object of desire without hearing it. It is possible to hear one’s object of desire without seeing it. It is also possible to have a secondary articulation of seeing and hearing the object of desire. Because of the nature of our physical world, it is not possible to hear someone who is distant. Neither is it a mark of any sense of intimacy if we get to see someone’s inside (this usually happens under medical

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conditions13), whereas listening to someone else’s beating heart is almost without fail a mark of intimacy (outside of medical conditions, of course). I have already pointed out that the notion of inside is deeply dependent on the sense of hearing (and on the sense of touch, but I shall not discuss that here). Several philosophical and methodological questions arise here, and I should pause and give them some thought. However, for the purposes of this discussion, I shall restrict myself to the auditory sense, supposing, for the moment, that it is possible to isolate it in some manner. The ratios indicated in the abovementioned sub-heading indicate a certain possibility of understanding the relationship between self and others (with some refinement about which we shall not worry here), and between the sense of intimacy and distance. Anything that is heard is likely to be coming from someone else (indicated in that brief distance felt when one listens to a tape of one’s own speech/song, whereas the act of seeing and the act of speaking/singing usually comes from one’s own ‘interiority’). Let us take a non-typical Hindi song, the so-called ‘back-ground song’, in which the song cannot be attributed realistically to the lead characters on screen. ‘Aaj sajan mohe ang lagaa le’ from Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa14 is a good enough example. Gulabo (Waheeda Rehman) has just been casually saved from a policeman by our protagonist, and in her somewhat drunken state, follows him to his house. A bhajan singer is singing of Radha and Krishna. The ‘interior’ emotions felt by Gulabo are channelized through the song sung by that singer. This sequence seems to indicate a certain iterability of emotion and desire: the singer sings of Radha and Krishna, but ‘quotes’ Radha, which in turn seems to ‘quote’ Gulabo’s emotion and desire. Through the sequence she climbs the stairs to ‘reach’ her ‘love’. The sequence only ends with Gulabo realizing her station in life as a fallen woman, or as a prostitute. She turns away from the possibility of ‘actually’ touching our 13The emotion of intimacy at such moments is always accompanied by a sense of medical knowledge, and since intimacy relates much more to ignorance through curiosity, these moments do not qualify to the adjective ‘intimate’. Also, usually, there are other people present. 14Guru Dutt (dir), Pyaasa, 1956. Starring: Guru Dutt, Waheeda Rehman, Mala Sinha, Music: S.D. Burman, Lyrics: Sahir Ludhiyanvi.

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protagonist and thus, makes the song, so to say, her own expression, while not ‘really’ expressing herself at all. I have already indicated how the song as a unity seems to be detachable from the film itself—clearly indicated in its independent and autonomous marketability. This detachability from the film makes it iterable.15 I imagine it is iterability that makes mechanical reproduction possible. If my speech were not detachable from me, and from the moment and intention of utterance, it would be a natural, organic growth on me, or of me, and thus could not be recorded mechanically, and subsequently reproduced. Some delicate but sharp surgery would be needed. It is clear then, that utterance itself is reproducible. What we see in this song sequence (and similar song sequences where the song comes from the sky, or from a radio, or some other machinic device) is the iterability of emotion and desire itself. Needless to say, all songs have lyrics and thus, partake of language, which is the prime locus of iterability. It is the iterability of the song that reveals the other side of the structure—that someone else’s, some other song can become mine, when I sing it. I can put my own emotion into it, and thus personalize it. Singing a song, thus, puts me somewhere between me as a person and as a self, my emotion or lack of it, and someone else’s song and emotion, or lack of it. Yet another major type of Hindi film songs is the parodic song. As is evident, iterability is also the condition of possibility for parody. There are innumerable instances of parodies of songs in Hindi cinema, the earliest I remember is from a film called Ek Phool Do Mali.16 There is a parodic song sequence in Mr India17 too. A more recent example could be the song ‘woh ladki hai kahan’ from Dil Chahta Hai.18 The differences between the parodic song sequences are quite revealing: in 15For a rigorous description of iterability, see Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, in Margins of Philosophy (Trans. with additional notes, Alan Bass). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982, pp. 307–30, especially 321 ff. 16Devendra Goel (dir), Ek Phool Do Mali, 1969. Starring: Balraj Sahni, Sanjay Khan, Sadhana, Music: Ravi, Lyrics: Prem Dhawan, Ravi. 17Shekhar Kapoor (dir), Mr India, 1987. Starring: Anil Kapoor, Sridevi, Music: Lakhshmikant Pyarelal, Lyrics: Javed Akhtar. The detail is more complex than I am reporting. This particular parody, for example, also reverses camera angles, and so could be seen as a transition between the first and the third parodies that I mention later. 18Farhan Akhtar (dir), Dil Chahta Hai, 2001. Starring: Aamir Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Saif Ali Khan, Preity Zinta, Music: Shankar Ehsaan Loy, Lyrics: Javed Akhtar.

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the first one, the parody was generated by the discord between the tunes and their mnemonic associations with the ‘original’ versions, and the words themselves, and this is true of the second one as well, whereas the third parody is, revealingly, mainly a parody of styles of song picturization, and works rather quickly through the history of song picturization. I shall ignore the third for a while and point out that in the first two, it was the discrepancy between words and tune that generated the parody. This is an important issue that I cannot take up here: what is the relationship between utterance and music? If the tune can be set to variable words, are not words dispensable? Can one dispense with words altogether in music, then? Can one dispense with music in words, then? The tune, too, is iterable and repeatable. In music one finds an example of iterability that does not seem to depend on language or writing in the general Derridean sense. It is not surprising therefore that several thinkers—including the otherwise careful Nietzsche—have attributed to music a primal universality, often calling it a universal language. The parodies I mentioned earlier seem to emphasize that in a song the words and the tune are detachable from each other, and it is this mutual independence that makes the first and the second kind of parodies possible. By the time we come to Dil Chahta Hai, style itself has become heavily visual, and self-reflexively provides comment on earlier styles of song picturization. The parody is now not merely in the words and tunes, but in the style itself. It is to be remembered that the parody of music has a long tradition in Hindi cinema, and these parodies might yield a way of identifying and marking the transitions in it as well. It would seem then that the song is detachable from the film, and the tune and the lyrics are further detachable from each other. They maintain a certain mnemonic relationship, that is, the words remind us of the tune, the tune reminds us of the words. There were times when the text of the songs from a film was sold outside movie halls. There were people who collected these pamphlets. One fine example of iterability of the tune and the song too is the ending of the song sequence ‘ramaiyya vatavaiyya’ from Raj Kapoor’s Shree 42019—the 19Raj Kapoor (dir), Shree 420, 1955. Starring: Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Music: Shankar Jaykishan, Lyrics: Hasrat Jaipuri.

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tune of the song becomes popular within the film, and several people are shown humming it as the director transitions to another scene. Iterability, then, has this double aspect to it, of detachability and attachability (to someone or something else). It seems to me that the Hindi film song does this with emotions as well. The emotions in the song can become mine, and I can put my emotions into the song. Anybody who has hummed ‘sham-e-gum-ki qasam’20 to herself knows what I am trying to get at. I am suggesting then, that while it is possible to think of iterability as the condition of possibility of communication (if my words or expressions were to be permanently attached to me, how would others understand them?), or as an otherness structured into expression, we might conceive of iterability as a place where a loose transaction can take place between oneself and someone else. Someone else can become a bit like me here, and I can become a bit like someone else. This is indicated, I think, in the fact that in the song sequence from Pyaasa, one is able to identify the emotion represented is that of Gulabo. A little like the song sequence from Anmol Ghadi, the visual assists in this identification: it begins with a close-up of Gulabo, but we notice that the visual plays a greater role, in the sense that a narrative at variance with the lyric and the music develops in the visual, and the song ends on a long shot of her rushing away from our protagonist, who is unaware that she had come close to him.

FOREIGN TECHNOLOGY, LOCAL AESTHETICS? It is well known that film recording technology was transported to India very quickly, within a decade of its commercial establishment in the West. It is also well known that Phalke played with the technology initially to generate some movies about plants, with an educational purpose, and then shifted to mythological films. It seems to me that in the initial stages of the interaction with this technology, and the development of Hindi film format, for example, there were curious interactions between western representations, western technicians and technology and more local, Indian content. Franz Osten’s film, Bhabi,21 is one good example of this. However, it is 20Zia Sarhadi (dir), Foot Path, 1953. Starring: Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, Music: Khayyam, Lyrics: Sardar Jafri. 21Franz Osten (dir), Bhabi, 1938 (further details not available).

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with the coming of sound that film making in Bombay and other places became more Indian, because with sound came the possibility of song. Song generated dance in a way that a merely visual film could not— visual rhythm is always in the danger of seeming mechanical. Thus, it is the film song that makes for Indian cinema. In as much as the camera is a limited mechanical device, matters of ‘visual culture’ are not yet significant: camera placement, angle, and film speed determine what can be seen or shown, rather than culture as such. While it is true that the content of films can obviously mark them as belonging to specific cultures, the techniques remain more or less constant, since the technology is not yet as versatile as later. One would imagine that with a technology as versatile as it is today, films made in various cultures would reveal (after analysis) something of the visual organization and features of these cultures. I would like to argue that the Indian-ness of Indian visual organization (if indeed this is the correct way of talking about these things) is revealed more specifically in the song sequences rather than the other, narrative parts of the film. Especially in cinematic ideas that came from the southern filmmakers, a definitely non-western visual imagination seems to be at work. Think of the song sequences in mid-1980s films, of which the film Tohfa22 is a remarkable example, or take even the path-breaking Hum Se Hai Muqabla,23 and one clearly sees that the camera placement, and character and camera movement and cutting are different from what can easily be identified as western style. If in the narrative part, technique seeks a certain realism, in the song parts, they become, loosely speaking, surrealist, or fantastic—one can be quite sure that they are not realistic at least. It is obvious that two or three distinct tendencies can be noticed in Hindi cinema in general. In the first, sound and music come to guide and govern the visual; in the second, the narrative parts pursue a certain blend of western realism and Indian emotions, themes, and plots; and in the third, the visual element comes to be of importance in the song sequences as well. It seems to me that tracing the interactions between these tendencies will trace the history of film-making styles available 22K. Raghavendra Rao (dir), Tohfa, 1984. Starring: Jitendra, Sridevi, Jayaprada, Music: Bappi Lahiri, Lyrics: Indivar. 23S. Shankar (dir), Hum Se Hai Muquabla a.k.a. Kadhalan, 1994. Starring: Prabhu Deva, Nagma, Music: A.R. Rahman (this was the first Tamil film to be dubbed in Hindi).

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to an Indian filmmaker. I must admit that these tendencies are merely exaggerations in my description, in the sense that one can rarely find them in such pure forms. However, it does seem to me, looking at songs in the early era, songs in the middle era, and contemporary songs, that there are identifiable differences, which could further be solidified artificially to give us some abstract picture of the available empirical variety. This would enable us to schematize the history of Hindi cinema on the basis of differences in the styles of filming songs, and this might be particularly useful if we looked at how love songs were filmed.

THE LOVE SONG I shall not discuss what love might mean in Hindi cinema, I shall restrict myself to the love song. In the variety available, it is clear that the socalled ‘love song’ is numerically the most frequent. This could be a solo, or a duet, this could be happy or sad. What is a love song? The love song expresses love—we could understand it in many ways, let us say that in the love song a character might express love and desire, or pain and depression. If it is a duet, it might be that both the characters express their love for each other, or one of them does and the other refuses, another remote possibility is that both characters express their love for someone else. The ‘sad’ versions have similar possibilities. In as much as the love song is expressive, it has something to do with exteriorizing some interior emotion. We have already seen that expressing an emotion makes it iterable and quotable. However, a distinction between expression in language and expression in music has to be made, for the simple reason that language is capable of expressing specific interiorities, whereas music, when not accompanied by words, is not capable of expressing a specific interiority (this is not to suggest that it cannot express interiority in general). When I express myself in language, the emotional content could be said to be mine in that specific situation of expression. In short, as has been observed of language in general, linguistic expression is heavy with syntax and semantics, and therefore precise; whereas music is syntax heavy and almost devoid of semantics. This is indicated also by the far more rigid rules of combination of notes in music, and far more loose rules of combination in language.

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The Hindi film song is, thus, a space that both language and music occupy, and is thus more complex than either of them. Music allows it to be repeatable and iterable, the words of the lyric allow it to be filled in with the singer’s emotional content (especially when real people sing film songs). One remarkable feature of how such songs are filmed is that quite a lot of them are filmed outdoors—gardens, mountains, snowy slopes, and many cases, tulip gardens, and the incredible blue sea of nearAfrica islands. There are, however, a few songs in which there are people around the couple (for example, ‘dekhiye sahibo mai koi vo nahin’ from Vijay Anand’s Teesri Manzil,24 or, ‘rafta rafta dekho ankh meri ladi hai’, the famous characters-in-crane sequence in Arjun Hingorani’s Kahani Kismat Ki25), but the couple is bound together in an outdoor privacy, so to say. We must be very clear on this issue, and attempt to avoid confusing interiority and privacy. These issues are related to the division between private and public spheres of action and thought. One might see in real life a couple kissing hard, holding each other tight, at the bus stop. Perhaps they are going to be separated for some time, perhaps for ever. One does not know. Is the space they occupy a public space or a private space? Is their space (of which they are thankfully unaware), a mutually shared subjective and reserved space?26 On the other hand, one sees a party being thrown, it is in my friend’s private house, but there are a hundred odd people on her plush lawn, what kind of space is this? One should wonder about smoking here, since smoking is banned in public spaces. But, it is very difficult to figure out if this is a public space or my friend’s private house where I have always been permitted to smoke wherever I wanted.27 This brief foray into concepts in law and concepts in political and social theory might give us some hint of the complexity of the spaces in which love, and the love song, might take place. What comes through 24Vijay Anand (dir), Teesri Manzil, 1966. Starring: Shammi Kapoor, Asha Parekh, Music: R.D. Burman, Lyrics: Majrooh Sultanpuri. 25Arjun Hingorani (dir), Kahani Kismat Ki, 1973. Starring: Dharmendra, Rekha, Music: Anandji Kalyanji, Lyrics: Rajendra Krishnan. 26The so-called ‘temenos’, a space reserved for, and shared by a pair of blissful lovers. See Northrop Frye, Studies in English Romanticism, New York: Random House, 1968. 27In short, how many people have to be present for a private space to become a public space?

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in most cases is the validity of loving actions in spaces that are generally thought to be public. One must never forget that this validity is being presented in a Hindi film. It seems to me that what validates these love scenes in public spaces are two things. First, the awareness that this is a presentation merely, without an experienced and experiential referent; and second, the desire for validating the notion of a person with interiority as such in Indian culture in general. There is another feature that is obvious perhaps, but I have not yet found a way of putting it in simple sentences. It seems to me that the object of desire—the lover or the beloved—is a figuration, even an allegory, of consumer goods in particular, and commodities in general. What I have in mind is the parallelism that can be seen between ‘love’ in Hindi cinema, and the social operation of desire for commodities. It is appropriate to suggest that Raj Kapoor’s Bobby28 was, in a certain sense, a turning point. Another notable instance is K. Balachander’s Ek Duje ke Liye.29 Many other examples can be found easily, especially after Bobby. The way ‘love’ is figured in these films is, I think, different from earlier ways. It is perhaps in Bobby that it is clear that the pair of lovers sleep together, have sex. This is new for the times: while the sex is indicated through a song as always, still they are in a room, and in the bed. Ek Duje ke Liye configures the fulfilment of love in terms of death. I think it is possible to find many other examples, where such a figuration of love for persons and love for commodities or items of consumption can be seen clearly. Minimally then, it might be possible to arrive at a schematic description of the history of filming of songs, the styles in which songs have been filmed. In the early black and white period, the visual was in the service of the music (as is clearly indicated in the ‘pause’ in the songs). The middle period, which includes the transition to colour, is marked by two tendencies. The first is a fusion of music and visual. This is fruitfully seen in Kashmir ki Kali,30 in the song sequence, ‘ye 28Raj Kapoor (dir), Bobby, 1973. Starring: Rishi Kapoor, Dimple Kapadia, Music: Lakshmikant-Pyarelal. 29K. Balachander (dir), Ek Duje ke Liye, 1981. Starring: Kamal Hasan, Rati Agnihotri, Music: Lakshmikant-Pyarelal. 30Shakti Samanta (dir), Kashmir ki Kali, 1964. Starring: Shammi Kapoor, Sharmila Tagore, Music: O.P. Nayyar.

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chaand sa raushan chehra’. The second is uncertainty about the relationship between music and visual, and this is amply indicated in the countless songs in which actors ‘play’ musical instruments, but the movement of their fingers have no relation whatsoever with the notes that are heard. While it is true that this goof-up can be seen in films from other periods as well, it seems to me that this period is particularly marked by it. The third period, the contemporary one, can be indicated by the song sequence that I have already mentioned, from Dil Chahta Hai. I do not mean to suggest that this is the only way to schematize the history of Hindi films, but that it would be interesting if we could arrive at a schematic history using song sequences as the classificatory concept. A large number of Hindi films have thankfully remained unaffected by advertisements of commodities. Superficially, of course, they have been ‘deeply’ affected, as is evident in the glossy quality of colours and shots and dress design and setting and so on. However, the crucial difference remains. The act of consumption, that is to say the act of consummation, still has a history, and a future. Love is still consequential, and represented as such in the narratives, whereas the narratives in advertisements of commodities hide the history of the production of a commodity, and certainly, the consequences of the consumption, or use, of a commodity. It seems to me that the figurations and configurations of this indeterminate quality of the notion of self (as represented in and through Hindi cinema), could be understood as the ‘subject in transition’: where an earlier understanding of self-hood is transforming itself into a different understanding of self-hood. On the other hand, it should also be possible to see these as figurations of the ‘yet to come of the subject as such’: where an earlier understanding of the self is imagining a subject-hood that has not yet arrived. It is necessary to say this because of the immense variety in the history and future of love that is represented in Hindi cinema in general. It is therefore necessary to wonder about the role of the song in Hindi cinema. Deeply expressive as it is, what, or whom does it express is a necessary question. I hope I have not misled you into thinking that I have answers. I believe it is enough to raise some questions, however uninformed, outmoded, and chewed over they might be.

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If I articulate only the auditory and not the visual—as when I sing a song from a film—then I become: a) my own expressive self; b) the singer himself/herself; c) the character in the film; and perhaps, reflectively, d) a consumer of the film as a commodity; and then e) a consumer of my own musical culture. Therefore, the question: who is it that is singing when I sing a song from a film?

PART III

NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND MEDIATIC INFRASTRUCTURE

9 The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why it Matters Indian Broadcasting Policy, 1920s–1990s* Robin Jeffrey**

T

he spread of broadcast radio does not necessarily make people happier or more democratic. Asked to gauge the political ‘success’ of India, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the second half of the twentieth century, most people would probably award the palm to India. But radio’s popularity appears to affect the propagation of a common, accepted language. Radio, one analyst asserted, has ‘taught them [the Filipinos] the national language’ (Lent n.d.: 88). In Indonesia, the Dutch permitted ‘loyal’, conservative Indonesians to run radio stations using the Dutch imperial infrastructure before the Second World War, and this ‘Eastern radio was tuned to Eastern listeners’. The language was intended to communicate with an audience throughout the archipelago, and the Japanese encouraged this development by giving Indonesian nationalist leaders access to radio to speak to the people (Kitley 2000: 24; Mrazek 2002: 182–3; Nugroho 1957: 27). In both the Philippines and Indonesia, acceptance of a ‘national language’ since independence has been remarkably widespread in comparison with the development of Hindi, India’s national language. *Originally published as ‘The Mahatma Didn’t Like the Movies and Why it Matters: Indian Broadcasting Policy, 1920s–1990s’, in Global Media and Communication, 2 (2), 2006, pp. 204–24. Published by Sage Publications, UK. **I am very grateful for the help of Barbara Nelson in completing this article.

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In India, more than fifteen years after independence, ‘the basic issue’ remained whether ‘the language used in A[ll] I[ndia] R[adio]’s Hindi news bulletins is understood by the vast majority of the people for whom they are intended’. Jawaharlal Nehru ‘complained that he could not understand the language in which his Hindi speeches were reported...!’ (Awasthy 1965: 132, 135). In Hindi-speaking areas, the language used on AIR was elite, highly sanskritized, and difficult to understand. South India in any case was often resistant to Hindi, a language of the north, and AIR’s style of Hindi, and its programming, did little to erode resistance. It was the arrival, in the 1990s, of satellite television, and its popular entertainment, that began to make Hindi acceptable to more of India. The decade of the 1950s, sometimes called the golden age of Indian films, was a dark age for Indian radio. Modelled neither on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) with an autonomous board, nor on the US industry with commercial advertising sponsoring programme production and station building, radio in India was starved of funds. Politicians and officials welcomed control of it as a privilege of high office, but did not understand its strengths or limitations. Films, on the other hand, financed by private investors, depended on paying audiences, and had a vital and incessant conversation with their publics through the box office. In 1980, India had only 20 million radios, but movie audiences were estimated at 65 million people a week (Awasthy 1965: 259; Fifty Years of Indian Talkies (1931–1981) 1981: appendices; Mass Media in India, 1980–81 1981: 193). Whatever the defects of films, they captivated hundreds of millions and crossed language boundaries more often than any other form of communication. ...For men and women dedicated to the transformation of their country—in Gandhi’s words, wiping the tear from every eye—the leaders of the Indian National Congress (INC) devoted surprisingly little attention to communications. Gandhi himself was both a master journalist and an instinctive communicator through pre-modern channels. His dress, his speech, and the nature of his travels and campaigns resonated subtly with the expectations of millions of Indians. Yet, Gandhi and the men and women he inspired gave little thought to the potential of the new media of film, recordings, and radio, in carrying messages of the nation and its rebirth to ordinary people. Innovation in these spheres came primarily in film, and from

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men and women with backgrounds in commerce and courtly entertainment. Broadcasting was largely ignored. When the Chanda Committee reported scathingly about Indian broadcasting in 1966, the foreign-exchange commitment to the electronic industries, on which broadcasting depended, had been reduced by 30 per cent in 10 years (Chanda Report 1966: 38). Ten years after independence, fewer than one in five villages, where 85 per cent of the population lived, had a radio.1 Television was regarded as an unnecessary luxury, and radio simply as a megaphone: a device by which the cultured could preach lofty ideals to the lowly. A former Director-General of AIR captured this spirit: ‘If cinema has been able to achieve its present pre-eminence as a result of private enterprise [people sometimes asked], why should radio and TV not be permitted to flower in the same way?’ He answered his own question: ‘For the intelligentsia the example of the film industry is an argument against commercialisation of broadcasting... Broadcasting is expected to serve national objectives some of which may not be commercially paying.’2 The film industry was notable for ‘corruption...black money, and vulgarity’ (Chatterji 1991: 192–3) and therefore, was not the sort of institution by which to uplift the nation. But the nation of highfalutin Hindi and classical music was not the nation of most Indians. A medium that seldom spoke to them seldom attracted them. This article tries to show how the austerity of the Gandhian ethos, the conveniently restrictive policies inherited from the imperial rulers, and a fear of enflaming a delicately plural society combined to deprive Indian broadcasting of finance, energy, and imagination.

COLONIAL LEGACY It would have taken a great effort to have snapped Indian radio out of its colonial structures after 1947. This straitjacket was stitched from various threads: the need of authoritarian foreign rulers to control information; the commitment, stemming from the British model, to 1See National Sample Survey (Fourteenth Round, July 1958–June 1959), No. 109, Tables with Notes on Indian Villages, Table 9, Cabinet Secretariat, New Delhi, 1966, p. 16. Fewer than 14 per cent got a daily newspaper (Luthra, Indian Broadcasting, 1986, p. 160). 2P.C. Chatterji, Broadcasting in India, 2nd edition, New Delhi: Sage, 1991, pp. 192–3.

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keep control of the airwaves in the hands of the state; and the reluctance of a colonial regime to devote revenue to anything that appeared unnecessary or frivolous. Censorship of films had been introduced from the time of the First World War to control ‘sexual content’, particularly involving Europeans, and the ‘portrayal of crime’, and from the 1930s was directed against nationalist political statements (Evidence to Indian Cinematograph Committee, vol. 1 1928: 105–44, cited in Shoesmith 1989). The fears that inspired film censorship applied similarly to radio. The new medium of radio seemed an additional problem for a colonial state preoccupied, from the 1920s, with a national movement transformed by Gandhi.... Reith, the creator of the BBC, later wrote that radio in India had been ‘without official support or interest’ and because of this, ‘a great opportunity had been lost’ (quoted in Awasthy 1965: 2; Gupta 1995: 11–16).... Apprehensive imperialist governments were not the only thing standing in the way of the expansion of radio. Most of India lacked electricity until the early 1970s, and the batteries for radios were cumbersome and expensive until the transistor radio came into widespread use in the 1960s (Chanda Report 1966: 129, 131). Advocates of rural radio in India in the 1930s, who tended to be Indian idealists (or calculating Europeans), took ‘the Soviet example’ as a model of what could be done to educate and improve illiterate rural folk. A limited number of durable, single-frequency radios, entrusted to reliable local authorities, could reach whole villages by loudspeaker. The idea had enthusiastic champions, but not among the influential, and it died away (Zivin 1998: 725). The exigencies of the Second World War reinforced the culture and the structures that enabled ‘authorities’—whether politicians or officials—to control radio. British officials reclaimed control of provincial governments from elected Indian politicians in October 1939, and the war justified mechanisms of censorship for all media and particularly, for AIR. Such censorship included ‘government-inspired attacks on Indian leaders of the Congress Party such as Gandhi and Nehru as being pro-Japanese’ (Fleay and Sanders 1989: 509). Examples of using radio to denigrate one’s enemies and promote oneself were established; they proved hard to abandon after independence. ...India, in 1947, inherited a national radio system shaped by the needs of an authoritarian colonial government but aware of a public-

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broadcasting ethos originating from the BBC. With independence this legacy came under the control of the Congress Party, which brought to media policy its own experience, ideas, and prejudices. Influential policy makers in the new government were not at home with film, radio, and recordings. Some were suspicious and even hostile to aspects of AIR’s programming that hitherto had proved popular. In one of Vallabhbhai Patel’s first actions as a minister, even before independence, he instructed that no one whose ‘private life was a public scandal’ should be given work at AIR. This rule, which never applied to men, effectively banned popular Muslim women singers, who were deemed to be courtesans (Luthra 1986: 105, 162, 305). In the eyes of many members of the Gandhian Congress, ‘entertainment’ was culturally tainted. It could suggest courtesans, prostitution, and Muslim influence (Keskar 1967: 7; Neuman 1980: 216). John Reith’s alleged ‘high browism’ at the BBC paled in comparison. Patel and others took their cue from the Mahatma, who, though a master communicator, was skeptical of anything that appeared to be ‘advertising’. When interviewed by Fox Filmtone News in April 1931, he began by saying: I do not like this kind of thing, but I shall reconcile myself to it, if not more than a few minutes have to be given. Although I know this sort of enterprise will advertise you, which is your primary object, I know also that it will serve to advertise the cause which I represent—India’s independence. I do not discount the value of propaganda. I have been described as the greatest propagandist in the world. I may deserve the compliment. But my propaganda is unlike the ordinary. It is that of truth which is self-propagating. Truth abhors artificiality.3

When he went to Britain a few months later and was taken to meet Charlie Chaplin, he had to be told who Chaplin was.4 He appears to have seen only one film, Ramrajya, in Bombay, in June 1944. ‘So far as I know’, he wrote to a cousin consoling her about the frivolous habits of a young man: ‘I am the only person who has never seen a film. But no, I did go once, not knowing what the thing was about, and saw a film about the exile of Janaki and Ramachandra. It was a depressing 3Hindu, 1 May 1931, in Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. 52, p. 16. Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. 4Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (hereafter CWMG), vol. 53, n.d., p. 393.

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experience and I felt like running away from the place, but could not do so. It was sheer waste of time’.5 We might infer that Ramrajya, released 1943, irritated Gandhi on three counts: it was a) extravagant; b) a musical; and c) it was on a religious theme. Based on the story of Lord Ram’s return with Sita from Lanka, Ramrajya had ‘big-budget art direction’ and a ‘final battle with fire[-]spewing magical arrows’. The fact that the ‘Gandhian sympathies’ of the director, Vijay Bhatt (1907–93), were said to have led him to take up religious themes did not impress Gandhi (Rajadhyaksha and Williams 1999: 63–4, 299). For him, film, radio, and recording ranked as distractions and temptations, capable of diverting people from the national quest for freedom and reformation. It is significant for broadcasting policy that three of his stalwart devotees held the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting for the first fifteen years of independence: Vallabhbhai Patel himself from 1947 to 1950; R.R. Diwakar (1894–1990) from 1950 to 1952 (having been the junior minister under Vallabhbhai); and the legendary Dr B.V. Keskar (1903–84) from 1952 to 1962. It is worth examining each man. Vallabhbhai Patel’s reputation as a committed follower of Gandhi, after his ‘conversion’ from a brandy-drinking, bridge-playing, suit-wearing lawyer, at the time of the First World War is well known. Thereafter, he embraced the Gandhian way completely—spinning, khadi, vegetarianism—and the puritanical ethic that went with Gandhi’s programme (Weber 2004: 145–51). R.R. Diwakar, who succeeded Patel, was, if possible, more committed to Gandhian ideas than Gandhi himself. A Brahmin, educated in Pune, the high-caste cultural capital of western India, he began his working life as a college lecturer in English before joining the first noncooperation movement against the British in 1920 when he was imprisoned for the first time. He became one of the staunch middlelevel leaders of the Gandhian nationalist movement. After leaving legislative politics at the first general elections of 1951–2, he was appointed a state Governor and then ‘dedicated himself to his first love, transmitting the message of Gandhi...all over the world’, through organizations like the Gandhi Peace Foundation.6 5CWMG, vol. 95, p. 380. 6Gandhi Marg, vol. 11, no. 4, January–March 1990, pp. 511; and vol. 12, no. 4, January– March 1991, pp. 467–77.

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Diwakar’s successor at Information and Broadcasting had a similar background. B.V. Keskar was to stay in the job for ten years and acquire a reputation for high-brow interference. Also a Maratha Brahmin born in Pune, Keskar was educated in Benares and at the University of Paris in the 1930s (Lelyveld 1994: 119–21). He too entered the Gandhian nationalist movement at the time of non-cooperation in 1921 and later occupied significant positions in the INC.... Keskar’s critics claimed that ‘he seldom gave a hearing to those with whom he did not agree...maintained autocratic control in areas where he was personally interested’ and was the author of ‘a number of ill-conceived plans and poorly executed schemes’ (Awasthy 1965: 225–6). The commission of inquiry into broadcasting, which Keskar long resisted and was instituted only after Indira Gandhi became the Information and Broadcasting Minister in 1964, noted more temperately that ‘successive Ministers usurped the policy-making functions of the directorategeneral and started interfering even in matters of programme planning and presentation’ (Chanda Report 1966: 51).7 The first three ministers were upper-caste Gandhians and wellcredentialed veterans of the nationalist movement. We may infer that they inherited Gandhi’s fears and doubts that the new media could contribute positively to the new India. The Chanda Report concluded that to such people ‘television is an expensive luxury intended for the entertainment of the affluent society and...should be left alone until our plans of economic development have been completed’ (ibid.: 199). And radio suffered from a failure of governing elites, such as those on the Planning Commission who determined where investment would be made, to understand that engaging, well-produced radio ‘can mobilize human resources and enlist the active and informed cooperation of the people’ (ibid.: 38). But, why should Nehru and his associates, who were influenced by the Soviet Union and other foreign places, have adopted such an attitude? For them, it appears, electricity came before radio or anything like it, and electricity would come from the full-scale industrialization that was the goal of the first fifteen years of independence. If politicians contemplated how to use a medium like radio, the model in their minds was that of the ‘bullet theory’—have a message, 7Keskar, who represented a constituency in Uttar Pradesh although he was from western India, lost his seat in the general elections of 1962.

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fire it, and expect the target to be hit. This expectation—and the lack of thought about media that underlay it—is captured in one of Nehru’s letters to state chief ministers in 1953. Having just returned from opening a dam and a power station, he was proud of the achievements but despondent at how few Indians recognized them: The sight of these works filled me...with a sense of achievement. They are mighty works of which any country can be proud. And yet, how many of us...realize the greatness of these undertakings...? ...I am anxious that we should reach our people in the villages as well as in the towns with some kind of a record of the work... Ultimately, what counts is the approach to our rural millions. I have come to feel more and more that that approach should be visual and through documentary films... We have not explored this avenue enough, although it is the obvious method of approach...among people who are largely illiterate. I think our Film Division of the Central Government, our Planning Commission and our State Governments, should co-operate in putting about the numerous developmental activities... We should definitely aim now at educating our village folk through films.8

Nehru envisaged mobile vans carrying the nation-building documentaries from village to village (as video vans did thirty years later). But, he gave no thought to radio and no consideration to the fact that audiences had to want to watch. Firing bullets achieves nothing if they miss the target. Nor did Nehru seem daunted at the enormity of trying to orchestrate the Film Division, the Planning Commission, and the state governments in an artistic endeavour like film making. The nervous junior public servants of AIR, who carried out the political and cultural wishes of the minister, sucked life out of programming. A listener survey in the 1950s found ‘nine out of ten houses in every street...tuned to [Radio] Ceylon, and the receiver in the tenth house was...out of order’ (Awasthy 1965: 54).9 Eventually in 1957, as evidence mounted of a decline in audience numbers at a time when India’s population was growing at 2.5 per cent a year, a new station,10 devoted to light music and even film music, was introduced, 8G. Parthasarathi (ed.), Letters to Chief Ministers, 1947–64,Vol. 3, 1952–1954, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 253–4. 9Awasthy may have had his tongue in his cheek in passing on this story, but it catches the mood among those AIR people who saw radio as a tool needing imagination and passion. 10The new station was called Vividh Bharati.

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which won back some listeners (Luthra 1986: 310). But media policy remained in the hands of an uninfluential minister, seeking to implement a policy of high culture with little thought about other goals for electronic media. ‘We reveal’, one insider wrote, ‘our lack of initiative and our incapacity to create organisations appropriate to our needs’ (Masani 1985: 1).

UNBOTTLED GENIES There was a third reason for tight, central control of media. Fear of repeating the bloodshed of partition—and further division of India— was used to justify various forms of censorship, caution, and control. The British had also been fond of citing the need for censorship to prevent riots and communal disturbance. ‘Censorship is necessary in India’, the Indian Cinematograph Committee (1927) concluded, to prevent ‘the import, production and public exhibition of films which might demoralise morals, hurt religious susceptibilities or excite communal or racial animosities’.11 Radio came to be regarded as having all the potential of word-of-mouth rumour and street-corner rabblerousing to incite disaffection and violence. Station managers were so sensitive that one wrote to the Director-General seeking advice about whether a version of a national song that referred to 300 million Indians ought to go to air, since the population of India at that time was 400 million and the missing 100 million might be construed as being that portion of the population who were Muslims. This was taken as ‘an indication of the communal passions and suspicions then rife’ (Luthra 1986: 185). In an India with an illiteracy rate of more than 80 per cent, and a daily newspaper penetration of no more than seven newspapers per 1,000 people (Jeffrey 2003: 47–9), print could do limited damage. But radio and film, though they might provide a way of connecting with ‘the masses’, could as easily inflame as educate. Colonial officials saw evidence of ‘the heat generated by religion’ when they interacted with radio in an incident in 1943, when one Muslim sect cut the line that linked the broadcast of a rival’s festival to the transmitter (Luthra 1986: 11Indian Cinematograph Committee (1927), quoted in Rama Ramanathan, ‘The Theatre’s (In)Ability to Resist Censorship’, email from newsletter, [email protected]. Accessed on 10 August 2005.

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349). In a south Indian state in the 1980s, the start of a television news broadcast in Urdu—a north Indian language now associated with Muslims—led to riotous protests in which more than thirty people were killed (Ghose 2005: 195). A 1980 report justified censorship: ‘in...a hyper-conservative society like India, which has rigid social and religious norms of behaviour, where the political consciousness has still not matured and where harsh economic conditions inhibit individual growth, there are bound to be serious limitations on the freedom of expression.’12 The timidity that this engendered discouraged timely, credible reporting and provided an excuse for constant political intervention. When live current affairs broadcasts were attempted on television in the early 1990s, the then Prime Minister, P.V. Narasimha Rao, had them cancelled within days. ‘We cannot have live broadcasts’, he told the television network’s boss. ‘It is too dangerous’ (Ghose 2005: 189). This was echoed by the Minister of Information and Broadcasting ten years later. Justifying the ban on newscasts on FM radio, Priya Das Munshi argued that: ‘the news broadcast on [radio]...is considered the last word and has unmatched credibility. Therefore it is our duty to see that the news being broadcast on radio is correct and does not provoke any section of the society. Our challenge is greater than any other country’ (Munshi 2006). Both politicians were publicly proclaiming the dangers to society of inflammatory words and false information. But both also had in mind the dangers of forceful criticism of the Congress Party. ‘Timid in reporting’, AIR became ‘a purveyor of stale news’ by hapless reporters who assumed any important story ‘should be cleared with authorities’ to determine how and whether it should go to air (Chanda Report 1966: 96–7). Thus the structures of authoritarian control inherited from British rule combined with Gandhian asceticism and fears about India’s inflammable social fabric. They produced an environment in which radio’s potential to communicate and educate was stifled, and television was regarded as an extravagance and an even greater danger than radio. Few embraced the enthusiastic view of the Chanda Report that radio 12Report of the Working Group on National Film Policy, New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1980, p. 74.

