The Mumbai-based industry producing Indian television programming is providing novel opportunities for a large and growing number of young women. On the small screen, female characters might display their piety through repetition of puja in ornate, spacious rooms. Behind the scenes, however, the action occurs in recently-constructed buildings in the northern “suburbs” of Andheri or Malad, alongside call centers and advertising houses, other products of the globalization that is altering the shape of the city. Here, in offices or cubicles, young Indian women are writing scripts, negotiating with producers or actors, shaping new female characters and scenarios that they hope will appeal to an audience they imagine to be predominantly female, but quite unlike themselves. They are producing gendered workspaces, creating young, female equivalents of “old boys clubs” in an industry that, until recently, often neglected to provide women’s restrooms. My talk is a report from the middle of my dissertation ethnography-in-progress, and a request for feedback and advice for the second half of my field research. Several questions inform my work which I will address in this talk: What are the conditions that the women I’m working with are experiencing, and which are they attempting to change? What larger notions of “the audience”, “India” and their “change” inform their work? How are the class and gender self-understandings of female media workers produced in relation or distinction to the representations they create of and for others? In sum, how is media production in Mumbai constituting a novel site of cultural change with implications for the Indian elite and middle class and Indian culture more broadly?
Deborah Matzner is a PhD candidate at New York University’s Department of Anthropology, where she has received a certificate in Culture and Media and a Masters degree. She is interested in media, urban experience, feminism and consumerism in post-liberalization India. She is in Mumbai for 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with female documentary filmmakers and television programming producers in the city.
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‘The Political Economy of Going Hindi: Private News Channels and Transnational Soap Operas in the Indian Television Landscape’
-Britta Ohm
My paper will focus on one of the most striking and significant developments in the Indian television landscape over the past few years: its increasing vernacularisation and particularly the trajectory from English to Hindi on the transnational and private national mainstream channels. While Hindi, represented mainly by Zee TV, was during the 1990s still a fairly ‘normal’, and in relation to English often belittled, component in the unfolding commercial television landscape, it has since the beginning of the new century seen a very conscious push, particularly through India’s first 24-hour Hindi news channel Aaj Tak. This push was motivated partly by the ideological aim of making Hindi into a topic in the global/(post-) postcolonial context and to prove its cultural equality with, if not its superiority to English, and partly by the insight of facing growing audiences – and thus prospective consumers - of television who understand Hindi (‘Hindustani’) rather than English, if not regional languages. This motion has since been taken up and carried rather forcibly further by transnational channels, particularly by Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV, in the endeavour to shed their Western identifiability and English-language dominance and to win ever-growing audiences. I will argue that this motion can be framed in terms of a trajectory from a ‘nation of values’ towards a ‘nation of numbers’, which is directly connected to the ideology of upward mobility in Indian society. In its course is not only Hindi itself re-invented and transformed from being a political and cultural argument into a commercial asset; it has also led to what one might call a de-hybridisation of Hindi and English that leaves English-language executives of Hindi programming, notably in the entertainment channel Star Plus, in a new form of ‘no man’s land’.
Britta Ohm, Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Europa-University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany; thesis on “The Televised Community. Culture, Politics and Market of Visual Representation in India” (submitted in Feb., currently under review with Routledge India); studied history, political science, and visual communications in Hamburg, London, and Berlin; co-author of documentaries and a feature film; worked as a journalist and cutter for German public TV; first monograph (2001) on the transnationalisation of Indian television; current research on the reconstruction of national identity on Turkish television
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‘How the Bawdy matters: Tradition and Now’
- Ratnakar Tripathy
Investigating the idea of the ‘obscene, bawdy, ribald, bad taste, objectionable etc’ is inherently interesting. this is so because along with the rights/staus of women this family of concepts is a good indicator of how tolerant a society is. liberalness of a society should not be conflated/merged with/into other values such a equality and freedom etc. and tolerance should remain an independent category. for example, in a feudal society marked by inequalities, tolerance of humour targeted at the rich and powerful can be a huge relief- making a difference to the quality of life. second, comparison between the different standards of obscenity etc allows us to focus on the differences between cultures and between the past and the present. it is interesting to find out why something is found ‘obscene’. very often ‘tradition’ is used to justify such claims. on closer examination, tradition through its multiple voices would not seem to support claims of obscenity. two examples illustrate it best. the Khajuraho sculptures leave very little to imagination and one should expect Indians to show a similar tolerance if they really wish to stick to ‘tradition’ as the moral premise. in traditional ‘ladies sangeet’[wedding songs] were often full of jocular insinuations - such as the bride’s father having a liaison with his sister in law and even incest etc. this tradition still carries on but it can understandably create a riot under the wrong circumstances. finally the Dostoevskian question - is everything permissible- such as sacrilege on one extreme and libellous conduct on the other? execrating or ridiculing someone else’s [or one’s own] God is still an unresolved issue that needs to be addressed. my paper will will examine a variety of positions but i do not promise any resolutions. i will try to reconcile the concepts however.
