The Metamorphosis of the Public Sphere in India over Time: Unfolding the Dichotomy between Public and Private Spheres in the Pre and Post-Independence Era

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The popular Indian television talk show, Neeya? Naana? ( You? or Me?), offers a public platform for open discussion of important issues facing citizens in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. Through its inclusive nature and open discussion format, the programme demonstrates the gendered involvement of citizens from all sections of society, including the socially disadvantaged castes and classes. While this suggests that Indian television provides a new site for an emerging public sphere, we contend that the public sphere in India can be historicized to the third millennium BC. In our analysis of Neeya? Naana?, we establish a relationship between Habermasian notions of the public sphere, India’s argumentative tradition and the ancient Sangam literature of South India. We further interrogate the concept of the public sphere by asserting that while India’s television talk shows offer the suggestion of an open democratic forum, they instead reinforce conservative cultural values.

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.

This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding of the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Aries, and Roger Chartier shows that the authentic public articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the of private life identified by Aries was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenthcentury France. Having superimposed the maps of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Aries upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution. Public sphere and private life these domains are now the focus of considerable interest among historians of the Old Regime on both sides of the Atlantic. 1989 saw the publication of English translations of the two works most closely associated with public sphere theory and the history of private life: Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and volume three of A History of Private Life, edited by Roger Chartier.' Each domain, private and public, has its own historiographical tradition and, in a sense, its own partisans. This division of historical labor, however, has contributed to a misunderstanding of the relationship between these two spheres of activity in eighteenth-century France, a misunderstanding that has led to the creation of a false opposition between public and private spheres. My aim here is to show that the two visions of the Old Regime represented by these two historiographical schools are fundamentally complementary. By focusing on the simple real1. Jfrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Habermas's work was originally published in German in 1962, and then translated into French in 1978. Chartier's De la Renaissance aux Lumieres, volume 3 of Histoire de la vie privie, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, was published in France in 1986. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.231 on Thu, 06 Oct 2016 04:06:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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.

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 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

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

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