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could help achieve ‘the liberation of the human mind, spreading knowledge and techniques necessary for progress and prosperity’ (ibid.: 38). As a result, radio made little contribution towards the popularizing of a national language (compared, for example, with Indonesia and the Philippines). Similarly, transfer of information and awareness among the population proceeded more slowly than an aggressive and imaginative policy of entertainment and news reporting might have achieved.

ALL ‘INDIRA’ RADIO, 1964–84 AND BEYOND It is ironic that Indira Gandhi, who exercised the most extensive censorship since independence, was responsible for a detailed inquiry into broadcast media policy. As the new Minister of Information and Broadcasting in 1964, she introduced ‘consultants and specialists and saw to it that their advice was implemented...major changes...took place’ (Jayakar 1992: 171). By the time the committee, under Asok Chanda, a former Auditor-General of India, reported in 1966, Indira Gandhi had become prime minister. Couched in the polite language of the bureaucracy, the report was nevertheless a catalogue of missed opportunities and misplaced efforts. ‘A psychological transformation is necessary’, it concluded (Chanda Report 1966: 231), if radio and television were to fulfil their potential in entertaining and informing the people. The committee made 219 recommendations, including a complete reorganization of AIR, the introduction of advertising, and rapid expansion of television, then confined to a tiny experimental station in Delhi (ibid.: 229–49). It concluded that AIR’s ‘failures arise from organisational deficiencies and inadequate financial resources’ and recommended the creation of an autonomous national corporation. It argued that such powerful media as radio and television should remain under public control and ‘not be allowed in private hands’ (ibid.: 244). The report emphasized the benefits of television ‘for the role it can play in social and economic development’ and called for a national television service overseen by a corporation separate from radio and insulated from government. It recommended that by the early 1970s, all of India should be covered by television (ibid.: 247).

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The timing of the report—April 1966—was inopportune. The Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, had died in January, Mrs Gandhi was an unsteady replacement, the country had just fought its second war in three years, and the two-year ‘Bihar famine’ was beginning. It is not surprising that the report and its recommendations were not instantly embraced. Television expansion did not begin until 1972, roughly when the Chanda Report suggested that the whole country should have achieved television coverage, when, in Bombay, only the second TV station in the country was opened. Pakistan already had a TV system, and strategic Indian stations were started on the borders, in Amritsar and Srinagar, in 1973. By the second half of 1975, when Mrs Gandhi, under her ‘emergency’, needed to proclaim accomplishments, ‘makeshift’ stations were opened in Calcutta and Lucknow and a more solidly prepared station in Madras (Chatterji 1991: 52–3). As one critic, writing just after the Emergency, observed: ‘Mrs Gandhi didn’t give it [television] much importance...until she discovered what a powerful weapon it could be both for offence and defence’ (Duggal 1980: 126). In a celebrated recognition of the possible power of television in the run-up to the post-Emergency elections of 1977, Delhi’s television station was ordered to screen Bobby, the blockbuster film of 1974, in an attempt to minimize the crowd at an opposition rally. The rally still drew hundreds of thousands,13 and Mrs Gandhi was out of power for the next three years. The rapid expansion of television, which the Chanda Report advocated in 1966, began only in 1982, catalyzed by the impending Asian Games in New Delhi and the wish of her son, Rajiv Gandhi, newly established as a politician, to demonstrate his own and India’s modernity. India’s eighteen television transmitters in 1979 expanded to 176 by 1985, with 80 per cent of the urban population and half of the rural population within range of a TV signal (Luthra 1986: 489; Page and Crawley 2001: 56). This article is not the place to elaborate on the expansion of Indian television, which various studies have analysed (Mitra 1993; Ninan 1995; Rajagopal 2001). It is important to note, however, that bureaucrats and politicians presided over that expansion, and two 13White Paper on Misuse of Mass Media during the Internal Emergency, New Delhi: Controller of Publications, 1977, pp. 75–6.

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elements jostled in the process: censorship and advertising. During Indira Gandhi’s ‘emergency’, from June 1975 to March 1977, her government attempted to use AIR, and the television service, Doordarshan, which was hived off from AIR in 1976, to promote the virtues of authoritarian rule and the eminence of Mrs Gandhi and her younger son, Sanjay. When she lost office in 1977, the new Janata government produced three inquiries into media—a Press Commission, a White Paper on Misuse of Mass Media during the Internal Emergency (1977), and the B.G. Verghese committee into electronic media. The Verghese Committee, following the Chanda recommendations of 1966, called for ‘an autonomous national trust’, to remove radio and television from the control of government on the lines of the BBC (Working Group on Autonomy for Akashvani and Doordarshan 1978). The journey to legislate such a body, which began in 1966, is still unfinished in 2006. Once they are securely in power, Indian governments have failed to carry through legislation begun by shakier, more idealistic predecessors. ‘No government’, a former DirectorGeneral of Doordarshan concluded, ‘is ever going to let go of the electronic media’ (Ghose 2005: 223). A bill to create an autonomous corporation was introduced in May 1979, just before the fall of the Janata government and the return to power of Mrs Gandhi. She let that bill die. Ten years later, another minority government, this time succeeding Rajiv Gandhi and his Congress, passed a similar Prasar Bharati [Indian Broadcasting] Bill,14 but the government fell before it could have the bill proclaimed as law. The new Congress government allowed the bill to lie in limbo, happy to pull the ancient levers of media control. Keep it in ‘very cold storage’, Prime Minister Narasimha Rao instructed officials in 1994 (Ghose 2005: 217). Only with the return of another shaky coalition government in 1997, was the Prasar Bharati Act of 1990 proclaimed by the President.15 But it was a diluted version of the original intentions. The new ‘independent’ authority has limited funds and ‘lives on handouts from government’ (Ghose 2005: 219). Doordarshan and AIR remain, in effect, responsible to the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. 14Frontline,

vol. 14, no. 19, 20 September–3 October 1997, www.frontlineonnet.com. Accessed on 7 August 2005. 15Ibid.

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The cushion between the government and the broadcaster, the key ingredient of a BBC model, has not been achieved. The history of advertising and public broadcasting in India may point to future outcomes. The Chanda Report had recommended ‘the acceptance of advertising...to supplement revenue’ but under strict conditions (Chanda Report 1966: 248). In 1967, Vividh Bharati, the popular channel of AIR, was permitted to dedicate 10 per cent of air time to adverts (Chatterji 1991: 58–9). When Doordarshan was created in 1976, its advertisement revenue was Rs 8 million (less than $200,000). By 1985, in the great television boom, when Doordarshan provided the only television outlets in India, advertising revenues allowed the abolition of licence fees on television and radio (Luthra 1986: 490). By the mid-1990s, revenue was Rs 4,300 million (close to $100 million).16 Such revenues enabled Doordarshan to expand its services. For a growing advertising industry, seeking to tap ever deeper into small-town and rural markets, Doordarshan’s great attraction was its coverage: by the end of the 1980s, its signal reached more than 80 per cent of India. In 2003, it was estimated to cover 90 per cent of the country and 75 per cent of the population, with a network of more than 1,100 transmitters and seven different channels (SSC&B Media Guide India 2003: 13). The arrival of satellite broadcasters, and the rapid commercialization of broadcasting, have, however, undermined the importance of government-controlled television (Page and Crawley 2001: 72–5). Indeed, Doordarshan’s dependence on advertising, and the challenge it faces from outside broadcasters, probably mean that its days as an influential outlet are numbered. But politicians are loath to surrender the apparent influence that goes with an All ‘Indira’ Radio institution that can be used to blot out or denigrate opponents and tell one’s own story in satisfying detail, however tedious such detail might be to others. In 2005, the Congress government looked for ways to control foreign satellite broadcasters, ostensibly to prevent cultural contamination but equally to stem the flow of advertising money towards the satellites and direct it back to Doordarshan.17 16Nitish Sengupta Committee Report, 1996, para. 2.32, www.indiantelevision.com/ indianbroadcast/legalreso/Chapter2.htm. Accessed on 7 August 2005. 17Outlook, 15 August 2005, www.outlookindia.com. Accessed on 25 July 2008.

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THE FAILURES OF INDIAN BROADCASTING POLICY The inability to put the Prasar Bharati Bill into force, when it was passed in 1990, marked a significant failure of Indian broadcasting policy. It was perhaps the last time a government initiative could have widely affected not just Indian, but global media production and consumption. In 1990, an Indian version of the BBC, sufficiently removed from government to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to the demands of news and entertainment, could have emerged as an attractive trans-national broadcaster, as Al-Jazeera was to do within ten years (Miles 2005). India has many advantages: a tradition of media freedom, large numbers of talented English-speaking journalists, an expanding computer and electronics industry, and a vast film industry with seventy years of experience. However, in a structure in which AIR and Doordarshan are branches of government, dependent on the whims and pressures of a minister, it has proved impossible to create an imaginative, flexible, and fast-moving organization. By the time the much-tinkered-with Prasar Bharati Act was implemented in 1997, the moment had passed. Satellite television arrived over India with CNN’s coverage of the first Gulf War in 1991. The dominance of land-based, controllable-by-government, broadcast media ended for good. In March 1991, ‘video magazines’, compilations on video cassette of news features and reporting, sent regularly by post to subscribers, were popular because they provided lively reporting, untrammelled by the ponderous sensitivities of Doordarshan.18 By November 1992, video magazines had almost disappeared and within two years they were gone. Satellite channels had captured the imagination of television owners and owner–aspirants all over India, with a minute-by-minute immediacy and all the gimmickry that ratings-seeking television deploys.19 Two contests began. The first was to see which financial interests could best exploit the new opportunities. The second was over the question of whether government could exercise meaningful control over broadcasters based in other countries, 18Far Eastern Economic Review, 14 March 1991, p. 17; Hindustan Times, 3 February 1991, p. 13. 19Hindu International Edition, 20 July 1991, p. 16; India Today, 15 November 1992, p. 26.

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who beamed into India from satellites Indians did not own and Indian governments could not regulate. The old apprehensions that had hobbled AIR and the Doordarshan remained. But government broadcasters were becoming less relevant as more and more television households connected, through cable operators, to the growing range of channels available from satellites. What damage would be done to ‘Indian culture’? To what extent would uncontrolled broadcasting tear the delicate fabric of national harmony? And, implicit though not stated, how would ministers get their speeches reported and their pictures on television, if they did not have a direct, authoritative line to the producers? Satellite channels test markets and attitudes. While Indian governments have few ways to control the channels directly, the channels themselves are sensitive to the ‘reactions of the market’. When a talk show on Star TV maligned Mahatma Gandhi, the host was fired. CNN was apologetic after culturally maladroit depictions of cows.20 In these instances, ‘the people’ seemed to be their own censors; government needed to do little. An advertising manager and a producer are likely to be as sensitive to threats from well-resourced pressure groups as a call from the minister.21 The pressure group and the minister may have different motives, but control of media is the common aim. Two ‘might have beens’ suggest themselves. One is domestic, the other international. In India itself, if governments in the formative years had chosen both to invest more money and importance in broadcasting, and if they had created a nimble, non-government (but public) broadcaster, social and economic development might have proceeded more rapidly, particularly in north India. Also, widespread acceptance of a national language might have progressed much farther. It is noteworthy that in Kerala, on the southwestern coast, where newspaper penetration was highest from the 1950s, social development and improved quality of life were also highest. From the 1920s, Kerala had a recognizable ‘public sphere’, founded on print, which fostered widespread interest in social reform and political change. The connection 20Hindu

International Edition, 8 July 1995, p. 16; India Today, 31 May 1995, p. 115. P. Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications, New York: Basic Books, 2004, pp. 317–26, for the growth of pressure-group censorship of the US film industry in the 1920s and 1930s. 21See

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between such public action and the necessity for governments to improve the quality of life of their people has been persuasively argued by scholars like Amartya Sen (Dreze and Sen 1989; Jeffrey 2001: 186– 211). Given the high levels of illiteracy in northern India, a vigorous radio and television culture, generated by an alert, well-funded public broadcaster, might have created the public sphere that seems essential for improved living conditions. The international ‘might have been’—perhaps it is still a ‘might be’—is this. An alert, well-funded public broadcaster could have given India a global media presence like the BBC, long before the appearance of Fox, Al-Jazeera, or even CNN. The talents existed from the 1950s, as did Indian aspirations to lead the ‘non-aligned movement’. But fears about the dangers of electronic media, and the seductive but deceiving temptations of media control, produced policies in the 1950s that Indian public broadcasting still struggles to modify. Whether we speak of ‘constitutive moments’ or ‘path dependence’ (Starr 2004: 4–7; Thomas 2005: 763–83), the patterns set in the first decade of independence proved temptingly easy to follow. British colonial structures, based on fear of political unrest and ‘communal strife’, provided mechanisms that didactic high-caste Gandhians and superficially cunning politicians were happy to maintain. But in doing so, they rarely achieved their own ends or realized the potential of electronic media. Whether the subversion of government-dominated electronic media, which satellite TV began in the 1990s, leads to a better informed and more prosperous population depends, in part, on the imaginations and the choices of the private interests that increasingly dominate India’s electronic media.

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10 ‘Subliminal Charge’ How Hindi-Language Newspaper Expansion Affects India* Peter G. Friedlander, Robin Jeffrey, and Sanjay Seth

U

nprecedented in history, India’s newspaper revolution since the 1980s, which has happened in a dozen major languages and eleven different scripts, lets us observe the sudden creation of a ‘public sphere’ for millions of people. Our definition of a public sphere is an abstract space between government and family where matters that might once have been known only to a few, or communicated among the many by word-of-mouth rumour, are recorded, disseminated, and discussed.1 Under colonial rule, tiny, literate elites engaged in limited ‘public’ exchanges among themselves and with British governments.2 After independence in 1947, poverty, low levels of literacy, and the limitations of printing technology continued to make newspapers a rarity in the lives of most Indians, especially in the Hindi-speaking north. Yet, without newspapers, a public sphere— ‘publicity’—is impossible. *Originally published as ‘“Subliminal Charge”: How Hindi-Language Newspaper Expansion Affects India’, in Media International Australia, no. 100, August 2001, pp. 147–66. 1Jurgen Habermas (trans. Thomas Burger), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. 2C.A. Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780–1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996 and Milton Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle 1920–1947, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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These circumstances changed in the 1980s as the newspaper industry grew. The effect on politics is palpable, general directions can be discerned and yet precise connections are almost impossible to map. How does one add up the effect on millions of new readers of their daily encounter with an array of stories about a huge range of subjects, couched in particular language and presented in various ways? What evidence would allow one to say, ‘As a result of this sequence of stories, read by these sorts of people, such political actions flowed’? Such a research task is beyond the scope of this essay. What we do here is: a) show how stories take shape and find their way into newspapers; and b) survey the subtle multitude of ideas and assumptions a newspaper puts before its readers and invites them to interpret each day. We can say two things with confidence. First, people who welcome the challenge and pleasure of a daily newspaper expand their horizons beyond their homes and families—beyond the range of interest, knowledge, and participation of those who have no such exposure. Second, broader horizons do not necessarily lead to greater love, understanding, and rationality; but they do lead to political change. Marshall McLuhan’s claim for print was sweeping: ‘Print created individualism and nationalism in the sixteenth century. Program and “content” analysis offer no clues to the magic of these media [print and television] or to their subliminal charge’.3 In this essay, we do in fact attempt a little ‘program and content analysis’, but to illustrate how India’s burgeoning newspapers conduct their business and to hint at how their practices affect the perceptions and ultimately, the lives of their consumers. We are interested in the complexity of the process out of which an essential element—the newspaper—of a ‘public sphere’ arises. We look first at the expansion of Indian newspapers and the need to localize coverage that has gone with it. We narrow the focus to the two largest selling and largest read dailies in Hindi, India’s official language. Then, using the example of an outbreak of dead monkeys, we examine the way in which the localizing imperative blends with the ideologies of journalists and proprietors to mould news coverage in ways that will be different from, yet familiar to, journalists in Englishspeaking countries. Finally, we look at translation and language 3Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, London: Ark Paperbacks, 1987 (First published in 1964), pp. 19–20.

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formation, which leads us to reflect on the effect of daily newspaper consumption on masses of new readers.

INDIA’S NEWSPAPER REVOLUTION From 1977, the year Indira Gandhi’s nineteen-month ‘emergency’ ended, newspaper circulations in India skyrocketed. (In the same period, of course, newspaper circulations in the countries of the West were falling). In 1976, daily circulations in India were calculated at 9.3 million. By 1998, they had reached 58 million, an increase of more than six times. In 1976, if India’s total population had been divided into equal groups, each with a newspaper, there would have been more than eighty people sharing each daily. By 1998, the crowd around each daily would have fallen to seventeen. Expressed in the more conventional language of ‘dailies per 1,000 of population’, the sixteen dailies per 1,000 people of 1972 had grown to sixty per 1,000 people by 1998.4 (See Table 10.1.) Commerce drove these increases. With few exceptions, Indian dailies are owned by families,5 whose prosperity depends on their Table 10.1: Daily Newspaper Circulation, Literacy, and India’s Population, 1961–98 Year

Daily circulation (copies)

Population

1998 1992 1991 1987 1982 1981 1977 1972 1971 1967 1961

58.0 million 28.0 million

966 million (est.)

Literacy %

846 million

52.2

683 million

43.6

548 million

34.5

439 million

24.0

22.5 million 14.7 million 10.6 million 8.8 million 6.6 million

Source: Press in India, for relevant years; Statistical Outline of India, 2000–2001 (2000: 29) and earlier volumes. 4R. Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, London: C. Hurst, 2000; Press in India, New Delhi: Publications Division, 1999, p. 29; Statistics of India, Mumbai: Tata Services, 2000, p. 28. 5The two notable exceptions are the Malayalam and Bengali dailies of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)—Deshabhimani and Ganasakti respectively.

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newspapers’ profits. These profits for the past twenty years have come increasingly from advertising, and the struggle to attract advertisers has driven newspapers into ever-more remote corners of India. To make their circulations grow, and thereby have more readers to sell to advertisers, Indian-language newspapers have taken production, distribution, and news-gathering to towns and villages. To increase circulation, it has been essential to localize newspapers, and such localizing has brought growth and reward. Advertising expenditure in the Indian print media grew from less than Rs 5 billion in 1981 to more than Rs 5,000 billion by 1997–8. By the 1990s, about half of this expenditure was going to Indian-language newspapers.6 Circulation of newspapers in Hindi, the national language, spoken by about 40 per cent of the population, surpassed that of Englishlanguage dailies only in 1979, even though only 3–4 per cent of India’s people read English. Hindi circulations hit 3 million copies a day in 1979; English, 2.97 million. By 1991, however, Hindi dailies sold close to 10 million copies, and this doubled to 24.3 million by 1998. English, by 1998, was a distant second at 7.5 million copies a day.7 In this essay, we examine India’s ‘largest circulated’ and ‘largest read’ Hindi dailies in 1997—Punjab Kesari and Dainik Jagran respectively— both based in provincial towns in north India. We present a picture of newspapers keenly concerned with their profitability as businesses, and as a result, striving to cater to the tastes of their readers. Both newspapers are owned by families that could be described as ‘urban, upper-caste, merchant Hindu’—a description that could also describe the historical base of India’s now-dominant political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In 1997, Punjab Kesari (‘Lion of Punjab’) was the largest circulated Hindi daily in India, though it was based in the town of Jalandhar, in the state of Punjab, where the official language is Punjabi, which is written in the Gurmukhi script, not Hindi. The newspaper also published from New Delhi and Ambala. Its audited total circulation from January–June 1997 was 740,000 copies a day.8 6Jeffrey, 2000, pp. 59–68. 7Ibid., pp. 39

and 48; Press in India, 1999, p. 29. Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC), founded in 1948 and based in Mumbai, publishes the audited circulation figures of its members for the benefit of advertisers. These figures are regarded as more reliable than the Registrar’s. 8The

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Readership of newspapers in India is estimated to be high. Every paper produced is thought to pass before at least half a dozen sets of eyes. Thus, Dainik Jagran (‘Daily Awakening’) claimed the largest readership9 of any Hindi daily. Based in Kanpur, in UP, and published from ten other towns, including New Delhi, Jagran had a circulation for January–June 1997 of about 650,000.10 However, it claimed 7.8 million readers—on the basis of the Indian Readership Survey 1998 (IRS-98)—or twelve readers per newspaper.11 Punjab Kesari’s readership was measured lower, thus lessening the importance of its edge in copies sold. These newspapers target different geographic areas and audiences. Punjab Kesari is read in Punjab, Haryana, New Delhi, and to some extent, in Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan; Dainik Jagran, overwhelmingly in UP, especially central UP. They compete only in New Delhi, where Kesari dominated in 1997, because, as many old Delhites ruefully assert, ‘Delhi is a Punjabi city’. Elsewhere in Hindispeaking India—in places such as Madhya Pradesh and Bihar—other Hindi newspapers, usually those with foundations closest to the region in question, are the circulation leaders. Since Kesari and Jagran accounted for more than 15 per cent of the total circulation of Hindi dailies in 1997, we may regard them as illustrating tendencies common to the Hindi press as a whole. The owners of Dainik Jagran are the Gupta family, based in Kanpur, where they lived in the 1990s as joint family in a large, luxurious compound. Their father founded the paper in 1942 in Jhansi to promote the national movement and moved it to Kanpur in 1948. It started an edition in Gorakhpur in eastern UP in 1975 and expanded steadily from the 1980s through its coverage of local issues and production of local editions, published from eleven towns in 1998. The brothers have divided the work of the newspaper among 9Some Indian newspapers claim up to twenty readers per copy. A readership of four or five people per copy seems a conservative average, on the basis of various surveys over the past thirty years. See R. Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, London: C. Hurst, 2000, p. 47. 10This figure compensates for the fact that the ABC, for two periods, refused to validate Jagran’s purported figures for Kanpur and Jhansi. We have included the last valid Kanpur and Jhansi figures, those for January–June 1996. 11Advertising and Marketing [A&M], 15 May 1998, p. 51.

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themselves, with Narendra Mohan, the eldest, the editor and columnist. He is regarded as friendly with the BJP and its policies, which is not surprising for an urban, merchant-caste entrepreneur in UP. The Chopra family who own Punjab Kesari have a similar background. They, too, belong to an upper caste, traditionally associated with clerical and commercial work, and their newspaper interests were also founded by a forebear who was a nationalist. They were at the heart of the Punjab insurgency of the 1980s and early 1990s, as vehement opponents of a separate Sikh state, and two members of the family, including the elderly founder were murdered. The family remained under heavy guard throughout the 1990s. The paper took its name from the heroic title applied to a Punjabi nationalist leader of the 1920s ‘Lion of Punjab’. The founder of the family’s newspaper fortunes, Lala Jagat Narain, murdered in 1981, had fled to India from west Punjab (what became Pakistan) at partition in 1947. He started an Urdu-language newspaper, Hind Samachar, in the town of Jalandhar in 1948. The family began the Hindi-language Punjab Kesari only in 1965, when it judged the Hindi-reading public in Punjab was large enough to make it worthwhile. By 1986, publishing from three centres, Punjab Kesari sold 460,000 copies a day, the largest circulating Hindi daily in India.12 Many of the forces driving the two newspapers, and the constraints within which they work, are similar to those affecting newspaper industries in other places and times. The need for revenue leads to the quest for big advertisers; big advertisers demand large readerships; and profit-hungry proprietors scurry to find new readers. In India, this has propelled the process of taking newspapers to smaller towns and the countryside and of localizing their content. However, in a democratic polity as complex as India’s, the creation of a mass readership requires constant judgements about the capacity of particular news items to interest or enrage readers and thereby to affect the fortunes of poorly paid journalists and ambitious proprietors. The following analysis of aspects of the coverage of Dainik Jagran and Punjab Kesari illustrates some of the implications. 12R. Jeffrey, ‘Hindi: “Taking to the Punjab Kesari Line”’, Economic and Political Weekly, 18 January, 1997a, pp. 77–83.

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SLIPPING ON A BANANA PEEL: THE PITFALLS OF GOOD LOCAL STORIES The drive for readers has propelled Hindi newspapers ever deeper into the towns of north India, and has led them to localize their coverage because local coverage appears to create newspaper readers. As a result, Hindi newspapers today report local events in far more detail than the English-language press, which often ignores stories which Hindi dailies pursue enthusiastically. Punjab Kesari routinely reports local enormities relevant to its Jalandhar readers: Telephone pole: may fall down at any time Jalandhar, 4 June (Rajendra). The residents of the Laksmipura area have demanded the removal of telephone pole number 2219 because it is half uprooted and might fall down any moment and cause an accident. It is noteworthy that it is tied up with rope.13

This is not to say that Kesari passes over stories from farther afield. It used news-agency copy to cover an industrial accident in the nearby state of Rajasthan: Nine women die while excavating Jaipur, 22 May (Varta). Near Punaba on the Pali-Samurepur road whilst digging in an excavation nine women were killed when it collapsed. Reliable sources state that all the above mentioned women were from Paldi village.14

The brevity of the report, in spite of nine deaths, may seem remarkable, but the area from which the story came was on the fringe of Kesari’s main circulation territory. Moreover, neither Telephone Pole No. 2219, nor the labourers’ deaths, were reported, so far as we know, in the English-language press. Such stories belong to a ‘vernacular world’ into which English-language newspapers see little profit in venturing. Indian-language newspapers, on the other hand, search for stories that echo at the village pump and the weekly market. The events at the village of Rohana Kalan, deep in Jagran’s home territory, illustrate this contrast between Hindi and English newspaper coverage. In October 1997, high-caste men were reported to have raped 13Punjab 14Punjab

Kesari, ‘Telephone pole: may fall down at any time’, 5 June 1998, p. 10. Kesari, ‘Nine women die while excavating’, 23 May 1998, p. 2.

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and murdered a Scheduled Caste or Dalit (‘ex’-untouchable)15 woman in the village of Rohana Kalan near Muzzafarpur in UP, Jagran’s home state. When police did not act against the accused, ‘ex’-untouchables demonstrated against the police, who opened fire. At least two people were killed, and many more injured. Eventually, after the accused in the case had fled, the police seized his possessions and arrested his servant. The officers responsible for ordering the police to fire on the crowd were transferred or briefly suspended. Jagran covered these events from 8 to 16 October 1997, with three prominent news reports and an editorial.16 In the English-language press, on the other hand, the Rohana Kalan incident received only passing comment. A state politician was reported as saying that the incident should be investigated, but the brief story gave little indication of what had actually happened at the village.17 For Jagran, however, it was a major story, close to the homes and lives of its readers and therefore, reported in detail, including the feeble denouement of a few transfers, suspensions, and the arrest of a servant. Striving to attract new readers by closely reporting local events no doubt begins to create a new place—‘space’, ‘sphere’—in which small-town and village people see their lives reenacted, and through which they may seek to influence the unfolding drama. The columns of a newspaper have no morals, and it can be as easy to get fabrications into print as accurate stories. Hindi daily newspapers are often accused of inflammatory and inaccurate reporting. In one of the more flagrant cases in December 1990, the Agra edition of the newspaper Aj put a totally false story on its front page: that Hindu patients in the hospital at Aligarh Muslim University had been killed by (it implied) Muslim medical staff. The story was completely false, and the Press Council censured Aj and three other Hindi dailies.18 Ten years later, Aligarh Muslim University claimed similar distortion by a Hindi newspaper when Amar Ujala (‘immortal light’) asserted that the campus harboured 15‘Scheduled Caste’ is the official term for ‘ex’-untouchable castes. ‘Dalit’, which means ‘oppressed’, is the term currently used, and preferred, by such castes. 16Dainik Jagran, internet edition, 8, 10 and 17 October 1998. 17Times of India, internet edition, October 1997, passim. 18Press Council of India, Press Council of India Review, New Delhi: Press Council of India, 1991, pp. 122–5.

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a cell of Pakistani intelligence agents, a charge that the university strenuously denied.19 During the period we tracked Kesari and Jagran, we did not come across such deliberately inflammatory reporting. There was a tendency, however, to exaggerate and thereby distort stories based on reports from local offices. It was easy to see how such tendencies, given the meagre training most Hindi journalists receive, and the loose control by senior editors, could lead in tempestuous times to wild, unconfirmed reporting. The case of the murdered monkeys illustrates how the reporting process, and the pressures for exciting, close-to-the-ground content, drive circulation-seeking Hindi dailies. Both Kesari and Jagran picked up this story, which was all but ignored in the English press. Because it was on Jagran’s doorstep—indeed, in the middle of a small circulation war—Jagran covered it more prominently. It began on 12 April 1998. Kesari put a brief agency report at the back of the paper: 50 Monkeys die from eating poisonous rotis Bareli, 11 April (Varta). Tension has spread in the area of the village of Rajpur Kalan in police station area Aliganj in Bareli district UP from more than 50 monkeys dying of eating poisoned rotis [bread] which were given by some person. According to the police in the village of Rajpur Kalan, these poisoned rotis were placed yesterday near a well. After eating these rotis until late last night, a succession of more than 50 monkeys and countless birds continued to die.20

For Jagran, however, the monkey deaths were front-page news, with a major story from one of the newspaper’s correspondents (presumably a staff member, since Jagran has a Bareli production centre). The number of deceased simians rose from fifty in the agency story to 200 on the front page of Jagran’s Bareli edition. More important, religious motives were darkly hinted at. In the Hindu pantheon, one of the principal gods is the monkey–god Hanuman; the poisoning of monkeys could be construed as a sectarian act. UP is a state with a large Muslim population, and religious antagonism is a frequent concern of officials responsible for keeping the peace. 19India

Today, 2 October 2000, p. 36. Kesari, ‘50 Monkeys die from eating poisonous rotis’, 12 April 1998, p. 14.

20Punjab

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More Than Two Hundred Monkeys Poisoned to Death in Bareli Tension Suspicion that the rotis were poisoned—investigation ordered—report against one person—police stationed in area—Bajrang Dal, Hindu Awakening21 front and Shivsena threaten to launch campaign— Gulariya (Bareli), 11 April (Bareli office). More than two hundred monkeys have been poisoned to death in the village of Rajpur Kalan in Bareli district. After the incident the entire area is in the grip of tension. In order to maintain law and order a police bus has been stationed in the village. At the order of the District Magistrate, Sitaram Mina, post-mortems have been carried out on the corpses of some of the monkeys. In order to file a report on the killing of the monkeys a report has been filed in the village against one person. The process of the monkeys dying continued until late last night. While this was going on the Bajrang Dal, Hindu Awakening front and Shivsena threatened to launch a campaign over the lack of firm measures over the matter. Elders and independents of the area believe this to be part of a plot to create the fire of communal tension in the area. Gulshan Anand, the former District Chairman of the Hindu Awakening Front, Dharmendra Rohtagi, the metropolitan organizer of the Bajrang Dal, and Gopal Gupta, the metropolitan spokesman of the Shiv Sena, say that the police, instead of taking action against the person accused in the case, are blindly shooting arrows around here and there in the dark. He gave a warning that if the police did not take firm action against the guilty person, then all the Hindu organizations would take joint action and launch a devastating campaign.22

The story jumped to an inside page which included three pictures of the dead monkeys taken by a staff photographer. The following day, however, treatment of the story changed. When the perpetrator of the poisoning was said to have been identified, Jagran’s news editors dropped the story to the back of the newspaper— perhaps because the accused proved to be a Hindu. The more dramatic Muslim–Hindu angle could not be sustained. The number of dead monkeys too had been reduced, from 200 deaths to ‘a fair number’.23 Poisoner of monkeys in Bareli discovered Lucknow, 12 April (Jagran Correspondent). The police and forest department have filed a report against the person responsible for poisoning monkeys in 21Note

that this is the same word, jagran, as the title of the paper. Jagran, ‘More Than Two Hundred Monkeys Poisoned to Death in Bareli Tension’, 12 April 1998, pp. 1, 6, 7, 15. 23In Hindi, simply kafi bandar. 22Dainik

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Bareli, but up until now he has eluded their grasp. It is known that a fair number of monkeys were killed yesterday in Bareli. The person who mixed poison with rotis [bread] and poisoned the monkeys was Surajpalpur Mahipal Singh Yadav inhabitant of Rajpur Kalan, Amvala, Bareli. The police have registered a report under Article 429 and Forest Department Article 16-A against him.24

What can we learn from the two newspapers’ treatment of the dead monkeys? First, we see the premises on which successful Hindi newspapers operate. Punjab Kesari does not circulate in western UP. Bareli is outside its readership area, and newspaper-industry statistics do not bother to list Punjab Kesari in relation to the Bareli area. Dainik Jagran, on the other hand, publishes a Bareli edition, and competes fiercely with Amar Ujala to be the leading daily of the area.25 The dead monkeys were a major local story and, in their early version, had interesting qualities—the possibility of a communal angle—even for the distant Punjab Kesari. Second, correspondents and stringers depend on their proprietors. Writers struggle to get their stories into the newspaper and to write stories that they know will please their owner– editors. Thus, from the reporter’s point of view, the more dead monkeys the better. Because the original story raised the possibility of a ‘communal’ aspect to the monkeys’ deaths, it had added newsworthiness—exactly what a local stringer or staff correspondent might hope would get their copy on the front page. (It is easy to project such an approach to riots and body counts). Jagran’s editor, Narendra Mohan, is well known as a Hindu nationalist.26 Jagran’s reporters know the sorts of stories that management favours, and, indeed, Jagran’s staff tend to come from similar caste and cultural backgrounds as its owner–editors. Why then did Jagran’s enthusiasm for the story evaporate? It ended its coverage on 18 April with the same agency report that Punjab Kesari ran. The monkey death toll had fallen to forty-six. The agency story reported: 24Dainik

Jagran, ‘Poisoner of monkeys in Bareli discovered’, 13 April 1998, p. 9. Ujala sold 13,800 copies in Bareli in 1995, while Jagran sold 11,100. Press and Advertisers Yearbook, 1996–7, New Delhi: INFA, 1997, pp. 144b–5b. 26Business India, 13–26 January 1997, p. 135. 25Amar

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Monkey murderer arrested Bareli, 17 April (Varta). The Uttar Pradesh Bareli police have arrested Surajpal, the accused in the incident of the killing of a great number of monkeys by feeding them rotis [bread] mixed with poison a few days ago in the village of Rajpur Kalan in the Avala Tehsil of the district. The police inspector of the rural area of Bareli, Gulab Singh, speaking here today, said that the accused in this incident, Surajpal Singh, was arrested near Nisoi railway station in the police station area of Aliganj. It is said that Surajpal Singh was angered by the damage caused in his orchard by monkeys eating the bananas and last week put poisoned rotis down near a well. Forty-six monkeys died due to eating these rotis.27

Jagran used the same report from the news agency, Varta, but attributed it to ‘agencies’ rather than ‘Varta’ alone. Between the first day’s great enthusiasm and the last day’s brief agency report, Jagran changed its coverage completely. One might suggest two (perhaps related) explanations: discovery that the first report was wildly inaccurate, blown up by a reporter eager to get his copy into the newspaper; and (or) that district officials, alarmed at the hints of ‘communal’ tension, warned the newspaper to treat the story soberly. The story underlines two aspects of India’s expanding newspaper industry. The first is the less surprising. Indian newspapers are produced by pressured people with interests, beliefs, and goals. A reporter on a tenuous contract wants to please the editor–owners, who in turn seek to advance their ideas, but also need to have fruitful relationships with governments and officials. Such filters are nothing new to journalists. The second aspect, however, is less well understood, especially outside of India. The story of the monkeys illustrates how newspaper coverage—driven by proprietors’ struggle for readers and ultimately advertisers—is widening and deepening a ‘public sphere’ in India. Twenty years ago, stories like that of the monkeys and Surajpal’s banana field would have appeared only on the records of local police station and on the lips of people at the well, the barber’s, or the market. Today, however, the proportion of India’s people whose experiences and views 27Punjab

Kesari, ‘Monkey murderer arrested’, 18 April 1998, p. 3.

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are dignified and disseminated by being reported in mass circulation newspapers has vastly increased. Geographically, it has spread to the countryside; socially, it has penetrated well below the level of Englishspeaking elites. The durability and portability of a newspaper story has potency that exceeds word-of-mouth story-telling. Photographs of the monkey victims, for example, could be passed from hand to hand to elicit outrage and sympathy. To record events and recognize people who in the past were ignored may often be an admirable and beneficial activity, but it need not always be. Local officials feared that reporting of the monkey killings could lead to religious conflict. A mass-based, localoriented newspaper industry could spread and sustain rancour, which in the past would have been contained and transient. This potential for embedding what was, in pre-newspaper times, ephemeral extends beyond simple reporting of events. It also affects the legitimacy and use of language....

LOOKING FOR READERS, NOT TROUBLE: GOOD TASTE IS GOOD BUSINESS As newspapers reach out for mass readerships, they become larger, more vulnerable institutions—sitting ducks instead of stinging bees. They need to avoid offending readers, and to that end, editors must control content and language. English-language newspapers throughout the world have developed various conventions (for example, %$@#* or f—) to indicate words judged obscene. In India, such questions can pose physical danger to newspaper people and premises, especially if a religious idea, group, or leader is deemed to have been blasphemed or demeaned. Because translation from one language to another is essential for Indian newspapers, the problem is constant and complex. The two issues—translation and insult—came together in the fate of a column by Arun Shourie, a syndicated journalist, who reflects Hindu nationalist opinion, and in 2001, was a minister in India’s BJP-led national government. In the 1990s, both Kesari and Jagran subscribed to Shourie’s column, which he wrote in English and syndicated around India, where it was translated into the language of the newspaper purchasing it.

