Media and mediated popular cultures in India

We live in worlds of signs and wonders. Nowhere is this more evident than in the contemporary mega-cities of India. For over a century now, urban sociologists, flaneurs, ethnographers, psycho-geographers, and semioticians have been pointing to the power of the visual media and publicity of the city street – not just the street lights, signboards, posters, and graffiti, but the very design of the motor car and the tram, of shopfronts and sidewalks. The new century has brought a whole host of new technological artefacts within hand’s reach of all but the poorest denizens of the city street – the cell phone, the iPad, and attendant applications that help us navigate the city and connect and network cyber and physical spaces. These technologies are creating new cultures, material and aesthetic, cyber and physical space-making of new kinds that do not simply alter older traditions but transmogrify them into new shapes and flows. Older forms of social theorization of structure-agency, objectivity-subjectivity, human being and technological artifice are in turn being rethought afresh in new material contexts, even as we have yet to absorb what the dominant media technologies of the past century – the book, the photograph, the neon sign, television and cinema – mean for understanding human society. In recent issues, Thesis Eleven has been exploring these themes of the ways our new, globalized technological social worlds are mediating our social worlds and annihilating time. Peter Murphy and others explored a post-discursive social theory of knowledge in Issue 89: ‘Medium Theory and Social Knowledge’ (2007). As Murphy himself states: ‘The key insight of medium theory is that linguistic acts (signs, symbols, codes, grammars, justifications, writings, and so on) are only a tiny aspect of the way in which human beings mediate and communicate what they know … symbols turn into artefacts, messages into mediums, content into forms, and ideas into objects – and vice versa’ (Murphy 2007: 3–4). This is a more dialectical – or at least paradoxical – reading of media than Friedrich Kittler’s archaeology of media technologies that sought to show how media determine each historical epoch and its cultural, social, and political environs (see Fleithmann 2011), for it shows how the artistic and technological artefacts and symbols of human creation produce their own effects on human sociality and self-reflexivity.

This in turn was the focus of our special themed issue on ‘The Artwork Made Me Do It: New Directions in the Sociology of Arts, Aesthetics and Performances’ (de la Fuente 2010). As Agnes Heller has emphasized time and again, if modernity is founded on the paradox of freedom this means that whatever material logics are at work in the power of social making, there is always a dialectical interplay of our collective historical and technological imaginations (Heller 2005: 63–79). The greater part of critical theory’s preoccupation has been to explore this dialectic across the past four centuries of first European and then American modernity. The tale of modernity has been a chasing of the tail of trans-Atlantic metropolitan centres of creative-destruction of industrial-capitalism and its colonial effects and reverberations across the globe to create an increasingly integrated world-system. The past decade has witnessed a growing critical interest in the spectre of post-colonial nationalisms and multiple modernities. Johann P. Arnason – in these pages and in his books (see 2003 for example) – has been a notable path-finder in seeking a non-ethnocentric critical theory of multiple modernities that retrieves the longer term structures and traditions of civilizational theories and integrates a hermeneutical horizon of social imaginaries (the collective self-reflexivity of social knowledges of all cultures).

India is one such alternative modernity to that of the trans-Atlantic pathways of Western Europe and the Americas and increasingly we are hearing new critical voices from the sub-continent itself who are not only ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty 2000; Chatterjee 1993) in the global epic of multiple modernities but also attending to the everyday minutiae of their own mediated urban/e worlds. Indian cities have been the sites of radical transformations in visual material cultures over the past century and this has been radically ratcheted up in the past two decades of mobile technologies – from print to film to cable TV and the cell phone. Indian cities are the crucibles of innovation and tradition and we are only beginning to grasp their particular character. The arc of cultural traffic, technological change and knowledge transfers moves incessantly across all points of the compass and over the past two centuries. India is pivotal to the global story in ways that the West is only gradually coming to appreciate in its immensity and complexity. This issue contains a number of new essays by India scholars exploring the mediated nature of modern popular visual and print cultures – from the modern book to film and photography, but also in the signs and symbols and advertisements on our streets and on our screens – as they have been uncovered, developed, played, performed and interpreted throughout the Indian subcontinent. We shall turn to address the impact of more recent internet media technologies in future issues.

