A re-imagined community: Pandemic, media, and state

2007

This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution). Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances. In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.

Salesian Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2020

Pandemic needs a globalized world where we have to live with the risks that come with it. Television is a crucial communication device that shapes public perception and mediates our comprehension of the outside world. It also forms part of the ideological apparatus that aids in reproducingthe dominant perception of reality among the masses. This article is based on observations made of the TRPdriven TV content produced during the lockdown period, in order to interpret the meaning that a projected reality produces. The article intertwines both: how government uses television to bring order as they tackle the situation and how advertisement on the other hand promote sales during crisis, both of which tries to convince the 'consumer-citizen' that these are extraordinary times but normalcy is returning. The objective of this paper is to understand the role of media during pandemic times and decipher the kind of self it produces given its strong influence in interpreting the world for its viewers.

In this paper an attempt has been made to explore the question of identity and how it is formed among the youth through the influence of the media. Popular culture which is often expressed through the media is important because of its mass appeal and its impact. It affects the identities of millions and also shapes self-identification and perceptions of the 'body' as well as the ways in which the 'self' and the 'other' look at each other. The challenges that the youth often face and the dualities of their own 'selves' are areas which needs to be sociologically understood. Amidst the expectations of the society, wherein one has an undefined pressure of image maintenance, in terms of taste of fashion, music, language, food which is often informed by the effects of globalization does ones actual identity gets lost? This paper therefore also looks at the blending of identities in the backdrop of globalization. To understand this process of identity formation the Goffmanian understanding of the " presentation of the self in everyday life " will be useful.

Globalizations, 2021

This article maps and analyses the trajectory of India's Covid-19 pandemic from its onset in early 2020 until the outbreak of the country's devastating second wave a little over a year later. I begin with a critique of the lockdown policy of the right-wing Hindu nationalist government of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which served as a political spectacle rather than a public health intervention. I then proceed to detail how India as a lockdown nation witnessed forms of social suffering and political repression that can only be truly understood in light of how the trajectory and impact of the COVID-19 pandemic was shaped by two preexisting crises in India's economy and polity. In conclusion, I reflect on the likely political outcomes of the pandemic, considering both the impact of its second wave, and the emergence of oppositional sociopolitical forces in the country.

Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 2021

This special issue features 12 contributions by early career scholars and artists dealing with the role of mediatization in the COVID-19 pandemic conjuncture. Themes such as mediated intimacy and sociality, pandemic ideology, politicians’ curated authenticity and discursive constructions of self, and playbour and resistance in digital games are examined in five original articles, while three autoethnographic contributions explore the concepts of mediated presence, collectivity, contemplative community, loneliness and relationality. The autoethnographies – in the form of short film, collage and poetry vignettes, respectively – add a personal experiential layer to the broader themes. To generate (mediated) interpersonal dialogue, two artists/academics engage deeply with the autoethographies, further reflecting on the themes explored therein. The issue concludes with an interview with Professor Andreas Hepp, of the University of Bremen, who comments on the contributions and reflects on...

IACLALS (Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies in India) Journal , 2021

At the time when COVID-19 was in the process of taking the shape of a pandemic at the end of 2019, Lijo Jose’s Malayalam film Jallikattu and Galder Gaztelu Urrutia’s Spanish film The Platform were released. Interestingly, there is a striking similarity between the present (ongoing) pandemic and the two movies. The worlds depicted in the films, although fictional and impossible, soon turn into a reality with surging Covid-19 cases, increasing human paranoia, xenophobia, communal hatred, and more ethnocentric nationalism. The ultimate selfishness in man, which makes him cruel, depicted in the two movies, became a living reality for all of us who survived (and are still surviving) the pandemic-affected year 2020. By taking into consideration the thematic similarities of the two movies, the paper will argue, by using the theoretical framework of antihumanism (an offshoot theoretical development to posthumanism), how the films expose a prehistoric nature in man—the raw and wild, which was always there in a state of dormancy. Thus, the paper will go on to argue that Civilisation has collapsed and man has returned to the prehistoric form of existence where survival by any means is the only mantra. Moreover, the paper proposes to explore the ‘experience’ of the ‘impossibility’ that penetrates real life and how we, the spectators at online platforms, make out of the dystopia offered in the two films. The paper shall be divided into three parts. In contrast, the first part will focus on exploring the dystopia in the two movies and how it can be correlated with the present pandemic, the second part will focus on antihumanism and explore how it can define the dystopian nature in the selected films. Finally, the third part will try to explore the praxis of the experience of watching dystopian films at the time of a pandemic.

Revista Conhecimento Online

Social media activity was reported to have significantly increased during the pandemic period as most of the daily routines transformed into the digital space. On the verge of this new normality of the post-pandemic, exploring virtual space would contribute in analysing and shaping the future digital media discourse. This paper attempted to explore the politics of representation in digital space using Foucauldian theories of power and discipline. A qualitative exploration of the xenophobic attitudes and representation was conducted on 123 young adults to understand how health concerns associated with the pandemic influenced social representations and marginalization of certain social sections and how participants recognized and understood their contribution to this group polarization. Thematic analysis of participant opinions indicated a significant change in polarization and attitude towards out-groups following the pandemic outbreak. The existing hierarchical homogenization a...

The proposed paper examines the notion of identity during the pandemic as depicted in the movie C U Soon. The movie is a fine example of a Screen life movie, as the pandemic necessitated using webcams in laptops and Smartphone cameras to create the film. However, the central premise of this paper is looking at how identities are formed and established by the characters through their interaction with each other using social media and other tools made available through technology. The movie brings into the foray the inconsistencies in identity and a conflict between virtual identity (their identities on social media platforms) and the identity of the characters in the real world. The paper explicates the different modes through which the characters are introduced to the audience and how their identities are constructed? How do their identities get confused? How do their virtual and real-world identities interact and at one point overlap with each other?

Saeculum ULBS, 2020

The current ongoing epidemic brought to the forefront of our mundane experiences the use of technology and the influence of media. Due to the isolation most of us face, technology is the only means through which we can safely connect with the people around us. Through technology, media is the way in which we can stay updated to the world around us. Due to this, technology came to facilitate the access to two main spheres of our lives: that of the people we know and that of the world we live in. The current essay sets to revisit Heidegger's Question Concerning Technology from our current predicament, reflecting on our relationship with technology, how this is relevant for the crisis we face, and the way in which media can change our way of perceiving the said crisis through its narrative.