[Book Review] Political change in times of 24x7 television

Review of Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change, edited by Somnath Batabyal, Angad Chowdhry, Meenu Gaur, and Matti Pohjonen, Routledge, 2011 In 2008, as America cheered and roared for change, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of an African father and a Caucasian mother, became the 44th President of the United States of America. Considering the blood splattered, radically disturbing history of the country, this indeed was a huge change. The world looked on in awe and wonder, hanging on to each word spoken by the man who many believed had irrevocably changed race relations in not only the United States but globally. Such dramatic political change seldom seen in the post-Cold War period made academicians and media pundits sit up and take notice of the subtle yet effective way in which real attitudinal change had taken place. In fact, the hope and optimism grew to such proportions that warranted a President, who was simultaneously fighting two wars, to be given the Nobel Peace Prize in anticipation of a radical shift in future foreign policy. Today, the very future of our planet is on the brink as we battle not only the reality but the abstract notion of change. At a recently concluded conference on climate change, the negotiations ended on a note not of agreement but stalemate on how much nations were willing to change in order to reverse the pattern of climate change. The last two general elections in India were fought on the agenda of change—change for the better. Interestingly, the results of the first one reversed the fortunes of the then ruling party and the second one brought the incumbents back to power stubbing the very metaphor of change in the face. As the voices around the concept of change grow louder and shriller, the examination of how much and to what extent the mass media is responding to political transformation becomes the need of the hour. A routine flip-through of the myriad news channels that dot the firmament of the Indian media industry is enough to understand the extent to which certain changes are taking place; a recent instance being the media circus that was played out on all channels, including the so-called elite, urbane, English language news channels such as NDTV 24X7, Times Now, Headlines Today, and CNN-IBN, concerning the standoff between the Indian government and the gregarious crowd-puller, Baba Ramdev. One has to only watch the news channels with some degree of continuation to gauge the depth to which each of the competitors will plunge to go one up on competition. If news channels have traversed beyond redemption on their quest to the top, other forms of the media too have responded to the slow yet steady political change that has swept the country. Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change, edited by Somnath Batabyal, Angad Chowdhry, Meenu Gaur, and Matti Pohjonen, collects essays on such responses and presents them in the form of an extremely readable volume. The book begins by examining the various methods in which the Indian news media conducts kangaroo court trials in full public view even before the real upholders of justice pronounce their verdict, in full evidence in the manner in which the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks have been presented and the debates conducted by the media. John Hutnyk, in his essay on the news television in India, compares the images of terror inflicted on the psyche of the viewer on an hourly basis to the advent of the Kali Yuga for the mass media. The definition of the Kali Yuga narrated by Sumit Sarkar in his treatise Beyond Nationalist Frames: relocating postmodernism, hindutva, history, as he draws from the Mahabharata takes into account all strands of human behaviour, positive or otherwise, to definitively create the imagery of the Kali Yuga in the form of disorders in nature, oppressive alien kings, Brahmans corrupted by too much rationalistic debate, overmighty Shudras no longer serving their caste superiors, and women choosing their own partners, disobeying and deceiving husbands, and having intercourse with menials, slaves and even animals. Hutnyk posits this imagery of the Kali Yuga to articulate his statement on the state of televised news media as we see the news not as realist commentary on what is going on, but as commentary within frames. He calls this Maya. Illusion. The chapter studies how the malevolent power of television, as a system of images, as representation and network, as imaginary, permeates understanding and shapes a kind of state-sponsored or endorsed cosmology of fear and anxiety, as seen in the nation and even worldwide. The news media thrives on this culture of fear. The author quotes CNN-IBN Managing Editor Rajdeep Sardesai as saying that TV is now increasingly entertainment and so is news; fear too has become part of this package of entertainment that is beamed into our living rooms every single day. In his bird’s eye look at the nitty gritty of how news is produced, Somnath Batabyal draws on extensive ethnographic work on two Indian television channels, Star News and Star Ananda and makes the case for a detailed analysis of how the liberalization of the Indian economy has changed news production practices in India. Amidst the unprecedented explosions of news channels in India, the national project is now being re-imagined in complex ways within these very practices where the Sales, Marketing, Research and Human Resources departments battle for editorial control of what is ‘news’. Behind these fragmented and conflicting narratives of change within the newsroom, the article warns, are increasingly corrosive ways through which the corporate policies of Indian television are taking over the production of news content, thus, providing a snapshot of broader commercialization and corporatization of the national project of India itself. Meenu Gaur’s article looks in detail at one of the key aspects of the imagination of change in India: through its cinema. The article focuses on the popular yet critically acclaimed film Roja and makes a case for a more contextual analysis of positioning films in the broader teleological narratives of change and how the Indian nation is imagined vis-à-vis its relationship to secularism. A close reading of the film tells us how the Hindu right has reared its head in India as a political force and looks closely at the limits of Indian secularism itself where the Muslim is seen as the ‘national failure’. Such periodization of films in relation to national events, in this case the Kashmir crisis, is problematic in understanding films as they often force the more polyphonous readings of films into simple narratives of change. At the micro level, the nuances of the practices in films made in B-town India are the focus of attention for Ratnakar Tripathy and Jitender Verma, who reflect on Bhojpuri cinema, music and language. Dwelling specifically on the role that the emergence of the Bhojpuri cinema and music has had in the construction of the Bihari identity and its many contradictions, the article looks at the complex nexus of language politics, poverty, regionalism and migration taking place in contemporary India. The article sees these representations as reflecting the core anxieties, dilemmas and despair of a changing India, especially outside its metropolitan centres. In his article on sex in the metropolitan centres, Angad Chowdhry looks at the different ways in which the hysteria over youth sexuality has been implicated in how change is imagined. Taking into account the various instances of MMS scandals and the ways in which people have used mobile phones to record themselves having sex, the article looks at how the shifting ways of adolescent sexual practices, technological mediations and moral panic about these, interact in complex ways. Kriti Kapila’s structured articulation of the ways in which sexuality is represented in the mainstream media attempts to understand the hidden meanings in the first ever major sex survey in India, where much-debated changes to Indian sexual norms are looked at critically as examples of how statistics and other narratives of change are used to produced the impossible object of Indian sexuality and intimacy by the mass media. Moving away from sexuality, Angad Chowdhry and Aditya Sarkar look at the complicated ways in which politics and change interact. It focuses on the phantasmagoric representations of change in the Obama and the BJP’s electoral campaigns and the complex labour politics of the mills in Mumbai, the articles takes on a ghostly narrative of how historical events should be understood in the present analysis. The book also gives credence to rapid changes in the digital media (naturally important in this digital age) and how they have problematized both academic research into these technologies as well as the practice behind creating them. The article argues that because of the speed of development, we need to come up with a new method of creative experimentation to keep up with the pace of change. In his tribute to the work of the exemplary journalist P Sainath and his theories of the ‘other’ India which is seldom represented on television screens and on celluloid, Naresh Fernandes argues that hidden somewhere behind the glitzy images of conspicuous middle class consumption and prosperity, remains a vast barren India with depressing levels of poverty. This is the mass reality of Indian which has been largely forgotten by the corporatized mass media. A volume of immense value to students of the mass media and those interested in the finer aspects that make up this behemoth known as mass culture, the book could have done with a more careful reading, especially with regard to the language. A number of readers, for instance, would find it difficult to distinguish the meaning of ‘electorate campaign’ from ‘electoral campaign’.