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The English version of Shourie’s column for 31 March 1998 began: I am at a dinner. Several of the new MPs are there. One of them is regaling everyone with lascivious remarks about everyone. Allusions to his so-called leader are not missing either. ‘Arey bhai, hum to kal ke chamar hain,’ says one. Someone else says he is distributing invitations to a lunch at the Jama Masjid for the coming Friday. ‘For what?’ ask others. ‘To celebrate the circumcision of Amiruddin and Moiuddin,’ he retorts. Everyone is in splits. I am the slowest to catch who ‘Amiruddin and Moiuddin’ are.28

In the original English version, Shourie aimed to attack the hypocrisy of the Congress Party, whose members, in his view, were forced to debase themselves before minorities to win votes. Thus, the Congress politician says, ‘Hey, brother, we’re yesterday’s untouchables (chamars).’ Then, referring to the Congress Party’s desperate courting of Muslim votes, he jokes that two prominent Hindu Congressmen are about to be circumcised because they have become so deferential towards Muslim opinion. When the syndicated English version of the column reached Dainik Jagran and Punjab Kesari, translators at both newspapers faced a problem: how to deal with this passage? Though they and their proprietor–editors may well have sympathized with Shourie, Hindi newspapers are wary of overt ridicule of any social group.29 Muslims and ‘untouchables’ sometimes buy Hindi newspapers—and advertisements. Jagran’s solution was to sanitize the passage. This is Friedlander’s translation from Hindi back into English: I was at a dinner. Several new MPs were also there. Each of them was entertaining each other with amusing comments about everyone. Their aspersions30 about their so-called leader [Sitaram Kesri] was not hidden at all. ‘Oh brother! We have become the harijans of yesterday,’ said one. Another said that he was distributing invitations for a party in the afternoon at Jama Masjid next Friday. ‘Why?’ another asked.‘To celebrate the circumcision of Amiruddin and Moiuddin,’ he immediately flipped around and said. Everyone was rolling around laughing. It took me longest to understand who ‘Amiruddin and Moiuddin’ were.31 28Arun Shourie, Column, 31 March 1998, Accessed on 3/4" www.indiaconnect.com/ ashourie/as310398. April 1998. 29Subtle grammatical change and vast exaggerations at times of crisis are common enough, however. 30kataksa—sidelong glances; figuratively, aspersions. 31Dainik Jagran, 3 April 1998, p. 6.

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Jagran kept the jibe about Muslims and the subservient Congress Party, but changed the offensive word ‘chamar’, which describes a large caste of ‘ex’-untouchables, to ‘Harijan’—‘people of god’—a term coined by Mahatma Gandhi. Today, ‘Harijan’ is regarded as effete and condescending by many ‘ex’-untouchables. The change in Jagran’s version was made in spite of the fact that ‘chamar’ appeared in Shourie’s original English text. What calculations might the translator have had to make? First, he (Jagran employs almost no women) would have known that Jagran’s readership among Muslims was limited: it is a Hindi-language newspaper sympathetic to Hindu causes. A great many of its readers might be expected to enjoy a joke in which Muslims were one of the targets. ‘Ex’-untouchables, on the other hand, are ‘junior partners’ of a sort in the Hindu religion, potential allies for Hindu-oriented political parties, and constitute 20 per cent of the population in Jagran’s home state of UP. Gandhi’s patronizing ‘Harijan’ might have been thought to take the string out of the vignette but still to allow ridicule of the Congress Party. The translation decisions would have been based on quickly made, yet complex calculations about local social and political conditions. Publishing for a different market, translators at Punjab Kesari made different decisions—they scrapped the whole passage: I was at a dinner. Several new MPs were also there. Each of them was entertaining each other with amusing comments about everyone. Their aspersions about their so called leader were not hidden at all. At that dinner several types of discussions were also heard.32

But there were clues to a disagreement over how the passage was to be handled. A careless sub-editor left the opening quotation mark, where a translation of the offensive statement had begun, in the copy that went to press. It therefore appears that a superior looked at the passage, judged it unnecessarily risky for Punjab Kesari’s readership and cut it. But the orphaned, tell-tale quotation mark got into the newspaper.33 32Punjab

Kesari, 3 April 1998, p. 4.

33The Hind Samachar group, which publishes Punjab Kesari, publishes an Urdu-language

daily from the same newsroom. The latter might be expected to have some readership among Muslims. Though the Urdu paper would not normally be sympathetic to Muslim causes, its production on the same premises as Punjab Kesari is a reminder of the complex linguistic, religious, and political make-up of the region Punjab Kesari serves.

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Both translators faced the difficulty of dealing with the word ‘chamar’. This offensive word is not normally found in Hindi papers. The Jagran solution of replacing it with ‘Harijan’ altered the tone completely and watered down whatever joke was intended. This small episode has large implications. First, it suggests that one can say things in the English-language newspapers that one cannot say in the Hindi newspapers. Why? Our reasons are speculative, but they include these. Punjab Kesari has a large circulation in New Delhi and would not want unduly to offend still-influential Congress politicians, or the Muslim, or ‘ex’-untouchable allies that those politicians court. Dainik Jagran, on the other hand, circulates in a region where there is a large, troubled Muslim population which is not viewed with sympathy by the newspaper. Similarly, the editor’s sympathies towards the BJP and its views are fairly widely known. The BJP desperately wants ‘ex’-untouchable votes in state and national elections. It is in the interest of those who wish for a Hindu-oriented government to secure even the poorest sections of Hindus as subordinate allies in a larger Hindu cause. The patronizing term ‘Harijan’ reflects an attitude of Jagran and many of its readers.

CONCLUSION The processes we have discussed go on every day in small-town newspaper offices around India as 550 million literate Indians34 consume close to 60 million daily newspapers. Since the early 1990s, figures for newspaper penetration (for example, sixty dailies per 1,000 people in 1998) have equalled and surpassed those of countries elsewhere, when they made a transition from rural, largely selfsufficient to urban, mass-consumer societies.35 McLuhan’s throwaway phrase, ‘subliminal charge’, aimed to encapsulate the unnoticed but fundamental effects of print consumption on the consumers. In examining activities of India’s two largest Hindilanguage dailies, we have tried to illustrate how this process goes on. Punjab Kesari’s apparently trivial story about Telephone Pole No. 2219 34The 2001 Census of India put literacy at 65 per cent of the population 7 years of age and older. The total population was 1,027 million. See www.indiacensus.net. 35R. Jeffrey, ‘The Future of Indian-Language Newspapers’, Seminar, No. 458, October 1997b, pp. 24–8.

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carries with it two novel elements—novel, at least, to generations that have not read or seen newspapers. First, the story contributes to making people take for granted the ‘normal’ behaviour of a modern state, which counts and tabulates everything, including its people and its telephone poles. Readers are encouraged to accept the enumeration of the world, in the same way that newspapers encourage them to accept ‘national’ weather and sports reports, stock market quotations and all the other aspects of urban, industrializing life that are taken-for-granted components of newspapers. Second, the call for remedy in the case of Telephone Pole No. 2219 represents a textbook example of what is supposed to happen in a ‘public sphere’: citizens discuss issues and propose action. Even the remarkably underplayed account of the deaths of the nine women labourers brings to readers’ attention an event that 10 years before might have been reported only in the old way—by word of mouth, starting from the lips of those involved. Now, however, local stringers had an interest in such an event because if their stories got into their newspapers, they got paid. And once such stories were passing before the eyes of millions of readers, they became like thousands of genies released from dozens of bottles. Nothing might come of them; on the other hand, they might be taken up by ‘the public’ and produce wide, unpredictable effects.36 The fact that ‘stories’ now had a value and a market meant that people would come forward to recount them and try to get them published. Liberal capitalism profits from a public sphere. The case of the poisoned monkeys provides the opportunity to observe the vagaries of newspaper coverage and emphasize the haphazardness of what becomes ‘the public record’. We can infer that local journalists and editors saw in the dead monkeys a strong story with a political hook: the implication that Muslims had done the poisoning. Such suggestions, however, would have worried the local law-enforcement authorities and perhaps, even the owners of the newspaper, who strove to balance sales against turmoil. Selling a few 36The successful prohibition campaign in Andhra Pradesh, in the early 1990s, had such origins. See Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, pp. 13–16. On the other hand, a story about dangerous conditions in the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, early in 1984, published in a Hindi daily, made no waves among ‘the public’, until after the disaster of December. Mrinal Pande, The Subject Is Woman, New Delhi: Sanchar, 1991, pp. 23–4.

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thousand more newspapers is usually not worth provoking a riot. When it was quickly proved that the monkey murderer was an angry banana farmer and a Hindu, the story died. For our purposes, however, what is important is how print gave the story potential to affect events far beyond the word-of-mouth neighbourhood that would have contained it prior to the newspaper growth of the 1980s. The problem of how to translate into Hindi the column by Arun Shourie, which used the word ‘chamar’, underlines the differing sensibilities between the English-language and Hindi-language newspaper worlds. Judged inoffensive to English-language readers (among whom there would be few chamars), ‘chamar’ became ‘Harijan’—a dated, slightly condescending term for ‘untouchables’— in Dainik Jagran, in its Hindi heartland of UP. But, among Hindi newspaper readers in New Delhi, Punjab Kesari judged there were too many literate, newspaper-reading ‘ex’-untouchables to make the whole anecdote acceptable and the passage was rewritten. ...The effects of the newspaper revolution permeate Indian politics of the 1980s and 1990s. The flourishing of Hindu chauvinist politics in north India, the inability of any political party to win a national majority since 1989, the vitality of locally-based political parties, the difficulty of most state governments to win consecutive terms in office—all are related to the growth of newspaper consumption. The localizing of newspapers has brought pleasure, outrage, and participation to millions of people for the first time. The antecedents and sympathies of Hindi newspaper proprietors in north India mean that their journalists and their newspapers often reflect ‘Hindu’ causes. Because their interests and their newspapers are locally focused, new readers become aware of—perhaps sympathetic to— political parties that are close to them geographically and socially. The sins of state governments are regularly exposed—there is no shortage of sins and sins make good copy. Constant exposure contributes to the defeat of incumbent parties. Mass newspapers in India do not create Habermas’ idealized ‘public sphere’, in which informed citizens rationally debate issues of concern. Nor, however, do they embody the bleakest elements of ‘refeudalization’ that went with Habermas’ picture of mass print media. India’s newspaper revolution has created circumstances that were previously

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unknown, in which wealthy, influential newspaper owners set out to discover the concerns and interests of ordinary folk, and make those concerns and interests widely known. The links by which the intricate processes of newspaper production affect politics are difficult to expose in fine detail. But the consequences seem evident in the burgeoning of regional political parties and the turnover of governments; in short, in the expansion of a public sphere in which tens of millions of people have acquired a daily interest.

11 A ‘Split Public’ in the Making and Unmaking of the Ram Janmabhumi Campaign* Arvind Rajagopal

W

ith the establishment of a unified visual field by nationwide television, for the first time there emerged a single platform of representation across a society, an event with profound social and cultural divisions. The technology was, of course, seen by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting as an instrument of national integration; the intent of the Ramayan broadcast was described more or less in these terms.1 There can seldom have been so great a failure of imagination in any attempt at social engineering. For the first time, the bewilderingly diverse parts of Indian society were simultaneously exposed to one of its most familiar narrative traditions, and represented to themselves as behaving in unison across its considerable breadth. The proof of this extraordinary claim was that everybody watched the Ramayan, a claim reiterated and amplified in the press. If the Congress or the BJP understood the formation of a nationwide televisual audience as the realization of a collective consciousness, however, the dependence of this presumed consciousness on a particular apparatus was completely ignored. The Indian public was, after all, hardly a single *Originally

published as ‘A “Split Public” in the Making and Unmaking of the Ram Janmabhumi Campaign’, in Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics after Television, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 151–71. 1S.S. Gill, ‘Why Ramayan on Doordarshan’, The Indian Express, 8 August 1988.

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entity, even if the technology for its unification, or for imagining its unity, appeared to be at hand. But the avowal that it was indeed a single entity was never before granted so much attention by so many people since the time of independence as in the wake of the Ramayan broadcasts. Even this immense convergence of attention was not sufficient to render a deeply divided public whole. What was eventually accomplished, amidst attempts to redefine the Indian public as a unified Hindu public, was a spectacular fragmentation into its several parts, as caste assertion broke the Hindu vote apart. The spectre of Hindu unity remained as a politically potent weapon, even though it came to be acknowledged as an unrealizable goal. In the process, the contours of Indian politics were permanently changed. In this essay, I describe the first phase of this process, namely, the coming to selfconsciousness of a multiply fissured rather than a seamless public, and the development of one set of divisions within this public through the print rather than the electronic media. I use the term split public as a heuristic in thinking about an incomplete modern polity, standing for the relationship between the configuration of political society desired by modernizing elites and its actual historical forms. Central to this split is the unfulfilled mission of secularism in a society where a compromise between Hindu orthodoxy and progressive nationalism launched an anti-colonial independence movement, one that culminated in the declaration of a secular state. The distinction between an officially maintained secular public sphere and a more heterogeneous popular culture was not likely to survive the proliferation of new electronic media, however, and became problematic, as political parties themselves began to invoke the authority of faith to reinforce their diminishing electoral credibility, while citizens drew on the narrative resources of religion to make sense of an often disorienting, unstable polity. The media’s reliance on the state to set its own moral compass, as it professed reportorial norms of objectivity, then led to a crisis of interpretation.2 This crisis, which was sparked, as I have argued, first, by the institution of national television and specifically, by the broadcast of tele-epics, worked out 2News media, claiming to be objective, typically rely on state authority to define the boundaries of normality. Thus, ‘order’ is by far the dominant value in the news, as empirical studies of the news media suggest. See, in this connection, Herbert Gans, Deciding What’s News, New York: Viking, 1976.

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in the coverage of the Ram Janmabhumi movement, which was perceived differently in English and in Hindi-language media.3 In this essay, I will contrast English and Hindi-language newspaper coverage of the Ram Janmabhumi movement, to argue that there were significant variations in the understandings of news as a genre, dependent on different sets of institutional practices in the print media. English-language news emphasized the truth-value of news, as information serving a critical–rational public. This reflected the origins of English-language news as an elite form of discourse in liberal market society. Here, any self-consciousness about the story-telling aspect of news gave way to the sense of a transparent communication that was objective and neutral.4 For English-language audiences, objectivity and neutrality worked not only to enhance the informational value of news and to guarantee its truth content, but also served as a marker of the relationship of these audiences to power. Objectivity, as a news value, corresponded to the history of English as a language of colonial and subsequently, technocratic nationalist rule, and rendered this history invisible, thereby avoiding a confrontation with English’s status as the language of a tiny minority. Hindi news audiences had a more fraught and contested relation to power, and could not assume a transparent, value–neutral approach to the news in quite the same way.5 Even as a means of informing citizens for active political participation, then, Hindi news was written quite differently from English news. The narrative aspect of news was much more in evidence, and perhaps understandably so, as the power relations between readers and rulers required constantly to be assessed, dramatized, criticized, or ridiculed, rather than to be taken for granted.6 3Here I focus only on Hindi and English language news coverage, and my choice is unavoidably selective. Clearly more research remains to be done, not only with more exhaustive analysis of the news in these languages but also in other indigenous language news of the period. I would argue, however, that the notion of a split public offers a powerful heuristic that can illuminate trends in other sections of the print public as well. 4This understanding of news in western Europe is offered in, for example, Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991, pp. 57–88. 5I should stress that rather than locating an essential set of differences between languages, I am arguing about discrepancy between news values in Hindi and Englishlanguage print news. 6This is not true, however, of the national Hindi dailies, which are owned and operated by the English language dailies, and for the most part carry articles translated from the

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In Hindi-language news, then, objectivity was one of a range of possible values in the news, and neutrality but one of a variety of possible relationships to political power. The distinction of Hindilanguage newspapers was typically seen only as a failure, however, in their inability to imitate the English-language press. There were no doubt many respects in which the Hindi press could improve. But, such criticisms also reproduced a colonial emphasis on a conception of neutrality that was never defined, while ignoring the specific cultural and political conditions of Hindi-language news production. What follows here is a preliminary exploration of how the Ram Janmabhumi campaign was represented in the press, and how these representations themselves folded back into the campaign’s development. The Ram Janmabhumi movement brought a series of contradictions to the fore: claims of secular nationhood and abundant signs of religious nationalism; claims of the English-language media to speak on behalf of the nation as a whole, and the ostentatious incomprehension it evinced as more people showed an affinity for popular Hindutva; and state claims of religious neutrality and the indulgence it exhibited towards Hindu militants who violated the law repeatedly. There operated a split between the ideal of the public, symbolized by the modernizing elite, including members of the state itself, and the more compromised forms through which it actually manifested. In another sense, this also took shape as a split between an electronic public, which represented the closest numerical approximation to the society at large, and the several print publics existing alongside it. Third, and in the specific sense considered for the most part here, there was a split between the English-language and the Hindi-language print public, whose sudden mutual awareness due to national television created the context against which the assertion of Hindu nationalism gained new significance. Unlike countries in the West, in India, the growth of television has been accompanied by the growth rather than the diminution of the reading public.7 The Ram Janmabhumi movement was, among other English. As a result, the latter newspapers, for example, Navbharat Times and Jansatta (belonging to The Times of India and The Indian Express groups respectively) are therefore quite unrepresentative of regional Hindi newspaper culture. 7Thus, for instance, in the period 1987–96, coinciding with the growth of the television audience from a few millions to close to 200 million, the overall circulation of newspapers

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things, an expression of the politicization resulting from this combination of quantitative increase in literacy and qualitative change in the character of the public. Arguments about a democratic public often imply that it was in the era of print capitalism that the public achieved its highest and most redeeming expression.8 The shift to electronic capitalism is registered as vitiating this legacy, as the profit imperative overtakes more proper political impulses, and the constraints of radio and TV reduce public information into staged displays.9 But the public sphere is an ideal type rather than an historical artifact; such an approach, therefore, seems dismissive of actually existing political formations. It remains possible, then, to think about what kinds of publics could be shaped in other contexts where, for instance, print and electronic audiences were both relatively small in relation to the population as a whole, and where steep entry costs and the retention of state controls ensured that print rather than electronic media remained closest to local and regional opinion. A more market-sensitive newspaper industry at this time provided venues for articulating public opinion, whereas television, which at this time was governmentcontrolled, mirrored the state largely as it wished to be seen....

THE INDIAN PRESS: GOVERNMENT, LANGUAGE, AND POLITICS ...In the West, ‘the public’ is held as the irreducible realm, whereby modernity as a historical condition translates into democracy as a political goal, through rational–critical debate in the press. In a country has grown by approximately 140 per cent. See Charu Gupta and Mukul Sharma, ‘Communal Constructions: Media Reality vs. Real Reality’, Race & Class, vol. 38, no. 1, 1996, pp. 2–3 fn. 8Thus, Habermas writes of the ‘re-feudalization’ that occurs as the public sphere becomes entirely absorbed into the production process and large corporations proceed to dominate the market. He quotes from H. Haftendorn to elaborate on a point: ‘Were one to see the sense of the radio and television transmissions of the Bundestag sessions in their providing the listener (or viewer) at the receiver with the opportunity for participation in the work of elected representatives, then one would have to conclude that radio and television are not adequate for this purpose; that instead, by biasing and distorting the debates, they represent a disruption of parliamentary work.’ Habermas continues: ‘Before the expanded public sphere the [Parliamentary] transactions themselves are stylized into a show. Publicity loses its critical function in favor of a staged display; even arguments are transmuted into symbols to which again one can not respond by arguing but only by identifying with them.’ See Habermas, 1991, p. 206. 9Habermas, 1991.

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like India, by contrast, where the public becomes, to a considerable extent, a ventriloquism of the state, the public is often perceived instead as a threat to order. Thus, in the news coverage of the Ram Janmabhumi movement, the majority of the citizenry itself became a suspect element, perceived to have been inflamed by sections of the Hindilanguage press. While there was truth to this perception, it often took the place of a larger understanding of the way in which the press was working. State attitudes towards the press in the post-independence period varied somewhat between the large, metropolitan press and the provincial press. The metropolitan press was to be curbed for fear of its potential political power. Controls were achieved through limits on their growth and rationing of essential supplies such as newsprint, to say nothing of the intimidation exercised through numerous complaints to the Press Council, and the threat of withdrawal of government advertising.10 As for the small newspapers in the hinterland, the government presented itself as their champion, providing advertisements and subsidies of newsprint to encourage their growth.11 In fact, the carrot-and-stick approach of a licence–permit raj operated far more bluntly with small newspapers, with provincial governments often using them in a frankly partisan fashion.12 Various warning notes were also sounded by successive Press Commissions about the oligopolistic nature of press ownership. However, existing anti-monopoly legislation under the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act, which could have been deployed effectively against market-dominant newspapers, was never in fact used. 10The Press Council, established in 1966, abolished during the Emergency in 1976, and set up again during the Janata government in 1979, was designed as a body that would warn, admonish, and censure reprehensible reportage in the news media. By far, the majority of complaints are registered by the government to harass newspapers, however. See R. Dhavan, Only the Good News: On the Law of the Press in India, Delhi: Manohar, 1987, pp. 420, 430. In a survey carried out by the Second Press Commission, 332 out of 392 newspapers thought government policy was unfair in respect to the allocation of advertisements. Second Press Commission of India, Report of the Second Press Commission, Delhi: Controller of Publications, 1982, p. 106. 11The Diwakar Committee on Small Newspapers, 1966, had recommended the encouragement of small newspapers as an effective means of furthering communication. 12See T.J.S. George, The Provincial Press in India, New Delhi: Press Institute of India, 1966, pp. 5–6.

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This suggested that although the business-owned press could at times be adversarial towards the government, the degree of convergence between their views and interests was greater than any differences that separated them. The leading Hindi dailies tended to share in this consensus, since these papers tended to be ‘satellites’ of the national English-language newspapers rather than ‘independents’, to use the distinction attributed to Rahul Sankrityayan. His distinction between satellites and independents pertains to the Hindi press, pointing to the dependent status of the former, namely, Hindi papers run by the large publishing houses as ancillaries to their Englishlanguage papers.13 The usual gulf between metropolitan and provincial papers is thus heightened in the case of Hindi, since the ‘quality’ papers lack a personality of their own, and are imitative of their Englishlanguage partners. If the English-language press had arrogated to itself the right to define the nation, as, for example, secular in intention if not in fact, not the least of its difficulties was that secularism was uneven in application. Secularism was understood variously: if for the purpose of elections, secularism forbade appeals based on religion, in the courts it was used to protect religious sensibilities from injury; meanwhile, in public institutions, it was interpreted to mean equality of religious groups. The BJP itself insisted that secularism required stewardship by ‘the majority community’, namely, the Hindus. The English-language press could not solve this conundrum, to be sure, and was therefore presented with a dilemma. As far as the Hindi-language media were concerned, however, the resulting incomprehension on the part of the Englishlanguage press reflected the ‘pseudo-secular’ obstinacy of a deracinated elite, that prevented Hindu culture from occupying its rightful place in society. For each, the crucial action or inaction was in the other half. For each, there was the sense of a society demonstrably not at one with itself, of a sundered half to be returned to the body social. This mutual misrecognition was generated and played itself out so that the split became stereotyped and hardened, and the friction between parts was magnified through a media-sensitive Hindu right that utilized the division to the utmost effect. 13Cited

in ibid., p. 51

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Deep cultural divisions in a hierarchically organized, multilingual society became politically salient through the media. The English and the Hindi press behaved as though they were in different societies, and it was hard to believe they belonged to the same world, the BJP public relations coordinator Amitabh Sinha observed. Language and culture did not seamlessly map onto each other; however, there were exceptions that disturbed a smooth division of qualities in this way.14 The division, nevertheless, offers a powerful heuristic. The English-language audience was a relatively coherent, wellnetworked national elite, with a sense of being bearers of the agenda of modernization.15 Although their relative importance was changing, it represented the leading segment of the market, in terms of production and consumption decisions. Thus, proportionately, business influence was greater in the English language than in the indigenous language press.16 More than merely British inheritance was at work; indeed, it can be argued that after independence, the status and power of English have grown in importance relative to the vernacular languages. Its history as a language of command left it remarkably free of any colonial taint, as new middle and ruling classes stepped into the role of nationalist technocrats in the task of state-led development. In retrospect, it might be said that English served to make up for the absence of a cultural policy, a high wire strung above the particularist thickets of caste, religion, and region. The use of English could serve as a disclaimer against the biases that dialect, style, and intonation would have 14Exceptions included the Navbharat Times in the Hindi press (‘a group of committed Marxists there’, in the words of one Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh [RSS] leader) and The Indian Express in the English press, and the latter emphatically so under Arun Shourie’s editorship, which lasted until November 1990, and to a slightly lesser extent thereafter under Prabhu Chawla. Personal interview with Devendar Swaroop Agarwal, Director, Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Research Centre, New Delhi, 27 April 1994. 15Thus, the Indian Newspaper Society, in 1989, had 167 English-language members (that is, newspapers and periodicals), as against 161 Hindi-language members. See INS Press Handbook, New Delhi: Indian Newspaper Society, 1989, p. clxxix. 16One confirmation appeared in the quantity of advertising. In a 1981 survey, the maximum space given to advertisements was in English-language papers, 49 per cent, with the figure still higher for the bigger papers. Hindi papers devoted a somewhat smaller amount of space for the same purpose, 34.7 per cent, as against a general average of 39 per cent. The Times of India devoted 60 per cent of its space to advertisements, and The Indian Express, 55 per cent. The First Press Commission had recommended that the quantum of advertisements should not exceed 40 per cent of the total area.

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made all too plain if an indigenous tongue were used. The linguistic appearance of neutrality cemented the functional utility of English for elite and majority alike. At the same time, there were tactical advantages in raiding a foreign vocabulary to express thoughts that had became awkward, delicate, or strange, as customs and mores lagged behind rapid changes. The borrowed words have a referential meaning, but are devoid of the streams of association that swirl in the wake of indigenous terms; thus, for instance, the elaborate codes of vernacular etiquette, of giving and receiving respect, and the linguistic layering of formalities, invariably marked by caste, may be put aside without explicit rejection by using English instead. The gentle, almost ‘passive’ character of this negotiation may thus be embraced by progressive and orthodox alike. The functional appearance of neutrality is, of course, undergirded by the real power inhering with speakers of English.17 In contrast, the Hindi-language audience is ‘regional’ in at least a double sense, representing only a part of the nation, namely the ‘Hindi belt’, and forming within this apportioning, various overlapping cultural and political sectors. Hindi-language newspapers, therefore, tend to be more numerous and to have a greater number of editions corresponding to the dispersed character of their audience. It was in the Hindi-language medium that, arguably, a ‘Hindu’ consciousness was re-asserted so forcefully over the last several years,18 with extensive organizational groundwork by the Hindu right serving to link different regions, one to the other, to form a relatively cohesive and selfconscious political force. The cultural isolation between English and Hindi print media worked to the political advantage of Hindu nationalists, as forms of expression excluded from the English-language media flourished in the Hindi media, and aided in the organization of Hindu opinion. If 17See in this connection Braj B. Kachru, The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions and Models of Non-Native Englishes, Oxford: Pergamon Institute, 1986. 18It should be noted that a small number of journalists in English-language newspapers, notably Swapan Dasgupta and Chandan Mitra, became vocal supporters of the BJP following V.P. Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations in 1990, and specifically in response to Advani’s rath yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya a few weeks later. (Arun Shourie, at the time editor of The Indian Express, had declared his sympathies a few years earlier, during the Shah Bano agitation.)

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the English media treated issues of religion as, for one reason or another, peripheral to their concerns, and the Hindi media treated it as a relatively familiar, living presence and as a sociological fact within their purview, the latter could become an organizing ground for the Hindu right. Not only the susceptibility of the latter to religious forms of expression but the lack of engagement of the former were operative in this process. If the Hindi press’s intimacy with the themes and the sentiments of the temple movement created sympathy, the Englishlanguage press’s blinders prevented it from questioning the Hindu right’s compartmentalization of itself into ‘cultural’ and ‘political’ wings that at times appeared unrelated to each other. The resulting unintelligibility conferred on the demands made the Hindu right’s militancy greater, and rendered it more of a force. Centred in UP (which, for part of the movement’s duration, was under a BJP-led government) as well as in the other Hindi belt states, the Janmabhumi campaign lasted, in its most intense phase, for a little over three years, culminating in December 1992 with the mosque’s demolition. In the post-independence period, the campaign can be said to have been inaugurated when Rajiv Gandhi’s government acceded to the demand made by some Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders to re-open the Babri masjid in Ayodhya. The mosque had lain shut by court order since December 1949. At that time, Hindu militants had forcibly installed a deity of Lord Ram in the mosque, triggering unrest in Faizabad. In effect, the re-opening of the mosque sanctified Hindu violation of Muslim property rights, and granted Hindus the right to maintain worship of the idol installed there. If the Congress Party had hoped to gain political mileage by this move, it was the sangh and its allies that seized the decisive advantage, beginning in the fall of 1989, through a series of campaigns that succeeded in mobilizing not only the traditional Hindu nationalist base of middle classes from small towns but also professionals and the intelligentsia, on the one hand, and large numbers of backward caste youth, on the other. The timing was fortuitous, and the mobilization was aided by many factors, principally the proposal to implement the Mandal Commission recommendations that backward classes be awarded reserved seats in educational institutions and central government sector jobs. Prime Minister V.P. Singh’s decision, in 1990, to re-activate the decade-old recommendations provoked a furious response from

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upper castes all across northern India. The Hindu nationalist struggle was played out on many fronts, then, ranging from Parliamentary speeches and court debates demanding restitution of ‘Hindu property’, to artfully designed mobilizations, civil disobedience, anti-lower caste and anti-Muslim riots, all combining to advance the cause of the temple’s construction. The slogan that endured throughout the VHP campaign, painted on walls and on banners, shouted in marches, sung in songs that blared from a thousand loudspeakers in Ayodhya and other sites of VHP activity, was: mandir wahin banayenge—the temple will be built right there. The overt emphasis of the slogan was on construction, but at the site of the mosque. The prior act of destruction was thus indispensable to the project. The implication was unavoidable, and available on asking the first question impelled by the utterance, where? Yet the press, English and Hindi both, maintained a tactful silence on the subject, reproducing the Centre’s own alliance in the BJP’s fictions of ‘construction’ and ‘renovation’. The Hindu nationalists themselves seemed to deftly engage in a wide variety of debates, unhindered by the awkwardness of making disparate claims in different places. The RSS and BJP members entertained arguments about the legal and juridical basis of the birthplace claims; Bajrang Dal ‘Hanuman’s Army’ and VHP members scoffed at the idea that mere evidence would deter them from their goals. The RSS and VHP intellectuals adduced archaeological and textual evidence to build a historical argument, while at the same time other RSS and VHP members declared that faith, and the masses of the faithful, would formulate the verdict. Against the moving target represented by this orchestrated medley, setting the factual record straight seemed to make little headway, and appeared, at times, like a shout in a storm. For the English-language press, the Ram temple movement was something ‘out there’, beyond the province of activities intelligible to its own readers. Whether it was understood as a matter of religious faith or of communal politics, it was something alluded to rather than engaged with directly, explained in abstract concepts rather than with reference to beliefs or practices familiar to their audience. Although it was nowhere stated as such, there was unquestionably the sense that the vernacular was the more muddy, compromised realm whose modernity was uncertain, whereas the domain of

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English was that of secular modernity proper. The English press’s apparent distance from the argumentative reach of the VHP and their allies was akin to a Brahminical posture, with its language functioning as a master language, and at the same time, as a kind of overarching juridical–legal apparatus within which the effects of regional discourses could be plotted and assessed.19 English was, in this sense, the latter-day equivalent of Sanskrit, a language of modern technocracy that guaranteed the disinterested expertise of those who wielded it. Its inability to access the values and beliefs of the vernacular realm was then a form of sanctioned ignorance, a sign of privilege rather than a handicap, portending none of the usual consequences of ignorance. Prabhash Joshi, editor of the Hindi daily Jansatta, published by the Goenkas, expressed the schism in sharp terms: A very insulting term is used—national press. This means that [only] those newspapers published in English spread their influence across the country. By this token the papers in Indian languages are regional. But why is Anand Bazaar Patrika not [considered] national press? Are Hindustan or Navbharat Times not fit to represent the whole country? This is a very unsound question. In the words of Vinobha Bhave, it has split the whole country into Rahu and Ketu. The few people who are in charge, know English. The principal responsibility for nationalism, for the reconstruction of the nation, has been taken by these English language literates. They are Rahu, the others are Ketu. Today even if a Shankaracharya or Tulsidas were to emerge in this country, they would be considered semi-educated if they did not know English. The grave problem resulting from this is that it is hard for those who dominate the national press to encounter the culture of the country, [to know] its roots.20

Underlying the relationships of English/Hindi linguistic power in news coverage of Ayodhya was a structured set of misperceptions, ensuing from and reinforcing such a bifurcated system of discourse. Beneath those misperceptions, however, lay some shared assumptions. Although there were court proceedings on the property disputes related to the 19In making this argument about the use of English in India, I am indebted to Vivek Dhareshwar’s ‘Caste and the Secular Self ’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, nos 25–26, 1993, pp. 117–18. 20Prabhash Joshi, ‘Chunautiyon ke beech Khada Patrakar’ [Reporters Stand Between Challenges], in Jayaprakash Bharati (ed.), Hindi Patrakaritha: Dasha aur Disha [Hindi Journalism: Condition and Direction], New Delhi: Pravin Publishers, 1994, p. 15.

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mosque and to the issue of the VHP’s encroachment, the VHP’s claim that the birthplace of Ram was primarily a religious affair was essentially accepted by the centre, and by major sections of the press. The BJP’s White Paper on Ayodhya, published in May 1993, disclosed that P.V. Narasimha Rao, who became Prime Minister in 1991, was chairman of a group of ministers constituted by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in April 1987 to work for a solution of the Ayodhya issue. In an article attributed to him, Rao discussed the matter in terms similar to those expressed by Buta Singh: ‘[U]nfortunately for the first time, a countrywide movement based on the deep religious devotion of millions of Hindus has been organized with an out-and-out political purpose in view, with amazing skill and astounding subtlety so as to touch the Hindu psyche deeply... The Hindu community...has been fanaticised for political ends. And once the majority community gets so fanaticised, what remains of secularism?’ He goes on to say, ‘When communal atmosphere prevails everywhere, no political party is or can be, totally immune from it.’21 The BJP claimed that Ram Janmabhumi was a matter of faith for the Hindu majority. To this, the Congress had no reply except silent assent. This was not surprising, since from the illicit installation of the idol, to the barring of Muslims from worshiping at the mosque and the eventual opening of the site to Hindu rather than Muslim worship, each significant development in the case had been overseen and steered by a Congress administration. Narasimha Rao’s essay thus indicated an acceptance of the Hindu right’s construction of the basic problem. It was the religious devotion of Hindus that underlay the issue; the Hindus were the majority community; this community was now hell-bent on achieving its aim.... If the centre granted the VHP its fiction for fear of its mobilizing power and as a political convenience, the media reproduced this fiction and reinforced it over time as a news routine; the impression created, as the Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya noted, ‘was one of a grand mobilisation without any dissenting voice to the “Sangh Parivar” activities.’ Effectively, the media ‘helped in the build up’, and provided 21‘The Great Suicide’ by ‘Congressman’, a byline which the magazine, Mainstream, explained was that of a leading figure in the Congress Party. The article has been declared as the work of Narasimha Rao in N. Ram, ‘A Tale of Two White Papers’, editor’s column, Frontline, 21 May 1993, pp. 30–1.

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‘a positive impression’ of the movement, the tribunal concluded.22 Meanwhile, the entry of national political parties into the dispute made the story a regular feature of political news, and the periodic reports on the status of ‘talks’ approximated the norms of politics-as-usual. For their part, critics of the movement in the English-language press pointed out that the authenticity of the Ram Janmabhumi site was dubious, that Muslim rights required respect, and that Hindus were in any case not a united group. Most crucially, the blame for the movement and the political threat it represented was completely identified with the BJP and its allies. The Congress did not emerge unscathed, but its involvement was largely regarded in residual terms, as failure to deal adequately with the ‘communal menace’. In this way, the BJP was spotlighted as a threat from outside to the stability of existing order; just what this ‘order’ was, was not questioned. But, as evidence flowed in of the abundant popular support for the movement, such a view was challenged. Now the BJP appeared rather as the enemy within, releasing dormant popular energies and inciting discontent for its own purposes. Taken together, what resulted was a fundamentally incoherent understanding of the ‘communal threat’, and of the movement as such. And this was closely tied to the conception of the existing political order, not ‘liberal’ in the received sense of the term but assumed as such. Caste, community, and religion compromised the polity’s claim to being progressive and secular, but the belief that liberal ideals were, if not prevailing then close at hand, could not be discarded easily. With only a bipolar categorization available, of secular or communal, the English-language press was hampered in exploring the numerous registers in between that characterized actual events. Avoiding the cultural aspect of the movement was a way to manage this confusion while retaining the press’s class/caste distance. Thus, as the first temple construction campaign following the foundation laying approached, in October 1990, The Times of India commented in an editorial, ‘The successful rath yatra [‘chariot procession’ led by Advani, across the country, to publicize the campaign in the fall of 1990] has... demonstrated that blind faith is too deep rooted to be wished away or 22Justices O. Chinappa Reddy, D.A. Desai and D.S. Tewatia, Citizens’ Tribunal on Ayodhya. Judgement and Recommendations, New Delhi, December 1993, p. 73.

