Geographical imaginaries in The New York Times' reports of the assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi (1948) and Indira Gandhi (1984)

Abstract

Geographical imaginaries are used by newspapers to interpret and make sense of foreign news, and to position their imagined readership in front of world events. Coverage in The New York Times of two notable assassinations in India is analyzed in order to compare and contrast the geographical imaginaries in use as each killing was constructed as a dramatic news story. Both assassinations were framed by a specific geopolitical context, the post-war reordering of the world in the case of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and the re-energized Cold War in the case of Indira Gandhi. This framing is reinforced by the globalized networks of news production used to report each event. While the analysis shows the expected narration of these events using Cold War narratives and terms, it also reveals shifting forms of Orientalism and civilization discourse at work, as well as ideas about terror, which demonstrate both the wide range of available framings and the variety of possible interpretations of these events. The paper argues that the geographical imaginaries used in this coverage cannot be read off a Cold War lexicon alone.