Abstract
India’s much vaunted explosion in printed newspaper circulation since the Emergency has become thoroughly enmeshed in the dynamics of globalised capital over the course of the last two decades. In her debut monograph, anthropologist Sahana Udupa explores what this encounter means for journalism in Bangalore, a city that is often thought to exemplify, for better and for worse, the radical changes that have swept across the country since liberalisation. Rather than telling a linear narrative about the simple commercialisation of news media, this book argues that market forces have collided with and significantly re-arranged Kannada language and caste politics in the city. The latest in an important line of ethnographies about newspapers in India, this nuanced and well-argued book has the added advantage of straddling English and vernacular worlds, allowing Udupa to intervene significantly in how we understand the dynamics of interaction between the language of empire and globalisation and the realm the author terms ‘bhasha’ media.
Among the giants of Indian publishing, Udupa could not have done better than to pick the Times of India (TOI) and its entry into the Bangalore market, as a lens through which to examine claims to building a ‘world class city’ through news media. The TOI model of publishing, whereby as much as 90 per cent of revenue comes from advertising, has changed the rules of the game for all players in the industry. In fact, we learn how the Bangalore TOI did not only report on market forces but actively shaped them, playing a key role in the city’s real estate market boom, for example, through its performative powers of narration in the Times Property supplement. This is a cosy relationship with capital indeed. But while we are often prone to thinking about the commercialisation of news media working in strict contradiction to its power of criticism, the picture drawn in this ethnography is somewhat more complicated. Although thoroughly complicit in promoting a privatised vision of development, with very little room for economic critiques of poverty and inequality, the Bangalore TOI did manage to project itself as an activist paper of sorts, where citizens’ criticism of the political class found public expression. In a familiar post-liberalisation narrative, disillusionment with the development state drives a sense of civics around topics like transportation infrastructure that privilege the middle-class property owner as the normative citizen.
If the English language press, exemplified in the TOI’s self-understanding as cosmopolitan and sophisticated, represents one ideological pole in the field of journalism in Bangalore, the Kannada language press finds itself preoccupied with inhabiting the opposite end of the spectrum, emphasising local politics, language and culture. Scholars are accustomed to thinking about the field of cultural production in terms of an English/vernacular binary, but Udupa develops an argument that takes the structural underpinnings of this binary seriously. By paying attention to specific acts of differentiation between languages and how these are intertwined with the forces of market segmentation, this ethnography contributes to a long series of debates on how to conceptualise the emergent relational aspects of cultural differentiation in moments of ‘excess’ that cannot be reduced to market logics or simple pre-existing ‘cultures’ that have come in closer contact through globalisation. Of particular methodological interest here is the idea that by looking at three papers (Times of India, Bangalore Mirror, Vijaya Karnataka) that are all owned by the same group (Bennett Coleman and Company Limited), the analyst can see the work of relational differentiation in real time as expressed in editorial and journalistic decision making and marketing.
By the final two ethnographic chapters, we land squarely within the world of bhasha media purveying ideas of Bangalore that are often at odds with the world class city narrative emanating from English language, self-styled ‘cosmopolitan’ media outlets. Here, Udupa’s research turns to engage the wider field of language politics, contributing to historical debates on regionalism, caste and literary history that have more often worked with material from the other South Indian languages. Of particular interest to the sociologically inclined reader is the final chapter on caste in the newsroom and in the wider journalistic field. The reader learns a great deal about the forms of contestation that have emerged in the wake of Karnataka’s anti-Brahmin movement, with the rise of Lingayat and Okkaliga journalism for example, in addition to witnessing concrete instances of caste-based discrimination in a world where dalit journalists face innumerable barriers in their quest to access the airwaves of public opinion. I particularly appreciated Udupa’s capacity to draw on her own experience as a journalist, in addition to materials from her more formal ethnographic research, to make the point that the discourse on caste and power in such contexts is always soaked in gender, whether explicitly or in more tacit associations between non-Brahmin assertion and the masculine habitus.
In sum, this book must be read not only by all of those interested in the continuing importance of printed news in a world increasingly defined by digitalisation, but also by anyone concerned with the future of cities as zones of public discourse and conflict. The ways in which urban life is narrated does not only reflect our attitudes to the city; the mass mediation of collective life, as heterogeneous as that category may be in a place like Bangalore, shapes our very capacity to live together. As part of a broader shift in anthropology to consider mass mediation beyond reductionist accounts of technical networks, Udupa’s book has also made a significant contribution to our understanding of globalising cities and the political public sphere itself. These are domains of social theory that we cannot afford to leave to speculation; it is only through this kind of grounded, long-term research that we can ever hope to develop a conceptual vocabulary adequate to the task of deeper comprehension.