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beaten into submission... Unfortunately, such a powerful exhibition of Hindu feeling is fraught with danger.’23 What could not be seen or understood could not, of course, be defeated easily. However, the adventitious character of the exercise evoked no recognition in The Times. On the rare occasions when they addressed the topic of belief in Ram, English-language newspapers felt more comfortable with a historical rather than a cultural or religious approach. The following example is symptomatic of its underlying assumptions: Did Lord Rama ever exist? Do events of the Ramayana have any historical veracity?... Academicians are yet to describe Lord Rama as a historical character. The late National Professor Suniti Kumar Chatterjee explained that the Ramayana is basically a literary creation by Valmiki with, of course, later interpolations... Rational understanding of history suggests that the cult of Lord Rama became prevalent only with the advent of Ramananda and his disciple Tulsidas. The history of Hinduism also bears this out as there is little evidence to indicate that the deification of Lord Rama was complete before the spread of Tulsidas’s verses. Nonetheless Ayodhya came to be identified as the mythical kingdom and the disputed site became a point of conflict.24

A rational, historical approach prevents belief in Ram, and leads to bracketing the story as mythical. The worship of Ram, for example, by the sect of the Ramanandis, here becomes the activity of a cult spreading against all the evidence, and with its fictional notions of a kingdom and a birthplace, leading, perhaps inevitably, to conflict. A historical approach was of course a necessary part of any critical response. But the conviction that the ideas in question were wrongheaded meant, in effect, a refusal of the sociological fact of religious belief. It was thus unnecessary to engage with its actual content and dynamics. Such a narrowly conceived approach could make little headway in understanding the movement, and the only recourse could be to demand reinforced security measures. The law-and-order frame prominent in news coverage was thus an overdetermined one. 23‘A Way Out in Ayodhya’, The Times of India, 16 October 1990, p. 8. On the rath yatra, see Richard Davis, ‘On the Iconography of Rama’s Chariot’, in David Ludden (ed.), Making India Hindu. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. 24N. Mukhopadhyay, ‘Whose God is it Anyway: Putting Rama Through Scrutiny’, Sunday Mail, 2–8 July 1989, p. 2.

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For the Hindi press, the Ram Janmabhumi movement was not only a legal and political issue, but a social and cultural one as well, whose symbols and rituals were discussed in often fluent and racy prose. Not merely the statements of leaders then, but the intuitions of journalists about the movement’s popular meanings could also inform news stories. To be sure, there was a great deal of subjective and misleading reportage, including propaganda masquerading as news, and stories too implausible to count as news in the usual sense of the word. Their appearance in Hindi papers was related in part to the very different institutional environment their reporters worked in, with a structure of incentives and systems of editorial control quite different from those of most English-language newspapers. But the profusion of subjective reporting signalled not merely a lack of professionalism, or the presence of communal-minded management, although these were undoubtedly important determinants.25 In addition to these factors, such reporting also indicated the cultural proximity of journalists to the subject matter, and their access to its inner modes and meanings. Of course, the assertion of proximity is more important here than the quality of understanding involved. Here, for instance, is a response by one journalist to a question allegedly put by American embassy officials in Lucknow inquiring as to the sudden importance of Ram, after police firing in Ayodhya in November 1990: Twice central governments have fallen on this issue. In the past month or two, more than ten countries across the world have seen a change in government. It seems as if Sesha Nag26 has started a disco dance. Nothing is stable, but Indians are indifferent to it. People are more agonized over the Ram temple than over roti [bread]... There are many things to be done in Hindu society. Untouchability needs to be removed, hierarchy needs to be ended, everyone has to be linked by a common thread, et cetera et cetera. Ignoring all these things, the Vishwa Hindu 25See

the remark by S.P. Singh on the need for professionalism in ‘Who is Afraid of Hindi Journalism?’, Vidura, vol. 29, June 1992, p. 15. On the ‘communal-minded’ management of newspapers, see Asghar Ali Engineer, ‘The Press on Ayodhya Kar Seva’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 26, no. 20, May 1991, p. 1263. 26The serpent that, according to mythology, holds up the world. See Crooke and Enthoven, Religion and Folklore in Northern India, Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968, pp. 63–4.

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Parishad has started working on the Ram Janmabhumi temple. There must be a reason for it. Perhaps VHP thought that with this one task, many other things would be achieved. Due to the aura of Ram, the demon of Reservation ran away. Isn’t that enough?... Ram is the soul of Indians. Here people are taught that he who does not have Ram and Sita in his heart should be repudiated, no matter how popular he is. This is the reason V.P. Singh and Mulayam, who until yesterday were ruling, are in the dust now...27

The idiom resists easy translation, even as it displays a cheerful hybridity, with its image of the cosmic serpent swaying to a disco beat and so sending shock waves through the world it carries on its back. The writer acknowledges the apparent material irrelevance of the VHP’s temple project, but points to its political efficacy: it was able to ‘defeat’ ‘Reservation’, that is, the opposition’s move to divide the Hindu vote with reservations for Backward Classes (BCs), and win votes for the BJP in the 1990 Assembly elections. He does not disguise his political affiliations in his hostility to reservations, and he addresses an audience he assumes is dominated by upper-caste literates. When he writes that people care more for the temple than for roti, his tone is ironic rather than reverent; at any rate, he emphasizes, first of all, the irrationality rather than the truth of the sentiment. The answer he offers to the inquiring Americans is hardly a native secret, but could be found in any of a number of Orientalist texts. The author makes two kinds of assertions here, both implicit. First, he assumes that ‘communalism’ enters only when the prerogative of Hinduism is challenged, such as by Muslims wishing to reclaim the mosque. In this view, for Ram to be identified as the soul of Indians is an unexceptionable statement. Second, his upper caste status, and his evident membership in the intelligentsia notwithstanding, he asserts a relationship of familiarity and power with the symbols (it chased away the demon of reservation). Proximity to religious symbols does not necessarily imply ‘communal’ politics, although in this case they were clearly tied together. In another column published a few days earlier, one writer had seen the symbol not in terms of ownership and its implied rights, but in terms of shared values: 27Abhinav Kautilya, ‘Tell Them Also the Importance of Ram’, Aj, Varanasi, 9 December 1990, p. 6.

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The country’s economic condition is miserable... [T]here should be popular movements on these issues... But nothing like this has happened. We have turned away from all other issues because the Mandir-Mandal issues have confused us badly. The temple should be built, but in an atmosphere of mutual harmony... I have one request to make of temple agitators. They should remember that the upholder of moral propriety, Ram, is the symbol and heritage of Indian culture. Ram is the ideal king, the ideal husband, the ideal son, the ideal friend, and the ideal enemy. While constructing a temple for such an upholder of moral propriety all values must be respected. Ram is not the god of any one community, he is the Ideal Man in the mind of Indian people as a whole...28

Not reverence for Ram, but confusion and misunderstanding are at the root of problems, in this writer’s argument. Naive as it is in its politics, and unwilling as it is to question the placement of Ram as a national ideal, there is here, nevertheless, qualified criticism of the temple movement, from a perspective that grants a social importance to the symbols. The sentiments at issue could then potentially become a subject for debate. There appeared to be, what we can provisionally call, a sense of intimacy with the symbols in the Hindi press, borne of a cultural rather than a legalistic approach to the issue, whereas such a feeling was emphatically absent in the English-language press. Hindu leaders, in fact, asserted ownership of the symbols, while denying the latter were property; rather, they were claimed as indispensable to life. The statements by VHP leaders were full of such declarations, which made highly quotable quotes;...[one] BJP MP, Vinay Katiyar, could declare, ‘As long as they use Mandal, we will use kamandal’, the tide of a front page story in the paper.29 Kamandal, the Hindu mendicant’s pot, was a play on the word, making explicit the tactical choice of terms in the struggle to establish Hindutva. If the ruling party would fracture the Hindu vote by offering quotas for BCs, the BJP would make aggressive use of Hindu symbols in return, Katiyar was saying. Even if symbols were religious in nature and served as objects of belief, they were, at the same time, part of the social vocabulary, acting as semantic currency with greater or lesser political energies at their command. 28Anandeshwar Prasad Singh, ‘Ulajh gaya hai mandir aur masjid masla’ [Mandir and Mandal Issues are Entangled], Aj, 22 November 1990, p. 6. 29Aj, 22 December 1990, p. 1.

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The whole business of politics then was to increase, or inflate, the energy behind the symbols with which one aligned, in the battle against the competition. In contrast, the frames of the English-language press wavered between understanding the Ayodhya story in terms of normal politics and seeing it as a movement liable to subvert the nation’s foundations, thereby invoking the police and the army, which mark the limit of normal politics. In neither of these frames was a cultural understanding of the movement possible, one where the movement could be comprehended as part of the social traffic in meaning. The interplay and give and take of symbols were acknowledged, but were understood to belong exclusively at an elite level. Thus, periodically, there was discussion of the BJP’s tinkering with its image, between weak, moderate, and strong Hindutva for instance, or between more and less openness to the entry of foreign companies. As for the masses, their faith was ‘blind’ and ‘deep-rooted’, presumably related to their inability to perceive these pragmatic adjustments and certainly to their incapacity for flexibility in such issues. Thus, although the perception of communal politics as a debate of images was fairly well established in the Hindi press, the conviction that profound, even atavistic beliefs were involved never left the English-language press. For all its insular presumptions of superiority, it was the latter who were naive and credulous regarding the issue of faith, even if it was credulity in the faith of others. It should be noted that the breakdown of differences was not strictly along the lines I have drawn; there were exceptions on each side. The Indian Express was often supportive of the movement, for example, just as several Hindi-language papers were critical of the sangh parivar’s activities, for example, the Navbharat Times or Jansatta. Within the English-language press, there were columnists who wrote about Hindutva with insight and, indeed, enthusiasm, such as Swapan Dasgupta in The Times of India and Chandan Mitra in The Hindustan Times. A majority of those in the English-language press were undoubtedly at least bilingual, so that the understandings circulating in the Hindi press were very likely available if not familiar to them. What was the nature of the interaction between the electronic and the print media in these circumstances? Although television created a context for collective awareness, the footprint of the medium was not

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large at this time (1987–91), with only one government-run channel available across much of the country. The speed and sensitivity with which television could respond to signals from popular audiences was therefore severely limited; in effect, electronic programming did not go much beyond the fare of Hindu tele-epics during this period. The print media were more regional in scope and operated on a more commercial basis, so that they worked within the footprint of Doordarshan, and could help interpret and work out the implications of a new set of social perceptions. What then was the effect of the press’s structured misperceptions on the Ram temple movement? The English-language press, in a sense, created the movement as it would become—closed, implacable, and impervious to reason, and challenging the existing bounds of legality by embracing religious fanaticism rather than the principles of constitutional democracy. Yet, the Ram temple movement was plainly not a monolithic entity; it enclosed a range of positions, from those critical of British colonial inheritance or desirous of more indigenous cultural influence, to the pious and devout, to those who conceived of collective revenge against Muslims as a politically liberating development. The Hindi press was able to articulate these distinctions and allow a more heterogeneous image of the movement’s cultural references to emerge. This was due to both the specific history of the relationship of Hindi to English in India, as a nationalist rather than a colonial language, and the more dispersed and down-market character of the Hindi print media, together with the different news values arising in Hindi media as a result of these two factors. Hindu nationalists exploited these factors successfully, so that the monolithic picture of the campaign in the English-language press became the active counterpart to the more nuanced and variegated narratives in the Hindi press, which expressed a certain level of political self-consciousness. This crucial dimension of self-consciousness was lacking in English news coverage of the movement, except in occasional discussions of leadership strategy. Such a portrayal only went to reinforce the threat represented by the BJP and its allies; indeed, those in the secular front might have frowned on granting reflexivity to Hindu nationalists for fear of humanizing those who were, after all,

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the enemy. Alongside the more complex accounts available in the Hindi press, supporters of the campaign could also be assured of more blatantly propagandistic coverage, replete with fabricated stories of Muslim treachery and Hindu heroism. As the BJP and its allies found their campaign being shaped in the ‘national’, that is, English press, in Parliament, and in the courts, as a singular and unified entity dangerous to the polity, the distance of this understanding from the picture available in the Hindi-language press actually helped the movement, lending it notoriety and power, while masking the variety and the incoherence of its constituent parts....

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12 Forging Public Opinion The Press, Television, and Electoral Campaigns in Andhra Pradesh* G. Krishna Reddy

T

he political context of communications has undergone substantial change after the advent of modern media, and more so with the revolution in communication technology. 1 While political communications have been shaped by the transforming culture of competitive politics, media technology—be it print or broadcasting— has created its own necessities, which, in turn, have shaped politics, politicians, and political discourses. The changing political culture created a space for the ‘mass’ media to make inroads into the political sphere. Consequently, it becomes necessary to explicate this process of transformation. The transformation of the culture of politics implies changing political orientations, values, and attitudes about the way electoral parties are functioning; about participation in terms of its *Originally published as ‘Forging Public Opinion: The Press, Television, and Electoral Campaigns in Andhra Pradesh’, in Bernard Bel (ed.), Media and Mediation, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2005, pp. 315–45. 1Duncan Watts, Political Communications Today, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977. See especially, Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television: Religious Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Indian Public, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, for an illuminating analysis of the political persuasion of voters which changed after the advancement of television in the Indian context. For a detailed description of the communication revolution in India, see Arvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers, India’s Communication Revolution: From Bullock Carts to Cyber Marts, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2001.

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base—class, caste, gender, etc.—the norms of electoral politics, the competition for power among the parties, and the procedures they observe; and about the very idea of democracy. The entry of new social groups into the electoral arena has qualitatively affected the participatory base and brought in a new political environment of values and vocabulary which has shaped the campaign agendas and strategies of almost all parties. Political articulations of caste-centred discourses have been striking examples in the recent history of electoral politics in India. It has challenged all the earlier functionalist paradigms by bringing caste from the periphery to the centre in their analysis; early functionalist explanations considered caste as merely one of those traditional institutions which would undergo the modernization process. But, it has come to influence the modern institutions and processes such as political parties and electoral politics substantially.2 Caste-based mobilization is now no more a liberal stigma. On the contrary, politics and parties addressing social cleavages on caste lines have become quite a legitimate way of representing and articulating the interests of segments of people in the electoral arena. It was made possible because of a series of attempts on the part of the lower strata to assert themselves in the political arena. Post-Mandal Commission political developments like the rise of the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and Samajwadi Party (SP) in UP, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) in Bihar, or other minor parties launched on the lines of caste polarization, have initiated new themes into electoral politics. The major parties like the Congress, BJP, and even the left parties have been compelled to take cognizance of the caste factor and mend their strategies accordingly. The shift from vote catching on the basis of the power brokers of the traditional rural elite who held sway over patron–client relations, to addressing clearly identifiable communities as the vote blocks, in the 1990s, has been evident through the way the parties—whether the parties of catch-all character or social cleavage-based parties—started competing and negotiating for their share of votes among these communities. ‘The assumption is that there is a collective identity 2M.N. Srinivas

(ed.), Caste and Its Twentieth Century Avatar, New Delhi: Viking, 1996.

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which can be mobilized for votes through promises and concessions. Political parties then negotiate with community leaders as well as make other gestures to woo the community’.3 The transition from patronage politics to ‘the politics of crisis’ marks one fundamental change in the perception of the political parties about elections: elections have come to be seen increasingly in instrumentalist terms. ‘Hence, parties are resorting more and more to marketing techniques, selecting issues likely to carry the widest appeal, projecting images. Few view them as occasions for raising basic issues and concerns’.4 The newfound cleavage-based parties and the ‘old’ parties, both are interested only in raising questions pertaining to identities at the symbolic level, without contributing to any substantial transformation of the marginal groups in terms of material gains. Yet, the politics of identitarianism introduced a crucial factor into the campaign agenda, that is, ‘social justice’ as sharing of political power. Politics of marginal groups not only helped to develop new parties but also introduced radical vocabulary into the campaign language and, in turn, flouted all the rules of the electoral game. All the parties, new and old, have become victims of the changed political culture in which they have become personality centred without being internally democratic. The BSP with Kanshiram and Mayavati; SP with Mulayam Singh; RJD with Laloo Prasad Yadav; or regional parties like the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh, with NTR earlier and Chandrababu Naidu later; DMK with Karunanidhi; All India Anna Dravida Munnettra Kazhagam (AIADMK) with Jayalalitha—all experienced the collapse of internal networks and democratic structures. In a way, democratic politics with enormously expanding active participation of varied sections is followed by more manipulative and symbolic politics. In plebiscitary politics, the leader becomes all pervading, and politics more symbolic and image based. Institutions other than parties, which deal with public consciousness, such as media, play a central role as parties become dependent on them in various ways in the absence of their own networks and contact with the people. 3Sarah Joseph and Gurupreet Mahajan, ‘Elections and Democratic Process in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXVI, no. 34, August 1991, pp. 1953–4. 4Ibid., p. 1955.

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The atrophy of the party organization, and the rise of the leadercentric parties, have promoted a new breed of politicians who characterize the culture of new politics. The politicians who joined the different ranks of parties are devoid of past political experience and are out of contact with people at the grassroots. The only qualification they have is their close connection with the leader of the party. They generally hold the view that politics is just another ‘vocation’ and profits must be reaped out of it to the best of their abilities.5 It is this change in the culture of politics that has created the necessity, on the part of politics and political actors, to explore new ways and means of approaching the voter environment. It has created the space for new modes of political campaigning and brought in the mass media in a big way. Political parties have substantially changed their organization of campaigns by relying more and more on media experts and market managers, ad-men, and professionals. The change in the political culture has necessitated new modes of political communications, but the advancement of mass media with its technological innovations, the extent of reach, and its newly acquired power dynamics has transformed competitive politics as much.

TRANSFORMATION OF ELECTION CAMPAIGNS Traditionally, the political campaigns were predominantly party mediated and more interpersonal in their communication. ‘Formerly, it [campaign] was more a bottom up than a top down process; candidates or their surrogates travelled from village to village in jeeps, addressing local crowds by voice or loudspeakers.’6 However, it should not be mistaken for a truly democratic practice as it was much bound by caste hierarchies. Earlier, the election campaigns were more decentralized in their organization. There was a plurality of sources of information—party networks, opinion makers, caste networks, gymnasia, and newspapers 5Ashis Nandy, ‘The Political Culture of the Indian State’, Daedalus, vol. 118, no. 4, 1989, p. 21. 6L.I. Rudolph, ‘The Media and Cultural Polities’, in Subrata K. Mitra and James Chiriyankadath (eds), Electoral Politics in India: A Changing Landscape, New Delhi: Segment Books, 1992, p. 86.

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to a lesser extent. For instance, according to Sirsikar, the 1967 general election was essentially heterogeneous in the sense that the electorate used to be mobilized through a variety of institutions.7 It must be said that so long as the Congress system8 existed on the basis of politics of patronage, party networks were active and thus, these traditional forms of campaigning were found to be useful. The twin factors—the collapse of patronage politics and ensuing crisis; and the advent of modern media and its permeation into politics— have affected the field of political campaigns phenomenally. Modern media does not replace the traditional forms but it coexists and assimilates them. Thus, modern forms come to acquire monopoly over the information systems and knowledge forms.9 It creates its own necessities; accordingly, the institutions such as political parties have to mould their campaign strategies when they resort to modern communications. The growing media networks fit well with the conditions that the parties have been experiencing, that is, the parties are leader dominant without grassroot networks. Thus, the political ambience and the transforming nature of communication practices suit each other. Rudolph rightly observes that, what political parties used to do through their networks, they now seek to do through mass media.10

THE TELUGU PRESS AND POLITICS The association of the Telugu-language press and politics has been intensely felt in the politics of media in Andhra Pradesh (hereafter AP). The changes that occurred in the media during the emergence of the TDP, with the involvement of Eenadu, are seen as one of the pioneering efforts on the part of the regional language press in the country.11 First, the media have been actively involved in the political 7V.M. Sirsikar, Sovereigns without Crowns: A Behavioural Analysis of the Indian Electoral Process, Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1973, p. 153. 8Rajni Kothari, Politics in India, New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1970. 9Craig Calhoun, ‘Indirect Relationships and Imagined Communities: Large-scale Social Integration and the Transformation of Everyday Life’, in P. Bourdieu and James S. Coleman (eds), Social Theory for a Changing Society, New York: West View Press, 1991, pp. 95–120. 10Rudolph, ‘The Media and Cultural Polities’, 1992, p. 86. 11R. Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics, and the Indian Language Press, 1977–99, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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developments of the state. Second, the Telugu-language press has become intensely competitive. Third, the notion of non-partisanship in the reporting, particularly among leading Telugu dailies, has become suspect, especially since the 1990s. Two crucial factors contributed to the enormous growth in the language press, both of which occurred during the 1970s.12 First, the rise of political consciousness of different sections and concomitant political changes like the rise of regional forces; and second, the technological advancement in the field of communications. There has been a phenomenal increase in the growth of newspapers from four dailies per 1,000 people in 1961 to ten dailies per 1,000 people in 1991 (Table 12.1). In both respects, Eenadu’s approach to its rise is exemplary and the rest of the language papers were forced to follow suit. Table 12.1: Population Change in Andhra Pradesh and Newspaper Change in Telugu, 1961–91 1961

1971

1991

53.6

66.5

36.0

Literacy (% of total pop.)

21

25

30

38

Urbanization (%)

17.5

19.4

23.3

27.0

No. of literate (millions) Telugu daily circulations (’000) Telugu dailies per ’000 people in Andhra Pradesh

43.5

1981

Population (millions)

7.6

10.9

16.1

24.9

158

237

439

664

4

6

8

10

Source: R. Jeffrey (1997c).

The formation of AP, based on the linguistic principle, marks the beginning of the consolidation of the regional elite. These elites were albeit accommodated in the power structure at subordinate levels. The green revolution gave new economic power to the agrarian classes. This triggered new socio-economic forces in the rural sector which called for a new political equilibrium. Political stability received a setback. The years, 1967–71, were the period when Indian polity underwent the process of readjustment. The assertion and counter assertion of the elite came to an end with Mrs Gandhi’s emergence as a strong leader at the national level. 12Ibid.

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The Andhra economy acquired a new momentum in the 1970s. As it picked up, the agrarian elite started investing in the industrial sector. The investment in industry, in the 1970s, started coming from the agrarian surplus generated by the peasant castes, particularly Kammas from coastal Andhra. This linkage between the agrarian and industrial capital gave rise to a new regional elite which was more sophisticated and articulate than the agrarian classes. 13 They became more entrepreneurial and started investing heavily in agro-industries, cinema, and the Telugu press. It was, in fact, during this period and context that the Telugu press became more assertive, if not aggressive. Eenadu, launched in 1974, was the culmination of these changing trends in the Andhra society. Eenadu played a significant role in the origin, development, and success of the regional party, Telugu Desam. Eenadu was instrumental in bringing about some significant changes in the world of Telugu journalism. This paper made several departures from the early traditions with a massive network and electronic teleprinters spread across all the districts, and had reporters in every nook and corner of the state. It gave extensive coverage to local news by introducing local editions. Another important aspect of the organization was its own distribution system and transportation.14 Thus, Eenadu was the only paper which managed to reach all the parts of the state sooner than others. With these measures, it emerged as the largest circulated daily, touching about 200,000 in 1980. There are at least three instances where Eenadu was intensely involved and openly took a partisan role in favour of the TDP and still managed to be legitimate in its anti-establishment position. First is Eenadu’s deep involvement with the origins and emergence of the TDP. The association of Eenadu and TDP marks an important beginning in AP politics. Media and politics are brought closer on the regional plank. The rising regional forces which sought a political organ to articulate and further their interests found a political vehicle in the form of Eenadu, which in its turn has given a powerful voice to their interests. Eenadu, having taken a plunge into politics on the platform 13Sanjay Baru, ‘Economic Policy and the Development of Capitalism in India: The Role of Regional Capitalists and Political Parties’, in F.R. Frankel, Zoya Hasan, Rajeev Bhargava, and Baveer Arora (eds), Transforming India: Social and Political Dynamics of Democracy, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000, pp. 207–30. 14Eenandu Pathikella Aksharayatra: 1974–1999, Hyderabad, Quality Cell, 10 August 1999.

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of regionalism, is bound by it in its subsequent expansion and growth in the industry. Thus, Eenadu and TDP, having been born out of this new political formation, have become so very identical in their base and growth. Not surprisingly, the social composition of readership of Eenadu and the social base of the TDP are somewhat similar. Second, Eenadu played a crusader’s role in bringing back N.T. Rama Rao (NTR) into power, after the unlawful overthrow of NTR’s government by Governor Ramlal at the behest of his own colleague in the cabinet, Nadendra Bhaskar Rao, in 1984. Eenadu took up the cause of restoring ‘democracy’ in AP.15 Third, by ‘spearheading’ the antiarrack movement in 1993, Eenadu set the ban on arrack, and this topped the campaign agenda of the TDP much ahead of the other parties in the 1994 Assembly elections. The TDP’s promise to ban arrack was lent credibility through the columns of Eenadu. During this period, Eenadu ran a special column, Saarapai Samaram (‘waging war with arrack’), for about two years.16 The TDP was able to make it a major campaign issue in the 1994 elections, whereas the Congress failed to capitalize on it as it was in power and was late in realizing its political potential. On all the three occasions, Eenadu explained its position in terms of taking up a just cause on behalf of the Telugu people. Interestingly, on all the occasions, Eenadu chose the TDP as the legitimate spokesperson of the problems of the people. When Chandrababu Naidu gradually lifted the ban on Indian-made foreign liquor in 1997, as it was felt to be a burden on the states exchequer, Eenadu made a surprising u-turn from its earlier position and subtly supported the government to reintroduce liquor in the state.17 Ostensibly, the Telugu press was acting in the name of the ‘larger 15Interestingly, when Naidu had unseated his father-in-law, NTR, from power in August

1995 by turning 177 Members of the Legislative Assembly (MLAs) to his side, the media, particularly Eenadu, was conspicuously silent. See G. Krishna Reddy, ‘New Populism and Liberalisation: Regime Shift Under Chandrababu Naidu in A.P.’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. XXXVI, no. 9, 2 March 2002, pp. 871–83. 16Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, 2000. 17Focus group interviews with activists—fifteen women, youth, and elders in Malapalle and Madigapalle of Kodurupadu village, which was one of the major villages where antiarrack movement was strong. Some of them were also interviewed individually. In the course of interviews, they often endorsed this view and expressed disillusionment. Interviews, 24 November 1994, Kodurupadu, Nellore district.

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interests’ of the people and legitimizing their respective political biases. However, one could discern two reasons for this, which are intricately linked to the political process set in the state since the emergence of regionalism. First, as the media became a more profitable industry, a new crop of entrepreneurs started to invest in it. But, as the competition grew among them, there was also a clamour for revenues through advertisements and circulation, which in turn forced them to compromise on various political issues.18 Ramoji Rao of Eenadu expanded into other media-related industry such as film production with Ramoji Film City and Eenadu Television (ETV) that now runs eleven channels in different languages like Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi, Kannada, and Oriya across the country. It has thus acquired a gigantic presence in the world of information. The second is the interest in local issues. Issues such as the Dalit movement, anti-arrack agitation, Dandora demand for categorization as Scheduled Castes, Telangana subregional agitation, caste-specific mobilization among Backward Castes, and anti-power tariff agitation influenced the campaign agendas of the elections in the 1990s, in a great way. The Telugu press, particularly Eenadu and Vaartha, played a prominent role in framing the agendas in these elections.19 It is instructive to note that Eenadu that started special tabloids to cover all the corners of the state was the first to recognize the significance of articulating local issues through newspapers. Gradually, it increased the number of editions to ten by 1997, and its circulation touched a whopping 722,771 in July 1999. After Eenadu, other newspapers also started local tabloids, which have become a major source of information to the local people and have found instant empathy. Vaartha, with its big capital backing, started with an unprecedented ten editions simultaneously and at present has twelve editions. Considering its recent origins, Vaartha has acquired a significant standing. The strength of Vaartha lies in opening the space for local dynamics both in terms of organization and the techniques of reporting. The reporting as well as editorial staff is predominantly drawn from 18R. Jeffrey, ‘Monitoring Newspapers and Understanding the Indian State’, Asian Survey, vol. XXXIV, no. 8, August 1994, pp. 748–63. 19Interview with Laxmaiah, a Senior Journalist who worked for Vaartha, 14 February 2000, Hyderabad.

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the lot of journalists who are associated with political activism of various hues. It is interesting to note that Vaartha had drawn its main staff at the time of its launch from the just closed Udayam, which, in fact, highlighted the local protest movements in the 1980s.20 A senior academic notes that ‘Vaartha has been trying to capture that political space which hitherto has not been adequately represented in the Telugu press. It has been its conscious effort to harness this resource to out beat Eenadu.’21 Thus, it has acquired a prominent place in the Telangana region, as it was sympathetic to the demand for separate statehood for Telangana. There was a phenomenal rise in the circulation of Vaartha from 150,000 to nearly 300,000 before and after the demand for separate Telangana. It is not uncommon in this part of the state, for people tend to identify Vaartha with the Telangana issue and Eenadu as an integrationist. Whatever the claims of any newspaper may be, what comes out clearly is that the Telugu press sees the potential gains of moving closer to the local issues. The engagement of the Telugu press has been substantial, not just in terms of reporting but also in involving itself in the political developments and shaping the discourses around it. Thus, Jeffrey notes that ‘Members of India’s elites in the 1990s, deplored the newspaper revolution—vulgarity titillating the semiliterate and harked back to former times when serious editors edited serious (and scarce) newspapers for serious (and scarce) reading.’22 This comment reflects the problem of unintelligibility between the elite and the masses that so characteristically shaped politics in India and is also reflected in the world of media.

TELEVISION AND POLITICS In the 1990s, television in India underwent a change with the advent of satellite-based private channels. The proliferation of private channels in AP started around the same time as the other television networks at the national level. It was the regional Eenadu newspaper group which 20Interview with Surender Raju, who worked for Udayam and Andhra Jyothi, 2 January 2000, Hyderabad. 21Personal conversation between F.D. Vakil and the author, 15 January 2000. 22Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, 2000, p. 13.

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expanded into Eenadu television network and has come to be one of the biggest television players in the country in terms of its reach, popularity, and revenues. Its advertisement revenues topped the list among the regional channels (after Sun TV networks), drawing Rs 55.1 crore ($12.45 million) in 1999. Incidentally, Eenadu television network was launched only on 27 August 1995. Another important Telugu television network is Gemini TV, which is part of the Sun TV conglomerate. It was launched in February 1995. A sister concern of Gemini, Teja was launched recently to serve as an entertainment channel with cinema music and news-based programmes. Gemini’s advertisement revenues were Rs 23.6 crore ($5.32 million) in 1999. The third important private channel was Citi cable, originally launched by Ramakrishna, who was allegedly killed in the local feuds over distribution of cable operating areas. The channel was later bought by Zee TV network as part of its regional language expansion. Each passing election witnessed a spurt of television channels in AP that explains how intricately the prospects of the media industry are linked to the political markets. For instance, in the recently concluded 2004 elections, three major television channels were launched. TVg, a complete news channel owned by Sreeni Raju, who runs a software company and belongs to one of the most enterprising and dominant community, Rajus, has become enormously popular. It has surpassed the other major channels—ETV and Gemini TV in ratings. Two, ETV launched its news-based channel, ETV2, just before the election. Another TV channel launched was CTV, converting a cable television network into a state-of-the-art satellite television channel. A family belonging to the Kamma community owns it. Interestingly, two dominant communities, Kamma and Raju, in the state own 90 per cent of the media establishments, print as well as electronic. It is important to look at the growth of regional media in comparison to the national channels. Like the regional press, regional television also asserts its identity and acts through the local idiom. The success of regional media in India has something to do with the way it associated itself with the rise of local politics. One media expert comments on the success of regional television: ‘The southern channels continue to maintain a distinctive identity, are local and

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target specific in their concern and language of communication and are willing to experiment with forms that are derived from the folk subconscious.’23 Television set the campaign agendas in the 1990s election with its overwhelming control over communications. Mass media, particularly the press and electronic media, have moved from the channel that disseminates information to the source of information with its authority over communications. The TDP recognizes the power of mass media in modern day politics more than any other party in the state. A comparative analysis of the media management in the campaigns under NTR and Naidu indicates an emphatic stress on the role of the media in winning elections. There was a fundamental shift in the TDP’s campaign strategies so far as media and communications were concerned, from NTR’s regime to that of Naidu’s. The two documents on the campaign methods, issued by the party in 1983 and 1999, amply prove the point.24 NTR’s campaign strategy was multivariate in using the communication forms ranging from holding public meetings, which was given greater importance, to modern communication means like cinema, audio– video cassettes, etc. There was a special emphasis on amalgamation of folk arts like Burrakathas and Harikathas with modern communication forms performed by skilled cinema artists. While it is true that television gained enormous control over the communication processes by the time of Naidu, campaign strategies singularly centred around the modern media during Naidu’s period in the TDP. The public spending on publicity is said to have gone up steeply.25 The figure was often shown by the opposition as Rs 300 crores ($0.06 billion) annually in a resource crunch economy and in a regime ostensibly committed to austerity. The campaigns, unlike NTR, became a permanent feature of governance. Thus, electronic media had become integral to his ‘permanent campaign’. 23Shashi

Kumar, ‘The Shadow of Chimera’, Gentleman, June 1999, p. 65. Methods’, A pamphlet issued by the TDP Office, Hyderabad, 1983; and ‘Campaign methods’, Excerpts from a brochure containing campaign materials issued by the TDP Office, Hyderabad, 1999. 25Personal conversation with a senior bureaucrat in the Government of AP, 15 July 2001, Hyderabad. 24‘Campaign

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An intermediary functionary, with a longstanding association with the TDP, stated that: the training that the TDP imparts to the cadres is managerial type. It does not enable party workers to develop any longstanding association with people. It does not inculcate commitment towards the party programmes nor to the political work. Party is presently filled with mercenary like cadres who are merely interested in the fringe benefits that they obtain from the TDP, being ruling party nor are they capable of organizing mass protests, if the TDP has to sit in the opposition.26

Though it may appear a little farfetched, the comment echoes the general state of affairs in all the parties. What marked the TDP differently from the other parties was its centralization and the total dependence on the manager-like leader, Chandrababu Naidu, who often called himself the Chief Executive Officer of Andhra Pradesh Inc. Much before election time, Naidu gathers information about the party’s prospects in different constituencies. There are mainly four channels that the party makes use of: police intelligence, district level bureaucrats, independent private agency, and local level party committees, among which the police intelligence report and district collectors play a crucial role in selecting the (political) candidates for elections.27 It has been widely understood among the rank and file of the party that media channels have been the crucial source of information. Thus, it is not uncommon for the activists and leaders in the TDP, at the local level, to maintain a record of their activities with photographs and reports in the local edition of the newspapers. They use this record as an evidence of their service to the party in claiming a stake with the leadership for appointments in the various committees, and even in the selection of candidates in the elections for various local bodies. The bio-data of the politicians has to be endorsed by the media reports. The Congress party started replicating this practice as well. From the perspective of the media, this development has actually made even the mofussil reporter indispensable in the power circles.28 26Interview with Inayatullah, State Urdu Academy member and member of the TDP Sircilla Assembly Constituency Coordination Committee, 10 July 2001, Hyderabad. 27A number of TDP functionaries at the district level expressed this view during the interview in Karimnagar, 11 January 2000. 28Interview with T. Srinivas Reddy, sub-editor, Eenadu, Karimnagar edition, 10 January 2000, Algunoor, Karimnagar District.

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Media and other exogenous networks, it must be noted, become vital sources of information for the centralized leadership with weak party networks as the TDP. Among other changes, the 1990s also witnessed media organizations competing for the audience/readership by evolving new programmes. Increased interest among the new groups in political developments, generally traced to the emergence of the TDP and later on, to the rise of local movements like Dalit movement, anti-arrack and Dandora movements, brought the people closer to politics. The Telugu channels developed a variety of programmes based on political themes, reports, news, and discussions. After entertainment, it is politics which occupies prime place on television. Programmes like ‘Prathidhwani’ (Echo), ‘Netibharatham’ (Today’s India), ‘Dear CM’, ‘Idandi Sangathi’ of Eenadu, Gemini, and Teja channels air weekly discussions on current problems in politics, especially the local problems, and offer pungent critiques of the government’s policies. It is now a practice in all the television channels that the primetime news is usually accompanied by commentaries on the issues central to the public debate. The intervention of these political programmes of the television channels into the public discourse is substantial, even during the nonelection period. Political parties keenly follow these debates on media and respond to them. Very often key politicians are invited to air the interests of their respective parties, and usually the programmes are debate based. This, of course, is apart from the daily briefing given to the press after a day’s session of the Assembly proceedings. Another important aspect which has acquired prominence in the media-driven elections is psephology. Psephology, as a wide practice with huge amounts of finances involved, is a result of uncertainties that the political parties have been experiencing owing to their unstable support bases and voter volatility. Yogendra Yadav remarks: when the political process fails, the market steps in. The fact is that today the routine processes of democratic politics have ceased to function properly. Politicians know less and less about the people because there is no party mechanism. The channels of information from the ground are thin and getting thinner. So you need an objective survey if you want to know the truth. When political organizations fail, you have to pay for an election forecast.29 29Sagarika

Ghosh, ‘Surviving the Masses’, Outlook, 14 February 1996.

