The Mullaperiyar Dam

Abstract

This article argues that media plays a crucial role in the constitution and representation of risk in modern societies. The transition from an industrial society to the risk society, involving an active critique of modernity, harnesses numerous mediated discourses that manufacture uncertainty. Therefore, the necessity of analyzing the various processes involved in the staging of a confrontation between the basis of modernization and its effect. The media plays a key role in both creating and voicing the distributional conflicts engendered by the transition into a risk society, as also in their legitimization and control. The media through creating, channeling, packaging and marketing effect, can in the absence of earlier tight knit social and cultural spaces of traditional institutions, help integrate new affinity groups or reflect the ideological preoccupations of existing ones. In the context of the Mullaperiyar Dam controversy in southern India, this article seeks to analyze the discourses generated by media for reflexive modernization as also the ideological premises of these discourses which yield vital clues to read the political, regional and material contingencies that shape them and their reception.