Abstract
Sahana Udupa’s study of news production in India offers entry points to an understanding of the complexity and imperatives of news production in globalising India. It is on rare occasions that one comes across a study that is both theoretically sophisticated and deeply grounded in the localities of news production and that is based on an understanding of the everyday marketplace of ideas in globalising India that is shaped by and is responsive to tensions, challenges and allegiances across the English–Vernacular divide. Indeed, Udupa problematises traditional ways of thinking about the news media in India while making a case for the need to go beyond Western ways of thinking about the media that is based on the public–private dichotomy and to engage instead with a ‘desire-visibility’ trope that offers an entry point to the study of news production that is being shaped by middle-class ‘desire as aspiration’ via the ‘structured visibility’ offered by news media.
Based on extensive ethnographic work carried out over a 4-year period (2008–2012) in the urbanising city of Bengaluru at the Times of India (TOI) and its vernacular ‘Bhasha’ counterpart Vijaya Karnataka (VK), the study offers a compelling perspective on the ways in which news production is being shaped not just by the variegated compulsions of globalising India but also by the force of changing tradition, national politics, flows of ideas within news rooms and personnel within a highly competitive news environment.
The TOI is India’s largest circulation English newspaper that has a reputation for ruthless competition but also for pioneering the shaping of a market-driven news product for globalising Indians. Using the lens of cultural studies, the sociology of media production and political economy, the volume offers a framework to understand the mutual imbrications and entanglements of news production and urban modernity. The result is a finely textured account of news production that is shaped by the compulsions of tradition and politics as well as by desires in a country that is rapidly becoming one of the world’s largest media markets. In that process, Udupa questions both the celebratory accounts of news production liberated by prosumers and accounts of the flows of power that are one-directional and closed. Udupa highlights a narrative of change in which the power of news sites to set agendas remain although they simply have to be conversant with the desires of their publics as well as the market. What makes this study interesting is that she captures the flux within news production, the muddying of boundaries between the English press and its vernacular counterpart and the contested nature of news production in which the desires of urban modernity in Bengaluru are countered by the status quo of tradition while being adapted by modernising tradition.
This clash of values and interests is best exemplified by Udupa’s interpretation of the TOI’s and VK’s reading of the Pink Chaddi campaign, that was a response to actions by the right-wing Sri Ram Sena at moral policing and that led to the rough handling of women, in particular who were out having a drink in a local pub in the city of Mangalore. As a response to the moral policing, young women activists from all over India sent hundreds of pink underwear (Pink Chaddi) to the office of the Sri Ram Sena. While the TOI’s response to this campaign reflected the sentiments and morality of their primarily middle-class readership that is closely connected to the project and cultures of urbanising modernity, the VK’s response, that was against the violence perpetrated by the Sri Ram Sena, was ambiguous to say the least, and included a strong avowal and acknowledgement of local, Kannada values and included a critique of the new lifestyles adopted by young women and a campaign that they perceived was in poor taste. The fact that both newspapers had prior notice of the attacks and were invited to cover the event is a reflection of the highly competitive environments of news coverage in India and the publicity-seeking politics of newspapers and their clients.
Udupa explores the English–Vernacular divide in Chapter 3 in which she explores the differing news cultures of the VK and the Bangalore Mirror (BM), an English newspaper that belongs to the TOI group. Udupa dissects the politics of market-based audience segmentation and its consequences highlighted by the valuation of the ‘common man’, his or her language, culture, tradition and the rural against Bengaluru’s urban modernity, its information technology (IT) gurus, pub culture and gleaming malls. Employing the term ‘split publics’ that Arvind Rajagopal (2001) had used to describe the role played by the Hindi-speaking publics in particular in India in the rise of the Hindu Right, Udupa finds that the Kannada and English press, divided by very specific news practices that are consonant with their market-driven interests, are also constitutive of each other within a shared field of news production. Despite all the differences, both expressions are open to change precisely because political, social and cultural stabilities can no longer be guaranteed. When Udupa visited the VK in 2012, many changes had affected the newspaper including the recruitment of an anti-Hindutva editor, which seemed to be an uncharacteristic choice although pro-Hindu sentiments remained in the newsroom along with the embrace of a strongly advertisement-driven, leisure-oriented, urban news and celebrity journalism approach in the TOI mould. The many mutations of the local and competition in the manufacture and production of the hyper-local are also aspects of the story of globalising and urbanising Bengaluru as it is the case with other cities in India.
News production in India, in other words, needs to be understood against the reality of a changing market, changing consumer expectations, contentious cultures of production as well as consumption. There are no staid uniformities in news production in globalising India. Caste and class, the market and an opportunistic politics, language, regional and religious chauvinisms all remain key to understanding the narrative realities and fictions of globalising India. As this volume eloquently highlights, news production as a field is a space where Indian publics are engendered, where globalising India and its compulsions are validated, contested, reformulated and remediated.