Page 272 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

the “establishment” and speaks the language of populism, while positing an
“authentic” culture. Further, the focus on the “all-round welfare of the human
personality” and the insistent critique of the concentration of economic and
political power in favor of decentralization coincides neatly with the insistence
of organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on the retreat of
the state from the functioning of the market and the free play of market forces
(Jaffrelot 1996, 18). The ideology of individualism and humanism (retooled in
the guise of an “Indian ethos”) coincides neatly with the ideology of the “free
market” and consumerism. What is crucial is that this constitution of “Indian
Culture” is integral to the dynamic of global capitalism, rather than in opposi-
tion to the dynamic of “cultural imperialism.” 4
The Hindu Right has successfully used the mass media to mobilize public
support: in terms of press exposure, it has at least one publication in each lan-
guage, a nationwide network of correspondents, sophisticated use of video
technology, particularly by the VHP, incorporating themes and genres from
popular culture as well as well-known ¤lm celebrities, live performances, and
the use of popular music modeled on ¤lm songs. Much of the success of com-
munal organizations in mobilizing popular support has been through their suc-
cessful insertion into the secular activities of rural and urban communities, by
providing much needed recreational, cultural, and welfare services. The widen-
ing of the appeal of the Hindu Right is thus closely related to the failure of the
state in guaranteeing public welfare, a failure that has been accelerated by its
further retreat as a consequence of the imperatives of the “free market” and
deregulation.
Religious discourse and ideology has always lent itself to a trans-local mo-
dality, whatever its pretensions. In the present context, the contact zone opened
up by globalization in all its forms not surprisingly sees a “return to the source.”
However, this return cannot be framed as the revenge of the repressed but rather
as the production of an already existing modality of the religious as a spatially
and temporally expansive and mobile discursive formation. Hindu nationalism,
in fact, simultaneously invokes scriptural authority to ¤nance its traf¤c with
the economic and technological imperatives of globalization, and justi¤es glob-
alization in its contemporary capitalist expansion as the culmination of what
“Hindu philosophy” has been saying all along—the Dasein of Capital concre-
tized in the lived reality of Indian society. As Walter Benjamin noted, however,
the lived reality (Erlebnis) of modernity derives its “richness” precisely in the
shock of the ever new, the paradoxical enervation of affect that extinguishes
the fullness of experience (Erfahrung) amid the phantasmagoria of continual
5
consumption. The necessity of constellating a materialist critique of the sacral
signi¤er of Hinduism and the virtual promises of endless consumption under
globalization increases the more that religious doctrines and political practice
assert their absolute separation from the concreteness of socioeconomic pro-
cesses and circumscribe themselves in the idealized realm of statecraft and cul-
ture. The Hindu Right in India, through a variety of strategies, always shifting
and contingent to the ¤eld of political practice, alternately invokes scripture

Gods in the Sacred Marketplace 261