Abstract
When primordialism is globalised, it produces binaries and complexities. Sahana Udupa’s latest book titled Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics is about the dichotomy between achievement as a homogenous goal and ascription as a complicated given. Interestingly, she situates this larger argument within the context of news-making in India and its concomitant paraphernalia for editors, journalists and readers of the newspapers. Apart from many other things, this book sends out a bold statement in the field of media studies and sociology of media in itself due to the choice of subject, that is, newspapers. In a world that obsesses over digitised media, Udupa chooses to focus on newspaper as the classical form of formalised communication between the press and the public. However, while doing so, Udupa does not undermine the significance of the digital discourse as she sets the terrain of IT revolution as the defining premise of the book.
The book is a product of extensive ethnography conducted in a media house in Bangalore namely Times of India (TOI) between 2008 and 2012 that brings out the anthropological reasoning and unreasoning behind the process of news-making and ultra-urbanisation of a third world neoliberal economy.
The most interesting and capturing term in this book is ‘global’. ‘Global’ encapsulates the dichotomy of identity politics in India at the face of a neoliberal economy that shapes certain class cultures participated by newspapers and news-making. This book deals with the universalism of the ‘global’ interjecting with the particularism of identity—of journalists and readers, too. However, what is compelling and very much acknowledged by the writer as well is that ‘global’ is not standardised. There is no homogeneity in ‘global’; it is multi-lithic. This recognition runs through the book, capturing the defining premise of a neoliberal sentiment that binds the underclass with the middle class in view of a certain social mobility or may be Sanskritisation! Caste complexity and caste identity especially with reference to regionalism and linguistic specification loom large throughout the book, thereby drawing the readers’ attention towards the challenge of defining India from a singular spectrum of the ‘global’.
The book has five chapters apart from the Introduction and the Conclusion. The first chapter titled ‘Regimes of Desire: The Rise of the Times of India’ deals quite literally, as the header suggests with the emergence of TOI and its growing popularity in Bangalore area. However, this chapter also rightly identifies the TOI style of journalistic reporting, editing and analysing that is not restricted to Bangalore but has gone pan-India. The second chapter titled ‘Democracy by Default’ engages with the burden of truth that the journalists in TOI have shifted to its publics. As a result, news reporting relies less and less on objectivity. Udupa calls this trend leading to ‘patterned permeations’, which, it appears, is close to PR campaign and brand management of TOI with the help of local and ‘global’ celebrities—a process that dangerously undermines neutrality as an ethic in journalism. The third chapter titled ‘The Difference Machine: Markets and Field Logics of News’ is like walking through the maze of bilingual, Kannada and English, newsrooms in Bangalore and taking (ethnographic) notes on how different these two organisations are but how palatably they thrive in the physical space of Bangalore. Udupa talks about three kinds of logic of difference that exposes the publics to the field of news-making—the first is the market logic, second is the imaginations of the readers and the third is that of field logics. These logics constitute the core of inter- and intra-organisational differences between Kannada and English media houses, journalists and readers. The next two chapters—the fourth chapter on Kannada bhasha media and the fifth chapter with a telling title of ‘journalists are pimps’ address the myriad of caste, language and class practices in India (with Bangalore as a prototype) that questions that the element of globality in a world-class city. While the Kannada-style news-making is dominated by the caste perception and experience of the journalists and its publics, TOI-style news-making pushes for neoliberal worldview dominated by urbanism—undermining identity politics of ascription. Unlike few other works on similar lines of news-making, Udupa does not end her work with disdain, but offers the multiple possibilities that journalism in India is and will undergo as it responds more and more to globalisation and more particularly, neoliberalism.
By binding together the most crucial stakeholders, that is, state, market and civil society (media, publics and politics), Udupa’s book comes full circle in its enquiry into how complicated the field of journalism has become at the face of the fast-track economy in India today. The content justifies the title throughout. It may also remind the reader of Robin Jeffrey’s India’s Newspaper Revolution: Capitalism, Politics and the Indian Language Press (2000). However, unlike Jeffrey, Udupa addresses the crisis within the social fabric of India much directly and definitely within a broader context. She reminds the readers that caste politics in India is almost cultural and a neoliberal drive cannot go past that. News-making, news dissemination and not even news reading are bereft of that identity politics. Language, in its universality (English) and particularity (Kannada), is at the heart of that identity too. Together, journalism in India today is juxtaposed by the necessity of the ‘global’ and the embeddedness of cultural conflict. Within that context, the term ‘global’ in the title of the book is both indicative of a bane and a boon, a reality and a myth.