Imagined and performed locality

Abstract

A busy industrial centre in a prosperous agricultural state, the town of Ludhiana in Punjab has been a porous site for both overseas migration and an influx of workers from other parts of the country. In the early 2000s, in the wake of economic reforms in India, the city was celebrating a new sense of cultural identity, not only at the regional (Punjabi) level, but also—unexpectedly—at the level of the city itself. How did this recent self-reflexive public culture link up with the simultaneous consolidation of cable TV networks in the city? This article examines the imagined communities and self-images that foster and are fostered by this form of globalised media capitalism, through the commodification of cultural identity. At the same time, however, it argues that the establishment of a televisual regime is also accompanied by performed communities, whose political valence has remained largely unarticulated and unacknowledged. The interactions between these virtual and performative communities have unfolded in different registers, thriving on the largely informal arrangements that corporate television networks and advertisers have had to rely on to operate at the local level. Attending to interactions such as these may be a useful supplement to the emphasis on semiotic practices of ‘reading’ and meaning-making in ethnographies of the media.