Abstract
Newness, a prized claim in the global economy, adds value to commodities and drives nations to rebrand themselves. Premised on a particular reading of the present, newness offers a vision of an imagined future and a promise of exhilarating possibilities. The new stands apart from the old precisely as a result of its assumed potential to reconfigure and transform. As India refashions itself in cosmopolitan terms, establishing contrasts between new and old identities is a national preoccupation. Koeli Moitra Goel’s monograph offers a compelling account of the multiple ways in which the mantra of newness is recited, repeated, and reproduced in a range of material and digital sites encompassing the political and social life of the nation.
The overarching objective that drives Goel’s monograph, as she states, is to examine the sources of metaphorical construction of a “new” identity for India. The monograph cogently describes how the dichotomous categories of old and new are mobilized and overlaid on other polarities such as global/local or modern/traditional. Guided by a deft theoretical engagement drawn from interdisciplinary sources, Goel introduces us to the discursive framing and the material contestations that accompany the evocation of the nation and citizen as new. Meanwhile, the monograph prompts a broader discussion of globalization.
New in Medias Res
As the global economy rushes to annex more and more areas of life, the scholarly challenge is to unravel the strategic ways in which social structures are reproduced across domains and through distributed circuits of power. For scholars in media and communication, this is a call for integrating multi-sited forms of inquiry where we follow circuits of meaning and trails of influence in a concerted move away from static notions of objects of inquiry. For example, Goel tracks the discourse of the new and the politics of its recuperation across a wide terrain encompassing spaces, platforms, and time periods. The study of India, or any nation for that matter, is no longer contained and confined by geography; the issues exceed borders. Nor can the study of mediated culture in India be relegated to “area studies” because its cultural conditions are always already transnational. The very idea of India, Indianness, and the new India is enabled by conditions and possibilities of transnational connections, circulation, and mobility. In fact, these global connections are by no means recent; the history of the nation is already entangled in the global currents of trade and colonialism.
The question of history is deeply implicated in the definition of the new and the modern. As Goel notes, “the rationality of the nation upheld by a cohesive national community had to be manufactured, managed and continuously constructed.” Goel shows how three prime ministers in different historical moments of postcolonial history have summoned visions of a new India as a nation building exercise. While each vision is contextually distinct, the history recounted is always a teleological narrative valorizing scientific rationality, development, and modernization. In each of these tellings, a historical perspective is naturalized as the dominant and the true account of the past. For example, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi raises the specter of scale, speed, and newness in his speeches, he uses the past strategically to differentiate the old, tradition-bound nation from the flexible, modern new India. Certain figures, events, and periods are romanticized, while others are submerged or glossed over. A case in point, right-wing histories of a Hindu India often marshal facts and submerge or conflate histories to support an unbroken, linear narrative. To propagate a case for the new requires a strategic entry into the flow of time to enable a particular narratological structure and argument. History therefore is summoned as a narrative that begins in medias res, or in the middle of things, constructing connections to make an ideological argument for national cohesiveness. For media scholars, the beginnings and endings of historical narratives serve as a serious point of political critique and interpretation.
Global Conduits of Newness
The discourse of newness is also bound to evolving notions of the ideal citizen. In the context of late capitalism, the neoliberal entrepreneur, ensconced in a cosmopolitan urbanism, claims center stage. The skilled Indian diaspora, due to their successes in the technology sector especially in North America, are regarded as agents of change. They play a very influential symbolic and economic role within India. Goel refers briefly to diasporic involvement in the cultural productions of a new India on You Tube. The diaspora is involved and attached to the homeland; at the same time, the homeland is enlisting the diaspora to add value to the newness of the national brand. Persuading diasporic communities to reconnect with the homeland and serve as ambassadors of brand India has been crucial to recent national image-making.
To be ambassadors for this branding exercise, the diasporic subject is regarded as a natural extension of the Indian state and an integral part of the global branding exercise. This involves projecting a strong image of the nation bristling with drive and inexhaustible economic energy. The diaspora’s highly visible and influential presence in the information technology sector is a major asset, both a resource and an infrastructure for the circulation of a new India. The diaspora enables the weaving in of two major themes to bolster the newness narrative—entrepreneurial success and a deep connection to the motherland. In recent speeches, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has applauded the professional achievements of the Indian diaspora, saying that these demonstrate Indians’ potential to succeed globally. Such statements rest on the premise that the diaspora’s connection with India will endure along with a sense of loyalty to the homeland. The hope is that the diaspora will contribute to the building of the India of the future.
