Tamil talk shows: Maintaining tradition in the new public sphere

The public sphere in India has undergone significant changes during colonial rule and the national movement, leading to its susceptibility to the recent rise of Hindutva. The current state of the public sphere in India is shaped by the ambiguities of the national movement, which were influenced by nationalist responses to colonial rule. To fully understand the public sphere, its relationship with the private sphere must be considered, as the public sphere’s definition and shape are derived from this relationship. To institutionalize multiculturalism in the public sphere, it is necessary to renegotiate the relationship between the public and private spheres. Therefore, it is imperative to explore ways to recreate the public sphere in a manner that reflects the country’s diversity effectively.

This article traces the complexities inherent in the formation of the public sphere in India and how this can be seen as impinging on specific kinds of media discourses. After highlighting a few of the apparent contradictions in the Indian public sphere, the article builds on the insights offered by Partha Chatterjee, Kuan-Hsing Chen and Walter Mignolo to argue the case for the need to reconceptualise the concept of the public sphere in order to make it more suitable for the Indian context. Using media reports on terrorism and terrorist activities in India and the diverse conceptualisations of terrorism that underpin them as examples, this article demonstrates the exercise of symbolic power by the state and the media, and how this is indicative of the contradictions intrinsic to the public sphere in India.

Emerging literature on the rapid rise of 24-hour commercial news television in India in the last decade, as well as popular and editorial commentary on the above phenomenon, suggests that these channels are playing the role of mediators for the middle classes. While the news content is widely believed to be sensationalised for the sake of attaining higher ratings in an overcrowded and competitive market, political talk shows have turned into the analytical and narrative extension of news segments. By including the ordinary – mostly through its mediation by middle-class experts and journalists – these talk shows have turned into the popular culture equivalent of a public sphere for middle-class discussions of pertinent political issues. This article traces the genealogy of a long-standing political talk show on one of India's longest-running commercial networks, NDTV 24×7's We the People, to demonstrate its attempts to mirror an inclusive Indian public sphere. Further, in light of the recent middle classled anti-corruption movement in India, and subsequent conclusions about the weakening of the state, an episode of the talk show titled ‘Anna and the Great Indian Middle Class' is subject to a detailed textual analysis. The purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate the show's construction of: (a) corruption as a pan-Indian, and not just a middle-class, issue; (b) the middle class itself as a homogeneous group; and (c) the televisual public sphere (and not a community consultation involving representatives of the state) as a place for establishing populist consensus. Literature on new political television and theories of the public sphere are used as theoretical springboards throughout the article.

India is among the most diverse societies in the world. Various religions, cultures, faiths, languages and social milieu of India reflect a very fine aspect of Indian multiculturalism. The Indian multiculturalism is not defined by any particular, community, religion or region rather it is a matrix of different values, traditions, customs and languages of its heterogeneous cultures, religions, sects etc. As a liberal democracy, it provides recognition to its vast diverse ethnic and religious groups with group-differentiated rights. For the Muslim community in India, both recognition and equal opportunity within the public sphere are keenly desired notions that tend to mobilise them politically and religiously. This paper explores the salience of Indian multiculturalism and issues of marginalisation of the Muslim minority in a liberal democratic polity. The objective of this study is to reflect upon the issues of representation of the Muslims in public sphere in India. This paper will examine the factors which help or hinder in shaping the attitude and participation of the Muslim minority in public sphere in India.

This themed issue of MIA highlights the complex nature of evolving, emerging, mediated public spheres in India, a large, imperfect democracy that is home to the most diverse mediated public spheres anywhere in the world. The history of the public sphere in India has followed a trajectory that is very different from – even at odds with – the history of this sphere as described by Habermas.

This article traces the emergence of a new public sphere in India by applying a critical-cultural theoretical lens to the digital discourse on the Twitter platform surrounding the 2014 Jadavpur University student movement against on-campus sexual violence. Social media platforms allowed the student movement to challenge not only the sociopolitical complications in academia but also the structural silence surrounding issues of sexual assault in the country. In this study, the method of qualitative textual analysis is used to critically analyze the tweets made using the hashtag #hokkolorob (meaning “let there be clamor”), during the movement. The findings in this examination indicate that the Internet today has the capacity to guide public opinion formation, influence collective action, and is emerging as a discursive public sphere among the youth of India. This study contributes toward an understanding of the use of social media communication for political mobilization in the Indian context.

