Media As A Politics in SA

Media as Politics in South
Asia
The dramatic expansion of the media and communications sector since the 1990s
has brought South Asia on the global scene as a major center for media produc-
tion and consumption. This book is the first overview of media expansion and its
political ramifications in South Asia during these years of economic reforms.
From the puzzling liberalization of media under military dictatorship in Paki-
stan to the brutal killings of journalists in Sri Lanka, and the growing influence
of social media in riots and political protests in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, the
chapters analyze some of the most important developments in the media fields of
contemporary South Asia. Attentive to colonial histories as well as connections
within and beyond South Asia in the age of globalization, the chapters combine
theoretically grounded studies with original empirical research to unravel the
dynamics of media as politics. The chapters are organized around the three
frames of participation, control and friction. They bring to the fore the double-
edged nature of publicity and containment inherent in media, thereby advancing
postcolonial perspectives on the massive media transformation underway in
South Asia and the global South more broadly.
For the first time bringing together the cultural, regulatory and social aspects
of media expansion in a single perspective, this interdisciplinary book fills the
need for overview and analytical studies on South Asian media.
Sahana Udupa is Professor of Media Anthropology, Ludwig Maximilian Uni-
versity, Munich, and Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the
Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. She researches and teaches
journalism cultures, digital media politics, global urbanization and media policy.
She is the author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics.
Stephen D. McDowell is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of
Communication and Information and is John H. Phipps Professor in the School
of Communication at Florida State University, USA. His research and teaching
interests address news content, new communication technologies and communi-
cation policies in South Asia and North America. His first book is on India’s
communication policies, Globalization, Liberalization and Policy Change: A
Political Economy of India’s Communications Sector.
Routledge Contemporary South Asia Series
106 Devotional Islam in 113 India’s Approach to

Contemporary South Asia Development Cooperation
Shrines, Journeys and Wanderers Edited by Sachin Chaturvedi and
Edited by Michel Boivin and Anthea Mulakala
Rémy Delage
114 Education and Society in
107 Women and Resistance in Bhutan
Contemporary Bengali Cinema Tradition and modernisation
A Freedom Incomplete Chelsea M. Robles
Srimati Mukherjee
115 Sri Lanka’s Global Factory
108 Islamic NGOs in Bangladesh Workers
Development, Piety and (Un) Disciplined Desires
Neoliberal Governmentality and Sexual Struggles in a
Mohammad Musfequs Salehin Post-Colonial Society
Sandya Hewamanne
109 Ethics in Governance in India
Bidyut Chakrabarty
116 Migration of Labour in
110 Popular Hindi Cinema India
Aesthetic Formations of the Seen The Squatter Settlements of
and Unseen Delhi
Ronie Parciack Himmat Singh Ratnoo
111 Activist Documentary Film in 117 Gender, Nation and Popular

Pakistan Film in India
The Emergence of a Cinema of Globalizing Muscular
Accountability Nationalism
Rahat Imran Sikata Banerjee
112 Culture, Health and 118 Media as Politics in South

Development in South Asia Asia
Arsenic Poisoning in Bangladesh Edited by Sahana Udupa and
M. Saiful Islam Stephen D. McDowell
Media as Politics in South Asia
Edited by Sahana Udupa and

Stephen D. McDowell
First published 2017
by Routledge
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© 2017 Selection and editorial material, Sahana Udupa and Stephen D.
McDowell; individual chapters, the contributors.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Udupa, Sahana, 1977– editor. | McDowell, Stephen D.,
1958– editor.
Title: Media as politics in South Asia / [edited by] Sahana Udupa and
Stephen D. McDowell.
Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge,
2017. |
Series: Routledge contemporary South Asia series ; 118 | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016054613| ISBN 9781138289437 (hardback) |
ISBN 9781315267159 (ebook)Subjects: LCSH: Mass media–Political
aspects–South Asia. | Mass media policy–South Asia.
Classification: LCC P95.82.S636 M44 2017 | DDC 302.23/09549–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016054613
ISBN: 978-1-138-28943-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-26715-9 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents
Notes on contributors vii
1 Introduction: beyond the “public sphere” 1

