Patriotism and Its Avatars: Tracking the National–Global Dialectic in Music Videos and Television Commercials

Abstract

In recent years, discussions in social sciences and postcolonial studies have identified cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism as two major notions that seek to surpass the nation-state. As a framing device for the paradigm of globalization, certain components of the post-national thesis have indeed proved influential in explaining the gradual erosion of the old certainties of nation-state, but do not adequately explain how the nation-state itself is accommodating globalization to preserve, and thereby strengthen, its hegemony. Interestingly, the ascendancy of such ideas has been accompanied by the gradual dislodging of materialist critiques of capitalist expansion (read: globalization) in the postcolonial world. One can discern a certain disquiet that prevails behind the sophistications and subtleties through which the contemporary moment of globalization is being theorized. In postcolonial India, the two ‘cultural systems’, nationalism and globalization, have an enduring influence, and it would be theoretically significant to trace their mutual effects in the context of the music video genre, particularly the procedures through which ideas of patriotism get articulated. Leela Fernandes (2000: 612) probed the post-national thesis by examining ‘the ways in which “globality” is invented through the deployment of nationalist narratives’, while pointing out to the ‘hybrid’ relationship between the national and the global, and the place of gender in such configurations. In addition, Arvind Rajagopal (1998: 16) noted that the national and the global were increasingly being shaped by Hindu themes and idioms, which coincided with the expansion of state-run television thereby creating a single mediated visual regime from the late 1980s. Indeed, for Rajagopal, the confluence of several forces such as economic liberalization facilitated the rise of right-wing politics in India. For Rajagopal, therefore, [the] visual regime was largely shaped in a struggle between the Hindu Right and its secular opponents, where, it is fair to say, the Hindu Right gained most ground. It was from this reformulated political consensus that advertising culture drew its fundamental understandings of the mode of signifying relations between the diverse classes and communities that comprise Indian society. Through advertisements we can see the reflected and changing shape of an increasingly Hinduized public.