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Media, Culture & Society

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First published September 2000

Nationalizing `the global': media images, cultural politics and the middle class in India

Leela FernandesView all authors and affiliations

https://doi.org/10.1177/016344300022005005

Abstract

The article intervenes in the debate over the effects of globalization on the nation-state by exploring the ways in which meanings of the global are produced through the nationalist imagination in India. Globalization in India has unfolded in the context of the `new economic policies' of liberalization initiated in the 1990s. Both television and print media images increasingly contribute to the reproduction of a hegemonic political culture, one that has discarded the remnants of a state-dominated planned economy. An analysis of this process calls into question the post-national thesis of the globalization paradigm. First, the imagined form of the `global' is produced through cultural signs that rest on the deployment of nationalist narrative. Second, media representations depict India's relationship with the world economy through images of a hybrid relation between the national and the global. Finally, globalization in India has led to a form of reterritorialization which polices the boundaries of gendered social codes.

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I am grateful to Benedict Anderson, Caridad Souza and Arvind Rajagopal for comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks go to Lloyd Rudolph for pointing me to an analysis of Rajiv Gandhi's policies. The framing of the argument benefited from Bob Goldman's comments at the Association for Asian Studies, 1998. I am grateful to Rupal Oza and Susanne Rudolph for much support. Fieldwork for this article was conducted with the support of an American Institute for Indian Studies Senior Research Fellowship, 1995-6 and by an American Council of Learned Societies/Social Science Research Council award, 1998-9.

1. A focus on the media is particularly salient as the post-national thesis of globalization in the postcolonial context has focused in large part on the role of imagination through sites such as the media and `travelling' cultural forms (Appadurai, 1996). I thus focus on media images rather than on more self-evident sites of nationalist narratives in India - for instance, in the context of the nuclear blasts or anti-Pakistan sentiment in the context of the Karghil conflict in Kashmir. For a critique of liberal and marxist versions of the post-national thesis of globalization see Smith (1995).

2. I am concerned with new hegemonic representations of the liberalizing Indian nation. This does not preclude resistance to such representations. An analysis of actual responses to such hegemonic images is beyond the limitations of space in this article and is addressed in my forthcoming book (Fernandes, forthcoming).

3. Interview with author, 17 September 1998.

4. Such processes are also significant in the case of the television industry. In state-owned television (Doordarshan) in 1992 four of the top five advertisers were multinational corporations (accounting for 21 percent of total advertising revenue). However, the expenditure share of the advertising industry is still highest in the print media (67 percent for print media and 20 percent for television in 1992). See Bhatt (1994).

5. Interview with author, 2 September 1998.

6. In the decade since Rajiv Gandhi's early policies of liberalization, the number of television sets had grown from 3.63 million in 1984 to 27.8 million at the end of 1990. See Dubey (1992).

7. For a discussion of the relationship between the media and the Hindutva movement see Rajagopal (in press).

8. Such concerns are also reflected in a study sponsored by the Indian advertising industry in order to assess (and disprove) the potential negative effects of advertising. See National Council of Applied Economic Research, Indian Society of Advertisers (1992).

9. Note also that the Ambassador is a symbol of early protectionist economic policies as it was historically the main domestically produced automobile. Rajiv Gandhi's early liberalization policies enabled the production of a new multinational production of the Maruti automobile. The Maruti continues to serve as a cultural signifer of urban upper-middle-class consumer culture.

10.

10. It has been estimated that by March 1996 Delhi would have 75-100,000 cellphone subscribers while Bombay would have 130,000 subscribers. See Chandra and Agarwal (1996).

11.

11. Interview with author, 3 September 1998.

12.

12. Interview with author, 6 October 1998.

13.

13. India is estimated to have 21 million cable TV connections, a figure which does not take into account community-owned televisions, which are common in working-class and rural areas.

14.

14. Note also that Indian channels have been more successful than satellite channels that air mainly English language programs. The music channel `V' which airs mainly Hindi songs has been more successful than MTV leading MTV to Indianize (Agarwal, 1996). Star TV has also shifted from primarily English programs to popular Hindi films.

15.

15. Interview with author, 17 September 1998.

16.

16. The election results failed to produce a clear parliamentary victory for the leading national political parties and the President asked the Bharatiya Janata Party, now the single largest party in parliament, to form a government and test its majority in parliament within two weeks. The BJP-led government failed to gain enough allies to prove a majority and the government only lasted 12 days. However, the subsequent national elections returned the BJP to power in 1998-9 as the leading party of a new coalition government.

17.

17. This also characterized the 1998-9 and the current BJP-led government. The government shifted away from a policy of swadeshi and made assurances that foreign investors would not be affected. Note also that the Hindutva movement in general and the BJP party are not a homogeneous unit and comprise both pro- and anti-economic reform wings.

References

Agarwal, A. (1996) `MTV Starting from Scratch: The Channel seeks to “Indianise” yet Retain its Global Appeal', India Today 15 March: 160-1.

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