Book extract: communications in the new India

Interpreting Media

September 2010

As part of The Hoot’s continuing commitment toward creating greater media awareness and fostering debates related to media issues we are excerpting two passages from Pradip Ninan Thomas’s Political Economy of Communications in India. New extracts will be posted on the site every month and readers are invited to send in comments, book recommendations, and reviews.

Thomas’s study offers a history of the structures of the political economy of communications in India from colonial times to the present. It then goes on to analyse specific aspects of that economy including Christian fundamentalism and the media and poverty and the media. The third section looks at various types of resistance to dominant structures. The first extract focuses on the ‘commodification of mediated products’ and religion in particular. It highlights the ways in which religion and religious goods are sold on television and as franchised commodities, catering to a burgeoning market in India and amongst the Indian diaspora in the US. The second extract looks at the differential manner in which various refugee and migrant groups are portrayed in the media. Ninan refers to Tibetans, Kashmiri Pandits, and Sri Lankan Tamils by way of contrasting media attitudes and coverage. He argues for a more committed and ethically balanced media discourse on displaced peoples within India.

Pradip Ninan Thomas. Political Economy of Communications in India: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. New Delhi, London: Sage Publications, 2010. http://www.sagepub.in/browse/book.asp?bookid=1487&Subject_Name=&mode=1

POLITICAL ECONOMY OF COMMUNICATIONS IN INDIA
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
PRADIP NINAN THOMAS, University of Queensland, Australia

2010 / 296 pages / Cloth: Rs 650 (9788132104490)

SAGE Publications

Communications in the new India

Commodification

There has been an intense commodification of mediated products, information and knowledge in India. The ownership of multiple media platforms offers possibilities for re-packaging content??"and the common language of the digital has facilitated synergies between different media and products and the targeting of increasingly segmented audiences. Commodification has been supported by a huge increase in advertising revenues over the last decade in India. The advertising industry in India was worth USD 4.9 billion in 2007 up from USD 4.02 billion in 2006.

A contemporary example of the commodification of culture was the attempt to commercialise and copyright Yoga sequences by the Los Angeles based Bikram Choudhary through a number of mediated platforms. As Allison Fish (2006: 202) describes it:

Transnational commercial yoga…is a body of essentialised forms that emphasises easily communicated aspects, primarily postures and breathing, selectively drawn from rich South Asian ideological traditions of spirituality and practice. Bikram Choudhary and the franchised purveyors of his choreographed program of 26 postures embody the ultimate commodification of yoga. In this version of practice, students become repeat consumers of a style of yoga that is controlled by a lucrative international structure under exclusive license.

The commodification of media has affected all sectors of the mediascape.

The tying-in of media products within a consumerist paradigm is best illustrated by the fact that there are currently more than 20 cable and satellite channels that exclusively mediate religion and in the process, sell a number of religious products??"from evangelical books and CDs on God TV to spiritual well-being products on Aastha. Hindu channels alone include Maharishi Veda Channel, Sanskar, Aastha, Sadhna, Sanskriti and Sudharshan TV. As one report describes it, ‘contrary to expectations that this genre of television would invite advertisers of products like incense and joss sticks, researchers were amazed to find branded jewellery, airlines, banks, lubricants, tyres, baby lotion and surgical equipment…’ (Televisionpoint.com 2007). The Bengaluru-based Indian guru Sri

Sri Ravishankar’s ‘Art of Living’ seminars unabashedly promote health and wealth for the nouveau rich in India. Nanda (2006: 492) on the paradoxes and contradictions of India’s tryst with modernity refers to:

TV programmes selling wild, unsubstantiated health benefits of yoga and

Ayurveda, delivered in a heady brew of spiritualism and Hindu nationalism.

India’s most popular tele-yogi, Swami Ramdev, has massed a fortune selling his Divya yoga on the TV. Interspersed with the swami’s calls for awakening

‘desh kaa svabhiman’ (national self-respect)…one finds totally unsubstantiated claims about the power of yogic postures, deep breathing and his own Ayurvedic concoctions for every ailment known to humankind including cancer, heart disease, diabetes….

The religious market, therefore, is not just about retailing during key events in the religious calendar of major religions like Diwali and Christmas. Not only has the traditional time-frame of these festivals been extended, as is the case with Christmas, the religious market has become part of the day to day experience of most, if not all the major religions. The commodification of the sacred does have a long history although it is in the context of contemporary capitalism that it has become a ubiquitous aspect of popular culture. While Indian calendars depicting Gods and Goddesses have been a part of the religious commodity landscape in India, the hyper-commodification of the Hindu God of success, Ganesh, for example, accelerated in the late 1990s during an era in which the Indian government was supported by a coterie of Hindu nationalist organisations.