S ahana U dupa and S tephen D . M c D owell
Part I
Participation 19
2 Small frame politics: public performance in the digital age 21

ethiraj G abriel D attatreyan
3 Envisioning Pakistan: urban ‘awami’ space, travel and the

media 36
C hloe A . G ill - K han
4 Media and minority ethnic political identity in Nepal 46

N atalie G reenland and M ichael W ilmore
5 Pimps, paranoia and politics: narratives of masculinities

and femininities in the Nepali blogosphere 61
S anjee v U prety
Part II
Control 75
6 Why did a military dictator liberalize the electronic media

in Pakistan? 77
K iran H assan
vi Contents
7 Re-inventing normality in Sri Lanka’s media systems 95
W illiam C rawley and D a v id P age
8 The politico-commercial nexus and the broadcast policy

reform in Bangladesh 110
A nis R ahman , S . M . S hameem R e z a and F ahmidul H a q
9 Writing, typing and scanning: distributive justice and the

politics of visibility in the era of e-governance 127
U rsula R ao
Part III
Friction 141
10 Two faces of Sri Lankan media: censorship and resistance 143

G ehan G unatilleke
11 Politics of clicking: blogs and political participation in South

Asia 160
D e v nath P athak and R atan K umar R oy
12 Mediating claims to Buddha’s birthplace and Nepali

national identity 176
D annah D ennis
13 Viral video: mobile media, riot and religious politics 190

S ahana U dupa
14 Closing comments: media as politics and mediated politics 206

S tephen D . M c D owell and S ahana U dupa
Index 215
Contributors
William Crawley is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Common-

wealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was a
broadcaster, producer and editor in the BBC World Service for over 20 years
with responsibilities for BBC radio broadcast services in South Asian lan-
guages. He is the co-author of Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting,
Culture and the Public Interest (Sage, 2001) and co-editor of Embattled
Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka (Sage, 2015). He
taught at St Stephens College, Delhi University from 1964 to 1967 and was
Secretary of the Charles Wallace Pakistan, Bangladesh and Burma Trusts
from 2002 to 2007. He was De Carle Lecturer at Otago University New
Zealand in 2007.
Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a visual anthropologist. He finished his Ph.D. in

anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania. His research in Delhi
examined how the immigrant youth from Nepal, Nigeria, Somalia and
Afghanistan are assimilating into the developing city. As a part of this
research, he made a documentary film called Waiting Subjects: Cry Out Loud
based on the Nigerian, Somalian, Cameroonian, Ugandan, Ivorian and Con-
golese settlement in Khirkee (Malviya Nagar). He worked with young resi-
dents of Khirkee, Hassan Abdi, Ahmed Ex, Young Hafes, Abdullahi Idris and
Abdul Abdulkhadir, who he brought on board to co-direct.
Dannah Dennis is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Vir-