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The spectre of election perhaps is less fearful for the political parties and a matter of bounty for the media with psephology doing the rounds. More importantly, some issues are made more primary than others, leading to a politics of exclusion. This can be discerned in the manner in which questions are asked in the surveys. For instance, the largescale suicides among small farmers was not seen as an issue of significance in the recent elections in the state, when it actually has become a crucial factor. Neither the media nor the surveys could gauge the intensity of the situation.30 Similarly the question, ‘Who is the most preferred prime minister?’, became the most discussed aspect in the elections of 1998, 1999, and 2004. The political campaigns of the parties were increasingly centred around personalities like Sonia Gandhi, Vajpayee and Jyoti Basu. The question of the foreign origins of Sonia Gandhi acquired prominence, particularly in the BJP and the TDP campaigns and surveys in the 1998, 1999, and 2004 elections. The surveys reinforce a certain type of stereotype which helps to prime the issues in the campaigns. The BJP and the TDP’s much taunted slogans like the ‘feel good factor’ and ‘India Shining’, in the 2004 elections, could be fine examples of this type. Ironically, the spin doctors went awry with their assessment of the ground reality of poverty, drought, etc., in the elections where the TDP and the BJP lost thoroughly. The division between the channels on political lines, though not very sharp, is significant. Generally, the Congress party places its campaign advertisements overwhelmingly on Gemini or Teja, while the TDP focuses on Eenadu television. However, one must be cautioned that this kind of preference to a particular channel by political parties is hazy and cannot be quantified. Media intervention in politics can be understood at two levels. One, the sharp polarization of the print media on party lines shows the intense competition in AP. Partisanship is the hallmark of political reporting here. Two, while competing for new constituencies, the media, along with political parties, build a consensus over crucial issues like the economic reforms, for their prospects. Both conflict 30P.

Sainath, ‘Andhra’s Electoral Earthquake’, The Hindu, 12 May 2004, and P. Sainath, ‘McMedia and Market Jihad’, The Hindu, 1 June 2004.

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and consensus building, thus, become integral to media and political establishment as well. Finally, the structures of media and of politics in AP increasingly resemble each other in terms of competition. In their race to expand the base of audience/readership and support for the television channels or newspapers, and parries respectively, they are increasingly focusing on local issues in the local idiom. That is where the convergence between media and politics is more evident. The act of convergence being one of appropriation of local cultures and groups, both media and the political parties help each other in shaping the campaign agendas which seek to rebuild consensus over the new political culture.

CONCLUSION In a way, the crisis in competitive politics, engendered by the decline in party grassroots networks, has resulted in the politics of crisis, which is characterized by the growing symbolic politics, in turn helped by the modern media. Modern media has come to substitute the loss of party networks and the earlier organized politics of the parties. The scenario in AP presents an emphatic case where the transforming nature of competitive politics was felt more profoundly than elsewhere. The rise of the TDP signified two features of competitive politics. First, the transforming culture of politics that changed the orientations and value patterns about the way the electoral politics could be viewed. The TDP also represents the percolation of political competition downward to the regional level but at the same time, it faced a stiff challenge with the incorporation of larger social sections into the polity. Second, the transforming culture of politics necessitated the parties to resort to new forms of communication which facilitated their imagecentred politics. The advancement of communication technologies has helped the mass media’s abilities to monopolize communication forms. Thus, television and the print medium have come to play dominant roles in politics. Evidently, one can see this in the transformation from the multivariate nature of traditional communication forms to increasingly centralized communication structures. The modern media has become the main source of information for the parties in the absence of grassroots organization. Identification

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of issues, and moulding the public opinion has become the prerogative of the media. Thus, the parties adapt themselves to suit the new media environment by improving their media expertise. The TDP, particularly under Naidu, has become managerial and laid newfound emphasis on the media skills; so also has the Congress party, though to a lesser extent. The intense competition, the reduction of the whole political process to electoral practices, and the constant intervention of the media into political debates have extended the campaign period virtually beyond the elections. This has resulted in a continuous campaign on the part of political parties, whose prospects have become uncertain with the increasing volatility in their support base. There is a convergence of the interests between the media industry and the political parties in an increasingly ‘market like’ politics, which determines the nature of the campaign structure in its form and content. Both media and the parties are in search of their constituencies. Television channels and newspapers both compete for their audience and readership respectively. The competition among the media is akin to competition between the political parties. It is this convergence that helps both associate so closely with each other in the present day campaigns. Local issues moved to the centre of politics, replacing national issues, with the rise of the lower strata through ‘local’ movements by the 1990s. Now, it is imperative on the part of the media and the parties to appropriate the rising social groups by shaping the campaign agendas on the lines of local issues. Simultaneously, the modern media and the party organization are increasingly getting centralized. Thus, the modern campaigns have come to be localized in terms of its content and centralized in their form. Finally, to sum up, political parties, in the absence of grassroots networks, cannot translate the local/regional issues to the generic levels. By building public opinion around the issues projected in the elections, the media brings the masses into the system and integrates them in the electoral processes, which hitherto was done by organized party politics. The capability of mass media to both create a uniformity in opinion making and build opinion suits the exigencies of the political parties in the present day political scenario.

PART IV

EMERGENT ORDERS LOCALIZATION, CONSUMERISM, DIGITAL CULTURE

13 Close Distance Constructing ‘the Indian Consumer’* William Mazzarella

THE NEW TRIUMPHALISM: GLOBALIZATION AS CULTURAL REVIVAL

B

y the time of my fieldwork in 1997–8, deflating the much-hyped figure of the (at least) 250 million-strong Indian middle class had become something of a public pastime for commentators inside and outside the advertising and marketing industries. One of the most notable and interesting features of these commentaries was their markedly triumphalist tone. The failure of initial multinational corporation (MNC) sales projections was reworked as evidence of the resilient cultural difference of Indian consumers. Conversely, if these brands wanted to be successful, they would have to amend their arrogant ways and adapt to local needs. Thus, consumerist globalization, far from bringing cultural imperialism, was being figured as the opportunity for a comprehensive revitalization of ‘Indianness’. The ideological implications of this position should not be underestimated. First, globalization per se, and therefore its brokers, the local advertising and marketing industries, were thereby rehabilitated *Originally published as ‘Close Distance: Constructing “the Indian Consumer” II’, in William Mazzarella’s Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 250–87.

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as a force for cultural effervescence and Indian pride vis-à-vis the rest of the world. Second, globalization was given a populist face through a revival of the representation of consumerism as an unbeatable sensitive index to the innermost needs of the population at large.1 Ironically, given the way that the value of foreign brands was embedded in a post-colonial politics of distinction, the globalizing moment was actually being figured by many commentators as an opportunity to redress the humiliations of the colonial experience. With some relish, one journalist wrote of the now-troubled MNCs: They came to the Indian market with much fanfare. Ambitious projects, hefty capital investments, flashy launches, swank outlets and swankier packaging showed their confidence in victory. They dreamed of a cakewalk, lured as they were by the proposition of enticing the 200 million-plus seamless Indian middle class that they believed hankered after the elusive foreign label. But many of the multinationals that entered the country over the last decade were in for a shock. Years after their entry, dreams of a market takeover remain chimerical, with the vagaries of the Indian economy and consumer purchase patterns putting paid to what were once considered successful global marketing formulae.2

There were countless other examples of this discourse, invariably rehearsing the trope of humbled pride. The evocation of colonialism was not merely implicit. As one columnist put it: ‘In the 8 years that India’s markets have been thrown open to the global corporate superpowers, successive waves of transnationals have been unable to colonize the country’s customers’.3 Another journalist, referring to the travails of Kellogg’s, remarked: ‘A big Western breakfast cereal maker saying with much machismo [that] it would change Indian tastes in ten years dropped prices on one of its mainline products.’4 And, on the subject of a latter-day Mercedes ad: ‘Its servile tone also showed how humbling the Indian market could be for a proud automobile giant and how it had to bow’.5 1William Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 59–98. 2Madhavi Irani, ‘Reading the Market Wrong’, Economic Times, 3 April 1996. 3George Skaria, ‘The Indianization of the Transnational’, Business Today, 7 July 1999. 4 ‘New Survey Puts Middle Class at 425 Million’, 31 December 1997, http:// www.rediff.com/business/dec/31vant3.htm. 5Ibid.

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Despite the apparent cultural populism of this new critique, we should not forget that many of the same executives who were now triumphantly proclaiming the collapse of globally standardized marketing templates had, only a few years earlier, themselves eagerly hyped up the idea of a 250 million-strong, western-equivalent Indian consuming class. In the wake of the 1991 reforms, the head-on collision between Indian executives looking for western joint ventures and western corporations desperate to get a slice of a newly ‘opened’ market with seemingly immense potential had produced, what a business journalist informant—himself at that time an account executive at a leading Bombay ad agency—remembered as, a ‘feeding frenzy’. In an atmosphere of heightened expectations and unlimited ambitions, Indian executives—wining and dining foreign corporate guests—had pumped up the figures. And their guests, already primed on Levittian visions of globally converging consumer segments, had often been all too ready to buy in. In retrospect, some of these local executives presented the selling of these dubious figures as a strategic gambit on their part, intended to sort the MNC men from the boys. The managing director of one agency offered: ‘In part this was a deliberate decision on the part of some Indian businessmen to merchandise this 250 million-strong middle class to the outside world. The truth is that the definition of the middle class in India is radically different from that of the Western world... Some of the MNCs asked “What exactly is the middle class?” Others didn’t. And perhaps they were disappointed.’6 Another senior advertising executive put the matter more bluntly: ‘Are the MNCS really that dumb?! Can’t they check?’7 Still other executives acknowledged that India had come to the encounter with prospective MNC partners from a position of weakness. Looking back on the local industry’s decision to push the inflated middle-class figures, an independent marketing consultant told me: 6This and subsequent quotes provided without citation are drawn from the author’s fieldnotes, with informants who will remain anonymous. 7Although warning signals about the discrepancy between sales estimates and the actual figures began to appear early on, many commentators felt that an adequate response had, in many cases, been delayed because local managers in India often wanted to avoid confronting their superiors with the figures. ‘Nobody wants to be the bad-news guy,’ observed an independent market researcher; the business journalist added: ‘Those guys were all on twoyear contracts anyway, so once the shit hit the fan they had already moved on, leaving their successors to pick up the pieces.’

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I think they were pushing [the 250 million middle-class figure] to attract, because the only thing India had to sell to foreign investors was people. And if you said, ‘Actually, listen guys—the kind of money cut-off that you have in mind, there are only 65 million people,’ it would have meant that no collaborator would have come to you. It’s pretty tough going. I mean, the Arvind Mills [Indian denim giant] guys tell me that when they actually went with fabric samples to companies overseas, the companies said that ‘we refuse to believe that this has been produced in India’. So the only incontrovertible fact was that you had people. I think a lot of the reason that these middleclass figures were hyped up was because what did you ever say to a foreign investor? I mean, I’ve done millions of these presentations. All you can say is, you know, ‘We’re huge, and while the rest of the world is stagnating and stabilizing, come to us and tie up with us.’8

Between the inflated expectations of the first half of the 1990s and the triumphalist discourse of the second half of the decade, lay the field in which my informants had to act. In either case, the overt promise had been populist—from the purported trickle-down benefits of the induction of a massive middle class into globalized consumerism to the new discourse of cultural self-respect that followed upon the deflation of these expectations. And, in either case, the foremost concern of the Indian advertising and marketing industries was to ‘merchandize the middle class’ to foreign corporations in such a way that their own status as middlemen would be ensured. For all the scorn that many Indian executives were now pouring upon the standardizing arrogance of western marketing templates, they were still obviously keen to remain on the MNC payroll. And the sine qua non for doing so was the ability to maintain and to ‘leverage’ the heightened value that their clients’ brands had enjoyed before they had attempted to expand into Indian markets. Price reductions were, therefore, often out of the question. As one executive asked me with some irritation: ‘do you think that I am going to go to an MNC and tell them their entire pricing policy sucks?! I’m also running a business here!’ As self-appointed mediators between the local and the global, my informants needed to connect the interests of two constituencies: on 8Interview. S. Gurumurthy of the Swadeshi Jagaran Manch was suitably scathing of Indian businesspeople who implored foreigners for investment: ‘We are crawling and standing at the airports with garlands to get foreign investment’ (‘India Has Never Had Swadeshi Economy’ 1998 and ‘India Cannot Live in Cities’ 1998; Rediff on the Net/, interview with S. Gurumurthy. http://www.rediff.com/business/1998/apr/02guru.htm).

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the one hand, MNC clients who wanted big profits and on the other, Indian consumers who were unwilling or unable to buy sufficient quantities of these clients’ goods. The great advantage of the new triumphalist discourse was that it offered Indian advertising and marketing professionals, at one stroke, two kinds of solutions to this dilemma. The first of these was to insist to MNC premium-brand clients that early expectations on sales volume would have to be scaled down, but that by maintaining high prices and engaging in concerted upscale brand-building advertising campaigns, a gradual expansion of a small market could be achieved. This option served to maintain the exclusivity of an MNC brand, while, nevertheless, ensuring plenty of lucrative work for local advertising agencies. The second path was to push for higher volume more quickly. Here, again, most advertising professionals advised against price reductions and suggested instead that the brand would have to be made more ‘relevant’ to Indian consumers through a carefully calibrated process of ‘Indianization’. Although this second option ostensibly seemed to undermine the ‘distance’ that was so crucial to the value of these brands, we will see that the process of ‘Indianization’ was managed in such a way as to ensure that the aspirational ‘gap’ would remain intact.

‘FOREIGN’ AS EQUITY Levi’s jeans were a good example of the first kind of strategy. To start, the official appearance of Levi’s in India marked a crisis of value. As a young account executive at one of the large Bombay advertising agencies remarked: First, globalization has certainly brought about an increase in choice for the Indian consumer... [But] the foreign players have come in at really high prices. They have found that beyond a certain point, the market is inelastic [meaning that people will not buy when prices are too high]. Take, as an example, Levi’s. The brand has enormous equity. ‘Foreign’ itself has an equity value, which is part of the brand, perhaps even half of it. But once it came into India, and started manufacturing jeans in India—although many of these brands were made of Indian denim anyway—the equity becomes significantly diluted.9 9Interview.

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One agency head, reproducing the standard triumphalist line, commented: ‘Lots of western brands have failed because they have assumed that a western brand will have superior equity in India.’10 As I have suggested, the matter was more complicated: it was not so much that Levi’s did not enjoy ‘superior equity’, but rather that this ‘superior equity’ depended upon the brand maintaining a certain degree of exclusivity and distance. Although there was much talk in the advertising industry of Levi’s ‘not getting the numbers’, the strategy that the corporation adopted in India was, in fact, guided precisely by a recognition of the importance of this distance. There were important cautionary examples. Through special arrangements with Indian distributors, certain multinational jeans brands like Wrangler and Pepe had already been marketed in India before the reforms of 1991. In 1987, when Wrangler launched its products in India, preliminary market research suggested that Indian consumers were hungry both for jeans per se and for foreign ‘badge products’ (that is, status-marking products) specifically.11 Market research also indicated that because Wrangler jeans had long been available through smuggled channels, the brand, in fact, enjoyed a high degree of brand awareness and brand equity. In other words, the brand was, apparently, both well known and highly valued. Consequently, it seemed to make good business sense to capitalize on this felicitous situation by pricing Wrangler jeans at a level significantly higher than its Indian competitors—Rs 365 per pair as compared to only Rs 150 per pair for the popular indigenous brand Flying Machine. The distributor, Du Pont Sportswear, however, made the crucial mistake of shipping Wrangler jeans out to a comprehensive range of retail outlets, thereby evidently ‘diluting’ the equity of the brand. Consumers, it seemed, were less willing to pay a higher price for a brand that was suddenly so widely available. In 1994, when Levi’s were about to launch, market research similarly showed that the brand enjoyed enormous awareness and equity. Indeed, although it was at that point only available through informal channels and in the form of counterfeits, the Levi’s brand was, according to I. Gupta (1994), the single best-selling jeans brand in 10Interview. 11My information on Wrangler’s experience in India is largely taken from I. Gupta, ‘The Wrong Fit’, Business Standard, 20 December 1994.

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India.12 But being conscious of the risks of brand equity dilution, Levi’s opted to make their jeans available for purchase through only fiftyfour retail outlets nationwide. These were a combination of singlebrand Levi’s outlets, so-called ‘shop-in-shops’ (that is, sections of larger department stores devoted entirely to the brand), and a carefully selected handful of multi-brand stores. As of mid-1998, it was assumed that such a strategy of relative exclusivity would enable the company to stick with a range of prices that started at over Rs 1,000 per pair; in other words, far higher than even most of their MNC competitors. Yet, of course, the problem of calibrating the close distance of a brand like Levi’s was not just a matter of pricing or distribution. Rather, it was also a question of what kind of messages and images were being used in its advertising. Whereas Alyque Padamsee, the former head of Lintas India,13 was now cutely insisting that MNC, in fact, stood for ‘Misreading National Culture’14, and another informant complained that ‘it’s not compelling enough, just sheer “Levi’s” and what it stands for’, still others were convinced that attempts at ‘Indianization’ would be the kiss of death for such a brand....

SPENDING PSYCHE, PRICE, AND VALUE My informants’ critiques of existing MNC branding strategies were important, not least for what they revealed about the politics of value that structured the moment of globalization in India.... [I]t was only with the invention of their own counter-commodity, ‘the Indian consumer’, that they were able to gain real leverage vis-a-vis their global clients. The Levittian model of globalization15 rested upon the expectation that the Indian middle class was equivalent in its consuming 12Gupta estimates that out of a total Indian jeans market of around 6 million pairs per year, approximately 50 per cent was accounted for by unbranded generic products. The officially available branded segment was dominated by desi brands: Flying Machine remained in the lead, followed by brands like Sunnex (marketed on a self-consciously anti-MNC platform: ‘Thankfully not made in the USA’) and Killer. A market overview by giant Indian denim producer, Arvind Mills, from 1998, depicts a much larger overall market of 30 million pairs per year. Out of this total, the ‘premium segment’, consisting largely of MNC brands, is the smallest: 10 per cent by value but only 4 per cent by volume (Arvind Mills 1998. ‘Market Overview’. http://www.arvindmills.com/market.html). 13W. Mazzarella, 2003, Ch. 3. 14‘Key to Reality—Are Advertisers Thinking Hard Enough About Who Their Target Consumer Really Is?’, Advertising and Marketing, 16–31 August 1997. 15W. Mazzarella, 2003, pp. 251–8.

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power (and consuming needs, if not stated preferences) to its counterparts in other parts of the world. The conjuncture of the meeting between foreign corporate executives and Indian marketing and advertising professionals, in the wake of the 1991 reforms,16 had not only perpetuated this fiction but encouraged vastly inflated estimates of the numerical size of this Indian middle class. Some felt that this had been a key mistake. The managing director of one agency remarked: ‘Despite all this talk of the “200 million middle class”, a truer assessment would be that there’s a sharp division between a five million elite on the one side of a wide gulf, and the other 195 million on the other. This five million have the same buying attitudes and, more importantly, buying capacity as western consumers.’17 For the kinds of generic reasons that I have discussed, lowering prices was always going to be an advertising agency’s least likely recommendation. The transcultural predicament of these MNC brands, furthermore, made it far preferable to suggest that the real barriers to larger sales volumes were a misunderstanding of consumers’ preferences, values, or habits. One of the most popular explanations in this genre revolved around the thriftiness of the majority of Indian consumers, their concern with ‘value for money’. This thriftiness was often, in turn, explained as an Indian socio-cultural tendency to downplay material wealth that was both ancient and at the same time specifically embedded in postindependence Indian public culture in the form of Gandhian asceticism and Nehruvian socialism. An agency planner remarked: If [a product is] purely seen as glamour, if it’s purely seen as style, in this country where a lot of people—especially as you go down pop [population] strata—a lot of people are very diffident about projecting—I mean, they underproject themselves. There are chaps—even in Bombay you will find— [a chap] who probably wears a simple shirt or pant, and who carries Rs 50,000 in his pocket, who doesn’t want to project. It’s only among the younger crowd who’s out to overproject. The mass of the country is all about under-projecting themselves. It’s actually a culture... I mean, apart from the sheer socialism which has been ingrained in the country for the past forty–fifty years, I think overall it’s a culture which is saying ‘materialism is not the best thing’. 16Ibid., pp. 264–6. 17Interview.

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It’s...saying, ‘chasing money is not your goal in life.’... So I might still be chasing money—I wouldn’t want to project it... Who’s the most powerful person in Indian society is not always the richest guy. It’s about the guy who knows a lot of people, who can get things done... Chasing pure materialism, chasing money, is not something that I would want to tell the world. I might still be doing it—all of the country’s doing it—but that’s not seen as a...[trails off]. And that will have a residual effect on people.18

Here then, was, on the one hand, an acknowledgment of the situational advantages of social capital over financial capital (and by implication, the kinds of symbolic capital that could be bought with financial capital, that is, premium branded goods). On the other hand, however, my interlocutor was arguing that the deeply embedded reluctance to ‘overproject’ gave rise to a kind of moral hypocrisy (‘all of the country’s doing it’), which might, in fact, be resolved by an acceptance of the advantages of consumerist display. There was also an evolutionary assumption embedded in my informant’s analysis: it was the younger generation that was more comfortable with ‘projecting’ themselves through consumer goods. And, this assumption of a historical trend was frequently allied with a normative evaluation; dawning consumerism meant both social progress and moral enlightenment. In the words of another (female) executive: Out of our population of 900-plus million, it was often claimed that there is this middle class of 300 million people. What experience has told us, however, is that only about 50 million of these people have the spending psyche. Most women—the woman is the influencer, but the decision has to go through the man—would rather use a bit more elbow grease than spend a few more rupees on convenience. Thrift still dominates. It’s only a small segment of the population where the women are evolved and enlightened enough to convince their husbands to part with the money for the brand they want.19

Some might assume that this purportedly Indian thriftiness, this concern with value for money, would make the relatively insubstantial attractions of brand benefits a secondary concern. But, of course, my informants generally did not believe this was so. If the MNCS were 18Interview. 19Interview.

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guilty of ‘value arrogance’, then their mistake was not to believe that Indians would be willing to pay more for a branded product. Rather, their greatest mistake had been to assume that what was valuable to a western consumer would automatically be valuable in India. The question of value was, of course, related to the issue of price (as demonstrated by the prominence of the expression ‘value for money’), yet it was also analytically and discursively independent of it.

MODELS OF INDIAN DIFFERENCE The explanations of Indian difference that I was offered by my informants in the Bombay advertising and marketing industries involved three interconnected propositions. First, that India as a whole was too complex and ancient for anyone to homogenize or control. Second, that Indian consumers were too ‘savvy’ to be ruled by multinational propaganda. Third, that it was central to both the duty and the talent of Indian marketing and advertising professionals to understand and to capitalize upon the first two propositions. In the present section, I explore the complex and sometimes contradictory interrelationships of these ideas. An initial thematic division appeared between what might be called passive and active models of Indian difference. The basis of the passive model was the empirical geographical, linguistic, and cultural diversity of India, which, so I was told, formed a ‘natural’ and a priori bulwark against ‘multinationalization’. One old industry hand insisted, somewhat wearily: Do understand, William, that India is not a country like France is a country, or England is a country, or any of your European countries is a country. Or even in terms of the United States of America. It is a subcontinent with fourteen principal languages and about 250 dialects. The cultural differences are vaster than they are between the American Deep South and the middle and Eastern seaboard. You go to the Indian Deep South and you go to Kashmir, and you’re in two different continents. There’s a huge diversity here, which can’t be multinationalized in terms of idiom. You may have the same brands here, but...there are very few multinational campaigns that have come through and that have remained unchanged here. Look at Coke. Look at Pepsi. They all have highly Indian equivalents of their international

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campaigns. So...this is not an Indonesia. This is not a Philippines. It’s another...it’s a unique ball game.20

This distinction between a complex India and apparently simpler, smaller Asian countries helped to position India as a uniquely equipped challenger to the forces of globalization. As one observer commented, ‘The long accepted law of globalization—One World, One Strategy— doesn’t hold once India’s borders are crossed’.21... One (female) consultant referred back precisely to the epic narratives of mainstream Hindu religious tradition to demonstrate the social and psychological basis for the hybridity that was now a necessity in consumer marketing: [We] have a pantheon of gods, right? And you will accept that Krishna was the ultimate playboy. [Krishna] and Ram, who is the ultimate good guy, are both incarnations of one and the same. Even if you look at the music... I mean, the Gitagovinda is about as erotic as it can possibly be, and that’s semidevotional too. But the Ram bhajans are all about what a good guy he was. I mean the Tulsi Ramayan keeps talking about how good he was. Similarly women: I mean, there is Kali, and there is Shakti, but there’s also Parvati. And Parvati was the ultimate...from a feminist standpoint [chuckles], she was the ultimate wimp, right? In many ways. And you had a Draupadi. And [then] you had a Sita. You know, Sita, who said, ‘Mother Earth, swallow me up because I am being tested’ [for her purity]. She was tough in her own way, but [she’s] not Draupadi, who said, ‘I will not tie my hair unless you give me the blood of that guy.’ You know?!22 20Interview. 21G. Skaria, 1999. 22Interview. My informant’s references to characters from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata should be understood in the context of the wildly successful TV adaptations of the epics that were screened on Doordarshan in the late 1980s. As Mankekar (Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999) argues, Sita and Draupadi represent opposing constructions of Indian womanhood; Sita, in the Ramayana, is the impeccably dutiful and subservient wife who prefers to be swallowed by the earth rather than have any doubts about her purity besmirch her husband’s public standing. Draupadi, in the Mahabharata, is a more ambivalent character in that she both actively questions her husband’s right to do with her as he will (he has gambled her away in a game of dice) and actively seeks revenge against those who have attempted to dishonor her. ‘Draupadi tells her husbands that she will leave her hair loose until she has washed it with the blood of Duryodhana and Dushasana [the victors in the dice game] brought from

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The objective existence of this multiplicity and ambivalence in Indian society and culture, then, became the basis for an argument about the agency of Indian consumers, and above all, their ability to turn the recombinational talent of the bricoleur into a kind of indigenously adapted technical know-how. At this point, the ‘passive’, absorptive quality of Indian culture was transformed into an ‘active’ principle of consumer agency (again, this stress upon the agency of consumers everywhere was, of course, an important legitimating tactic for the marketing enterprise).... This adaptive agency operated on a ‘grass-roots’ technical level, as the agency planner illustrated: Washing machines. I don’t know if somebody’s told you this, but when they came to India first in the ’70s, in Punjab, which is a state up north, one of the favourite drinks up there is what they call a lassi. And you have, you know, what they call dhabas. Dhabas are like roadside inns, where the truckers and all these guys stop. And there lassi is a very staple kind of thing. With every meal you must have one big glass of lassi. The way it’s made is by taking this thickset yoghurt and churning it. Now if you’re trying to produce it for fifty people, it’s an awful lot of hard work. So the very first use to which India put washing machines was to take these top-loading types...and they would dump the yoghurt into it [along with] sugar and it would churn. And it would produce lassi...Indians have this amazing capacity to see what is most apt and right for them. And even to sit around and make something which, you know, nobody else would have even thought of.... It’s a grass-roots savviness kind of a thing. And you’ll find that....despite the 900 million people, they don’t move blindly in hordes....23

As my planner informant acknowledged, his practice necessarily required reduction or generalization: We have made an attempt to reconcile...this complexity of the Indian population, which makes it so difficult to actually segment them. You know, the battlefield’ (ibid., p. 34). For other discussions of the televised epics see Marie Gillespie, Television, Ethnicity, and Cultural Change, London: Routledge, 1995; Philip Lutgendorf, ‘All in the (Raghu) Family: A Video Epic in Cultural Context’, in Lawrence Babb and Susan Wadley (eds), Media and the Transformation of Religion in South Asia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995, pp. 217–53; Arvind Rajagopal, Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001; and Mark Tully, ‘Rewriting the Ramayan’, in The Defeat of a Congressman and Other Parables of Modern India. New York: Knopf, 1992, pp. 111–35. 23Interview.

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it’s mind-boggling to imagine a market of 900 million. Or even 300 million. And it’s very difficult to therefore start charting out a course or a strategy for your brand—whether it’s in marketing terms, or product terms, or in communication terms—unless you have some kind of a fix. And from that point of view, segmentation often becomes necessary. And that’s a contradiction that you’re trying to manage.24

Ostensibly, getting a ‘fix’ on the Indian market meant ‘segmenting’ Indian consumers internally. At the same time, the need to manage the relationship between Indian consumers and foreign corporations— which necessarily involved imagining the relationship and differences between Indian consumers and consumers elsewhere—was really the crux of the challenge of globalization. By speaking of a ‘contradiction’ between the objective complexity of Indian markets and the work of ‘segmentation’ involved in marketing, the planner rhetorically moved some way towards an acknowledgment of the reification involved in the transnational commodity imaging project. And yet, presented as such, the work of market research appeared, with innocence fully intact, as a positivistic attempt to reduce processes of cultural hybridization that were taking place independently to a manageable level of generalization. ...What my Bombay informants needed was a new variant of the close distance that had generated such a heightened sense of value for many foreign brands prior to the reforms of 1991. Now that foreignness itself could no longer automatically be relied upon to signify aspirational distance, a hybrid ‘Indianness’—that was nonetheless flagged as culturally authentic—had to be made to fit the bill. This is why for all that advertising executives might rhetorically celebrate the grassroots ‘savviness’ of dhaba operators, they could only actually make commercial use of such imagery if it could first be aligned with the aspirations or identifications of an elite whose consuming energies were driven by a desire that was analogous to the hybrid structure of the transnational commodity image: a libidinal and imaginary investment in ‘world-class Indianness.’25...

24Interview. 25Channel V

was perhaps the most glaring apparent exception to this aesthetic.

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14 Local News Gatherers* Sevanti Ninan

Anyone who is willing to get advertisements can become a stringer.

N

ewspaper expansion and the localization which followed had many colourful consequences for daily journalism in the Hindi heartland. It created a genre of news which did not exist before in this region, and a new breed of news gatherer. A local public sphere, rich in possibilities, began to evolve once local pages for districts, and subdivisions thereof, became the norm. With newspaper managements deciding that the way to create new readers was to give them news from where they belonged, a new genre of news emerged, brought by a new tribe of news gatherers. ‘How local is local? From the region, the town, the neighbourhood or the street?’.1 To that question was added another one: how much of the everyday jumble of local occurrences qualify as news? The logic of creating a local public sphere was irrefutable. That was, after all, the level where governance touched the citizen, and communities acted out their cultural rituals and social concerns. As urban and rural local self-governance took root in India, as local *Originally published as ‘Local News Gatherers’, in Sevanti Ninan’s Headlines from the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2007, pp. 113–42. 1Bob Franklin and David Murphy (eds), Making the Local News, London and New York: Routledge, 1998.

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communities became more vocal and more conscious of their rights, as local commercial interests came forward to make viable the publications that could engender such a space, its emergence became inevitable. Local politics, civic services, law and order, all demand discussion and accountability in a democracy, even as cultural practices seek media space. And because human nature rather than idealism governs the realm of local discourse, crime news assumes primacy in the pages of the local press.

RISE OF THE CITIZEN JOURNALIST The rapid plunge into localization led to a democratization of news gathering which encompassed the citizenry at large. It turned local lawyers, teachers, shopkeepers, and busybodies into citizen journalists. They had no conventional journalism training but a clear understanding of local concerns: crime, corruption, poor quality services in government schools and hospitals, and in terms of maintenance of roads and sewage systems. They also had a clear sense of how local interests operated, and approached issues with an instinct for selfpreservation. And because the newsmakers and news providers were drawn from the more vocal sections of the community, the local public sphere also became a reflection of the local power structure in terms of caste and class. Mediators in the local power structure, such as panchayat leaders, religious leaders, and social activists became both actors in, and beneficiaries of, the local news universe. Beginning with the mid-1980s, in the Hindi-speaking states there was an exponential growth in the development of the rural and semiurban news machine. Many cogs were put in place to create this news gathering and delivering operation, which expanded as the radius of the rural newspaper revolution grew. It began to take in roadside villages which could never have dreamt that they would figure on a news map. The newspaper industry cast its readership net wider and began to reach out to hitherto untapped readers because there was now commercial interest in the rural Indian. He was a potential consumer. The parallel impetus for localization came from the fact that television had come in from the early 1990s and begun to corner much of the advertising pie. By the 1990s, regional newspapers were looking elsewhere, at local markets, for the potential they had to offer. The

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decade of 2000 began with an advertising recession, and newspapers such as Rajasthan Patrika worked harder to create alternate sources of advertising by leveraging the paper’s increasing small town and rural reach. The advertising was there then, waiting to be tapped, but you had to find news to fill the pages on which people could advertise. By then, the Patrika was claiming to reach 300 panchayats and tehsils (development blocks). Dainik Bhaskar was claiming that 50 per cent of each edition’s circulation was in the rural areas. So, what news would you give these rural areas, and who would produce it? District editions also demanded delivery networks that facilitated greater localization. These originated with trains and then switched to taxis and buses, because train routes had limitations, you could only drop papers at five or six stations. With road transport you could drop smaller bundles in more places. But when your paper began to reach smaller places, your news network also had to encompass these places, to deliver incident-based, problem-based reporting that would draw readers.2 How would a newspaper make a vast news gathering operation, that goes down to villages, viable? One solution was to do so by making it a participative effort where local people were encouraged to send news items about the community. As newspapers in Hindi-speaking states expanded their circulation base, they invited circulation agents to send news about their areas so that the thrill of seeing their village and people figure in the daily pages would become an incentive for would-be subscribers to take the newspaper. As the amount of space given to local news grew, the local news network also grew beyond the circulation agent to the advertising agent, as well as other interested individuals in the community. It was understood that this was a sort of altruistic unpaid activity, what was paid was a commission on the subscriptions or advertising brought in by the person who was also filing stories. In return, many newspapers conferred a visiting card on the news filing individual, which gave him the status of a representative of the newspaper. When the paper involved was a large and influential one, a household name all over the state, the visiting card conferred status upon the local stringer. He became the local gentry’s passport to figuring in the newspaper. 2Yadvesh, General Manager, Hindustan, interviewed by author, Varanasi 15 March 2005.

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A significant agent of localization was thus emerging. Together with a determined local marketing thrust which saw a culture of incentives to subscribe develop in rural, semi-rural, and small town markets, these citizen–journalists (to use a term which had gained currency worldwide by 2005) spearheaded the penetration of newspapers into the rural hinterland. In more common parlance, they were known as stringers (from an old international practice of paying part-time reporters by the column inch for the text that they produced, and the fact that the length was measured by a piece of string). As local news pages expanded with the growth of printing centres and the multiplicity of editions, the dependence on this local stringer led newspapers to induct more of them, and pay them small amounts of money that would not by any reckoning qualify as a respectable journalistic salary. Some of them were reimbursed for the cost of faxing the news. What the newspapers were investing in setting up printing centres was saved in a unique approach to creating the editorial product. Without exception, every localization drive in India’s Hindi heartland was riding on the willing backs of a host of largely unpaid stringers, filing quantities of miscellaneous news from their immediate neighbourhood. A large publication such as Dainik Jagran or Hindustan may have anywhere from 200 to 1,000 stringers in a state, depending on how many editions it publishes. They were responsible for transmitting news from kasbas and mohallas (neighbourhoods) and for placing many villages and block headquarters irrevocably on India’s news map.3 The southern part of the country had set the trend earlier. In the early 1990s, Eenadu already claimed to have a stringer in every mandal (a unit of local government) in Andhra Pradesh. They were paid expenses and one rupee for every column centimetre of their copy that got into the newspaper. Other Telugu dailies also maintained hundreds of stringers, to whom they paid rates varying from 75 paise a column centimetre at Udayam to Rs 1.25 at Andhra Prabha (Jeffrey 2000: 145). Shortly after Dainik Bhaskar came to Rajasthan in December 1996, it decided to push ahead with district-level expansion and by 2002, 3‘Mirzapur: Micro Media, Minimal Impact’, 29 July 2003, http-// www.thehoot.org/ story.asp?storyid=Web61113226hoot52519% 20PM865&pn=16csection=S13.