The overall arc of our themed issue moves across print and visual media alike in and through their production, distribution and consumption: from books, signs, ID cards, comics, photos, and film, cross-cutting chronologies, cultures, the quotidian, the mass-produced and the critical avant-garde aesthetics of media in equal measure.

We commence our explorations in perhaps a surprising place, with a focus on tea as an everyday drink that is both the signifier and the media of empire and colony, nation and city. Philip Lutgendorf’s article on the social history of chai in India is no less a story of global proportions and everyday addictions. By the 19th century, the British had become addicted to their ‘daily cuppa’ but were not able to meet their insatiable appetite for tea from within the bounds of their own empire. They had three options – war, trade, and self-production. They took these up in turn. As China was a reluctant trader, the British went to war, and then offered an alternative drug of opium so as to force the recalcitrant Chinese to trade with them. Finally, the British started tea plantations in occupied territories of India and Ceylon; these were so productive as to create a new challenge of over-production. New markets beyond English domestic consumption needed to be created. What better place than India itself? So runs Lutgendorf’s fascinating history of changes in marketing, transportation, consumption, dietary and social practices, and urban and rural social space that characterized the 20th century in South Asia. Lutgendorf highlights the central role of mass-produced images in shaping modern tastes, in creating local markets that shaped the future social imaginary of national identity. In ‘Making Tea in India: Chai, Capitalism, Culture’, Lutgendorf examines the process by which tea, a plant and product introduced into the Indian subcontinent in the early 19th century as a colonial cash crop, became indigenized and popularized as chai, often regarded today as India’s ‘national drink’. This process mainly occurred during the 20th century and involved aggressive and innovative marketing by both British and Indian commercial interests, advances in the technology of processing Assam tea, and changes in social space and practice, especially in urban areas. Much like the Irish and potatoes, the Italians and tomatoes, today the world’s denizens assume that Indians have always been tea drinkers since time immemorial. National identity and myth-making are historical constructs of our own invention – and modern visual and print media are important to the creation of modern nation-states as imagined communities – what Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) dubbed as ‘the invention of tradition’.

Print culture has been central to Indian civilizations for well over two millennia, but in the modern epoch India has been a global crucible of books, pamphlets, magazines, and other print media. Benedict Anderson (2006) argued that print capitalism has been a major source of anti-imperial movements since the 18th century and the media for new nationalist imaginaries. This is particularly pertinent to the epic of modern Indian anti-British colonialization struggles and the various regional and national movements for imagining modern India. But what of the printed medium itself? Books are artefacts with material traces and histories that carry their own cultures. Abhijit Gupta’s article takes up some of the Bengal story by surveying the early history of printing in colonial Bengal, in particular the rise of the indigenous book trade in Calcutta which saw some of the earliest attempts to transform the printed book from being an object of fear and fascination to one that could be made familiar with use. The popular reception of the book [pothi] in India, however, is a different story to that of Western Europe (cf. Briggs and Burke 2002). The materials for producing manuscripts were not as expensive and pothis were revered but not rare objects before the introduction of print technology in India. Through a close examination of the interface between the manuscript tradition and the printed book, Gupta shows how the ongoing presence of the former on the title pages and other paratextual matter of the printed text facilitated the socialization of the book, leading to the rise of a substantial interpretive community by the middle of the 19th century.

But if the popularity of the printed book rode on the back of a pre-existing familiarity with the manuscript tradition among the reading public in India, it also carried the seeds of a contrary tendency to limit and control public reading. With Peter Friedlander we turn to another early moment in the 19th century, but this time to examine the losses entailed in the transition from oral to print through a study of Kabīr, the popular 15th-century poet-saint who became a formative figure in the emergence of Hindi literature. Friedlander argues that the contemporary construction of Kabīr as ‘the champion of an earthy spirituality’ was forged only in the late 19th century within a nationalist discourse which sought to erase other lineages of Kabīr. The multiple identities of Kabīr which were transmitted through oral and manuscript-based traditions were never an issue before the 19th century. With the introduction of print technology and the process of compiling, editing and publishing the verses, however, editors were compelled to take decisions that at once limited the number of legitimate interpreters and restricted the possibilities for variation which were inherent in the transmission of the verses within the oral and manuscript spheres. Local perceptions of Kabīr now gave way to nascent national conceptions, eventually resulting in the contemporary image of a secular Kabīr who conveniently stands for religious harmony more than an evenly distributed distaste for institutionalized religion in general.