ginia. Her dissertation examines changing narratives of national identity in
the midst of Nepal’s constitutional transition to secularism and federalism.
She has published articles on the gendered and regional exclusions that shape
Nepali citizenship law and on the politics of road-building and infrastructure
in Kathmandu, along with a piece of ethnographic fiction exploring the effects
of international migration on Nepali middle-class families.
Chloe A. Gill-Khan is a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Muslim
Civilisations, Aga Khan University, London. Previously, she was a post-
doctoral research fellow at the University of South Australia. Chloe is cur-
rently completing a monograph that examines British and French literatures
viii Contributors
of the ex-colonial diasporas (British Asians and Franco-Maghrebians). Her
research interests include Pakistani culture and politics, European colonial-
ism, decolonization and the postcolonial, comparative literature and
philosophy.
Natalie Greenland is an anthropologist who holds a Ph.D. in anthropology from
the University of Adelaide. Natalie’s research interests are predominantly in
youth engagement with development via communication consumption and
production practices in South Asia. Natalie has worked in the South Austral-
ian NGO sector since 2011 in policy, advocacy, research and evaluation.
Natalie has contributed to policy development, legislative change, and led a
number of evaluations in the areas of alcohol and other drug use, homeless-
ness and family violence. Natalie currently leads evaluation at a large South
Australian NGO.
Gehan Gunatilleke is the Research Director of Verité Research. He teaches
post-graduate courses in human rights, democratization and development at
the University of Colombo and the Open University of Sri Lanka. He is also
the author of The Right to Information: A Guide for Advocates (Sri Lanka
Press Institute/UNESCO, 2015) and a contributing author of Embattled
Media: Democracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka (Sage Publications,
2015). Gehan is currently a Commonwealth scholar at New College, Univer-
sity of Oxford.
Fahmidul Haq is Professor at the Department of Mass Communication and
Journalism, University of Dhaka. He earned his Ph.D. in film studies from the
University of Science, Malaysia. His areas of interests include film studies,
new media, citizen journalism and political economy of communication. He
is the lead editor of Jogajog, a prominent communication journal in Bangla-
desh published in Bangla.
Kiran Hassan is a communications scholar with expertise in Pakistan’s media,
domestic politics and foreign policy. She received her Ph.D. from the Institute
of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. She has served as Pakistan
expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, and has
taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Hassan has previously
worked as a senior research associate at South Asia Free Media Association
and a senior communication specialist with the Punjab Government in Paki-
stan. Prior to that, she contributed to various diaspora research projects with
the BBC World Service in London.
Stephen D. McDowell’s research teaching interests address news content, new
communication technologies and communication policies in South Asia and
North America. He has written a book on India’s communication policies,
Globalization, Liberalization and Policy Change: A Political Economy of
India’s Communications Sector (St. Martin’s and Macmillan, 1997), and held
fellowships with the Canadian federal Department of Communications in
Contributors ix
Ottawa (1987–1989), with the Shastri Indo-Canadian Institute (1989–1990),
and a Congressional Fellowship supported by the American Political Science
Association in Washington, DC (1994–1995). He is John H. Phipps Professor
in the School of Communication at Florida State University in Tallahassee,
Florida.
David Page is a senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth
Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. He was a broad-
caster, producer and editor in the BBC World Service for over 20 years with
responsibilities for BBC radio broadcast services in South Asian languages.
He is the co-author of Satellites over South Asia: Broadcasting, Culture and
the Public Interest (Sage, 2001) and co-editor of Embattled Media: Demo-
cracy, Governance and Reform in Sri Lanka (Sage, 2015). He taught at
Edwardes College, Peshawar from 1966 to 1967 and is the author of Prelude
to Partition (Oxford University Press, 1982).
Dev Nath Pathak teaches sociology at South Asian University, New Delhi. He
obtained a doctorate in sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University. His current
research interests include anthropology of performance, communication and
culture, and South Asian studies He edited Intersections in Sociology, Art and
Art History (Akar). One of his edited books, Performative Communication:
Culture and Politics in South Asia, is forthcoming. He is currently the reviews
editor of Society and Culture in South Asia (journal of the Department of
Sociology, South Asian University, published by Sage India). He was Charles
Wallace Fellow (2015) at Queen’s University Belfast.
Anis Rahman is Instructor and Ph.D. candidate at the School of Communica-
tion at Simon Fraser University. His doctoral research explores media demo-
cratization, policy reform and journalism issues in Bangladesh. Rahman holds
master’s degrees from the Goldsmiths, University of London (Television
Journalism) and the University of Rajshahi (Mass Communication). He
received a Chevening Scholarship from the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, UK. He has published in the Asian Journal of Communication, Journ-
alism & Mass Communication Quarterly and Eptic online journals. He has
also published an open access book: Public Service Media Initiatives in the
Global South (edited with Gregory Ferrell Lowe).
Ursula Rao is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Leipzig in
Germany. Her current research focuses on e-governance and the social con-
sequences of biometric technology in India. She is completing a manuscript
on “Biometric Futures: Rescaling Governance through New Bodily Discip-
