Page 269 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

Screening the Past

It is because we want to be modern that our desire to be independent and
creative is transposed on to our past.
—Partha Chatterjee, “Our Modernity,” The Present History of
West Bengal: Essays in Political Criticism

The complicated social and economic history of the Indian nation-state is all
but erased within the contemporary public discourse in the mass media and
among mainstream political leaders. Presenting the current moment as a nar-
rative is necessarily, then, a political coding of the value of cultural and eco-
nomic identity, often in religious terms. After Independence in 1947, the Indian
nation-state was largely de¤ned in economic and political terms as part of the
Non-Aligned movement. Refusing, at least in political discourse, the paths of
capitalist and communist development, it sought to chart an independent pas-
sage through the stormy waters of ¤rst- and second-bloc political and economic
hegemony. In terms of the discursive constitution of the nation, then, indepen-
dence from integration into either the free-market or the state-led economic sys-
tems was avowed with a simultaneous assertion of sovereignty in political mat-
ters and international détente. In the sphere of culture, the state propagated a
discourse of secularism and recognition of difference under the slogan “unity
in diversity.” The state-controlled mass media, particularly All-India Radio and
Doordarshan (DD) television, were the organs for the constitution of a notion
of public belonging to the nation in terms of a secular nationalism that empha-
sized unity as well as group speci¤city in terms of language, religion, geographi-
cal region, and so on. Most important, for our purposes this relationship be-
tween the state, the media, and an affective belonging to the nation was strongly
anti-consumerist. It is worth recalling that the ¤rst prime minister of India,
Jawaharlal Nehru, initially had serious reservations about the introduction of
television which he saw as a luxury the country could ill afford given the many
serious problems it confronted in delivering basic needs to the majority of the
population. Thus when DD began its function as a state organ it was strongly
pedagogical, anti-consumerist, and directed primarily to those target audiences
seen as needing help through education.
The introduction of commercial advertising within the DD structure already
marked the beginning of a sea change in the role of TV as a medium. The ¤rst
educational soap opera, Hum Log (We People), formulated to spread family plan-
ning behavior, quickly became the vehicle for the phenomenal marketing suc-
3
cess of Nestle’s Maggi Instant Noodles. Commercially sponsored programming
led to a Leavisite condemnation of popular culture in certain intellectual and
bureaucratic circles. The increasing reliance on the market, particularly dur-
ing the years of Rajiv Gandhi’s leadership, opened the ®oodgates and the mass
media, especially TV, exploded into a plethora of satellite TV networks from
within the country but most noticeably from major international players such

258 Sudeep Dasgupta