Abstract
This book seeks to critically explore the vast terrain of popular culture in India, in the post liberalisation and globalisation age, as refracted by the media (cinema, television, advertising, print and the internet) with a focus on representations of gender. It regards the media as a ‘prime encoder-cum-disseminator of popular culture’ (p. 33), producing hegemonic cultural forms and representations.
The first chapter attempts an overview of contemporary Indian popular culture in the context of a rapidly changing social and media landscape, and introduces key concepts, such as, popular culture, mediation and gender politics.
The second chapter, ‘Indian Media in Transition: Recent Present and Past’, provides a historical account of Indian media, which it broadly divides into the era of state domination and the period of liberalisation. The latter was marked by the entry of satellite channels in 1991, signalling a decline in state control. It regards the change and continuity as simultaneous forces, where apparently ‘new era’ representations of women co-exist with long-standing gender stereotypes. It also examines the emergence of right-wing cultural policing and the media response to this. It regards the media as performing a balancing act as it attempts to reach markets that represent the contending forces of continuity and change.
Chapter 3, ‘Filming Change, Securing Tradition’, explores the terrain of popular cinema with a focus on Bengali cinema. The rationale for the choice of films and filmmakers for analysis is not clearly spelt out. This chapter also examines the work of women filmmakers Aparna Sen and Mira Nair. It briefly mentions the experience of the authors with the censor board without problematising the project of censorship which is based on a simplistic understanding of the cinematic text and its relationship with audiences.
In the next chapter, the institution of television is analysed in terms of its construction of gender and its social responsibility. It points out that the media images propagated by soaps and serials have an agenda of promoting ‘traditional’ roles, mindless of the changes in the world outside, reproducing an upper class/caste Hindu world that excludes all minorities and marginalised social groups.
The fifth chapter starts with a historical account of the role of advertising as represented in Bengali literature. It locates contemporary advertising within the context of globalisation where predominantly stereotypical and conservative representations of women co-exist with ‘the possibility of recognising female viewership and female voyeurism’ (p. 129). It regards advertising in terms of the ‘hypodermic needle method of injecting needs, aspirations, desires’ (p. 131), luring consumers into ‘the seductive world of endless choice’ (p. 131). This notion of a direct impact seems to be a fairly limited way of posing the complex relationships between consumers and the discourses of advertising that obtain in contemporary popular culture.
The chapter on print media undertakes an analysis of the little magazine tradition in Bengal and its contribution to a culture of debate and political dissent. It sees these magazines as resisting the prevailing ethos of globalised consumer culture and as providing alternative spaces for combining the global and the local in interesting ways. The authors also look at women’s magazines, both English and Bengali, with a case study of the Bengali magazine Sananda, tracing the shift towards an increasing emphasis on lifestyle and infotainment in the struggle to retain and expand readership.
The final chapter of the book, ‘Media Responsibility—The Winding Road Ahead’, sets up a dichotomy between ‘popular’ and ‘public interest’, regarding commercialisation of the media as responsible for diminishing the responsibility of the media to provide information and represent diversity. It sees the possibility of a ‘constructive mode of popular culture’ (p. 185) that facilitates public interest through combining entertainment with sensitive representations. It regards the public in the Indian context as reduced to a phantom public with little direct access to the media and makes a case for a shift from a consumer to a citizen paradigm, enabling the emergence of a Habermasian public sphere. It examines the possibilities of both the internet and alternative media in democratising the space of the media. It finally makes a case for media activism that promotes media literacy and media reform.
The book, while covering a vast canvas and providing much information, appears to be somewhat analytically weak for a few reasons. It is based on a simplistic and polarised understanding of tradition as regressive and modernity as progressive. Moreover, its underlying view of media effects appears to hinge on a notion of direct impact and media harms, which leads it to take an uncritical view of censorship, as mentioned earlier. In terms of methodology, its textual analysis tends to limit itself to a description of media content, in the process losing out on a more nuanced understanding of the larger discourses within which these texts are located. This results in its inability to move beyond a general statement about how all these texts represent patriarchal stereotypes of women, which is not a particularly illuminating conclusion. There also seems to be little rationale presented for the specific selection of texts for analysis, as the book moves across a vast terrain through a set of disconnected textual forays. The language is sometimes convoluted and the copy-editing leaves much to be desired. The conclusion of the book, which makes a case for a more democratic and citizen-based popular culture (instead of a mindless consumer culture), hence comes across more as pious exhortation rather than informed analysis.