Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century. By Chandrika Kaul

Abstract

Ten years after Reporting the Raj, her study of British press reportage of India, and the British government’s attempts to manipulate it in the late-colonial period, Chandrika Kaul’s newest work sets out, ambitiously, to demonstrate the role and impact of media in shaping the Raj experience in the first half of the twentieth century. It is a notably successful attempt, and a valuable contribution, consolidating and expanding Kaul’s authority on an important niche. Indeed, the relationship of late-colonial Indian society to its rapidly proliferating media is a relatively under-researched area, strangely given historians’ increased awareness of changing media environments in mediating social and political change. Her definition of a shared journalistic discourse (p. 16) between Britain and India is a valuable contribution to our understanding of the transnational cultures of empire, and she contributes to well-established modes in the ‘new imperial history’ in her concern for the cultural underpinnings and impacts of the imperial experience in Britain particularly.