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both this newspaper and Rajasthan Patrika had built up networks of stringers, though neither claimed that such information providers (‘informants’, as Rajeev Harsh, the resident editor of Patrika in Udaipur would later describe them)4 were journalists. Babulal Sharma, the Bhaskar’s Jaipur editor at that point, would say expansively that the Punjab Kesari may appoint shopkeepers, but their own stringers were more likely to be a lawyer, teacher, or social worker. ‘If an MA or PhD comes to me and wants to help, we let him become our correspondent.’ He would add in the same breath that they also let their circulation agents send news.5 ‘Anyone who is willing to take on an agency of circulating 50 copies can become a correspondent/stringer. Anyone who is willing to get advertisements can become a stringer. Thus, circulation and advertisements together determine who becomes a reporter.’ This, from the bureau chief of Dainik Jagran in Nautanhwa, Gorakhpur district.6 In the early stages, stringers helped to attain a newspaper’s circulation objectives without expanding its area of editorial influence. Increasingly, some newspapers used them to collect advertising or publicize advertising rates. The news, too, was collected rather than written, when a circulation agent doubled as a stringer.

ABOLISHING GATEKEEPERS In the Kanker and Bastar districts of Chhattisgarh, the road which connects Raipur to Jagdalpur is dotted with small commercial establishments which announce a dealership for one or other of the region’s newspapers. Most of these dealers or agents also sent news. If insurgents attacked a village nearby, or an outbreak of an epidemic occurred, or the member of parliament or legislature from the area did something newsworthy, the shopkeeper cum circulation and advertising agent cum correspondent, would handwrite a little despatch, and hand it to the driver of a transport bus going to Jagdalpur where the local pages for the Bastar edition are made. One evening newspaper called Highway Channel, in Jagdalpur, even had a mailbox at the local 4Rajeev

Harsh, interviewed by author, Udaipur, 2 December 2004. Sharma, interviewed by author, Jaipur, January–February 2002. 6Satish Shukla, bureau chief and sub-editor, Dainik Jagran, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Nautanhwa, Gorakhpur, 20 June 2003. 5Babulal

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bus stand, where such news despatches could be deposited. Rural sales varied from fifteen to twenty copies in a modest village to 50 or 100 in a kasba. Many roles get collapsed into one at this local level, for example, at Farasgaon in Bastar, within a family, one brother was the circulation agent as well as stringer for Deshbandhu, and his younger brother who hadn’t managed to finish school was gainfully employed as a hawker for the same newspaper. Circulation, editorial, advertising, and distribution all under one little roof! But, more often than not, the news was collected rather than reported by this multi-purpose human being. A general store owner in a village called Bhanpuri on the Kanker–Jagdalpur highway had a sign up on his shop: ‘Come and give your news here’, it said in Hindi. At Kondagaon, a long distance telephone booth owner had a similar sign, he was the agent for Nava Bharat. He said people came and gave him press releases. The more you carry local news, the more local people buy newspapers, these stringers said. Their job was to collect the tiny, inconsequential items of self-publicity that filled local news columns and drew readers to these pages. Precisely the sort of news items that sharp-eyed news editors in self-respecting metropolitan newspapers would circle with a red pen and term a plant. Localization democratized media access and abolished gatekeepers. Since its logic was that local gentry should be able to read about themselves in the next day’s papers, it encouraged its stringers and circulation agents to forward all the local handouts they received. The citizen walked with his news to the place of receipt, it was stamped and forwarded with no alteration, and liable to appear on the next day’s pages without much alteration either. It was received by a shopkeeper, transported by a road transport bus, free of charge, to a mailbox in a district town bus terminus. Sometimes, if the paper or an interested party paid the fax charges, it was faxed to a modem centre, scattered across districts. A modem centre was a district-level newspaper bureau where local pages were made up and transmitted through modem to the town where the edition for the region would be produced. Even in a bigger place such as Jagdalpur, the full-time reporters in the Nava Bharat bureau would happily accept handouts and thank the bearer for them.7 7Author’s

observation, Jagdalpur, May 2002.

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In a place like Chhattisgarh, those availing themselves of the proffered hospitality of a newspaper’s columns ranged from organizers of local school events to the Naxalites (left wing guerrillas) who terrorized government functionaries. Members of this extremist group had embarked, in the summer of 2002, on an ‘image-building strategy’ which involved issuing press notes, sending letters to the editors of newspapers, and responding to articles that appeared in the press. They sought to explain their position and apologize for excesses by gaining access to the local pages of the Hindi press, much as the rest of the citizenry was doing. The difference was that their handouts were not delivered personally to the newspaper bureau or to the stringer. They were handwritten, on the letterhead of the People’s War group, and were mailed to newspaper officers or bureaus, since the group chose to remain underground. Their press releases were issued by different levels of the organization, both the special zonal committees as well as the central committee. Like all other levels of press notes received by local newspapers, they were eagerly accepted and used.8 The-come-and-give-your-news principle applied in different parts of Rajasthan as well. In Banswara district, where a great deal of religious news originated on account of pilgrimages and religious fairs, one way of ensuring coverage was to pay the fax charges of the local shopkeeper who functioned as a stringer cum circulation agent. It also helped if he belonged to your community. In Ganoda, 30 km from Banswara town, the Dainik Bhaskar’s man also happened to be a Jain. ‘We are Jains so when I send a story on a Jain event, the Digambhar Jain samaj of Ganoda pays the fax charges. People say, you send our news we will pay fax charges.’9

MIRZAPUR’S MEDIA MEN The quality of the public sphere being created in small town India had to do with the quality of news which found its way into the pages of the local press. But when stringers did the reporting themselves, many complexities coloured their output. Interviews with them and 8 Sevanti Ninan, ‘The Naxals and the Press’, http://www.thehoot.org/ story.asp? storyid=webhoothootLlK0914023&pn=l. Accessed 29 May 2005. 9Vastupal Jain, Paras News Agency, interview with author, Ganoda, 1 December 2004.

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with citizenry at the local level highlight both the potential and limitations of stringers or citizen journalists as newspapermen. Whether in Uttar Pradesh or Jharkhand or Bihar, such a person tended to be upper caste, male, and a part-time scribe. The rest of the time he could be a farmer, small entrepreneur, politician, lawyer, teacher, or shopkeeper. How well he reported had to do with whether or not he also collected advertising, what his caste and professional background was, why he had come into the profession, and how much gumption he had as an individual. It also had to do with how keen his management was to have him display any journalistic derring-do. Interviews done for this study, in 2003, with stringers, correspondents, local government officials, and readers drawn from various segments of society in Mirzapur district in eastern Uttar Pradesh shed some light on both the quality of journalism in these parts and on reader expectations from newspapers. The most widely circulated papers here were all in Hindi: Aj, Hindustan, Dainik Jagran, and Amar Ujala. Covering nearly 5,000 sq km, the district is known largely for its carpet weaving and mining industries and the attendant negatives of child and bonded labour. Several had been stringers for many years. A few were fulltime journalists, bureau chiefs in charge of stringers. Several were conscious of the limitations of their journalistic potential, given their circumstances. R.N. Jayaswal, a 65-year-old graduate in political science, was the Mirzapur-based bureau chief of the Vindhyanchal division of the Amrit Prabhat, the Hindi edition of the Calcutta-based Amrita Bazar Patrika, and published from Allahabad. He was also the local bureau chief for The Pioneer, published from Lucknow and Varanasi, and a social worker who had helped found the Bandhua Mukti Morcha, an organization that worked to free bonded labour. Reporting in such areas often meant close interaction with agitations mounted by landless agricultural labour, with Naxalites, and the nonliterate population in the district. Given the international focus on issues of child labour as well as rescue and rehabilitation of bonded labour, he thought that local print media had a catalytic role to play. However, he said, such reporting was based on a personal commitment and unlikely to be rewarding. On the contrary, as a caste Hindu, he had faced social boycott from family, friends, and

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acquaintances. Wealthy landlords as well as the erstwhile owners of large carpet-making units initially tried to buy him off, he said, but when that failed, goondas were sent to beat him up. In time, as attention and donor funds were channelized towards this issue, the local district and state-level functionaries were more supportive of the efforts of activists and journalists alike. According to Jayaswal, the Hindi print media was significantly responsible for exposing cases of bonded labour, including child labour in the carpet industry, and for formulating the well-established proposition that the carpet industry produces an army of uneducated people. Ram Murthy Pandey, a school graduate at Halliya in Mirzapur, reported for Hindustan which is published from Varanasi and has a bureau office at the Mirzapur district headquarters. He was 45 years old, and between him and his two brothers they owned 15 bighas (measure of land varying from a third of an acre to an acre) of land. He had been a stringer for 11 years, working for Prayag Darpan, Amar Ujala, Samay, and Dainik Jagran before he came to Hindustan. He had been a Congress party office bearer in Halliya and Lalgunj, and had also been a district-level secretary as well as organizer of the district unit for the party. That was when he began writing for newspapers on rural issues and problems. Pandey earned Rs 500 a month, irrespective of the number of stories he wrote; another Rs 105 with which he had to subscribe to the Hindustan; and got a commission on the advertisements he collected for the newspaper. He was aware that this commission which added to his income made him dependent on the block authorities and traders. ‘That means I cannot take a stand against either the government or the trading community.’ But he seemed to think it was possible. ‘The trick is to get past them all, and yet contribute to enhancing people’s awareness.’10 He used the term ‘good story’, like any regular journalist. A good story, he said, was typically about problems facing rural people: hand pumps that have fallen into disrepair, food stocks that have found their way out of the public distribution system and into the market, and other news of corruption involving local officials such as the Block Development Officer (BDO) using the government vehicle for private use. ‘I have had to face boycott by him whenever I write such a 10Ram

Murthy Pandey, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Halliya, Mirzapur, 14 June 2003.

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piece.’11 Any more analysis than that, he thought, was unnecessary, since readers tended to lose interest. He had a useful source in the head clerk at the block office who got him all the local news on inside developments. After the land reforms were enacted in this area, the Patel community became extremely powerful, Pandey said. They are more in number and have easily got control over the land here. We Brahmins have to fight to defend our honour and dignity which these fellows are bent on ravaging. They have been troubling us for quite some time now in this part of Halliya block. Being a correspondent allows me to contain their oppression.12

Rajiv Ojha, with Aj for the last 20 years, started out with Jagran. A 39year-old advocate, he was also a supplier of raw materials such as china clay and plaster of Paris for Chunar’s crockery industry. He lived in Chunar. His law degree and postgraduate diploma in journalism helped him write news with a lot of analysis, he said. ‘I think that was problem with the management in Jagran, but it is an asset in Aj.’13 He admitted that it was depressing to read some of the news that got published. According to him most news items tend to be events-centric, not processual or analytical. These are mostly of the teen marey, terah ghayal14 variety, which merely passes on information. His fellow stringer for Aj at Lalganj in Mirzapur, Shashi Bhushan Dubey, had been working with the print media for the last 25 years. He was earlier with Jagran, Amrit Prabhat, and Rashtriya Swarup. A 45-year-old postgraduate in journalism from Mirzapur, he belonged to a family that owned 700 bighas of land. People become stringers, he said, because it brought them a lot of clout. If you were a contractor or transporter, being a stringer conferred respectability, and could be extremely beneficial. It gave them a cover to carry on their business, clout with the local administration and politicians, and brought them a respectability that distracted public opinion from their underhand 11Ibid. 12Ibid. 13Rajiv Ojha, stringer, Aj, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Chunar, Mirzapur, 15 June 2003. 14Literally, three killed and thirteen injured, referring to the overwhelming focus on mishaps and single events, which do not always have any impact on the development outcomes of people’s lives.

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dealings. They develop the right connections and contacts, so they even got encouragement. ‘You see, it is not only about officials not interfering with your work. It is also about them supporting what you do.’ Of himself, he said that he was in this profession because he wanted to be. ‘Inspired by ideals of social work, and by a willingness to expose corruption and injustice we have taken on these roles.’ He was also the circulation agent for Aj, but was not responsible for collecting advertisements. While he was reimbursed for fuel expenses incurred while reporting, he only got an honorarium for the work he did. ‘Let me tell you, in this profession and at this level, no one is salaried. Anyone who claims he is, is lying.’15 A stringer–transporter from the district of Gorakhpur confirmed this cynical assessment, dwelling on the advantages of this parttime calling: I am not into this trade for any altruistic reason. Rather, it is the press ka billa [clout] that interests me. I have a taxi and sumo service that operates between Sonauli border and Gorakhpur. Putting a press tag on them saves me from harassment by the police. They know that if they touch anything of mine, it will be a big story about the kind of activities they are into. That helps!16

Nor were newspaper managements keen on any journalistic derringdo being displayed. Stringers were hired to increase the presence of local gentry on the paper’s pages, not to embarrass them with revelations. This stringer–transporter did his reporting around the Nepal border. I did a story on the RAW–ISI nexus [India’s Research and Analysis Wing and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence]. A couple of RAW officials met up their ISI counterparts at Kathmandu. My management was appalled. I irritated them further by doing up a story on the involvement of the border police with smuggling. Each story I wrote was like a nail in the coffin. I was finally pulled up and told, ‘chup chaap se pade raho’ [keep quiet]. I was instructed to report ordinary news. So that is what I do. Who killed whom, who got robbed, you know that kind of stuff.17 15Shashi Bhushan Dubey, stringer, Aj, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Lalganj, Mirzapur, 14 June 2003. 16Stringer for Rashtriya Sahara who pleaded for anonymity, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Sonauli, Maharajganj, 20 June 2003. 17Ibid.

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Shamshed Khan, Secretary of a non-governmental organization (NGO) called CREDA in Mirzapur, has his own reading of what makes a stringer less independent than he could be.18 They belong to a social strata and a given caste group that is involved in perpetuating poverty, exploitation, and malfunctioning in both the bureaucracy as well as society. At the local level, it is difficult to report serious issues of development due to pressure from within the social or caste group that stringers belong to. Dalit (an untouchable, in the Indian caste system) issues, land issues, and human rights issues are not covered at all, he said, since the stringers and the exploiters belong to the same caste. Most stringers in Mirzapur belong to the Brahmin community. Most of the land mafia were also Brahmins. The caste profile of stringers did not make them the voice of downtrodden anywhere in India’s Hindi belt, though there were individual exceptions. By and large, local editions had middle-class concerns: power supply, water, crime, development infrastructure, etc., and not caste atrocities, or exploitation of labour, or subjugation of women. Injustice did not move the local news machine. In Varanasi, Shekhar Tripathi, the resident editor of Hindustan, confirmed this: ‘Upper caste stringers likhte hain police ke khilaf, afsaron ke khilaf. Social aur economic issue par nahin likhenge. Eastern UP mein crime ka samachar zyadatar’19 (Upper caste stringers write against the police, against officers. They will not write on social and economic issues. In eastern UP, crime news dominates). Readers in Mirzapur also proffered perceptions of what constituted local news and how much impact it could have. Tejbal Chaturvedi, a 52-year-old cultivator in Halliya, educated up to high school, was a subscriber to Dainik Jagran. To him the local news pages were crime chronicles that did not even bother to investigate the crime stories they chronicled! From the conditions in the rural areas it would be difficult to believe that the bureaucracy had taken note of the negative daily reports, he felt. ‘Roads continue to be bad, and hand pumps are never repaired.’20 Mohammed Karim Ansari, a private practitioner at Chaudahawan, found the reporting on property disputes unsatisfactory because they 18Shamshed

Khan, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Mirzapur, 15 June 2003. Shekhar Tripathi, interviewed by author, Varanasi, 15 March 2005. 20Tejbal Chaturvedi, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Mirzapur, 14 June 2003. 19Shashank

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never referred to the social causes that underlined these disputes.21 Readers were aware that stringers also collect advertisements and in the perception of some, this role constricted their independence as journalists. Chandra Mohan Prasad, the son of a landless labourer, with a recent postgraduation degree from Kanpur, was a keen reader of newspapers, with a preference for Jagran. He said that there was practically nothing reported on wider issues that had widespread socioeconomic implications. Reading the newspapers, one did not easily get a feel of the extent to which landlessness continued in the area. That meant there were no obvious references to child labour, bonded labour, agricultural labour, as well as to discrimination against chamars, musahars, and kols.22 He also rationalized as to why this was so: ‘I don’t blame reporters and managers of newspapers either. Such news is hardly interesting, especially for the landed and urban social groups who read the newspapers. It also embarrasses the government, which is something local reporters would not want to do. Think about it, reporters depend on BDOs for advertisements. They would also want to be on good terms with the sarkar’.23 Representatives of the sarkar thought so too. Chandra Shekhar Shukla referred to the ‘consumerism of the advertisements that propel their newspapers’, which was why stringers do not touch private traders, or for that matter, even bureaucrats like himself.‘They know they will have to come back to us for their advertisements, which they get a commission for. That perhaps accounts for the events-based negative news that we hear and read.’24 The most pointed comment on what local journalism lacked came from a shopkeeper in a village called Markundi in Chitrakoot district of Uttar Pradesh. ‘Yeh log bhanda phod nahin karte’, he said of the correspondents of the big Hindi newspapers. ‘Bhanda phod’ was the local term for an expose. What he was saying was, such reporters never did exposes. 21Mohammed Karim Ansari of Chaudahawan, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Mirzapur, 14 June 2003. 22Chamars and musabars are scheduled caste communities, while kols are the most important scheduled tribe community in Mirzapur. 23Chandra Mohan Prasad, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Devripurab, 14 June 2003. 24Chandra Shekhar Shukla, Block Development Officer, interviewed by Indrajit Roy, Rajgarh, Mirzapur, 13 June 2003.

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POSITIVES OF LOCAL NEWS GATHERING Thanks to localization, the village-level bureaucracy in the Hindi belt was rapidly becoming au fait with the media universe. In Jharkhand, Anil Kumar Singh, the circle officer of Patan in Palamau district, was an unusual man who claimed to have been a newspaper reader for 30 years, but now he had more choice than ever before. He subscribed to three newspapers daily—Hindustan, Hindustan Times, and Prabhat Khabar—as well as magazines like India Today. When he could, he also looked at Rashtriya Navin Mail, Dainik Jagran, and Ranchi Express. He not only found them ‘100 per cent useful’ but also valued the fact that you could rebut what appeared in the press more than you could a sensational report on television.25 Editors indicated that the more newspapers were read, the more the local stringer mattered in the pocket from where he reported. They quickly developed clout. Sanjeev Kshitij, resident editor of Amar Ujala in Varanasi, observed: To become a stringer is to become a member of the existing power coterie. Every day you get three requests to move the existing one. I have 400 stringers. I get 20–30 complaints about them every day. I have to verify if the complainant is an interested party or a genuine case. If there is a caste conflict between Yadavs and Thakurs, I have to see what caste my stringer is and check his story accordingly. Caste complications make the appointment of a stringer more complicated than the appointment of an editor.26

In Bihar, the resident editor of Hindustan would say succinctly, ‘I have an army of content providers. It is the content developers who are missing’. 27 And, in Raipur, the resident editor dismissed them as blackmailers.28

DELOCALIZATION After the initial flush of localization, a reaction set in to the indiscriminate flow of miscellaneous news. Newspapers were creating separate pages 25Anil

Kumar Singh, interviewed by Vasavi, Patan, 24 April 2003.

26Sanjeev Kshitij, resident editor, Amar Ujala, Varanasi, interviewed by author, 17 March

2005. 27Naveen 28Anal

Joshi, resident editor, Hindustan, interview with author, Patna, 1 June 2003. Shukla, resident editor, Nava Bharat, interviewed by author, Raipur, May 2002.

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to cater to what circulation executives believed was a growing demand for local news, but editors were hard put to find news that could be dignified with a place on a news page. Dainik Jagran, which used to have three pages for Kumaon, now had nine after Uttaranchal became a state, and in a hill area with limited reporting staff, found filling them a major challenge. According to Naveen Joshi: Stringers file any rubbish, like a cow has overturned an egg cart. The emphasis is on volume. The resident editor comes into office and counts: We have 110 news items, fewer by two compared to Jagran. The pressure comes from the circulation department. Carrying anywhere from 25 to 40 stories per page is our USP. Put three lines on page 1, and carry over. If the circulation manager says I cannot sell this paper, the resident editor is gone.29

It was a succinct summing up of what local news came to mean: keep it local and voluminous, never mind if it scarcely deserved to be termed as news. The resident editor of Hindustan in Bhagalpur, in Bihar, described much of what was going into his paper as stuff that did not deserve to be called news.30 At the end of a month-long review, the chief subeditor concluded that localization had led to a drop in standards. The language used had deteriorated and the paper had become crimebased, with even small local brawls being reported. Planted news was frequent, and political parties wheedled their way on to news pages with what was often no more than internal party news.31 He decided the paper would not use news of disputes in which both side were not quoted. When Hindustan began to delocalize at Bhagalpur in 2003, it was the start of a process of introspection by the big multi-edition dailies. By 2005, Dainik Jagran in UP and Dainik Bhaskar in Jaipur were asserting that the stringers they employed to report were not required to book advertising any more, or function as circulation agents. Complaints of pressure from stringers to give advertisements if a politician wanted coverage led proprietors to seek to remedy the 29Naveen 30Vijay

Joshi, resident editor, Hindustan, interviewed by author, Patna,2 June 2003. Bhaskar, resident editor, Hindustan, interviewed by author, Bhagalpur, 5 June

2003. 31Praveen

Baghi, Hindustan, interviewed by author, Bhagalpur, 6 June 2003.

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situation. At Jagran, one of them asserted that separate people had begun to be employed to book advertising.32 And, when the paper set up a school of media management in Noida, it began to send out teams to train journalists at its small town and district editions. By the end of 2005, at least in some areas of the local news universe, there was enough introspection to lead to soul-searching in editorial offices about the quality of news being peddled as well as the negative consequences that were becoming apparent in the local edition approach. Dainik Bhaskar began to appoint state editors, one for Chandigarh, Punjab, and Haryana, and another for Rajasthan. Their job was to focus more closely on editorial quality. The Rajasthan appointment was spurred partly by the fact that Rajasthan Patrika had overtaken Dainik Bhaskar, in 2004, to become No. 1 again in this state. When N.K. Singh moved from Bhopal to take on this job in mid-2005, he began a major exercise in quality control of district news and professed concern at the consequences of localization that were becoming manifest. ‘For me the issue is the fall in intellectual standards of newspapers because of localization.’ He also acknowledged that Dainik Bhaskar had a credibility problem in the state because of the kind of news it had been peddling.33 There was, at last, recognition at the top that journalism in these parts had been led by the market, with runaway consequences. In September 2005, if you were to wander into the Jaipur office of Dainik Bhaskar at mid-morning, you would see, in a glass enclosure, half a dozen men poring over newspapers at a long table. The paper had created a review cell, comprising of senior sub-editors, to give feedback on the quality of news which had appeared in local editions across the state the previous day. What they would blue pencil was later collated into a power point presentation, prepared edition by edition, to be presented at monthly meetings of resident editors. These dealt with missed stories, story structure, factual mistakes, blunders, repetition, and made comparisons with the same day’s editions of Rajasthan Patrika. Competition first led to degradation of the editorial product and subsequently, to its improvement. 32Mahendra Mohan and Sanjay Gupta, interviewed by author, Noida, 2 September 2005. 33N.K. Singh, state editor, Dainik Bhaskar, interviewed by author, 16–17 September 2005.

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CONCLUSION As urban and rural local self-governance took root in India, as local communities became more vocal and more conscious of their rights, as local commercial interests came forward to make viable the publications that could engender such a space, the emergence of a local public sphere became inevitable. But, once the paper began to reach smaller places, the news network also had to encompass these places, to deliver incident-based, problem-based reporting that would draw readers. As newspapers in Hindi-speaking states expanded their circulation base, they invited circulation agents to send news about their areas. As the amount of space given to local news grew, the local news network also grew beyond the circulation agent to the advertising agent, as well as other interested individuals in the community. When the paper involved was a large and influential one, a household name all over the state, the visiting card conferred status upon the local stringer. He became the local gentry’s passport to figuring in the newspaper. An important agent of localization was thus emerging. Localization democratized media access and abolished conventional gatekeepers of news as stringers and circulation agents competed to forward to the page-making centres all the local handouts they received. In a place like Chhattisgarh, those availing themselves of the proffered hospitality of a newspaper’s columns ranged from organizers of local school events to the Naxalites who terrorized government functionaries in these parts. But when a stringer did the reporting himself, many complexities coloured his output. How well he reported had to do with whether or not he also collected advertising, what his caste and professional background was, why he had come into the profession, and how much gumption he had as an individual. It also had to do with how keen his management was to have him display any journalistic derring-do. It was plain to village-level civil society that, while newspapers were anxious to be local and to be read, they did not always have a sense of how to use their forum to provide purposeful coverage. Yet, their stringers quickly developed clout and began to matter in the pocket from where they reported. They became a member of the existing power coterie, and their caste influenced their reporting.

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As localization evolved, local reporting came under the scanner, and a process of delocalization was initiated so that newspapers stopped creating separate pages for localities which simply did not generate that much news. Basic news ethics were revived; planted stories eliminated; and circulation, reporting, and advertising functions separated. Once there was recognition at the top that journalism in these parts had been led by the market with runaway consequences, newspapers moved to restore their own credibility. They became watchful of whom they appointed as stringers, and began to insist on basic reporting ethics being adhered to. With the cleaning up and professionalizing of local news collection, its advantages became evident to those who participated in the local public sphere. Those working in the training of panchayats in rural areas sensed the change newspapers were bringing about in the nature of politics. They brought transparency in the dynamics of political parties with the reporting they did. The army of stringers was also being deployed to survey the state of governance region-wide. As newspaper localization evolved, it began to develop its own strengths, and the charge that local news was inconsequential and incapable of having impact began to lose its sting.

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15 Globalization, Sexuality, and the Visual Field Issues and Non-issues for Cultural Critique* Mary E. John**

INTRODUCTION

G

lobalization in India has rightly been associated with liberalization and the ‘opening up’ of the economy to the forces of the international market, after over forty years of autarkically conceived planning and state-led development. Along with such processes, there has been a tangible sense of the ‘liberalization’ and ‘globalization’ of sexuality. Never before—or so it would appear—have our public spaces been so inundated with sexual images, that is, on posters and billboards, in the cinema and on TV, in glossy magazines,

*Originally published as ‘Globalization, Sexuality, and the Visual Field: Issues and Nonissues for Cultural Critique’, in Mary E. John and Janaki Nair (eds), A Question of Silence: The Sexual Economies of Modern India, New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1998, pp. 368–96. **This essay has been presented to different audiences at various stages in its development, beginning with the workshop on Rethinking Indian Modernity: The Political Economy of Sexuality, at MIDS, 1–3 August 1996. Subsequent venues included the seminar on The Imaging of Women in Myth and History, Gargi College, New Delhi, 20–22 November 1996; the colloquiuum series of the Department of Sociology, Delhi University, 21 February 1997; and the 5th Women in Asia Conference, Sydney, Australia, 3–5 October 1997. I am particularly grateful to the group consisting of Kumkum Roy, Kanchana Natarajan, Bharati Sud, Monica Juneja, Ratna Raman, and Ratna Kapur for their lively discussion of an early version. Thanks also to Satish Deshpande, Janaki Nair, and Madhava Prasad for their comments and encouragement, and to Jacob E. John for help with materials.

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and especially in that hoary middle class institution, the daily newspaper, which has visibly taken on the characteristics of a tabloid. Moreover, if the inroads of multinational capital have been cause for concern, the effects of the sexualization of the visual field are widely perceived as being positively alarming. ...It may be useful, at the present historical juncture, to keep a distance from the ‘victim vs agency’ approach for tackling issues of sexuality.1 In the Indian women’s movement, not to speak of the world at large, we are more familiar with the objectifications and violence of sex for women, who are at the receiving end of male desire and aggression. Radical lines of reasoning have therefore tended to see sex and violence as inherently coterminous. On the other hand, more liberal positions have sought freedom for the woman by transforming her from the object to the subject of sex, urging her to break out of submission through an active, assertive sexual agency of her own. However, if the radical position effectively eschews sex altogether in favour of supposedly more egalitarian, asexual relationships, the liberal strategy will not take us very far either. Not because most of us lack the will, or are too conventionally bound, but because sex cannot be considered an isolated entity repressed by patriarchal forces, awaiting release through the right kind of access. Moreover, and this is my second point, the widespread search for signs of agency and resistance in a world steeped in victimization does not pay enough attention to the logic guiding the search. This is particularly pertinent in the case of the Miss World contest, where explicit as well as implicit claims about the ‘nation’ and ‘culture’ were deployed in opposition to the ‘West’ and its globalizing powers. I would, therefore, suggest a more circuitous route: that we begin to conceptualize the sexual domain as a force-field, an intersubjective realm in and by which sexual desire is variously aroused, blocked, or violated; and where much more than the freedom or lack of sexual expression is involved. In order to discover what greater sexual agency 1A number of feminist scholars have begun to question the unqualified positive valency

placed on women’s agency, and in contexts that bear interesting connections to issues of sexuality. See, for instance, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, ‘The Subject of Sati’, in Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture, Postcolonialism, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 15–39; and Kumkum Sangari, ‘Consent, Agency and Rhetorics of Incitement’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 28, no. 18, May 1993, pp. 867–82.

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might promise for women, we urgently require a more effective descriptive apparatus that would provide the ability to name sociopsycho-sexual processes that are historical and mortal.... To address the subject of sexuality, it is not enough to oppose violence and abuse; sifting ‘good’ from ‘bad’ sexual images is an even more limited strategy. What is required is a careful consideration of our present political culture and its evolving economies of sexuality, including the possibilities and limits encountered by different categories of men and women today.

THE BEAUTY BUSINESS In one of the few extended discussions on the sexual relations between men and women in the Indian context, Sudhir Kakar has offered an important starting point for an exploration of the ideology of sexuality—the conjugal couple. Unfortunately though, his analyses (drawn from a wide variety of sources, including literature, film, the personal accounts of two slum women, and the life of Gandhi) seem to be driven by the need to make implausible universal claims about a quintessential and singular ‘Indian sexuality’. One such unsubstantiated statement concerns ‘a general disapproval of the erotic aspect of married life, a disapproval which is not a medieval relic, but continues to inform contemporary attitudes.’ He goes on to add that this is because ‘sexual time beats at a considerably slower pace than its chronological counterpart.’2 Historians of sexuality in India would, doubtless, have something to say against such sweeping assertions about our past and present.... In a situation of unprecedented flux, when the contours of not just the economy but also of caste, community, and gender are undergoing far-reaching national and regional transformations, ‘sexual time’, as Kakar would have it, is showing few signs of beating at a considerably slower pace. My preliminary evidence comes from the media. The field of visual representation has long been recognized for its extreme significance regarding questions of sexuality. In its simplest formulation, the 2Sudhir Kakar, Intimate Relations: Exploring Indian Sexuality, New Delhi: Penguin, 1989, p. 20.

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difference between the sexes has been associated with visual processes—to be sexualized as a ‘woman’ is to be objectified as an image to be looked at, while the power of ‘man’ is in his gaze, the pleasure and anxiety generated by the desire of looking.3 The media’s new found power plays a disproportionate role in organizing our visual field, and, in the present context, is itself one of the hallmarks of globalization. ...The first and, in many ways, central image to which I wish to draw attention hails from the Kamasutra (or KS) condom advertisements, which first appeared some years ago in magazines and on huge city hoardings. These advertisements carried a photograph of a semi-nude young couple in an apparently heightened state of sexual arousal, accompanied by an equally sensational text along the lines of ‘For Your Pleasure’. As might be expected, considerable controversy did ensue, but the advertisements were never banned. In my estimation, they deserve our critical attention for signalling a new public legitimation of sexuality in the form of consensual, mutual, safe, and private heterosexual pleasure (heterosexual intercourse, to be precise), in a style not witnessed before. The contrast with the pre-existing Nirodh advertisements couldn’t be more dramatic—the all too well-known inverted triangle and the childlike faces of the small ‘happy’ family promoted by the Indian government. The Nirodh advertisements, once a ubiquitous feature of our national landscape, helped position India as an underdeveloped Third World nation teeming with irresponsible adults and poverty-stricken children, watched over by the all-powerful, yet strangely ineffective parent–state. What did the KS advertisements help inaugurate and how might we assess their significance? In his reformulation and elaboration of Saussure’s theory of the linguistic sign, based on the distinction between the signifier (sound– image) and the signified (concept), Jacques Lacan has offered a particularly striking analogy for the structuring effect of certain key 3Two early, and now classic, analyses of the visual field came out of Britain in the 1970s, one by the art critic John Berger and the other by the feminist film critic Laura Mulvey. (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: Penguin, 1972; Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975, pp. 6–18.) Using the very different intellectual and political resources of a Marxist critique of private property under consumer capitalism (Berger) and Lacanian psychoanalysis (Mulvey), both critiques highlight the relationship between the active male spectator versus the passive female spectacle/publicity image for the sustenance of the social organization of sexual difference.

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signifiers: that of ‘the point de capiton’ or ‘quilting point’. The arbitrary and fluid relationship between the double structure of discourse, constituted by a chain of signifiers and a current/mass of meanings, requires points ‘at which the signifier and signified are knotted together’ and appear united.4 Everything radiates out from and is organized around the signifier [as quilting point], similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of the material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively. By directing these insights to a terrain of signification that is broader than that of language, and, more importantly, by historicizing the field, the KS condom advertisements become an essential ‘quilting point’ for the discourses of sexuality in India, a palpable element of our experience.... On the one hand, this is obviously part of the break from the regimented world of Nirodh, being the result of a transformed addressee—a new middle class in the throes of self-discovery. But, the very ambiguity of the image—how could it possibly be advocating free sex?—reveals the complexity of its function as an anchoring point for the significations of ‘sex’. ...Interestingly enough, the cinema, too, has seen breaks and transformations in its sexual economies, as the much-cited demise of the vamp would attest. Today’s heroine cannot be a passive object of desire, but displays a responsive, active, and at times, disturbing sexuality, of a sort probably first enacted by Sridevi.5 Contrary to what Kakar has claimed, in the emergent genre of new-middle-class films pioneered by Mani Ratnam, it is the marriage relationship itself which 4Jacques Lacan, ‘The Quilting Point’, in J.A. Miller (ed.), The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses ’55–56, New York: Norton, 1993, p. 304. 5The Hindi film, Mr Bechara, with Sridevi and Anil Kapoor, (though less well-known than the highly successful Mr India), employed suggestive strategies for the introduction and accommodation of this new feminine sexuality. Sridevi’s boisterous and directly sexual persona is unmistakably the focus of the film and commands assent, even as viewers are invited to sympathize with the hero’s active dislike—even sexual repulsion—of her in comparison with the lingering memory of his first wife. Two themes hold the narrative together—the heroine’s successful supplanting of the hero’s old love, along with her visible and effective devotion to his young son. In other words, as a potentially unsettling new sexual norm edges out a more familiar older one, the audience is simultaneously reassured that this is accompanied by loving and responsible mothering.

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is eroticized. The hero in both Roja and Bombay (played by Arvind Swamy) displays an unabashed passion for his wife in an almost antimacho, vulnerable mode. His conjugal desire comes to be fully reciprocated by the wife–heroine, her response being integral to the movement of the narrative in each film. It is important to note that the depiction of their sexual desire for one another is no longer confined to spectacular song-and-dance sequences, as was the norm in commercial cinema until recently. Indeed, it is staged in contrast to other kinds of sexual display.6 Moreover, the wife’s sexuality is coded as something positive and, in distinct contrast to so many earlier popular films, it is never threatening or in turn threatened by the possible sexual violation of others. Though there is great danger to the couples’ happiness together, in both the films, the form and quality of such danger operates on the different plane of terrorism and violence. (What gives these films an ideological edge over other recent box-office successes such as Hum Aap Ke Hai Kaun and Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is the clear pronouncement that love, sex, and marriage can flourish in the life of the couple, which must now constitute the heart of the Indian family if that institution is to successfully take on the challenges of the present, be it a besieged Kashmir7 or a communalized Bombay.) ...[W]e are surely witnessing a new ideological dimension to the growing confidence of middle-class men, whereby masculine desire 6The promise and legitimacy of their conjugal sexual relations are signalled and set apart in each film by providing a larger sexualized context as backdrop: the ‘Rukumani’ song in Roja, with its somewhat startling depiction of the sexual agency of old village women; and ‘Hamma, Hamma’ in Bombay, where the more predictable gyrations and poses of disco dancers interweave with shots of the couple’s delayed opportunity to consummate their marriage. In my view, the overall message is that sex in marriage is not just OK, but an ideal to be striven for. For other discussions of the erotics of these films, see Ventakesh Chakravarthy and M.S.S. Pandian, ‘More on Roja’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 29, no. 11, March 1994; Madhava Prasad, ‘Signs of Ideological Re-form in Two Recent Films: Towards Real Subsumption?’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 29, pp. 27–43; Tejaswini Niranjana, ‘Integrating Whose Nation? Tourists and Terrorists in Roja’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 29, no. 3, January 1994, pp. 89–92, and her’s ‘Banning “Bombayi”: Nationalism, Communalism and Gender’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 30, no. 22, June 1995, pp. 1291–92; Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Bombay and its Public’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, no. 29, pp. 44–65. 7Placeless, snow-covered slopes with a tumbling hero and heroine—such a common ingredient in our cinema—are brilliantly temporalized and localized in Roja to signify India’s threatened Kashmir.