The secular construction of Kabīr spoke to a certain vision of a modern India that was forged in the wake of independence. Nandini Chandra’s essay tracks the gradual dismantling of this vision, not by a return to the more primordial loyalties which purportedly lay buried within and repressed by the nation-state but by the challenge posed by contemporary forces over and beyond it. Positing a rough distinction between a ‘pre-terror era’ of development planning and a more recent time of terror that coincided with a global ascendency of neo-liberalization, Chandra argues that comics of the development era very consciously situated themselves within ‘a modern and rational grid, where science and technology formed the core to progress and development’. They also tended to champion the cause of national autonomy and the implied role of the national bourgeoisie in protecting the nation from villains who were mostly drawn from urban and metropolitan centres while also sometimes singling out the US with its world hegemonic agenda as the enemy. The heroes of these early comic books were rigged out in battle gear but largely remained affiliated to the nation-state, either as members of vigilante self-defence squads or bona fide members of the police force. Under the neoliberal regime of the 1990s these heroes were displaced by the figure of the costumed superhero. This new genre of comic books, she argues, coincides with the consolidation of the neoliberal state whose heightened security consciousness works primarily on the principles of a flattening of the master-slave dynamic. In the superhero comics the terrain of conflict shifts from the rural-urban dynamic of the nationalist imaginary to an urban global complex where both villain and hero are mutually implicated. The role of the state too shifts from bringing outlaws to book to the more Hobbesian performance of visiting violence upon its own people. In such a superhero imaginary, the people cease to be heroic. At best, endowed with anarchic potentials, they are ready grist to the mill of the will-to-power of global super-villains.

A very different view of ‘the people’ is found in Sanjay Srivastava’s article on the print cultures of deception, simulation and dissimulation. Srivastava looks at a variety of fake identity cards and permits which are available for purchase, like any other commodity, from persons mediating between the state and its people. While ‘the people’ in Chandra’s analysis above are presented as vulnerable to manipulation by the more powerful, for the people in Srivastava’s analysis manipulation is the people’s own chosen means of securing access to livelihood and residence in the city. At the same time as the relationship between the state and its subjects is mediated by a monetary transaction, counterfeiting also spawns a web of other, non-commodified relationships which serve to produce the semblance of a community built on a degree of trust between the counterfeiter and his clients. Fake documents which begin their journey as commodities at some point drop out of the circuit of exchange to tentatively secure their owners’ identity in relation to the state (which in the process is revealed to be less monolithic than is generally assumed), but succeed even better at binding their owners to new modes of community in the city (cf. Sundaram 2010).

The city is yet again the site of unexpected intimacies in Ken Botnick and Ira Raja’s photo article ‘The Unruly City: Signs, Streets, and Democratic Spaces’. The focus here is on one aspect of a conflict at the core of the many questions concerning the future of the urban landscape in India: between a modernist design-aesthetic privileging uniformity and predictability and what many consider to be the unsightly presence of a chaotic local aesthetic. Hand-painted signs, a hallmark of Indian urban experience, are among the worst offenders in this regard as they are not readily assimilated to a modernist aesthetic. Additionally, since these are called upon largely to sell ordinary objects of everyday use (unlike digital signage used to sell more high-end commodities), hand-painted signage tends to come in for special attack because its distinctly local and regional Indian aesthetics epitomise the doubtable tastes of an amorphous mass public. In this light the drive for visual homogeneity which characterized the move to transform Delhi into a world-class city – a drive especially strong in the lead-up to the Commonwealth Games in 2010 – could be read as a wish to erase popular expressivity in the name of elite values that are deemed to be more cosmopolitan or Western at the expense of the quotidian, the vernacular, and the populist (cf. Swati Chattopadhyay 2009). This implicit hierarchy of value also privileges Western taste-making over and against India’s difference that is presumed ‘less civilized’. But as Botnick and Raja argue, the presence of hand-painted signboards in the city is an aspect of its democratic, expressive culture. Through a close examination of a series of hand-painted signs which display their sensitivity to location, individuality and nuance, their textual indeterminacy, their accessibility as a medium of self-expression and agency, this essay makes a case for seeing hand-painted signage as making a critical contribution to the collective experience of intimacy in the city.