Grand visions of national change are inevitably about technology and infrastructure. In September 2015, Prime Minister Modi came to San Francisco intending to get the digital glitterati of the Indian diaspora on board with his ambitious “Digital India” project. On the stage next to him were the three Indian American men who had made it in Silicon Valley—chief executives of Google, Microsoft, and Adobe. Silicon Valley is the ultimate symbol of radical transformation where all norms can be rewritten, redesigned, reformed, revamped, and renewed. It enshrines the classic neoliberal, risk-taking, consumerist citizen. The Silicon Valley success of these skilled immigrants is rewritten by the Indian state in its publicity events as a neoliberal story along with the fiction of an enduring loyalty and ever-present quality of Indianness. Connected visibly to the information technology industry, the diaspora’s members seem to seamlessly fit into these visions of the new India and serve as conduits to deliver India into digital modernity. No doubt, this narrative erases the politics, struggles, and economic diversity within diasporic communities. Clearly, complexities are burdensome hurdles that have to be left behind while clearing space for the new.
Clash of the Indias
Efforts to flag India’s arrival on the global stage have to overcome old Orientalist stereotypes which render the nation primitive in the Western imaginary. These images are solidified especially regarding gender and sexuality. In her analysis of political speeches, Goel notes that Prime Minister Modi summarily discusses and dismisses the issue of violence against women by relating it to the inadequacy of male socialization and dysfunctional families. Similarly, Indian journalists often explain violence against women in India by calling into question the nation’s claim to modernity.
The infamous 2012 gang rape of Jyoti Singh Pandey put Delhi and India right at the center of global media attention. The news media was abuzz with headlines that Delhi was the rape capital of the world and India was the worst possible country for women. The two dominant responses to the violence shook India. One was from major global media outlets, which connected the crime to the regressive mind-set of the nation, its chaotic legal infrastructure and repressed men. A discursive machinery thus set into motion warned of India’s ruptured pathways to global modernity and questioned its ability to be a true global player. In these media stories, the gang rape served as evidence that the country was neither new, global, or modern. Instead, India was backward, stuck in the Dark Ages. The second response came from within India, where the violence was attributed to the new urbanization. The fear expressed in this response was that the new life styles that accompany global consumerism have undermined a sense of values and tradition among urban youth.
Embedded in these responses are three scripts about the nation. First is the narrative of the urban India, the nation of shining malls and multiplex cinemas, call centers, high rise buildings, technology corridors, and urban sprawl. Crowding these spaces are the urban, mostly English-speaking young Indian men and women, such as the ones whose voices Goel captures in the monograph. This new India is the outward-looking, aspirational nation with an emerging global presence. The second narrative concerns the old India, the pristine India of an earlier clunkier era, one untouched by the outside world. Here, women were revered and protected within the confines of a private sphere while patriarchal attitudes were and remain impervious to change. The vernacular space of this India is the prime stumbling block to global ascent. There has been a trend to blame violence against women on disenfranchised young men standing on the fringes of capitalism with a mind-set that is not quite ready for the neoliberal freedoms. This juxtaposition of new and old Indias and the tensions of their encounter is a formulaic response to issues of social issues concerning gender, especially ones referring to safety and security in public places.
The third narrative involves stain and shame: a deeply split India that lacks the cultural DNA to be part of the big league, an India that boasts of economic development but lacks the moral and physical infrastructure that globality requires. By recouping this particular logic, the narrative presses into action the familiar ordering of cultures where some cultures are forward-looking while others are retrograde. The culturalist explanations about mind-sets and condemnation about women’s morality deflect the structural issues. Sexual politics is inserted into figurations of modernity. Instead, the focus is directed to some sort of catching up. The question is to what and at what cost? There are multiple ideological investments in keeping these narratives distinct and at the same time glossing over the geographies, histories, and economic realities in which they are embedded.
In sum, the lifeworlds of these separate Indias are connected in complex ways. In the split narrative of Indian modernity, the culprits who rob India of its shiny brand are the urban poor and those of the medieval mind-set who cannot handle the challenges of living between states of being. Pitching the national story in this split template of old and new, local and global, or rural and urban adds to an already long list of impossible binaries. Neo-Orientalist stereotypes at best culturalize issues. These bypass scrutiny of structural conditions and politics that drive social life. Newness is a capacious construct that swells with meaning but is strategically presented as transparent and recognizable. The point to remember and recognize is that the old and the new are part of a whole and the local is already embedded in the global. It is the confluences that are hidden, manipulated in this saga of the perpetual birthing of a new India.