The public sphere as conceptualised by Habermas is a bourgeois institution that had emerged in European countries as a “discursive platform ” to engage in critical discussion and deliberations with the idea of delivering “common good”. The institution has been replicated in many countries including India. But the institution as a whole has inherent assumptions that of the social structures of a bourgeois society. The platform that is supposed to generate “common good” is transforming into the one which almost bringing together socially unequal cultures, whereby the language of the dominant overrules the subordinate. There is no socio-political safeguard to the pluralism of the masses and hence the “common good” is decided by the motivations of private interest in place of public interest. Therefore it becomes crucially important to take a re-look at the present structure of “public sphere” in the Indian context as to how far the institution itself is democratic to deliver “common good” to the society.

This thesis examines the processes which led to the emergence and development of a form of Nepali public sphere in India in the early twentieth century. It proposes that an analysis of the rational-critical modes of discourse adopted by this sphere, and their extension into areas of social, cultural and political institutionalisation offers the best way of understanding the formulation of a modern Nepali identity which has proved persuasive to this day. The central chapters focus on the way in which popular publishing built up both a large readership and the infrastructure which was adopted by more discursive journals; the contours, complexities and contradictions of the dominant rhetoric of social progress which they fuelled and propagated; the way in which rhetoric was incarnated in various organisations and social structures, and the extent to which social mobility allowed power relations to be redrawn while other paradigms of exclusion continued to delimit participation in public life; finally, it offers an assessment of the summation of these processes insofar as they contributed to the development of a clearly articulated, self-aware, and delimited sense of Nepali social consciousness and community belonging. This thesis is based on materials that have been almost entirely ignored by previous historical or literary studies, primarily published Nepali journals and books. It challenges many of the presumptions which underlie traditional approaches to the areas studied and offers specific critiques of a number of influential theorisations of Nepali history and society. At the heart of its analysis is a commitment to understanding the intellectual processes of community conceptualisation and rationalisation as they were experienced and expressed by Nepalis themselves in the period in question. This also entails a detailed dissection of issues of power and authority, of tendencies towards both contestation and the development of normative understandings, and, throughout, of the role of language in enabling and mediating these processes.

"The quotidian revolution: vernacularization, religion, and the premodern public sphere in India." Contemporary South Asia, 28(4), pp. 534–535

Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public Sphere in India, New Delhi and Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2017, 402 pp.

The Illicit Daughter : Hindi Language Newspapers and the Regionalisation of the Public Sphere in India

Through a comparative discussion of public rituals of national commemoration in India and Turkey, this essay examines the relationship between the formation of the public sphere, the production of national identity, and the establishment of state sovereignty. The central organizing principle is the notion of the “creation of the public” as a historically specific political and cultural project. This departs from the evolutionary understanding of the public sphere as a derivative byproduct or “unintended, rolling effect”1 of social, economic, and political “structural transformations” that took place in the course of the longue durée of European history.2 By theorizing the formation and reproduction of the Indian and Turkish public spheres as deliberate projects or strategies of nationalization and étatization,3 I draw attention to several significant aspects of political modernity that have been obscured in prevailing theories of public sphere formation and transformation.

