In January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence .
See Full PDF See Full PDFIn January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence times, around the symbol of Lord Ram, led by Hindu nationalists. The complexion of Indian politics was irrevocably changed thereafter. In this book, Arvind Rajagopal analyses this extraordinary series of events. While audiences may have thought they were harking back to an epic golden age, Hindu nationalist leaders were embracing the prospects of neoliberalism and globalisation. Television was the device that hinged these movements together, symbolising the new possibilities of politics, at once more inclusive and authoritarian. Simultaneously, this study examines how the larger historical context was woven into and changed the character of Hindu nationalism.
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in Adam Possamai (ed.), Handbook of Hyper-real Religions, Leiden, Brill, 2012, pp. 279-297.
"On Sunday mornings from 25 January 1987 to 31 July 1988 between eighty and one hundred million Indians watched Ramayan, a 78-episode television series directed by Ramanand Sagar (Kumar 2006, 38). This was a realisation of the Ramayana, one of India’s most loved stories, an epic regarded as smrti (“that which is recollected”) scripture, and was shown on Doordarshan (the national broadcaster, founded in 1959). Though derided by critics for its gaudy costumes, extremely slow narrative pace, and low-quality special effects (Lutgendorf 1990, 144-147) Ramayan evoked spontaneous outbursts of popular piety and became an important focus of devotion, with viewers performing purification rituals before the programme began and adorning television sets with flowers and incense, consecrating them as altars (Mitchell 2005, 2). This chapter argues that Ramayan concretised a religious and aesthetic vision that was deeply imbricated with Hindu nationalism, and that its enthusiastic viewers received it religiously in their daily lives. Watching television became for many a religious act, and personal devotion to the actors playing the gods emerged as a form of popular piety. Ritual and practice marked out Ramayan-watching as an act of worship. It is argued that the cinematic and televisual media were peculiarly appropriate vehicles for the experience of the divine within the Indian religious context. This is partly because Hinduism lacks explicit distinctions between this world and the otherworld, and between the gods and human beings. First, the development of the genre of mythological films in India is sketched and the Sagar Ramayan is contextualised within this genre. Then the ways in which Ramayan represents a source of popular-culture mediated religion are examined, and these new devotional forms are linked back to traditional Hindu understandings of darśan (seeing the divine) and bhakti (loving devotion). Finally, the imbrication of this televisual piety with Hindu nationalist politics is reviewed. The chapter concludes that the hyper-reality of this religious form was only imperfectly realized, in that the popular cultural rituals supplemented rather than disestablished traditional ritual."
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In a milieu inundated by ever more striking and sophisticated technologies, television may appear to us a dated medium, too familiar to provoke any special interest despite its pervasive influence. But when in the 1980s in India the TV started to become a feature of middle-class homes it was no less than a magical device –on one hand, treasured by the state (which controlled broadcasting rights) for its instant effects and extensive reach and, on the other, its rationed telecasts eagerly awaited, and gaped at, by fascinated masses. This technological development coincided with a period of important upheavals in the nation’s nascent postcolonial history and politics. Till the 1970s, the Congress had ruled as the preeminent national party, the overarching vanguard “uplifting” India and its populace into the committee of nations and peoples of the world. By then, however, the limitations of a putative democratic socialism had combined with other national and global developments to unde.
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South Asian Cultural Studies Online Journal
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies
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This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution). Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances. In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.
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South Asian History and Culture