Ratnakar Tripathy has a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Poona. He has been working in print and television media for the past two decades. in the past ten years he has been drawn towards research on themes around the politics of popular culture and media and has worked on Bombay cinema, folk music and theatre, and am currently doing a project on Bhojpuri cinema. Presently he is a Senior Research fellow at the Asian Development Research Institute {ADRI}, Patna, India.
(NOTE! We wil be having a video presentation of Ratnakar Tripathy from India, followed by a Q&A done hopefully through video chatting and webcam).
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‘A Less Privileged View: Marriage, Gender and Social Change According to Access Trained Filmmakers in Chhattisgarh.’
- Margaret Dickinson
My presentation will centre round the portrayal of changing marriage and gender relations in documentaries made in Chhattisgarh State by students and former students of an access course in digital video. The course was initially linked with anthropological research on industrialisation and the first students were encouraged to make films about their personal experiences of social change. They proved to be most interested in gender, family and marriage, topics which have continued to be popular with students in subsequent years. The clips from the Chhattisgarhi films will relate to an assumption which seems implicit in most products of the metropolitan media, that ‘Indian tradition’ required, particularly from women, lifelong monogamy and that more permissive attitudes to sex and marriage are a product of ‘modernity’ or Western influence. Some of the clips appear to endorse this view, others do not. I will suggest that metropolitan media assumptions about trajectories of change are skewed by the near monopoly of jobs enjoyed by people from forward castes and well off families. I will argue that, up to a point, different stories emerge if you offer people from other social strata access to the media but that the process is far from automatic or simplistic. The relationship between lived experience and representation is always complex and I will point to factors which, in this case, encourage filmmakers to ignore or censor their own experience.
Margaret Dickinson is an independent filmmaker who works from her London based company, Marker. From 1998 to 2001 she co-ordinated Jandarshan/Images in Social Change, a network in Europe and India encouraging co-operation in the fields of social documentary, visual anthropology and community media. She was one of the founders of Vertigo Magazine and writes on film and the British film business. Her books on the subject are: Cinema and State. (co-authored with Sarah Street) and Rogue Reels (ed.) both from BFI publishing.
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‘Environmentalism through the media: construction of environmental attitudes among the middle classes in India.’
-Deepti Sastry
The paper attempts to explore how the middle class in Delhi constructs their environmentalisms through media messages. Middle class environmentalisms are mediated and constructed through a complex process involving a range of factors including, more importantly, the influences of the media and the role played by income, age and demographic variables. Using an ethnographic study of middle class attitudes towards the environment, this paper attempts to focus specifically on the role played by media images on middle class understandings of the environment and environmental issues. The literatures on environmental attitudes in India are concentrated around the ideas of ‘green’ and ‘brown’ environmentalisms, making distinctions between concerns of an aesthetic nature and those concerns, which address the daily grit and pollution associated with living in cities and polluted areas. This paper argues that the traditional ‘green’ and ‘brown’ concerns do not adequately address the complex web around which environmental attitudes are framed. By providing a more detailed account of lifestyle choices and ‘habitus’ this paper argues that the ‘environment’ is being constantly defined, re-defined and re-constituted by individuals as part of their interactive lives with the spaces that they live in and engage with. Through interviews, questionnaires and primary data sources the study arrives at a set of preliminary ideas on the nature of environmentalisms and the construction of environmental attitudes. The study identifies the role of media messages in formulating these attitudes and elaborates on the manner in which the messages are translated into environmentalisms.
Deepti Sastry is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College. She is interested in the environmental affiliations and concerns of the middle class in India. Her work looks at the political, economic and social aspects of environmental attitudes in middle class India. She also works more generally on global environmental issues at the global level and the involvement of Southern nations in these global negotiations and is working on a book dealing with the reporting of global environmental news in the media in India.
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‘A Dialogue on the Indian Software “Revolution” and Practice-based Research’
- Matti Pohjonen & Soumyadeep Paul
This presentation consists of a dialogue between a researcher and practitioner working with digital media in India. However, instead of a classical paper, it will take the form of a dialogue between a researcher looking at Indian media and an Indian software architect working for a high-profile web 2.0 company in India. The presentation thus aims at addressing two different things. Firstly, it will look at the problems one faces when one wants to understand the politics of a rapidly-changing field such as new media software development in the Indian context. Secondly, it will look at practice-based research as a possible methodology to address some of the problems that are raised. Using an example of a software developent project that the two are working on together at the moment, the presentation will therefore look at some of the theoretical and practical problems that get raised when the boundaries between research and practice become blurred and the roles between the academic and the professional get sometimes reversed. What are the benefits and risks of such an approach?