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can be displayed in the full expectation of consent and reciprocity. In these media images there are no disappointments, and no signs of submission or explicit patriarchal constraint. The new woman may actively devote herself to her husband and children (as in Mani Ratnam’s films), or, as in so many advertisements, be addressed as much more than a smart, sexually desirable homemaker. Interviews with models inform their readers that their careers come first, even as they expect to find love and a family when the time comes. As ‘Indian women’, they are confident of being able to harmonize home and career. What sense can one get of this emerging visual ideology foregrounding a conjugal, erotic sexuality? How powerful is it? What counter ideologies might be at work? In August of 1995, the Maharashtra government forced the withdrawal of a controversial advertisement for jogging shoes, in which two models (Madhu Sapre and Milind Soman) posed together in the nude. According to Kalpana Sharma, a BJP minister’s major reason for opposing the advertisement was that the two models were going to get married: ‘How can we allow anyone to pose in the nude with his wife?’8 Are there, then, conflicting positions amongst the competing forces vying for dominance, which set limits to the public legitimacy of the sexual couple? But rather than believe that here, too, the BJP managed to carry the day, I would hesitate in according great weight to the ban. To return to my example, by all accounts, the two models have only grown in popularity since the incident; and at least one of them, Milind Soman, refused to apologize. One cannot help feeling seduced by the surface attraction of these new sexually egalitarian images. For haven’t we protested against the double standard, by which men from dominant groups were granted a sexual licence whereas women were split into the chaste wife/debased prostitute? Their appeal appears to be founded on the woman’s active consent and the absence of violence, all of which is placed within the overall frame of conjugality. It also makes those who question such images into nothing other than the victims of prudery. Consequently, it becomes increasingly obvious that one has to go beyond the visual representations themselves to the logics and agendas 8Kalpana

Sharma, ‘The Medium is the Message’, The Hindu, 17 August 1995.

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that mobilize them. Or, to put the issue in reverse, isn’t the success of the new ideology entirely dependent on what is never explicitly addressed, or is left out of the frame altogether? In what follows, I will attempt to broaden and contextualize the field by looking out for links with consumer capitalism, caste hierarchy, and the nexus of fertility/ contraception. Such considerations clearly do not exhaust the theme before us. This essay has the limited aim of making a case for the need to create a descriptive apparatus from many vantage points and on different sites. The purpose of such an analysis is not the celebration of the diversity of sexuality in India but the presentation of a more convincing perspective on the powers of globalization, even as our lives are being visibly transformed.

SEXUALITY AND CONSUMER CAPITALISM The most obvious wider context for the mobilization of desire is that of consumer culture, with its proliferation of images and commodities, its promise of happiness through the possession of products. Many of the criticisms of the Miss World contest naturally highlighted this. As is well-known, an early and widespread ploy in the world of publicity has been the display of sexuality, especially of women’s bodies or body parts, to promote the desirability of a particular commodity. Sexual fulfilment has thus been a unique, if not pivotal fantasy, emblematic of the transformation in social relations that awaits the consumer. What, then, is the relationship between less objectified and more ‘wholesome’ body images of women, on the one hand, and India’s recent attempted transition from a ‘restrictive’ state-regulated form of capitalist culture to a global consumerism, on the other? Can any direct connections be made between my claims regarding the legitimacy accorded to visual representations of the erotic couple and our entry into a new phase of capitalist development? To start off with, one would have to examine the need to recruit the new middle-class woman as a ‘consuming subject’ of local/global products in a vastly expanded market (whether for beauty, fashion, or the home), a recruitment that cannot take place without her sexualization as an actively desiring subject.9 9Poor women—women far removed from the middle class—are also being selectively addressed under the new order of liberalization and structural adjustment, but not primarily

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Further considerations would have to account for the modes by which such sexualization is regulated and housed—in the current context, I am trying to suggest, this is placing new demands on the institution of marriage.10 Questions relating to marriage bring in their wake long-standing debates on the nature and form of the family. In this connection, Madhava Prasad’s thought-provoking essay on the symptomatic reasons behind the ban on kissing in Hindi cinema (a ban that was recently lifted) assumes a special significance. According to him, whereas the western modern state rested on the stability of the nuclear family embodied in the private autonomy of the conjugal couple, in India, the transition from the traditional to the modern family has been an ‘unrealized ideal’. The need for the Indian state to make alliances with pre-modern elites, whose family structures are authoritarian, does not admit: the invention of the private, the zone of intimate exchange and union where... the members of the couple become as one. Thus while the spectacularization of the female body poses no threat to the informal alliance that constitutes the Indian ruling bloc,...[a]ny representation of private space and its activities in the public realm constitutes a transgression of the scopic privileges that the patriarchal authority of the traditional family reserves for itself.11

If Prasad’s analysis draws on the context of post-independence Nehruvian state-led development and its accommodation of ‘premodern’ elites, then we must ask ourselves: what changes amongst as consumers. Increasingly recognized now for their role in production and reproduction, they are to become the new managers of poverty, the micro-entrepreneurs of the Third World. For a discussion of these issues in the field of development, see Mary E. John, ‘Gender and Development in India: Some Reflections on the Constitutive Role of Contexts’, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 31, no. 47, November 1996, pp. 3071–7. 10A comparative study of women’s magazines in English, such as Femina and Woman’s Era, would, I believe, lend further weight to my thesis. Though Woman’s Era is of more recent vintage, it enjoys a much larger readership than Femina does. Unlike Femina, which is a glamour magazine, concentrating overwhelmingly on fashion and beauty, Woman’s Era devotes considerable attention to questions of marriage and the family, and is respectably middle class even as it offers explicit discussions of sexual relations. In this connection, see Amita Tyagi Singh and Patricia Uberoi, ‘Learning to “Adjust”: Conjugal Relations in Indian Popular Fiction’, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 1994, pp. 93–120. 11Madhava Prasad, ‘Cinema and the Desire for Modernity’, Journal of Arts and Ideas, Special Issue: Careers of Modernity, nos 25–26, 1993, pp. 77–8.

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the dominant classes and especially, what unprecedented features of the Indian state are suggested by the new public legitimacy being accorded to representations of private intimacy. Considerations such as these would also provide fresh dimensions to debates on the changing forms of, and pressures on, the joint family in India— where the joint family is at one and the same time a statistical artefact and an intrinsic ingredient of ‘our’ difference from the West.12 What fresh contracts are possibly being drawn up between the state (in retreat from its productive economic functions, now actively mediating between the nation and international capital) and the new masculine middle-class citizen? (Where does this leave the so-called ‘traditional’ elites, and how should we address transformations in rural family structures and sexual codes?)

SEXUALITY/FERTILITY/CONTRACEPTION Let me bring these very diverse, if not rambling comments and questions to a provisional close by returning to the image I began with—the sensational KS advertisement. Having drawn a sharp contrast between KS and its predecessor Nirodh, it is possible to come to the conclusion that sexual pleasure is ‘in’ and population control ‘out’. Clearly, this is far from the case. Instead, what I believe is being set up in the KS condom advertisement is a decisive shift in the relative framing of sexuality and fertility in society. The earlier, Nirodh advertisements were part of an apparatus for addressing the problem of poverty, understood to be the problem of an underdeveloped nation. Opposition to population policies have worked within this interpretive horizon, through arguments that large populations are the effect rather than the cause of poverty. Slogans such as ‘development is the best contraceptive’ were among the more widespread demands to have been raised. In the meanwhile, the Indian 12See especially A.M. Shah, ‘Is the Joint Household Disintegrating?’, Economic and Political Weekly, March 1996, pp. 537–43. The burden of Shah’s argument is that, at least where the household dimension of the family is concerned, the size of the household has been growing over time—whatever a small, professional middle class would like to believe. Shah’s views would be enriched, it seems to me, by taking into active account the family as an ideological construct; after all, the dominant nuclear family in the West has been able to outlive its statistical minority status for decades.

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state, castigated for its ‘softness’, muddled along with ineffective family planning programmes, which came to a head in the fascist sterilization camps of the Emergency (where recorded deaths alone were close to 2,000), while the middle classes remained on the sidelines. Over the last decade or so, the situation has changed dramatically. The middle classes have come into their own, constituting a clear cultural reference point as they seek to administer a new set of norms and exclusions. While their own family sizes register a drop from one generation to the next, the condom has truly been lifted out of its earlier frame by the Kamasutra advertisers to resignify the right to pleasure of this class; being such an eminently translatable signifier, the Kamasutra simultaneously signals the inheritance of a Hindu erotic past and, as KS, the pleasures of the global present. At the same time, the apparatus for population control has been thoroughly retooled, modernized, and rendered efficient: women are the exclusive targets, not their men, through methods ranging from (hazardous) injectables and new anti-pregnancy vaccines, to literacy campaigns.... A new anxiety grips members of the middle class—even as their lifestyles expand, they fear encroachment by those marked ‘other’: these are no longer the undifferentiated poor, but (since Mandal and Ayodhya) lower castes and Muslims.13 The world historical possibilities inaugurated by contraception are therefore now caught up within new nationalist agendas bearing little connection to development. The demand is, rather, pleasure for ‘us’ and fertility control for ‘them’. In such an over-determined situation, it is difficult, but vital to get a better sense of the very real, if different, 13Soon

after the 1991 Census Report on the break-up of the population by religion was released in 1995 by the Indian government, newspapers were flooded with articles which jubilantly used the fact that the Muslim population had grown faster than the Hindu one between 1981–91, to bolster pre-existing beliefs about Muslim lust, polygamy, and the swamping of the nation by Islam. In an extremely useful recent article, Alaka Basu has opened up the essentialist and communal category of ‘Muslim religion’ to a much richer analysis—such that regional considerations turn out to be more salient for understanding fertility differentials. See her ‘The Demographics of Religious Fundamentalism’, in Kaushik Basu and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (eds), Unravelling the Nation: Sectarian Conflict and India’s Secular Identity, New Delhi: Penguin, 1996, pp. 129– 56. Though an indispensable corrective in a number of ways, and indicative of the kind of issues demography should be taking on, Basu’s essay relies on a somewhat simplistic conception of ideology as ‘uninformed ideology’, which, by implication, therefore, only needs the right kind of information to be countered.

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dilemmas and struggles faced by women from all classes and groups over the relationship between fertility and sexuality. The part being played by contraception can by no means be assumed; mechanistic renditions of contraception as having solely to do with the ability to ‘break’ the connection between sexuality and fertility may, indeed, have little to do with the unequal experiences and responsibilities of anyone except population planners. It is my belief that since questions of ‘our’ pleasure and freedom as middle-class women are not being defined in isolation, but through an active process of othering, there are no avenues other than collective ones for an exploration of a more genuinely egalitarian sexuality that can radically challenge our times.

CONCLUSION This essay has attempted two things. First, to denaturalize the production of regulatory heterosexual norms through an active consideration of those institutional sites (of capital, the state, caste, and the family) that effectively constitute the very materiality of gender relations. Second, my suggestion is that the exclusionary outside of the dominant sexual order (of gender, caste, class, and community), ‘those “unlivable” and “uninhabitable” zones of social life which are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject’,14 are being produced within the heterosexual matrix as much as at its boundaries.15 It is only too evident that India is being drawn into a new phase of global capitalism, in which unprecedented faith has been restored and whose end or horizon is nowhere in sight. Distinctions between the ‘national’ and the ‘foreign’ are increasingly smudged. The partnership between Indian capital and the state-in-the-making, heralded in the Bombay Plan of 1944, has, after all these years, given way to uncertain alliances with global partners of various kinds. Under such conditions of flux and potential loss of identity on the economic front, forces from the Hindu Right are endeavouring to 14Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: Notes on the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York and London: Routledge, 1993, p. 3. 15It is hoped that such a denaturalization of heterosexual hegemony in India may be of value to the lesbian and gay movements as well.

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reaffirm the purity of Indian culture by cleansing it of ‘alien’ sexualities. The analysis developed in these pages is in considerable tension with their strategies; but my formulations are also slightly different from western feminist confrontations with heterosexuality. The institution that has come to be repeatedly highlighted in the course of the discussion is that of marriage. In so doing, my purpose is not to shift attention away from what has been the most important site so far in the self-understanding of the women’s movement, namely, the state. Indeed, it is an essential aspect of my argument that we cannot open up sexuality to further investigation without a fuller exploration of both these institutions in their changing relationship to each other. But, if claims upon and interrogations of the state have been on the agenda for some time now, theorizations of the social and sexual relations underpinning the critical institution of marriage in contemporary India are just beginning.

16 Internet in India K. Gopinath

INTRODUCTION

I

nternet arrived in India through the technical community, but is now mostly dominated by the business and entertainment segment. Even though it is still a costly technology, it is becoming more accessible as the cost of transactions for users—whether businesses or individuals—reduces, and advances in technology make the cost more affordable. It has also made forms of collaboration and communication possible that were unthinkable before. However, there are significant barriers. The diversity of peoples in India is not easy for Internet to handle yet. For example, the various scripts and languages pose significant problems, even if not insurmountable. Different levels of literacy within the country pose a challenge. Internet is also a component of the ‘globalization’ phenomenon; with high-speed networking, distance melts away, whether for businesses, individuals, or communities. If local communities are not strong, globalization can make globally wellconnected entities benefit at the expense of others. While it has certainly proved beneficial to certain segments of the population and communities, its dubious value to those on the ‘outside’ of the globalization phenomenon without suitable intervention is becoming

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clear. Internet can also make it easier to penetrate the economy of peripheral countries by increasingly encroaching on the autonomy of the nation-state through technical mechanisms such as legal (Intellectual Property Rights [IPR]) and business processing. In this essay, we will examine the potential of Internet in India as well as the difficulties, along with a brief outline of the history of use of Internet in India. The role of government, especially its policies with respect to making the infrastructure (such as telecommunication) affordable, and those of control over content, and promoting Internet will also be examined.

BACKGROUND ON INTERNET Until the early to mid-1980s, computing activities were conducted in enclaves (especially during the mainframe computer era), each with a centralized setup. Such activities then shifted to a local scale of computing (‘The network is the computer’), where some distribution of computing power took place and later, to the worldwide web scale of computing (‘Anytime, Anyplace’). The term ‘Internet’ is both a technical term as well as a social one. The technical sense is that of a network of computers that use certain technical standards (‘Internet Protocols’) to exchange information in spite of differences in the type of computers or the base software running on them. Before 1985, Internet could have meant a few different sets of protocols, but post-1990, Internet relies on a single set of standards based on ‘Internet Protocol’ (IP) and, often, the ‘Transmission Control Protocol’ (TCP), as adjudicated by an organization called Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Other contenders, such as those defined by International Standards Organization (ISO), or vendor protocols such as BITNET or DECNET, have withered away.1 1Essentially, open protocols on low-cost systems (such as TCP/IP protocol on BSD Unix running on minicomputers, developed at University of California, Berkeley, in 1982) won over protocols that were proprietary protocols (such as DECNET), or running primarily on expensive systems (such as BITNET; this was a university led effort), or protocols that were taking too long to be standardized (such as ISO). The value of a protocol depends on the number of users; open protocols slowly gathered ‘moss’ and became predominant just before the Web burst on the scene. The IETF’s methods of operation were also nimble compared to the slow pace of ISO standardization.

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Since the explosive growth of the World Wide Web (WWW), from around 1995, Internet has also acquired a certain social dimension. Instead of the technical orientation, the availability of services (such as email, chat, and instant messaging) has come to the centre stage. While many of the services in the earlier stage were mostly the output of the voluntary efforts, especially, of the academic sector, the later stages have seen increasing involvement of the commercial sector. Now the commercial sector is easily the most dominant, if not the most creative, component of the Internet. The origins of Internet are in the military domain. A method was needed to ensure the survivability of some communication infrastructure in spite of massive strikes (nuclear, especially). ARPAnet, the ancestor of Internet, was designed around 1964 and deployed in 1968. However, the current Internet outgrew its military origins to become an academic network and thereafter, a commercial network. Internet has been primarily designed to have no ‘centre’ (for survivability) but this aspect is in conflict with the government, business, or commercial notions of control.2 Many of the interesting conflicts in the Internet system arise from this fundamental dichotomy. While the openness of Internet is well attested, it is still the case that it has been open only with respect to the Internet community extant at the time of its development. Hence, Internet has many distortions, mostly errors of emphasis; for example, India has only 2.7m Internet addresses available to it3 when compared with a single university in 2Consider a major conflagration on the Internet: the Scientology debate 1991–4 (David Post, ‘New World War’, Reason, April 1996, http://www.reason.com/news/show/29894.html); this is also an interesting case of information warfare before the Web came into existence. This particular case has very interesting implications for IPR ‘infringement’ (some body posted the ‘secret’, ‘copyrighted’ teachings of Scientology onto the Usenet), the nature of ‘war’ in cyberspace (postings and cancellation war that erupted as Usenet allows posted articles to be ‘unposted’; the development of new weapons such as ‘cancelbots’), the extensive use of anonymity in this warfare through anonymous mailers, the involvement of law enforcement agencies in trying to shut down these mailers, the fluidity with which information seeped through (Scientology could obtain seizure orders to close down some machines but ‘information’ went elsewhere), and the lack of a geographical or organizational centre (most of the warfare occurred on alt.religion.scientology, a ‘distributed database around the world’). 3Note that we are discussing an Internet that uses a network layer called the Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) which is predominant as of now; with the newer Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), these distortions will essentially disappear, but this is likely to happen only by the next decade.

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the US such as Stanford which has 16m addresses, with the US having a total of 1.2 billion addresses! (See Map of Internet, The IPv4 Space, for a pictorial representation). Similar is the case with English domain names,4 text encoding, the language of technical discussions (‘requests for comments’ [RFC] in IETF), etc. There are, thus, deep-rooted structural biases whose manipulation is not a matter of equal access. Interestingly, just like ‘democracy’ embedded in an unequal society, Internet embedded with structural biases generates contradictory pressures and responses. Internet attempts to give ‘easy’ access, if not free or fair access. There is an influential libertarian position that information ‘wants to be free’; note the success of Wikipedia with the many ‘nameless’ volunteers contributing to the articles, and maintaining them, so that they are current and not vandalized. The attraction of Internet worldwide is possibly the sense of freedom of interaction across the globe coupled with the liberation of ‘information’ from its traditional confined spaces (such as books and libraries). Since the primary function of Internet has been to interconnect computers, it has birthed various collaborative approaches to sharing information. First, it produced ‘Unix to Unix Copy Programme’ (UUCP) as a way of providing email communication, then introduced mailing lists (for example, the ‘listserver’ india-gii that discusses issues related to telecommunication sector in India and also, the Internet in India) and newsgroups, and then the Web and its derivatives such as Wiki and blogging. There is also now a talk of ‘Web 2.0’ that is carrying the notions of participation and community to higher levels. The major reason why Internet can engender newer types of communication is that the incremental cost to communicate or collaborate is small. Just as books have been a significant factor in erasing the impact of geography on the one-way flow of ideas (‘broadcast’ or ‘multicast’), Internet has begun to erase the role of geography on the two-way flow of ideas, collaboration, etc. For example, blogging, as a newer method of communication, has caught on fast. While this is also a one-way medium, with appropriate search mechanisms (packaged as ‘blogging tools’), it becomes a two-way medium. This is generally true for the whole of the Internet with search 4To date, website names can only be registered using Latin characters, which effectively alienates countries that cannot register Internet addresses in their script. Some efforts to change the system are already underway.

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tools. A ‘publisher’ sets up a Web page on some piece of information; once it is indexed in one of the search engines, it becomes available to any ‘active consumer’. Thus, both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ aspects are present in the architecture of current Internet. Internet’s ‘grammar’ is the many protocols that fix the details of the interactions of the various entities in the Internet. While this grammar is not fixed,5 it has a core set that constrains introduction of dramatically newer protocols (such as those that might be required for efficient video transmission). However, a newer service over established protocols is quite simple. It can be argued that protocols are, in fact, the way Internet is tacitly governed, and users and entities have to learn to live with this aspect. An Internet protocol that is extensively used, the TCP, is a two-way peer-to-peer channel for communication; it is not suited for broadcast as is print, radio, and TV. In the past, centralized solutions have been designed even with such a peer-to-peer protocol; nowadays, some true peer-to-peer applications are becoming popular. Consider, Skype, a proprietary peer-to-peer VoIP implementation that enables two users to communicate over Internet using speech. While Internet protocols form its basis, the use of encryption, its deliberate use of some non-open protocols and generally its non-open nature makes it opaque. It has a certain subversive potential (it threatens the traditional telecommunication industry), and there is a wide interest in detecting and containing it but it has not been very successful so far. Countries that want to prevent free communication between its citizens or across the globe (possible through Skype) do not have any lever unless the Internet itself is restricted somewhat.6 Oddly, a ‘closed’ programme is making open communication possible in spite of efforts to prevent it! Internet is, generally, a less regulated medium compared to previous communication networks. Internet has come in a time when rapid technological changes are the norm; governmental and societal responses have not been fast enough to have a tight regulatory impact. 5Consider, for example, the voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP); this part of the ‘grammar’ has got fixed only in the recent past with standards such as session initiation protocol (SIP). 6Note, however, that China has succeeded in compromising Skype (with a special version for use in China) to snoop on conversations due to its economic and political muscle.

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BRIEF HISTORY OF INTERNET IN INDIA Internet arrived in India, as elsewhere, first through the computer users’ community. Even though it is still a costly technology, the progress in technology is making the cost more affordable. Some examples of the ‘public face’ of Internet in India are railway reservations run by the Indian Railways (since about 2002, while a non-public access intranet has been in existence for at least a decade before), the announcement of examination results on the Web by the various State Intermediate Boards or Central Secondary Education Boards, the availability of cellular telephone bills on the Internet, etc. Internet started in India through broadly two sets of users: users in industry who needed to be connected to their counterparts in the US in software development, and academic users. The first software park in Bangalore started around 1986 and companies such as Texas Instruments used its dedicated telecommunication connections. However, this part of Internet was for all practical purposes ‘closed’. Using almost the same infrastructure, the academic community also got access to Internet through the Education and Research NETwork (ERNET) project. The ERNET project of Department of Electronics (DoE) can be credited to be the start of public Internet in India. Before that, specialized or proprietary systems (such as Systems Network Architecture [SNA] or BITNET, popular amongst mainframe systems) were in use for communication between systems but they never went past a few systems in India due to their exorbitant cost. National Informatics Centre (NIC) had come up with NICNET using Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSATs) but speed and reliability were almost always found wanting. The ERNET project used ‘minicomputers’ rather than mainframe systems, already a trend towards lowering the cost of interconnecting geographically dispersed systems. They also typically used ‘Unix’ software as the base software that had already been used in the computer science departments worldwide for a decade or so. The nodes that were part of ERNET in the beginning were technical government organizations such as National Centre for Software Technology (NCST), Mumbai and DoE, Delhi, as well as educational institutes such as Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Mumbai, IIT Delhi, Indian

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Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore, IIT Chennai, and IIT Kanpur, but it was not possible to have any sense of reliability of the system well into the mid-1990s. Leased lines were expensive and one had to cross many bureaucratic hurdles before one could get hold of one; operationally, they also failed quite frequently. Since even these minicomputers were expensive, academic departments started exploring the use of personal computers (PCs) for interconnecting systems as they were more affordable, even if extremely expensive by today’s prices! The availability of ‘downsized’ versions of Unix accelerated this process and the Linux kernel made its appearance in 1993 in a usable form. Since the Linux kernel and the GNU system, needed for a complete usable system, are free, it furthered experimentation.7 Around the same time (1993), the Web had made its appearance.8 Many did not recognize its importance at that time. Many machines in use ran DOS or Win3.1 operating systems, and this was a serious liability as networking was not part of these systems. If one had to use such systems, it required skills to install networking systems into these systems before any attempt to use Web was possible. By early 1994, it was possible in India to run Web on Unix machines or Win3.1 machines (for example, on the author’s PC with NCSA Mosaic, the first graphical browser) and, by later part of 1994, on GNU/Linux systems as well with Netscape. The availability of Win95 from Microsoft, for the first time, included networking code on a widely available platform, and this became the popular platform for Web, outside academic circles, with the later availability of ‘Internet Explorer’ from Microsoft. The changes due to these developments cannot be underestimated. The author was part of a study in early 1993 on how to interconnect computing systems in agricultural research organizations and it could not have been more 7For example, a non-working Unix system, lying unused in a colleague’s lab, was changed by installing a GNU/Linux kernel system in the author’s lab for experimenting in mid-1994. The availability of Internet through ERNET allowed downloading of the GNU/Linux system as necessary. The GNU is the Free Software Foundation’s free software that can be shared without any restriction, as long as its freedom to be shared at the source level is not compromised. 8An international conference was organized by the author in August 1993. See K. Gopinath (ed.), ‘Conference Proceedings of International Conference on IPR in Software’, Bangalore, 19–21 August 1993. Though Internet was used extensively (email, especially) for the conference, it did not include the Web in India (or for that matter most parts of the world).

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depressing. There were too many disparate machines with their own base software; networking was the exception rather than the rule.9 In the West, Internet started out mostly as an academic endeavour (if we ignore its even earlier military history) and so Internet had certain ‘playfulness’ or an experimental aspect. Technical people, especially well-educated researchers, attempted to build communities with a certain ‘freewheeling’ attitude, without undue concern for economics. A certain maturity of its then users is evident such as in philosophical debates about open and closed systems, a certain democratic spirit (rather than hierarchy) but at the same time mostly valuing effectiveness (‘merit’) over ‘committee design’, and a greater coupling between civil and ‘electronic’ (read, Internet) liberty communities such as Electronic Frontier Foundation. The commercial side of Internet (now the largest part) added a later layer onto the experience. In India, the academic part of the initial Internet was too small to have any impact socially. When the Internet (actually the Web) became widespread around 1997 in India, there was mostly the commercial (or mostly, utilitarian) aspect than the playful aspect. Only recently has the space for experimentation being partly reclaimed, as non-technical people have started using Internet systematically. For example, the new media initiative, Sarai, started about 2002. A Free Software Foundation India branch has been in existence since about 2002. Note that websites of some established businesses were already up and running at least five years earlier (for example, The Hindu newspaper has been on the Web from around 1997 and has made a name for itself as one of the good sites worldwide). The dramatic rise of certain cities such as Bangalore, Chennai, Gurgaon, Pune, and Hyderabad for undertaking software and backoffice work can be attributed to a good extent to the availability of Internet (especially, the Web) as a critical low-cost medium for discovering timely information needed for conducting the business. It may not have been the driving economic force (for example, the year 2K problem) but it has been a critical enabler. Steve Hamm (Hamm 2006: 3) studying the rise of Wipro Ltd as a leading IT 9Telephone links to some agricultural research organizations did not work; these are necessary, even now, for Internet connectivity across distances. In addition, some organizations in UP could be reached faster by car, before the telegram sent a day or two earlier!

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outsourcing company, cites the formula: Internet + Brains—High Costs = Huge Business Opportunity. Internet usage has, however, evolved more in ‘depth’ than in ‘spread’ in its decade long presence in India. This is to be expected in a highly stratified society as exists in India. According to a study conducted in 2005, there are about 17 million regular users, with casual users being 5 million, with the penetration of Internet among urban Indians being around 9 per cent and amongst all Indians about 2 per cent. However, almost a third of urban Internet users are heavy users (‘depth’), logging more than three hours every day. For Internet to grow rapidly in urban India, Internet would need to break two major barriers. The first barrier is that of low speed and connectivity which makes online experience a poor one. The second barrier is the ‘perceptual’ one of creating a more ‘persuasive’ relevance of Internet in people’s overall lives rather than it being restricted to the work domain. Internet has certainly entered into the imagination of the Indian citizen. However, it is not clear that it has succeeded in going beyond the cities. The situation seems to be quite different away from these areas. A colleague who spent some time (2004) recently in a small town (Gadag in Karnataka where he grew up) reports that while telephony (both wireline and wireless) is pervasive, Internet and SMS are not. The basic reason is the barrier of language. The former is language neutral, while the latter are English-centric. Seeing this, some manufacturers such as Nokia have recently introduced mobiles with support for Hindi, Telugu, etc., along with some services (such as SMS, called ‘samasa’). Internet is currently penetrating at a lower rate than cellular, chiefly due to the cost and language issues. Cellular voice service burst on the scene in India around the same time as Internet. Both started out elitist, and it is interesting to see the changes from this orientation in the recent past in both these media. While the cellular voice service can be said to be reasonably free of some of the ideological or cultural biases of its origins in the Western world, it is not clear that Internet in India currently can be said to have this aspect. This contrasts with some of our eastern neighbours (such as China, Japan, Korea) who, at least, have succeeded in eliminating one of the (Indian) Internet’s most obvious biases for some time, namely, the dependence on English as the default medium for

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communication at the consumer level when only around 3 per cent of the Indian population is familiar with English as a written form. Recently, the Knowledge Commission, in its Report to the Nation 2006, observes that ‘even now, though English has been part of country’s education system for more than a century, no more than one per cent of our people use it as a second language, let alone as a first language’.10 If cellular phones turn out to be the first device of access to the Internet in the near future for the bulk of its users, Indian Internet is likely to remain utilitarian (being metred by the minute or by the amount of data) rather than ‘explorative’. This will be reinforced by the ‘centralized’ model of interaction, with the cellular provider being the ‘switcher’ and provider of Internet services. The programmable aspect of the cellular phone, available with advanced models, is needed to make it a freer medium.

ONTOLOGICAL AND EPISTEMOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF INTERNET IN INDIA Given that Internet is a powerful communication medium, it has significant ontological and epistemological issues intertwined with its use. For example, many are using the results of a search query (using search engines such as Google) as a way to define a subject, as traditional models of information access such as libraries are seen to be either too cumbersome or not sufficiently up-to-date.11 Search can be used to guide users to preferred views on a subject. This is not that different from traditional print media where, for example, a ‘manufacture of consent’ can be arranged (for example, by a government) by making sure that preferred views are disseminated more systematically and widely. However, Internet does not have the infrastructure (and has not been around long enough) for critical review of the information posted on websites and it seems likely, at least for some time to come, that providing certain preferred views 10Report

to the Nation 2006, National Knowledge Commission, Government of India,

p. 32 11Note that while this problem of bias exists even for technical information (especially due to the many commercial vendors for technical products), it is acute for political and social issues, given that the wide world, with all its ethnic, societal, political, and governmental divisions, is the stage for the Internet.

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is relatively easy.12 Hence, the control that is being exercised by countries such as China to control the results of a search query instead of providing those from ‘unbiased’ search engines. The Indian government attempted to close a Naga Yahoo discussion group but had to backtrack after much negative publicity. There has been a recent clumsy attempt to prevent access to the ‘blogosphere’ (access to blogs through a gateway or portal) in India after the July 2006 Mumbai terrorist attacks to ‘censor’ hate-filled language; it seems only some blogs were to be proscribed but the entire set of blogs were made inaccessible as it was more easy to do so from a technical point of view. Nunberg (Nunberg 2005) argues that fears of a ‘Google’ or an ‘Anglo-Saxon’ takeover of the online world are unfounded. In 1997, one study calculated that about 85 per cent of Web pages were in English. Five years later, another study came up with a figure of 72 per cent. While this is good, the absence of other languages in search-engine results (‘omnigooglization’) is disturbing; the results show the totality of sites from all over the world and often give higher rankings to the more popular English-language pages that are linked to widely. For example, if one does an unrestricted Google search on Roland Barthes (ibid.), forty-four of the first fifty sites that come up are in English, with four in French, and one each in Spanish and German. Since there are still no effective search engines for most of the Indian languages (except for Hindi, as Google has recently started support), most of the sites for information are necessarily in English.13 Given the extremely small amount of content in Indian languages, the now successful model of using Internet as a tool for discovering information 12Newer Web 2.0 services on the Internet using community-based models of relevance and ‘voting’ are providing an alternative to critical review. Such models are also likely to be timely and capable of scaling up. For example, in digg.com, a community provided news service, ‘every article on digg is submitted and voted on by the digg community’. However, if majoritarian bias precludes alternative perspectives (due to voting), fairness of news will be a casualty. 13According to www.webdunia.com (a Indian language portal), as accessed mid-2006, its Hindi search engine has over 60,000 Web pages from over 150 sites, while that of Tamil search has about 8,000+ Web pages indexed and searchable. A search of ‘Krishna’ (in Devanagari script) in Google hit 46,000 pages (as on 12 August 2006). Note, however, that most of the ‘Indian’ search engines actually search ‘Indian’ information in English.

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has not yet begun for a ‘virtuous cycle’ to develop. The usefulness of Internet is primarily due to search engines, and due to the differentials in the technical capacity in the search mechanisms in English and Indian languages, the advantage for the English Internet has been increasing steadily in India. Since Internet has no geographical boundaries, interested parties can attempt ‘information warfare’ to make certain entities invisible or make them non-existent. This has happened quite regularly in the war of website defacement that has been going on with Indian and Pakistan ‘crackers’, possibly with government encouragement. Recently, it is believed that China orchestrated many signature petitions on the Internet to stymie Japan’s attempt to enter UN Security Council.14 Also recently (December 2006), Javalobby, a group that promotes the Java computer language, disappeared from Google search results entirely as some spammers were able to abuse a feature to post questions and comments from unregistered guest accounts. Google’s system detected that many links from the site were to undesirable sites and stopped indexing the site itself. The site, for all purposes, disappeared from Internet as many use Google search as a way to reach the site. Such manipulation is also easy by manipulating the page ranks of Web pages15 that determine the importance of a particular Web page, as those with high page ranks are displayed first. Currently, search engine companies employ staff that detects ‘web spam’ so that such content is no longer indexed. However, this is necessarily an unsatisfactory solution due to its informal or unregulated nature. In a larger sense, the questions of ‘Who exists? Who does not?’ are already at the centre stage for future trajectory of Internet in India. The Internet is, at present, so lopsided in its representation of issues of interest (for example, many websites in India started as portals of information for Non Resident Indians [NRIs]) that Internet’s current representation of India is still mostly the concerns of NRIs (see, for example, www.samachar.com with its advertisements emphasizing remittances and matrimonials), software professionals, 14Both cellular phones and Internet were used for this purpose but it is believed to have been contained by the Chinese government later. 15There are ‘search engine optimization’ commercial services for boosting page ranks, usually using dubious means.

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journalists, students aspiring for jobs or higher studies, researchers and academics (especially, at the better colleges), and now, of the younger generation who have learnt to use it as a source of entertainment (especially, music and sexual material). Outside of this circle, Internet is something to be read about! Note that this lopsided aspect permeates all aspects of Internet as of now: in the language used (English), how different organizations communicate between themselves (until recently or even now, many emails sent from one domain [say, sify.com] would be routed to the US before the email made its way to another domain [say, vsnl.com], both being Indian domains), and so on. In essence, there is a strong resident elite and NRI alliance that shapes the Internet presence of India and Indians, just as in many other domains. There is, thus, very little presence of rural or other disadvantaged groups and hence, their concerns are rarely reflected. While this is true at the national level, it is acutely so at cities such as Bangalore that are at the forefront of technical work in India. There is an eagerness of this NRI–elite alliance to appear cosmopolitan and thoroughly immersed in western standards and conventions, while espousing national identity in such a way that the history of colonialism as an influence on the forms of knowledge is ignored. National identity itself is also not the panacea it was at one time thought to be; the reason is that ownership and diffusion of (traditional) knowledge is perhaps being shaped or even phased out by ownership of (Internet) protocols. There is a poignant paradox that hinges on the question: What is a poor nation with a substantial majority of its population mostly outside of the world view of a sophisticated medium such as Internet that privileges ‘the colonial masters’ to do in the circumstances? Internet in India has to solve many of these problems before it can make headway; we list them here one more time and discuss some of the issues in more detail later: 1. Lack of Indian content. 2. Lack of Indian language presence. 3. Lack of Indian connectivity amongst the ‘hinterland’, instead of only with metropolitan centres of the outside world. 4. Lack of participation of the Indian majority (such as non-literate, women, and low caste).

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Indian Languages and Internet The diversity of India is a challenge for Internet. While Indian languages are phonetic, the scripts have a richer and non-linear structure that has proved to be difficult for the input systems devised for the English language. Attempts to make Hindi and other languages possible on current keyboards have had to face difficulties as the English script is, in some sense, deeply ‘embedded’ in the design of computers worldwide. There have been considerable efforts to enable non-Roman languages and scripts, but only recently some progress has been made. A good technical discussion is available at http://anakin.ncst.ernet.in/~aparna/consolidated/ (‘Guide to Localization’). Because of the varieties of representing Indian scripts, there are considerable font interoperability problems.16 The transliteration approach is widely used in academic work, especially Indic research outside India.17 This is likely to pickup momentum once the current generation of Indians schooled in Indic languages is replaced by those who start with English as the ‘first’ language. (For example, students in some schools in Bangalore often do not learn any Indian language after primary school and can substitute an European language instead. Government Central School students in Karnataka typically do not learn to speak or read Kannada.) 16Recently (mid-2006), the author tried the default Hindi and Telugu fonts freely available for download at www.webdunia.com. The author almost exclusively uses a GNU/ Linux system (with 1024x768 resolution or better) and it was not possible to set up the system to be able to display the Indian fonts in Linux, as the instructions had not been updated for current systems. The author next moved to a Win2K system but the fonts were unreadable in the case of Telugu. With Hindi, the conjoining of the aksharas was seriously problematic to make the readability an issue. It was not possible to set the recent (mid2006) Firefox browser settings to read the Web pages of www.webdunia.com. The author also tried using the Unicode that comes with recent terminal software on the text of Mahabharata (that is encoded using Unicode), as an example, with the same serious problem. For example, the word namaskrutya, the consonants encoded were s, kr (conjoined), t and y, instead of skr and ty; this makes for a difficult reading. However, the text of Mahabharata could be read very well in the Firefox browser using the Unicode encoding. 17Unfortunately, English is also being used in India for transcribing the notation for Indian classical music such as for abstract notes or rhythms which are very phonetic by their very nature; it is much ‘simpler’ to use the dominant language, English, in a multilingual environment, even when it is quite inferior to Indian languages in this regard.

