Subcontinental media

Abstract

The following is the second set of papers from the conference “Innovations in the Social Sciences and Humanities,” in December 2021, at Ton Duc Thang University, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. As mentioned in the January issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, the idea of “transforming knowledge production” (Chen 2010, 216) brings us to this special section interested in the ways media connects Indian audiences with the world through different formats. We reach back from the “imagined communities” of “print capitalism” (Anderson 1983), through global-social “mediascapes” operating through new technologies and connectivities, that now mediate a “naked struggle between the pieties and realities of Indian politics” (Appadurai 2006, 595). The theme is the significance of the formations of Indian media, though without covering all angles, the section investigates newspapers, film, video and television news. The indicator of note is that there is more to be done to build on the new South Asian media studies work represented in texts as diverse as Madhava Prasad (1998, 2014), Gera Roy (2012, 2015), and Ravi Sundaram (2009; 2013), among others. There are five papers here. The first tells the story of the emergence of English and vernacular language newspapers in India, entailing engagement with the early formation of the Bengali intelligentsia—the bhadralok class fraction prominent. Some older controversial history, about papers like Hicky’s Bengal Gazette (Otis 2018) is required to understand why the nineteenth-century formation of the press is still hugely relevant to how thewidermedia sees itself today. Reforming and informing, campaigning and campafflicted, knowledge-promoting and seemingly all-knowing, Shaswati Das shows how this estate took some time to negotiate its path between the forces of Government (then the British colonial regime) and the factional aspirations of emergent nationalism. Film history has been central to Indian political imaginings since the emergence of cinema— the first films made in the 1910s as “mythologicals” and by the 1960s cinemahad a political and national role without question. Within this, as John Hutnyk shows, the Bengali auteur cinema of Satyajit Ray and Ritwik Ghatak made international linkages, in this case reacting to the struggle in Vietnam, but verymuch fromwithin the sensibilities of a national Indian andBengali, even Calcuttan imaginary (see Mrinal Sen in Reinhard Hauff’s film, Ten Days in Calcutta, Hauff 1987). The importance of international solidarity and a cinema of the world was very much a part of the self-understanding of Indian media from its earliest manifestations. Histories of the cinema spaces, and subsequently video halls, are an aspect of this same trajectory. Still, the paper of Dattatreya Ghosh alerts us to critical submerged aspects of this narrative that need to be brought out through close, careful archival media work.