Matti Pohjonen is currently a Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he is also finishing his PhD from. He is also one of the co-founders of Sacredmediacow, the media collective on Indian media at SOAS who is organising this conference. Prior to this, Matti Pohjonen completed an MA in Anthropology of Media and two BAs in International Studies and Journalism. Having worked in both the practical side of media as well as as critical theory and research, his current interests lie in combining critical anthropology / cultural studies with recent developments in information, cybernetic and digital theory, with a special focus on the practical and experimental sides of computing and new technologies for artistic and social purposes.
Soumyadeep Paulis a filmmaker, technologist and entrepreneur from Mumbai, India. He is currently working as the Senior Architect in the founding Indian team of a venture-backed disruptive media-technology startup called Nanocast that’s about to launch its product in Web 2.0 and New Media space. He completed his B.Tech. in Computer Sc. and Engg. From IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Kanpur, and then continued his interest in Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence through research projects in Graphics Lab at EPFL, Lausanne and AI Lab at University of Zurich. He also spent three years working in embedded technologies in a Silicon Valley firm. In addition to his work in the technology sector, Soumyadeep Paul has also made several short films, some of which have been broadcast in the past and he continues to create content for the internet video space as a platform for artistic experiments. In filmmaking, his interests lie in exploring traditional forms through internet based artistic collaborations, generative art, storytelling systems / interactive fiction and other emerging forms of artistic expressions.
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‘Slogans have no footnotes:’ collaborative mis-recognition and the weaving of queerness into India’s ‘problem of modernity’
-Akshay Khanna
This paper meanders through a series of interfaces between (mass?) media assemblages and queer activist collectives to explore the conditions under which the question of queerness (same-sex desire, gender transgression and other challenges to heteronormative assemblages) comes to be articulated as yet another aspect or instance of what may be considered India’s ‘problem of modernity’. There is a multiplicity of ways in which sex, its significance and politics are experienced, understood, negotiated and spoken about in India. It may be argued, infact, that queerness must be considered as an integral aspect of the political and cultural landscape that is considered ‘India’. Yet, it seems, the only way in which sexuality may articulate as an object in ‘mass media’ is as a product of conflictual cultural interfaces resulting from ‘globalisation’. Every articulation of ’sexuality’ must thus necessarily resolve an apparent conflict between modernity and tradition. ‘Change’ is thus always already a ponderous aspect of such articulations. This, i argue, is an effect of collaborative mis-recognition that is quite literally negotiated between media assemblages and queer activist collectives. It is such collaborations that allow a ’slogan’ for change to exist without the footnotes that elaborate the conditions of its relevance (and therefore also its irrelevance). I go on to argue that rather than considering practices of representation as sparks to self-reflexivity, we need to consider them as moments when a crisis of representation (a disjuncture between the urban middle-class activist and an abstract queer body that s/he is called upon to represent) comes to be managed through mis-recognition. This opens up the possibility for the examination of the conditions that make such collaboration possible. Briefly, these relate to class, the implication of these media practices themselves in neo-liberal expansion and the relative location of participants to each other, and in the terrain of India’s ‘problem of modernity’.
Akshay Khanna is a presently based in Edinburgh where s/he is producing words that will at some point take the form of a PhD thesis in Social Anthropology. Her/is present research relates to activism relating to sexuality, sexualness and desire in India. S/He also often goes by the introduction of Queer activist, being a founder member of Prism, an activist collective based in Delhi. s/he is most concerned with addressing the disjuncture between sexual activity and sexuality activism, with bringing the sexual back into sexuality (and actually, bringing the sexual into most things).
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‘Dress Indian and Say no to Rum’: Cultural Performance and Managing Authentic India.
-Atticus Narain
Melas are festivals showcasing a variety of cultural attributes through a range of musical, visual, physical and edible delights. At present they exemplify a selective construction evocative of diasporic endeavours to recreate communities of culture through an array of metaphors, performances, objects and texts. Perfomatively they articulate a set of guiding principals for an inclusive cultural identity for the Indian Diaspora in Guyana. The structure and performance of Melas in Guyana draw heavily from Indian films that reiterate their importance in informing local versions of ‘Indianness’. Which characteristics of Indian identity are utilized, invested and promoted give an indication of the selective reconstructions on offer. Melas cooption and appropriation of Indian film aesthetics and Hindu inspired narratives are sites which represent cultural, social and religious values that in turn evoke and reify nation, culture and identity as decidedly Indian
Given the ethnic diversity and fragile political landscape of Guyana any emphasis on the interests of one ‘community’ is problematic and Melas deliberately exploit the narrative of Indian marginality. One focused on the drama of their ‘arrival’ and is ambiguously woven through a Bollywood inspired modernity. The duality between tradition and modernity played out on stage reconfigures Indian subjectivity for public consumption in ‘progressive’ yet essentialist guises. Bollywood’s growing focus on NRI’s in the West has become characteristic and holds particular emotional, aspirational and economic resonance for Indo-Guyanese. The ‘subaltern Indian’ in this paper questions the flow of capital and culture from India to the West by presenting a series of ambivalent exchanges between Indian film, identity and nation.