Even as these religious representations continue to figure prominently in private and public acts of piety, Michelle Caswell reminds us that these representations, outside of the spatial confines and practices of lived Hinduism, run the risk of becoming empty signifiers of meaning, devoid of any spirituality:

Images of Hindu deities are showing up in trendy boutiques on a huge variety of household objects??"even nightlights??"but the lunchbox is the most popular. Accoutrements, a Seattle-based wholesale distributor of the ‘novelty items’, lists the ‘Hindu Krishna lunchbox’ as its fourth biggest seller and the goddess Kali lunchbox as its fifth biggest seller, right behind the ‘wiggly hula girl’ and the ‘nun punching puppet’. The lunchboxes, which Accoutrements first introduced to the American market in 1998, were inspired by the ‘beautiful, bright, and appealing’ depictions of Hindu gods on Indian posters, says Heather Conrad, the company’s public relations director. (Caswell 2006; see also Thomas 2009)

News too has been commodified. Daya Thussu, in an article on the ‘Murdochisation’ of news in India, describes the commodification of Star News:

Star news is leading the way with a news agenda that emphasises metropolitan concerns, with an obsessive interest in glamour, crime and celebrity culture. At the heart of this agenda is the popularisation of news by making it accessible and entertaining, thus expanding the audience base for advertisers as well as promoting synergies among Murdoch’s entertainment and news operations in India. (Thussu 2007: 599)

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An Eloquent Silence: Refugees, Migrants and the Media

Poverty affects both settled and unsettled populations in countries in South Asia. We now recognise the fact that chronic manifestations of poverty are not just about low calorific intake, or access to land, employment, credit, health determine subsistence but are also related to numerous social determinants such as caste, class, gender and conflict. These multiple determinations of poverty affect both settled and unsettled populations. Some of the most deprived populations in India consist of the internally displaced, due to military, civil, development-related and environmental conflict and refugees from neighbouring countries such as Bangladesh. India has traditionally been a haven for refugees from all over South Asia. These include Tibetans, Chakmas and Rohingyas from Bangladesh and Tamils from Sri Lanka along with many other groups who have either fled to India because of political persecution or are economic refugees. The internally displaced include those who have been the victims of state-based mega-development projects such as roads and dams along with those who have had to flee environmental disasters, civil or inter-faith conflicts within the country.

In terms of media representation of refugees in India, Tibetan refugees are probably the one community that have been represented sympathetically in the media, although India’s rapprochement with China over the last two decades has resulted in less media sympathy for the Tibetan cause. In terms of displaced people, the plight of the Kashmiri Pandits have evoked more sympathetic media coverage than, say, Muslim communities in Gujarat and Mumbai who have been the victims of anti-Muslim riots. Kashmiri Pandits have been backed by both Congress and the BJP governments for obvious reasons. In stark contrast, Tamil Sri Lankan refugees who have been relocated in camps in Tamil Nadu have scarcely received any positive coverage. In fact, most journalists are ignorant about the existence of such camps and rarely if ever visit these camps or bothered to write about the plight of these refugees. In fact, following the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, there has been a noticeable decline in the coverage of Tamil refugees and increased negativity when they have been covered, a situation that has continued in the context of the exacerbation of and post-conflict situation in Sri Lanka today. The issue of why some of the more progressive newspapers in India have opted to only tangentially cover the plight of the Tamils remains a significant blind spot.

An organisation that has carried out important work on the media coverage of refugees in India is the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group. In a volume entitled Media and Displacement II: Three Case Studies, Media Coverage of Forced Displacement in Contemporary India, the situation with regard to media coverage of displacement is explored in Jammu and Kashmir (J and K), West Bengal and Assam. These studies clearly reveal that both the English speaking and vernacular media fall short of adequately covering displaced people. Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, in the case study of media coverage of displacement in J and K, has observed that media reportage has been selective, lacking in analysis, frequently based on frameworks that are jingoistic and nationalistic and rarely if ever deal with rape and violence committed by the Indian armed forces on displaced people.

In the insurgency-hit areas of Jammu and Kashmir, the media has not only remained engaged in the pursuit of selective reporting to project the image that the armed struggle is communal by nature by invoking words like Jehad and ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ but has in turn largely vitiated the atmosphere by communalising the situation… Even in the displacements from the orders,

… vested interests and politicians preaching hate-soaked anti-Pakistan ideology have been provided more space than the displaced lot, in an obvious bid to shift focus from mundane issues as well as to justify war or troops buildup. There is a clear design to use media to ‘manufacture consent’…in the name of ‘national interest’. If the traumas of the displaced and their issues are highlighted, they are seen as isolated from the content, from the ‘wisdom’ behind wars, which the media feels must not be questioned. (Jamwal 2004: 48)

We would do well to encourage representations of refugees that are sympathetic rather than hostile. Since the media plays a key role in the making of public opinion, in the creation of strangers and friends, in mediating a sense of national identity, in the setting of agendas, drawing the boundaries of discourse on refugees and creating a national consensus on issues such as citizenship, immigration, resettlement and repatriation among other issues, it is necessary that we periodically interrogate the media practices and routines that media professionals employ in their coverage of refugees. This is easier said than done, since the reporting of refugee related issues and concerns tend to be connected to, even overdetermined by regional conflicts, local politics and the perceived impact of refugee flows on local economies. We would, of course, like all journalists to be objective, independent, even sympathetic in the manner in which they report issues to do with refugees??"but the stark reality is that media professionals work in value-laden environments and reflect a variety of interests. given competing claims and concerns and the fact that the refugee beat is not exactly a glamorous or, for that matter, lucrative one, chances are that it would be difficult to find a critical mass of journalists in any given country who are committed to covering refugee related issues. It would be more likely than not that there could be one or two journalists per country who are committed to providing regular space for refugee related issues. The fact that there are such journalists indicates that all is not lost, despite the fact that journalism is going the way of Rupert Murdoch rather than that of a Robert Fiske or John Pilger. As long as there is one journalist of the calibre of Peter Mares at ABC in Australia, Gary Younge with the Guardian in the UK, Irene Fernandez, Steven Gan of the net-based news service Malaysiakini in Malaysia, along with Sainath, Max Martin and other journalists in India, there is hope.