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In addition, there are considerable other problems in Internet for Indian languages such as in the domains of search, dictionaries, equivalent terms, and translation from one Indic language to another. At the current rate of progress, there might be some solutions for some of the dominant Indian languages but it remains to be seen if the current educational system will encourage the independent development of the Indic languages. Tragically for Indian languages, anyone advocating an Indian script or language is sometimes criticized for being obscurantist, chauvinist, or worse, a communalist. For example, Gurcharan Das, says, ‘In a world growing smaller and an India growing bigger, English is the currency of the future. Even insecure vernacular chauvinists can’t deny us our due’.18 In a recent article in The Hindu newspaper, Rajendra Chenni writes: The State [Karnataka] finds itself in an unprecedented situation wherein a linguistic identity is threatened by technology. And this time the adversary is the State capital, Bangalore... English is being seen as the language of globalization and of immense opportunities; the corollary has been, unfortunately, that Kannada is not the language of modernity and not the language of globalization. It can now be ghettoized as a vernacular, regional language of ‘culture’. It is not the language of science and technology... In contrast, English is the emancipatory language of promise and fulfillment. English in the globalized context is a powerful double-edged weapon. But the commonsense perception is that English is the language of power and also emancipation; Kannada is the language of domesticity and of poverty and protest.19

Given the close connection of Internet development with IT industry in India, it is important to understand how IT industry is faring in the popular imagination. Recently, the death of noted Kannada actor, Raj Kumar, caused widespread disturbances in Bangalore in April 2006. Infosys and Microsoft Research properties were ‘attacked’ (buses and buildings respectively but without major damage).20 This has surprised many. However, while the IT industry created 75,000 jobs for 18See Gurcharan Das, ‘Inglish as She’s Spoke’, Outlook, 3 May 2005. He is a former head of Proctor & Gamble in India and a management expert. 19R. Chenni, ‘Is it Capital Punishment?’, The Hindu, 4 November 2005. 20A report from Reuters says that rioting by fans, mourning the death of Kannada film icon Raj Kumar, would have cost the technology hub of Bangalore around $160m, with software firms losing $40m in revenues.

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professionals by 2001 in Bangalore, more than 100,000 workers in engineering and ancillary units lost their jobs. More recently (August 2006), it has been reported that Karnataka’s annual growth in employment has been only 1.9 per cent during 1998–2005, while the increase of the entrants into the job market is many times higher. Given that print was an extremely late development in India (in relation to Europe), and always an elite medium, it can be expected that Internet would privilege English, since English speakers are globally networked to a much greater extent than Indian-language speakers. However, one recent development is the strength of Hindi newspapers compared to those of English newspapers,21 even though from an impact, stature, or credibility point of view they are not in the same class as some of the established English newspapers such as The Hindu. Similarly, considerable Hindi programming has become imperative for major TV channels (such as Sony and NDTV Hindi). These same pressures might also propel Hindi, Tamil,22 and other regional languagebased Internet, but it is too early to predict. If and when Internet acquires a strong presence in the entertainment domain (through video delivery such as YouTube, where many Hindi soaps are already available almost in real time, or devices such as ‘video iPod’), Hindi and other languages might make a comeback on the Indian Internet.

Lack of Participation: The Problem of Excluded Communities This is an acute problem given the current literacy levels and purchasing power of the bottom half or more of the Indian population. This is reflected in the content available on the Indian part of Internet. For example, while airline and railway schedules are available, there is almost no information on bus schedules or routes used by the urban poor in the major cities.23 To make such information accessible, it 21Even with a small base, note that Times of India has become the largest circulating English newspaper worldwide! 22Journalists have reported that after the take-off of a dozen 24-hour news channels, it is Hindi reporters who are the main target of politicians, and English reporters take second place to them. If true, this is an interesting and certainly a recent development. In Tamil Nadu, this has probably long been true vis-a-vis Tamil journalists. See Arvind Rajagopal, Personal Communication, 2006. 23For example, Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation has none that could be located, either through Google or through its website in 2005. Recently (March 2006), there

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might be that a ‘voice’ Internet should be emphasized, possibly through mobile devices such as cellular phone.

MAKING INTERNET ACCESSIBLE It is said that at Rs 500–700 total monthly cost (leasing cost of a computing device and telecommunication costs), Internet will become accessible to at least 100 million urban users in India, and Internet can become qualitatively different and introduce newer models of social interaction. Some attempts are being made to get to this cost by a public utility model and the next few years will be interesting to watch how this would be achieved. As of now, the leasing model has not taken hold and Internet expansion is primarily limited by the rate of purchase of PCs (about 1.5–2 million per year), a costlier capital proposition for the majority of the population. Note that before the deregulation of Internet in 1998, Internet expansion was limited by high Internet Service Provider (ISP) costs (high licence fees on ISPs that were passed onto the consumer). Since computers are still expensive (a low end system being approx Rs 20,000), an alternate device, the cellular phone, seems likely to be the agent for penetration of Internet. Cellular phones have started to make a penetration in the country (especially in towns and cities) as they have become increasingly affordable, and the Internet that rides on it will become, most likely, the face of Internet in India in large parts of the country. In the near future, it will also be the first device for access to Internet for a large number of users. According to a recent report in The Hindu (February 2006), there will be 250 million cellular phone users by 2007, with 1.75 million added every month.24 Economics is the principal mover here. A basic Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) phone chipset is only about $5 (Rs 225), while it sells for approximately $40 (Rs 1,800). Currently, using Internet through cellular phones is still the exception is a site that gives live traffic information at six congested areas in Bangalore but this is not for the urban poor. 24At current cellular phone average revenue per user (ARPU) of approx Rs 450, the cellular subscribers in cities are growing rapidly.

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as it is costlier per minute of airtime but the economics in the future is likely to be compelling.25 If Internet is to become widespread in a resource constrained economy such as India, many social/technical solutions have to be analyzed for being socially and environmentally efficient. For example, the current PC, as the vehicle of Internet use, needs to be reevaluated, as it is not power efficient. The cellular phone is much better for casual, timely, and ‘small’ pieces of information. We also need to evaluate societal cost of information dispersal through traditional paper-based mechanisms and digital/computer mechanisms but we will not discuss it here.

Role of Government Internet got started in India when a software technology park (STP) was set up in Bangalore in 1986 that offered 64kbps ‘TCP circuits’. They were very expensive, and affordable by large companies only. Such TCP connections were also used to set up ERNET as a way of interconnecting educational institutes through a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) project (though dial-up was only used in the beginning). Due to the attempts of the Indian government to facilitate crosssubsidization (special services subsidizing basic telephony and furthermore for rural areas), costs of long distance services were kept at high levels in the early 1990s. This forced independent operators out of the market, as they could not compete with the prices offered by the telecommunication department for 9.6kbps dial-up access in major cities. It was not clear in the beginning that this was retarding the progress of a service such as Internet. In addition to the costly inefficiencies resulting from monopoly, most of the charges for providing Internet went into the costs of overseas long distance communication as most of the websites in the beginning were outside the country. Also, there 25For example, the author returned a non-functioning landline (2003) in favour of using a code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile for Internet access: a better proposition as Internet then becomes accessible at all the cities and most major towns in India. The recent introduction of broadband by BSNL (a government telecom services company) at a good price point (Rs 250 per month with up to 400MB of data transfer) has again changed the equation.

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were no ‘Internet exchanges’ in the country: mail, for example, sent from one local ISP would go outside the country to come back to a second local ISP. The end result was that Internet connectivity in India in 1996 was worse than that in the African continent. However, the Y2K problem could not be effectively addressed by the IT industry in India without lower costs of telecommunication (and Internet). The new government in 1998, sensing an economic opportunity, spelt out a new telecommunication policy and drastically reduced the licence fees for ISPs, resulting in an immediate boom in Internet use.26 Progressively, the high cost of long distance communication has been brought down and it has become more reasonable. Also, the starting of Internet exchanges in the country has kept local communication local to India. A similar rationalization and intervention in cellular industry has been very helpful.27 However, the high cost of starting an ISP has been reduced only recently. The VoIP has been legalized recently (2004). In contrast, countries like China moved quickly to make it legal (1999). The delayed introduction of VoIP has been primarily to protect Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Limited (MTNL) (and Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited [VSNL] when it was in government control). However, an aggressive rollout of VoIP, coupled with innovations such as ‘voice web’, could have increased Internet usage significantly. For example, VoIP phones can be made available in kiosks that have Internet connectivity. As a policy of making telecommunication accessible (and therefore, Internet) to all sections of society, considerable attention has to be given to ensure that the access network cost is lowered through standardized interfaces and competition in the market place. 26Another

major reason for the new policy was the incoherence of the old system: depending on the technology, market segment, and time of entry, there were wildly differing licensing costs that became increasingly untenable. Technology was pushing towards a ‘convergence’ model where data, voice, or video were all the ‘same’ (digital bits), but the old system saw it differently and it vitiated relations between different players (for example, between GSM operators and CDMA operators that exploited ‘local mobility’). 27According to a recent GSM Association report (2006), India has one of the lowest mobile phone tariffs in the world. The Indian government has brought down import duties on handsets over the past three years, helping to boost the proportion of its population with mobile phones to more than 10% from less than 1%.

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Currently, the Indian government is planning a massive infrastructure, Common Service Centres (CSC), so that Internet usage becomes widespread. It is expected that one in every six villages will have such centres with an outlay of Rs 57,000 million in a public–private partnership. If such an exercise fructifies, it is possible that grassroots concerns will inform future debates about the evolution of Internet rather than the current status quo elite formulations. However, lack of good quality information about current Internet usage in India precludes good planning for such large exercises. It is suggested that there is a need to create a state-sponsored autonomous body to track both Internet usage (as seen in China) and the IT industry.28

INTERNET AND ITS IMPACT: IPR AND OTHER LEGAL TRANSNATIONAL ISSUES Due to the costs of doing business in Silicon Valley and other hitech centres in the US, having a Research and Development (R&D) centre in India has been an excellent proposition for some time. Almost every major company (for example, IBM, Microsoft, GE, GM, Google, Yahoo, EMC, Intel, TI, etc.) has either a research lab or a development centre in Bangalore. The IPR generated in these organizations belongs to the parent company (located in US typically). Given this reality, any startup company in the US (say, the Silicon Valley) cannot compete without a presence in India to actually do the R&D. Conversely, many R&D companies, started by Indian professionals, often have the marketing arms in the US and the ownership is formally in the US, even though the companies have been started by Indian citizens and the entire R&D happens in India. In effect, Internet seems to facilitate making IPR developed in India the exclusive property of the US through captive subsidiaries or otherwise. Without Internet, it is not clear that transnational companies would have been able to penetrate another’s economy so easily. Just as IPR has opened a chink in the legal systems of many nations in the world, there is also another interesting aspect of globalization that is increasingly encroaching on the autonomy of the nation-state 28C.P. Chandrasekhar, ‘India is Online but Most Indians are Not’, The Hindu, 25 September 2006.

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(especially, of the nations on the periphery) that Internet facilitates.29 To be a member of the current economic system and show some gains, any entity that works with the organizations in the ‘centre’ has to agree with the rules laid out there, rather than be governed by the legal system of the country. Over a period of time, the rules and legal notions at the ‘centre’ have a salience and importance that exceeds the local ones. This has happened in the context of IPR (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade [GATT]) and is likely to happen in many other spheres. As Viswanathan puts it, ‘the authority of law will shift from sovereignty of nations to consensual submission to rules evolved contractually by the participants’.30 However, due to unequal participants (say, between software firms in the US and India, or between a subsidiary in India and the headquarters in the US), the consensual submission is likely to be one-way. The major issue is that ‘informal’ arrangements between actors in the globalization phenomenon will, after a time, become powerful models of how to conduct business and become de facto legal understandings, without any basis in national laws.

CONCLUSION Internet is still a limited medium in India due to its historical origins (reliance on text and graphics, dominance of the English language, and its cost). However, a low-cost cellular Internet (or, more likely, a VoIP + Wifi-type access) with good support infrastructure for voice applications and for Indian languages will change the landscape in ways that cannot be predicted. An Internet based on mobiles could induce participatory decision making in developing countries such as India. Just as Internet has lowered the cost of locating information, countries such as India require low-cost coordinating mechanisms for organizing effective decision making. Mobile web is one promising answer.

29This is similar to the way roads and railway tracks were laid in interior areas of Asia and Africa, facilitating the exploitation of valuable forest produce in the nineteenth century. 30T.K. Viswanathan, ‘Ensuring Justice in a Flat World’, The Hindu, 9 May 2006, opposite editorial page.

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17 Call Centre Conundrum D. Wood

‘T

he slaveships of the digital age’, I often mumble to myself, not without irony, as I observe an ungainly fleet of transport coaches listing and pounding across the broken thoroughfares of Mumbai. Boldly emblazoned names: Intellinet, 3 Global Services, and Tata Interactive Systems defiantly proclaim India’s high tech aspirations; in naked contrast to the compounding squalor and urban degeneration that characterizes the nation’s financial capital. As an American musician and former Fulbright scholar living in Mumbai for more than two decades, I have witnessed a myriad of accelerating social and environmental changes. Among them, the gradual arrival of globalization and the sudden proliferation of call centres. Both have dramatically transformed the landscape and mindset of this dynamic mega city. The1990 arrival of satellite television and new economic liberalization policies heralded the end of an era for this once charming old world city that I have made my own since the early 1980s. I can actually chart that transformation by recalling how the quality of garbage dumped and washed up on Juhu beach had changed over the years. My initial 1982 seaside strolls meandered over flotsam and jetsam largely composed of biodegradable matter—coconut husks, corncobs, and recycled examination papers fashioned into the ubiquitous

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paper cones used to serve peanuts, bhel puris, and other Indian cart wallah ‘snakes’. As the 1990s dawned, and the Indian middle class asserted its initiative to obediently consume, Himalayan proportions of plastic bags, styrofoam cups, and tetra packs staked claims on Bombay’s favourite picnic spot. At the turn of the new millennium, when floppy cricket headgear gave way to backward baseball caps and Indian mamas’ boys seemed to say ‘Yo’ in every other TV commercial; corporate logos in bold primary colours, the clowns and golden arches, and other symbols of the New World Order were prominent in the vast kelp-like beds of solid waste that strangle the coastline. I suppose this is a good enough indication as any that the multinational colonization of this immense subcontinent is well underway. An exuberant cover article in India Today, in 2005, celebrated the Indians under the age of 25 who had become the majority of this fecund nation’s population. That’s over half a billion people and counting. Call centre employment offers, at least to some of these young Indians, previously unimaginable entry level salaries and stepping stones to lucrative IT careers; and the wherewithal to act out MTV fantasies. Veritable beehives, teaming with well-educated, English-speaking, eight dollar a day workers grateful for a monthly paycheck, make ‘Destination India’ the subject of increasing interest and concern. Meanwhile, the phone rings at mealtime in Minneapolis. Bill Stevenson introduces himself on behalf of American Express to offer congratulations for merely being a valued customer. Then he quickly cuts to the chase, pitching an add-on financial service for a minimal monthly charge. The fact is that Balakrishna Subramanium is actually on the line, calling from Navi Mumbai or Hyderabad. The accent though is most often a giveaway, and that’s where I came in. During my years in Mumbai I supplemented my music income with a mixed bag of assignments, including teaching, playing minor foreign roles in occasional Indian films, anchoring TV documentaries, voicing commercials, and recording in-flight audio presentations. When the media industry became sluggish earlier this year, a friend recommended that I leverage my being an ‘American English speaker’, along with my voice and communication expertise, into a gig in the technology sector—as a Voice and Accent trainer. Perhaps some

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portion of this industry’s projected 23 billion dollar capital would find its way into my Citibank account. Investing in a new pair of shoes and xeroxing twenty-five resumes, I made tracks to the IT job fair being held at the newly constructed Hyatt Regency, located a short drive down impossibly narrow lanes from the city’s airports. As my auto rickshaw approached the monolithic venue, I was astonished that a massive queue, on a scale reminiscent of ancient pyramid builders, shared my destination. Luckily a press card and foreign appearance expedited my speedy entry into a world I knew nothing whatsoever about. Bungling my way through a couple of interviews, I managed to pick up a handful of requisite buzzwords—lead acquisition, inbound versus outbound—and was soon discussing strategies for neutralizing Indian accents, overcoming ‘MTI’ (mother tongue influence), and dropping names of industry gurus, including Ann Cook and Dr Stern; glibly comparing their merits. The two hours I spent rubbing shoulders with the IT world seemed productive enough; distributing my entire stock of resumes, listening to almost as many insincere promises, and recovering from the shock of a prospective employer politely offering me tea. However, within a month I signed on with a training consultancy and soon set out on the bumpy two-hour journey to my first assignment. Squeezed between the mosquito infested mangroves of Thane creek and the soaring rocky outcrops of the panoramic Western Ghats, Navi Mumbai, or, New Bombay, offers a relatively affordable alternative to industrial and residential real estate across the harbour in Mumbai proper. Conceived several decades ago as a ‘dream on dude’ solution to decongest the island city, the predominating architectural style apes the concrete clichés of 1960s East Germany—juxtaposed with unintended tributes to ‘Vegas’. Motoring tentatively along the causeway in a vintage taxi, road debris bounced up through the rusted floor board. Rapidly receding agricultural plots and grazing land alternated with refineries, storage tanks, and chemical plants resembling the pipe organs of Dante’s inferno. An occasional whiff of some decidedly carcinogenic vapour mingled with the taxi’s haze of sticky incense—offered to the vehicle’s dashboard deity—providing consolation against the wildly oncoming traffic and absent seat belts.

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A small armada of signboards imprinted with yet more high-tech monikers and pompous logos finally announced my approach to an entire district of call centres and technology facilities. As my new workplace came into view, I imagined myself being an important dignitary being greeted by the thick wheezing crowds of 20-something’s who lined the lane out on a smoking break. After a sign-in ritual that, in hindsight, made my previous Indian immigration formalities seem like diplomatic immunity, I was subjected to a body search that invoked images of Rikers Island. Relieved to be spared the anticipated cavity investigation, a young officious woman, with a propensity to continually repeat the call centre mantras of ‘absolutely’ and ‘not a problem’, escorted me to my workstation: a glass walled cubicle which served as a promontory looking out onto a sea of bedlam. They call it ‘The Floor’, and it resembled an Indian version of a university frat party—with computers in place of kegs of beer. Young men, some in traditional kurtas, others clad in Mega Death gear, sang, danced, and launched wads of paper through the air to the beat of an imaginary Bollywood soundtrack. Meanwhile, their female counterparts in salwars and jeans sat diligently tethered by headsets to their terminals, waiting for the next call to ‘pop up’ on screen. This was the staging ground for the relentless onslaught of generally unwanted phone solicitations; irritating millions of Americans daily across a multitude of time zones. Occasionally ‘The Floor’ would break out into markedly wilder pandemonium, not unlike a home team goal in a Brazilian football stadium. Every sale of a credit protection plan, emergency roadside assistance scheme, or online medical programme was both an individual and team victory. After all, this is a job that depends on cut to cut sales quotas, and can mean the difference between earning a bigger salary than Dad could ever dream of, or hawking bhel puris on Juhu beach. In this establishment, exuberant behaviour was encouraged and often rewarded with small cash incentives and other goodies to boost morale and keep the tally of sales mounting on the scoreboard that dominated the game show-like environment. My function in this unfolding Rube Goldbergesque process was to monitor calls, and make notes on quality issues, and to make recommendations on how to inculcate more effective speaking and

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comprehension skills. Rumours were circulating that the account I was assigned to was at risk due to poor sales. When I finally met the department head with that unmistakable deer caught in the headlights demeanour, I got down to work. It was surreal to witness rowdy Hindi street banter give way to tentative attempts at American accented English when calls were finally connected. The players on this stage were acting in a real time drama which seemed to demand an aptitude for schizophrenia. There was something almost pornographic about invisibly listening in on dozens of conversations between complete strangers—separated by vast geographical and even wider cultural distances. I felt embarrassed and maybe, even a little ashamed when I heard guys from North Carolina, Maine, or Oregon tell kids from Vashi, Belapur, or Ulhasnagar to ‘fuck off and never call this number again’. I listened to racial abuse, angry tirades about American jobs outsourced to India, and conversations slammed shut before they even began. I even saw tears, and plenty of dejection. In this business, they were occupational hazards—like in war—nothing personal. But, once in a while, the roar from ‘The Floor’ would signal a sale, and a complicated set of calculations would be set in motion determining conversion rate percentages and other arcane statistics. These figures would calibrate the appropriate quotient of elation or shame to be shared by the sales team at the shift debriefing. Nights later, with my evaluations completed and recommendations printed in hard copy, I was assigned to work out of a basement conference room to instruct agents pulled off ‘The Floor’ for refresher training. I’ve never thought of myself as paranoid, but somehow the mildew that had formed sinister looking stalactites on the airconditioning ducts in that damp low-ceiling room, devoid of sunlight, was a sure harbinger of some local cousin of Legionnaires’ disease. The lights and most of the audio–visual equipment in the room were actually controlled from some kind of nerve centre on an upper floor. A phone call was required to make the stuff work. Kind of spooky, but like everything else thus far, I got over it. Unlike some of the other call centres in the region, candidates hired by this firm were not from the sophisticated south Bombay or western suburban set. These recent college graduates came from modest middle-class, so-called vernacular backgrounds, and didn’t speak much

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English at home, read much in any language, or travel widely. Most of what they seemed to believe about the world, beyond their education and limited personal experience, was gleaned from TV and popular movies; not unlike their American counterparts. Although their collective communication skills were in urgent need of work, the class members were warm, enthusiastic, quick on the uptake, and embodied many of the positive qualities and values that people tend to abandon when mobility moves upward. I was humbled when my new students told me about the sacrifices they were making for their families, or elaborated on various nuances of Indian culture and philosophy that might stop a New York University (NYU) professor cold in his tracks. Luckily, I had scope to make the seven-hour plus communication improvement sessions interesting for all of us...and presented challenging vocabulary-building drills, read from motivational books, did yoga and breathing exercises, watched films, discussed a huge range of issues, and laughed a lot. The sense of bonding with these good hearted kids was fabulous and I was actually beginning to feel respected when, without warning, I was transferred out of my basement clubhouse and out onto ‘The Floor’. I was quietly taken aside by a friendly colleague and informed that two conspiring internal trainers resented my growing popularity and engineered my exile. My determination to generate funds helped see me through new depths of boredom that made me feel like my head was being held underwater. This latest assignment required me to roll in my swivel chair from agent to agent, hour after hour, reciting a three page script, word for word ad nauseum; working on pacing, pitching, pausing, pronunciation, and various other parameters. Since this particular project worked from a ‘verbatim script’, any deviation from it was out of bounds and could lead to trouble. If it wasn’t written in the script, the agent had no business saying it. ‘Blind monitoring’ kept things in check. There was animated speculation as to why this account was changed from an ‘open script’, where the agent is free to say whatever to get the job done, and generally enjoys a much higher success rate than does the verbatim model. One rumour speculated that agents were occasionally offending customers with freestyle chat, which supposedly drew vociferous complaints. Others said that the

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inevitable fall in sales, due to the verbatim script, was a good excuse for the California-based client to gradually pull the contract and award it to another vendor. I didn’t know or care, I just did the best I could to will the hands of the clock to move faster so I could go home to sleep and forget the monologue that buzzed in my ears like a cloud of blood drunk mosquitoes. Returning home wasn’t nearly as easy as my ‘against all odds’ taxi schlep in the direction of work. Due to its remote location, in the most godforsaken sector of the Navi Mumbai industrial zone, taxis were impossible to find at 2 am. Nocturnal combat with the sadists running the company motor pool was essential in order to get my nightly seat assignment in the designated vehicle, which plied back to my part of town at the end of the shift. Mission accomplished, paperwork in hand, I was compelled to transform myself into an even uglier beast each night when attempting to round up the seven females on the official transport list, who would disappear indefinitely into the canteen, cyber centre, toilet, or who the hell knows where. The coach driver had strict instructions to idle stoically in place, filling the interior with carbon monoxide, until the seats were finally occupied by each person on the manifest. The image of a homesick middle-aged guy, on a soggy monsoon night, held hostage by a pack of 19 year old Pepsi swilling, mobile phone obsessed,...er...um...ah...co-workers, is rather pathetic. The 2:45 am journey home had its own challenges. The obligatory three digit decibel orgy of Bollywood evergreens and the campfire sensibility it inspired, forced me to seek refuge in my growing repertoire of meditation techniques, positive affirmations, and yogic kriyas. I’m now certain that the spiritual and philosophical traditions of India would never have taken shape on such a magnificent scale had it not been for the irritants dished out in equal measure over the millennia on this subcontinent. Sure, I suppose I can bitch and complain about the stress; the ‘diabetes specials’ served up in the canteen; the hidden Machiavellian agendas; the many hazards of travelling to and from work; no praise– only criticism; and my unending search for sleep at daybreak, when India pounds, blares, and shouts itself silly until twilight. But I did get to interact with some truly wonderful people, and was fortunate to actually receive my skillfully negotiated salary, without all of the

Call Centre Conundrum

319

begging, fighting, and dance sequences that can often be expected in this country before a payment finally makes it into hand. My tenure at this call centre abruptly ended with my brilliant idea of creating a phonetic version of the script. It wuz ree-lee e-zee. All I had ta doo wuz ta rite the skript out ex-act-lee like an Uh-mare-uhkin wood say it, and en-nee one with a lid-dle bit uv am-bish-in kood kwik-lee lern ta speek too, an bee un-dur-stood much bed-der by Uhmare-uh-kins. It was magic. The agents began excelling on the phone and the numbers on ‘The Floor’ were improving day by day. Approached by the beaming management, I was requested to transcribe an entire pile of scripts from several of the struggling departments. Upon accepting the challenge, I was practically frog marched to the nearest workstation. My new assignment took time and patience, but it came to me naturally; and I wrapped it up within a week. Triumphantly delivering the immaculate documents by internal email, duly proud of my inventiveness, I was promptly informed that I was to be placed on standby until further notice, to wait for a new work schedule that was never issued. I had inadvertently made myself redundant—less than two months into my brave new career... I could have called it call centre seppuku, but instead of a sense of glory and honour, I felt like a choot, outwitted by a cabal of cost-cutting bean counters and a few internal trainers with whom I, an ‘American English speaker’, wood all-waze hav the last werd.

320

Appendix

16 Appendix

Literacy, Print, Radio, and Television Growth 1941–2006

450,000,000

400,000,000

350,000,000

300,000,000 250,000,000

200,000,000

150,000,000

100,000,000 50,000,000

99

97

95

01 20

19

19

93

91

89

Readership—All Periodicals

19

19

19

85

87

19

19

83

81

79

Average Daily Newspaper Readership

19

19

19

19

19

77

0

TV Viewership

A Chart 1: Readership Growth versus Television Viewership Growth, 1977–2001

Appendix

321

800,000,000 700,000,000 600,000,000 500,000,000 400,000,000 300,000,000 200,000,000 100,000,000

19 4 19 1 4 19 4 4 19 7 5 19 0 5 19 3 5 19 6 5 19 9 6 19 2 6 19 5 6 19 8 7 19 1 7 19 4 7 19 7 8 19 0 8 19 3 8 19 6 8 19 9 9 19 2 9 19 5 9 20 8 01

0

Literacy

Daily Newspaper Circulation

Number of Radio Sets

Number of TV Sets

A Chart 2: Growth in Print, Radio, and Television and in Literacy, 1941–2001 1,200,000,000

1,000,000,000

800,000,000

600,000,000

400,000,000

200,000,000

19 4 19 1 4 19 5 4 19 9 5 19 3 5 19 7 6 19 1 6 19 5 6 19 9 7 19 3 7 19 7 8 19 1 8 19 5 8 19 9 9 19 3 9 20 7 0 20 1 05

0

Population

Literacy

A Chart 3: Growth in Population versus Growth in Literacy, 1941–2005

322

Appendix

1,200,000,000

1,000,000,000

800,000,000

600,000,000

400,000,000

0

1941 1945 1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 1969 1973 1977 1981 1985 1989 1993 1997 2001 2005

200,000,000

Population

Literacy

Average Daily Newspaper Readership

Daily Newspaper Circulation Readership—All Periodicals

A Chart 4: Growth in Readership and in Literacy, versus Population Growth, 1941–2005 1,200,000,000 1,000,000,000 800,000,000 600,000,000

400,000,000 200,000,000

19 4 19 1 4 19 5 4 19 9 5 19 3 5 19 7 6 19 1 6 19 5 6 19 9 7 19 3 7 19 7 8 19 1 8 19 5 8 19 9 9 19 3 9 20 7 0 20 1 05

0

Population TV Viewership

Literacy

Average Daily Newspaper Readership

A Chart 5: Growth in Newspaper Readership and Television Viewership versus Growth in Population and in Literacy, 1941–2005

Appendix

323

350,000,000 300,000,000

Amount

250,000,000 200,000,000 150,000,000 100,000,000 50,000,000

19

4 19 1 4 19 5 4 19 9 5 19 3 5 19 7 6 19 1 6 19 5 6 19 9 7 19 3 7 19 7 8 19 1 8 19 5 8 19 9 9 19 3 9 20 7 0 20 1 05

0

Years Daily Newspaper Circulation Average Daily Newspaper Readership

A Chart 6: Growth in Newspaper Circulation versus Estimated Readership, 1941–2005

1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962

0.2831 124,347,364

439,234,771

66,187,447

0.1833

361,088,090

38,780,993

Literacy

0.1217

Lit%

318,660,580

Population

26,500,000

12,390,000

2,478,000

5,300,000

12,500,000

Average Daily Newspaper Readership

2,500,000

Daily Newspaper Circulation

6.0332

3.4618

9,404,000

Daily Readership— Rch % All Periodicals

3,089,448

6,428,262

2,142,754

1,638,957

546,319

1,029,816

827,865

Radio Listenership

275,955

Number of Radio Sets

A Table 1: Literacy and Media Growth, 1941–2006

41 58

21

Number of TV sets

205 290

TV Viewership

(contd...)

0.00005

TV reach %

1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983

0.4142 283,034,912

683,329,097

Literacy

0.3445 188,841,000

Lit%

548,159,652

Population

Appendix Table (contd...)

46,915,000 47,305,000 53,360,000

72,655,000 76,275,000 11.1623 74,235,000

9,222,000 9,383,000 9,461,000 10,672,000

14,531,000 15,255,000 14,847,000

8.2093

5,400,000

Number of Radio Sets

33,822,000 34,075,000 37,437,000 40,850,000 46,449,000 20,670,000 50,921,000 51,102,000 50,094,000

12,894,535

29,303,000 11,750,000

21,676,000 21,687,000

Daily Readership— Rch % All Periodicals

45,000,000

31,600,000

Average Daily Newspaper Readership

9,000,000

6,320,000 6,600,000

5,288,000 5,600,000

Daily Newspaper Circulation

62,010,000

38,683,605

35,250,000

16,200,000

Radio Listenership

93 649 4,170 6,184 7,765 12,303 24,833 44,855 84,114 163,446 275,424 455,430 479,026 676,615 899,123 1,191,311 1,547,918 1,672,568 2,095,537 2,783,370

Number of TV sets

465 3,245 20,850 30,920 38,825 61,515 124,165 224,275 420,570 817,230 1,377,120 2,277,150 2,395,130 3,383,075 4,495,615 5,956,555 7,739,590 8,362,840 10,477,685 13,916,850

TV Viewership

(contd...)

1.22384

0.04091

TV reach %

1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

0.6990 0.7110

0.6580 676,825,596

1,028,610,328

Literacy

0.5211 441,008,331

Lit%

846,302,688

Population

Appendix Table (contd...)

177,500,000 201,000,000

291,835,980 294,021,015

35,500,000 40,200,000

58,367,196 58,804,203

241,723,427 23.5000

109,245,000 113,035,000 107,815,000 115,485,000 113,185,000 121,500,000 14.3566 140,460,000 147,440,000

21,849,000 22,607,000 21,563,000 23,097,000 22,637,000 24,300,000 28,092,000 29,488,000

Radio Listenership

95,000,000 285,000,000

Number of Radio Sets

118,257,597 125,000,000 375,000,000

67,826,482 114,000,000 342,000,000 70,720,512 115,000,000 345,000,000

63,667,000 67,611,000

64,051,000 56,830,000 54,873,000 58,284,000 53,160,000

61,147,000

Daily Readership— Rch % All Periodicals

93,635,000

Average Daily Newspaper Readership

18,727,000

Daily Newspaper Circulation

112,000,000

79,000,000 80,000,000

3,632,328 6,750,000 11,000,000 13,256,000 17,339,000 22,539,000 27,820,000 30,803,000 34,858,000 40,337,000 45,680,000 52,300,000 57,700,000 63,200,000 69,100,000

Number of TV sets

560,000,000

395,000,000 400,000,000

18,161,640 33,750,000 55,000,000 66,280,000 86,695,000 112,695,000 139,100,000 154,015,000 174,290,000 201,685,000 228,400,000 261,500,000 288,500,000 316,000,000 345,500,000

TV Viewership

38.40133

18.19857

TV reach %

326 Appendix

Appendix

327

CHARTS PREPARED BY BONNIE DIXSON Sources 1. Literacy and Population Census of India 1941, 1951, 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991 Literacy and population information for 2001 is from: 1. Statistical Abstract of India. Central Statistical Organisation, Ministry of Planning, Government of India, 2002, pp. 447–8, Table 33.8 ‘Literacy Rate in India.’ 2. www.censusindia.gov.in 2. Newspaper Circulation Summary of sources for newspaper circulation: 1. Mass Media in India. Periodical compiled by Research and Reference Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. New Delhi Publication Division. 2. Press in India: Annual Report of the Registrar of Newspapers for India. Office of the Registrar of Newspapers for India, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1965. 3. Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution, 2nd edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. 4. S.C. Bhatt, Indian Press Since 1955, New Delhi: Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 1997. 5. Press and Advertisers Yearbook, New Delhi: India News and Feature Alliance Publications, 1964. References by specific years: 1951, 1961, 1971 (Robin Jeffrey, India’s Newspaper Revolution) 1963, 1964 (Press in India 1965) 1966, 1976, 1986, 1993 (S.C. Bhatt, Indian Press Since 1955) 1974 (Press and Advertisers Yearbook 1977) 1998, 1999 (Press in India) Remaining figures for newspapers from Mass Media in India. Average Daily Reach of newspapers calculated using circulation numbers multiplied by average household size (estimated at five).

328

Appendix

3. Television Data 1. Mass Media in India. Periodical compiled by Research and Reference Division, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. New Delhi Publication Division. 2. Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business, 2nd edition. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2006. References by specific years: 1959 through 1993—Mass Media in India 1994 through 2002—(Vanita Kohli, The Indian Media Business, New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2003.) Average Home Television Viewership based on number of Televisions multiplied by five (average estimated household size). 4. Radio Data 1. A.K. Chanda Committee on Broadcasting and Information Media, ‘Radio and Television: Report.’New Delhi: Ministry of Information & Broadcasting, Government of India, 1966. 2. Mass Media in India. 3. The Hindu 25 August 2002, ‘The Voice of India’; http:// w w w. h i n d u o n n e t . c o m / m a g / 2 0 0 2 / 0 8 / 2 5 / s t o r i e s / 2002082500090100.htm References by specific years: 1947, 1950, 1956, 1960, 1965—Chanda Report. 1998, 1999, 2002—The Hindu (cited above). Remaining figures from Mass Media in India; comprehensive data not available.

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17 Contributors

C.A. BAYLY is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge and Fellow, St Catharine’s College.

RAJEEV DHAVAN, a Senior Advocate, practices at the Supreme Court of India, and has argued many constitutional cases including those related to the Babri Masjid and Mandal.

PETER G. FRIEDLANDER is Senior Lecturer, Hindi Language and South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.

K. GOPINATH is on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science & Automation (CSA), Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore.

RANAJIT GUHA, a historian of South Asia, is the founding editor of the Subaltern Studies Collective, and has several publications to his credit.

CHARU GUPTA is Associate Professor of History, University of Delhi. ANIKET JAAWARE teaches at the Department of English, University of Pune.

ROBIN JEFFREY is Professor Emeritus, La Trobe University, Melbourne, and Professor, Australian National University, Canberra.

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Contributors

MARY E. JOHN is Director, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi.

PURNIMA MANKEKAR is Associate Professor, Departments of Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles.

WILLIAM M AZZARELLA is Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago.

SEVANTI NINAN is a media critic, author, and founder-editor of the media watchdog TheHoot.org.

FRANCESCA ORSINI is Reader, Literatures of North India, School of Oriental and African Studies, London.

CHRISTOPHER PINNEY is Professor of Anthropology and Visual Culture, University College London.

ARVIND RAJAGOPAL is Professor, Departments of Media, Culture and Communication; Sociology; and Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University.

G. KRISHNA REDDY is Professor and Director, Centre for the Study of Social Exclusion and Inclusive Policy, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad.

SANJAY SETH is Professor of Politics and Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London.

D. WOOD is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and a former Fulbright scholar in India. He currently heads the Music Department at Whistling Woods International, Mumbai, among Asia’s leading film institutes.