Ethics and aesthetics are counter-posed and united in Vijay Mishra’s ‘Salman Rushdie, Aesthetics and Bollywood Popular Culture’. Rushdie is arguably the most globally renowned expatriate Indian novelist and public intellectual writing in the English language. Mishra makes two moves. First, he deals with the manner in which Rushdie’s works engage with the heterogeneous logics of ethics and aesthetics. Drawing upon the work of Jacques Rancière, he argues that Rushdie neutralizes the two by introducing what Rancière calls a dissensus in the ethical-aesthetic hierarchy. The dissensus works on a principle of ‘excess’ so that within the domain of aesthetics the ethical is pushed to its limits. The order of desire (aesthetics) and the order of knowledge (ethics) are no longer seen as hierarchical and mutually exclusive categories. Second, Mishra moves to look at an early unpublished work by Rushdie that draws attention to the centrality of the material and imaginative centrality of the Bollywood film industry to the creation of modern India but also to the form of Rushdie’s own writing. By examining two versions of an early unpublished novel by Rushdie (Madame Rama), it is suggested that Bollywood cinema functions as a mode in which the two orders come together in Rushdie’s work, both thematically and formally. In this unpublished novel can be found the early traces of Rushdie’s belief that works of art are sites of ideological and ethical contestations, and in order to understand these struggles in modern India, the most important modern medium has been the film. In particular, Rushdie believes that the Bombay film industry has been the major articulator and medium for generating the modern Indian social imaginary in all its un/conscious collective reflexivity. Mishra suggests that this is a current that runs through all of Rushdie’s oeuvre, both in his aesthetics of fictive form and in his critical interpretations of India.

Mumbai is not the only site of the subcontinent’s production of the cinematic imaginary; other regional cinema can be said to be counter-hegemonic contestations of the Bollywood trajectory and modus operandi, even as they work out of their own traditions and focus on their own immediate contexts. Bose and Chakravarty’s article explores alternative Bengali cinema in ‘Kolkata Turning: Contemporary Urban Bengali Cinema, Popular Cultures and the Politics of Change’. They explore the shifts in contemporary urban Bengali cinema and map and historicize the main trends in relation to changes in the political fortunes of the city. They identify three new trends in Bengali cinema: First, the inward-looking, often apolitical sketches that celebrate liberal development and psychosomatic indulgences. Second, the sentimental, community-based films that sometime take political changes on board as well, and attempt to bridge the rural-urban divide. Third, cult-ish films of a newer pedigree that show impatience with old Left and progressive values, and are also technically experimental and avant-garde. It is the more experimental forms and self-consciously critical voices of contemporary Bengali film, however, that Bose and Chakravarty find most interesting. They highlight contemporary filmmakers who not only sociologically map the modes of new Kolkata as a city but also comment on the changes that are taking place in the life and minds of its denizens in this changed clime. Bose and Chakravarty are hopeful that these filmmakers symbolize a revitalized cultural politics: while they do not provide easy answers to ameliorating Kolkata’s fraught conditions, the authors suggest that this new generation of progressive filmmakers are posing urgent questions about a variety of alternative political trajectories and agendas to that of the hegemonic state-centric ideologies of Bengal and India at large.

In historical and technological terms, the photograph precedes the moving picture, but here we turn to the still image last. Christopher Pinney, a visual anthropologist with a particular interest in Indian visual cultures, proposes seven theses for conceptualizing photography in the 21st century. The article works as both a montage of his own critical reflections and fieldwork over several decades and a restatement of what a theory of photography can look like today. An answer of sorts is performed by Pushpamala N’s own photographic essay that provides a powerful, thought-provoking conclusion to our collected reflections on word and image: ‘Media India’.