Testing concepts about print, newspapers, and politics

Interpreting Media

August 2010

As part of The Hoot’s continuing commitment toward creating greater media awareness and fostering debates related to media issues we are excerpting a passage from Robin Jeffrey’s collection of essays Media and Modernity. New extracts will be posted on the site every month and readers are invited to send in comments, book recommendations, and reviews.

Robin Jeffrey’s Media and Modernity is a collection bringing together essays published in diverse scholarly journals between 1978 and 2009. Essays in Part I focus primarily on the place of women in Kerala and their role in politics, development, and the growth of literacy. Part II ranges over subjects such as the monitoring of Indian newspapers, the absence of Dalit journalists in India’s newspapers, and ‘the role of newspapers in politics and political change’. The extract points to the necessity for a nuanced theorizing of print cultures in India. ‘The role of print in the making of nationalism needs to be explored for individual cases, not invoked sweepingly.’ Jeffrey concludes with a larger question of how the ‘transition from print as rare medium’ to mass media may actually diminish the public sphere.

Robin Jeffrey is currently at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore

Robin Jeffrey. Media and Modernity: Communications, Women, and the State in India. Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2010. http://www.orientblackswan.com/display.asp?categoryID=0&isbn=978-81-7824-284-2

300 pages/Hardback: Rs. 695 (978-81-7824-284-2)

(Excerpted with permission from Permanent Black)

Testing Concepts about Print, Newspapers, and Politics

Public Sphere

Habermas displays keen interest in newspapers and how they originate, work, and change.92 Perhaps for that reason, his notions of a ‘public sphere’??"how it emerged, changed, and contorted and the role of print and press in the making of a public sphere??"often fit well with the experience of Kerala. ‘The bourgeois public sphere’, according to Habermas, was ‘the sphere of private people come together as a public’ to debate ‘the general rules governing relations . . . of commodity exchange and social labour’.93 Such a place or space as the public sphere cannot happen without ‘critical publicity’, which is ‘the principle of the public sphere’.94 The public sphere becomes a notable feature of some European countries from the eighteenth century.

Habermas approvingly quotes Kluxen on the ‘public opinion’ that took shape in this eighteenth-century public sphere:

. . . this public opinion was directed by another factor: by the establishment of an independent journalism that knew how to assert itself against the government and that made critical commentary and public opposition against the government part of the normal state of affairs.95

In short, the ‘public sphere’ cannot happen without print and regular publications.

My argument about Kerala is that the social turbulence of the twentieth century happened in a ‘public sphere’, which was made possible partly because of the spread of print, publishing, and newspapers. Habermas offers a further element which dovetails with the experience of Kerala. He sees three stages in the evolution of printing, stages similar to the notion of rare, scarce, and mass modes. In the first stage, printing was a handicraft practised by artisans to make money, as if they were stitching boots or hammering horseshoes. This corresponds to my ‘rare’ mode when newspapers have not really begun. The second stage is that of ‘literary journalism’, wherein ‘the newspaper’s publisher . . . changed from being a merchant of news to being a dealer in public opinion’ and ‘the commercial purpose . . . receded almost entirely into the background’. Such publications often lost money??" a characteristic of the scarce mode of print in Kerala.96 In Habermas’ third stage, the ‘the profitability of the enterprise got the upper hand over its publicist intention’. We move into the mass media age where ‘the publisher appoints editors in the expectation that they will do as they are told in the private interest of a profit-oriented enterprise’.97

For Habermas, ‘the world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only’.98 What I termed the loss of the magic of print in its mass-media mode, Habermas refers to in terms of ‘a culture that no longer trusts the power of the printed word’.99

Habermas’ view of the role of newspapers in the evolution of a ‘public sphere’ fits the Kerala experience. In what I call the scarce mode, which roughly corresponds to Habermas’ eighteenth-century public sphere, print enabled the formulation and discussion of social and political issues and the mobilization of significant numbers of people around such issues. The diversity of newspaper publication in this mode??"it was relatively cheap and technically feasible to put out a newspaper??"promoted variety. The relative scarcity of print gave it interest and authority. Thus arose the fears among governments that led them to close the three Malayalam newspapers in 1910, 1938, and 1948. Similarly, Habermas’ argument about mass media resonates in Kerala. The dominance of the two great capitalist newspapers, Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi, has coincided with the decline of competitors and an increasing dependence of the survivors on their relationships with the state and with large advertisers. The last great political mobilizations in Kerala were the ‘liberation struggle’ of 1959, in which Christian-owned newspapers played an especially important role, and the land-reform protests of 1969??"70, propelled by communist publications.

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Conclusion: Print, Newspapers, and Their Effect on Societies

My purpose in laying these ideas about printing and newspapers, which are such important components of the theorizing of Anderson and Habermas, against the experience of India’s most print-exposed region is to make a point about the study of print and newspapers.

Although they are accorded such prominence in theories of social movements and historical change, little attention is paid to the important nuances of these industries. As we have seen, the newspaper is often treated as if it were the same, and had the same effects, no matter in what place or time. Habermas, in my view, is the more sensitive to changes and their potential consequences for societies.

On the other hand, one has to draw a very long theoretical bow to make the print-capitalism ideas of Anderson fit Kerala, or even India. Certainly commerce and printing go together, but as the Kerala story shows??"in common with the Habermas argument??"there are times in the evolution of print when profit-making is less significant than publicizing. Moreover, the easy equation between print-capitalism and nationalism, which is implied (though never explicitly stated) in Imagined Communities, has no purchase in Kerala. In spite of a distinctive language and script, long-standing princely-state units of government, and a vibrant print culture, Kerala’s people showed (and show today) scant inclination to demand their own nation-state.

This discussion contributes three suggestions to those who use print and newspapers as raw material for interpreting and understanding change. First, it suggests the need for care and questioning if scholars, in using ideas about print-capitalism or public sphere, choose to emphasize the role of print and newspapers. The notion of print-capitalism and a connection with nationalism, though initially stimulating and provocative, finds little fit in the history of India’s most print-using region. The role of print in the making of nationalism needs to be closely explored for individual cases, not invoked sweepingly.

On the other hand, Habermas’ suggestion of three episodes or stages in the role of print in the creation of a public sphere resonates in Kerala, where the experience of mass media in the past 30 years accords with ideas about ‘refeudalization’. Proliferation of media, and of audiences that consume them, does not signal increased political activity. It may, indeed, signal its decline.

Arising from the caveats about use of these social-science concepts is a more general admonition: the need for fine-grained analysis of what we are talking about when we refer to the effects of print and the role of newspapers in the modern world. One needs to ask questions about finance, technology, circulations, owners, editors, and advertisers. To generalize about a world of ‘print’, undifferentiated by time or place, is like wearing boxing gloves to make pastry.

Finally, the discussion in this essay raises a more difficult question: what does it mean for politics if much of India is making a transition from print as rare medium to a mass-media age, thereby missing the experience of a rambunctious scarce era and, with it, something approaching a ‘public sphere’? Is a valuable tradition of politics, which is part of Kerala’s twentieth-century history, lost? The expansion of satellite television, now received by close to one-third of Indian households, offers the possibility that the majority of Indians will move rapidly from having little exposure to print or other media into an electronic mass-media age. There, media bring entertainment, sometimes presented as news, but they seldom generate social energy, argue sociopolitical viewpoints, or encourage political action. Will the absence of such practices and traditions malnourish politics in much of India in the future?