Previous articleNext article No AccessConstructing‐Contesting Masculinities: Trends in South Asian CinemaGita Rajan Gita RajanDepartment of Women’s StudiesHamilton CollegeandDepartment of EnglishFairfield University Search for more articles by this author Department of Women’s StudiesHamilton CollegeandDepartment of EnglishFairfield UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 31, Number 4Summer 2006 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/500959 Views: 344Total views on this site Citations: 13Citations are reported from Crossref © 2006 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Hoimawati Talukdar Masculinities and Media Culture in Indian Bollywood Films, (Jan 2022): 570–584.https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-4511-2.ch034Meraj Ahmed Mubarki Body, masculinity and the male hero in Hindi cinema, Social Semiotics 30, no.22 (Nov 2018): 225–253.https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2018.1547497Praseeda Gopinath, Pavitra Sundar Introduction: Masculinities, South Asian Popular Culture 18, no.11 (Mar 2020): 1–10.https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2020.1736819Shamshad Khan, Sapna Nair, Anthony Huynh, Claudyne Chevrier, Raghavendra Thalinja, Ravi Prakash, Prakash Javalkar, Satyanarayana Ramanaik, Shajy Isac, Parinita Bhattacharjee, Robert Lorway Media, nationalism, and the body: Exploring masculinities, male partner violence, and HIV vulnerability among female sex workers in northern Karnataka, India, Global Public Health 15, no.11 (Aug 2019): 64–82.https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2019.1650948Shailendra Kumar Singh Interrogating Stigma: Menstrual Management and Maternal Masculinity in R. Balki’s Padman, Women's Reproductive Health 6, no.22 (Jun 2019): 118–127.https://doi.org/10.1080/23293691.2019.1601906Hoimawati Talukdar Masculinities and Media Culture in Indian Bollywood Films, International Journal of Smart Education and Urban Society 9, no.22 (Apr 2018): 12–24.https://doi.org/10.4018/IJSEUS.2018040102E. Guillermo Iglesias Díaz Alternative Modernities and Othered Masculinities in Mira Nair’s The Namesake, (Dec 2017): 203–222.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62133-3_11Natasha Anand “I Am Trying” to Perform Like an Ideal Boy: The Construction of Boyhood through Corporal Punishment and Educational Discipline in Taare Zameen Par, Boyhood Studies 9, no.11 (Jan 2016).https://doi.org/10.3167/bhs.2016.090105Krupa Shandilya Of enraged shirts, gyrating gangsters, and farting bullets: Salman Khan and the new Bollywood action film, South Asian Popular Culture 12, no.22 (Jul 2014): 111–121.https://doi.org/10.1080/14746689.2014.937579 Eungu Lee Indian Woman in Deepa Mehta’s , Journal of South Asian Studies 18, no.33 (Mar 2013): 193–212.https://doi.org/10.21587/jsas.2013.18.3.008 Bibliography, (Feb 2010): 270–315.https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203889343.bmattRamaswami Mahalingam, Sundari Balan Culture, Son Preference, and Beliefs About Masculinity, Journal of Research on Adolescence 18, no.33 (Sep 2008): 541–553.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-7795.2008.00570.xVinay Lal, Gita Rajan ETHNOGRAPHIES OF THE POPULAR AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE IN INDIA, South Asian Popular Culture 5, no.22 (Oct 2007): 87–95.https://doi.org/10.1080/14746680701619479

Colonial governmentality in India reconstituted the public sphere. New political rationalities that constituted modern governmental power and the liberal technologies of government effected a new conception of economy and society. Governmentality’s governance of colonial conduct in an improving direction socialized native public opinion to question the legitimacy of the colonial covenant. As native opinion against colonial rule sharpened, colonial liberalism had often to make a volte‐face of its liberal principle and was forced to suppress public opinion. Gandhi alone sought to overturn colonial governmentality and in doing so, provided a conception of public opinion that could transcend the limits of liberal reason.

This article examines the mobilisation of protest against an aggravated sexual assault of women from the urban poor in Chennai, South India. All women who participate in the protest are organised in a local women’s rights NGO but their attempts to mobilize the NGO for the protest remain without success. By reference to narrations of women who organise and/or participate in the protest as well as the NGO director and staff, the article interrogates previous works about dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in practices of political mobilisation in India. The guiding question is, with reference to which moral and normative backgrounds the instance is rendered into an issue worthy of public intervention by women and how this definition of the situation is put into doubt by the NGO. On the basis of the empirical findings and literature about civil society and the public sphere in India as well as literature about development cooperation, I argue that the mobilisation of protest cannot be understood as a process of ‘translation’ (of concepts relevant in the NGO). Instead, women refer to a common form of female lamentation to render the incident into a ‘women’s issue’. Subsequently, I argue that the missing cooperation between NGO and women is not a result of this missing translation into a language that is accepted among civil society actors. Instead, it is useful to understand it as an outcome of situational processes of the actualisation of necessarily always vague normative ideas. I show how, in these processes, diverse, and sometimes conflicting, moral and normative references intersect to lead to practices of inclusion and exclusion in protest mobilisation.