Page 73 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

48 Vibodh Parthasarathi

being a drink to a symbol associated with cricket all over the country.
Interestingly, in terms of representation, both its narrative and ideol-
ogy, this series of TV advertisement echoes the ‘Mera Bharat Mahaan’
(My Great Bharat) series initiated by Doordarshan a few years ago. To
construct a harmonious ‘national culture’, it uses snippets of music
and dance from various parts of the country, thereby reaffirming the
discourse of ‘unity in diversity’. Ostensibly rivalling such dominant
videshi (metropolitan) and swadeshi (indigenous) modes of national
culture, stands the Hindu right, whose culture-ware is today as equally
visible as that of the state and the market. Through posters, graffiti,
pictures or stickers of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s saffron flag along
with (proposed) temple at Faizabad , it has given traditional icons a con-
temporary political context and ideological direction, ensuring that a
single message is read from such individual texts (Basu et al. 1993: 61).
Very much like corporate brand promotion, images of Om have been
usurped by Hindutva’s (Hindu right-wing nationalist groups) symbol-
ogy and projected in the public (such as on car stickers) as an assertive
indication of the ‘new’ Hindu identity. Detailed analyses have revealed
that structures of dominance are reproduced as much through media
representation as within the mode of communication associated with
the Hindu right (Babb and Wadley 1997).
In ways very similar to the manner in which Rajiv Gandhi was
‘made’ by the state television, Sadhvi Rithambara was ‘made’ by audio
tapes ‘marketed’ through non-state media. A close look at the 1980s
indicates that the Hindu right’s use of the audio-visual medium is
neither sporadic nor at a larger level unprecedented. In harnessing
the audio-visual media, the Hindu right reaped the benefits of what
Maruthur Gopalan Ramachandran (MGR), NTR (N.T. Rama Rao)
and Rajiv Gandhi had sowed with the help of popular cinema, mobile
video vans and television respectively. However, the forces of Hindutva
have demonstrated the unique, and rather discomforting, synergy
between a reactionary ‘church’ and the modern electronic church.
At the same time, its use of media forms predating the mass media
(puppetry, theatre, music and so on) has striking parallels with the
way in which they were adopted by the state to promote the discourse
of Green Revolution in the 1960s and the ideology of family planning
in the 1970s.