lines.” In the past Rao has written on Hindi and English journalism, urban
space and ritual theory. Some of her recent English-language publications are
News as Cultures: Journalistic Practices and the Remaking of Indian Leader-
ship Traditions (Berghahn, 2010) and “Talking Back to the State: Citizens’
Engagement after Neoliberal Reform in India” (Social Anthropologist 22:
410–427).
x Contributors
S. M. Shameem Reza teaches at the Department of Mass Communication and
Journalism, University of Dhaka. He served as a visiting scholar at the Insti-
tute of Malaysian and International Studies (IKMAS). He specializes in
media and communications policy studies, community and alternative media,
diaspora media and development communication. Reza is an advocate for
community broadcasting and democratization of media policies in South
Asia. His recent works focus on media policy reforms and development of
community radio as third sector broadcasting in Bangladesh.
Ratan Kumar Roy is a research scholar at the Department of Sociology, South
Asian University, New Delhi. His research work at the University of Dhaka
was published in Bangla, titled Dorshoke Chokhe Television [Television in
the Eyes of Audience]. He worked as a television journalist in Bangladesh
before starting his ongoing doctoral research on the relation of audience and
television news in Bangladesh. He is editorial assistant with Society and
Culture in South Asia (journal of the Department of Sociology, South Asian
University, published by Sage India).
Sahana Udupa is a communications scholar and social anthropologist with
research interests in journalism cultures, digital media politics, global urbani-
zation and media policy. She is Professor of Media Anthropology, Ludwig
Maximilian University, Munich, and Senior Research Partner at the Max
Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.
She is the author of Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics
(Cambridge University Press, 2015). Her articles have appeared in American
Ethnologist, New Media and Society, Communication, Culture and Critique,
Media, Culture and Society, Critique of Anthropology and many other peer-
reviewed journals.
Sanjeev Uprety, a professor of English literature and cultural theory at Tribhu-
van University, took early, voluntary retirement from the university after
teaching for 26 years. After completing his Ph.D. from Brown University, he
did his post-doctoral work on South Asian masculinities at Harvard and UC-
Berkeley universities. Sanjeev also coordinated the M.Phil. in English
program for two years and supervised the construction of IMAP, a digital
archive of art and theater related materials of Nepal. He is currently working
on a book project concerning Nepali masculinities. Sanjeev is also a novelist,
playwright and a well-known theater artist of Nepal.
Michael Wilmore is Professor of Media Studies and Anthropology. He has
worked on projects in Nepal, Australia and the UK, investigating issues
in development and health communication. He has also held a number of
faculty leadership roles supporting learning and teaching, and is currently
Executive Dean of the Faculty of Media and Communication, Bournemouth
University, UK.
1 Introduction
Beyond the “public sphere”
Sahana Udupa and Stephen D. McDowell
The dramatic expansion of media and communications sector since the 1990s
has brought South Asia on the global scene as a major center for media produc-
tion and consumption, signaling the reality of a media-fed South Asia that is no
longer on the periphery of global media dynamics. Recent studies estimate that
television reaches over 650 million viewers, newspapers have more than 300
million readers, and the Internet media are accessed by close to 250 million
people in the region covering India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal.
Unlike many countries in the West, newspapers in South Asia are not dying but
multiplying, satellite television is in many ways the “new media” with a tantal-
izing hold over millions of viewers, mobile phones are making inroads into
urban as well as rural areas, and the Internet media have touched the region with
the promise of unmediated, peer-to-peer communication. The rapid growth of
media and the vibrant political cultures cohering around them indicate that the
media impact not merely the distribution of symbolic goods but the very possib-
ility for ordinary citizens to engage local, national and transnational power.
This volume is an attempt to see media as politics in the expanding and
important media landscape of South Asia. It is rooted in the recognition that
there need not be the conjunction “and” separating the two fields, but a more
definitive interconnection suggested by the preposition “as.” The chapters are
anchored to the specific question on media’s significance for a new wave of
political mobilizations and aspirations in the last two decades across sites as
varied as television channels, social media, shopping malls, music videos, riots
and protests, as well as the strategies of control that have surfaced in the midst of
this massive expansion of media cultures. What political cultures are inspired
and activated by media − what hopes are sparked and what voices effaced? We
address these questions with a collection of studies on South Asian media in the
years of economic liberalization and media re-regulation.
Diverse in the cultural artifacts it produces, the large audiences it engages and
the intricate networks of ownership that exercise power, the South Asian media
landscape is without doubt one of the most complex media fields in the world.
Across most parts of South Asia, organized commercial media and media policy
started with the British rule. Between the later decades of the nineteenth century
and early decades of the twentieth century, commercial players started
2 S. Udupa and S. D. McDowell
newspapers, while the British regime established early radio stations and formu-
lated laws to manage mass communication (Rajagopal, 2009). Although the defi-
nition and scope of “South Asia” are constantly shifting, the region covering Sri
Lanka, Pakistan, Nepal, India and Bangladesh is characterized by a distinct set
of interconnections with shared colonial histories, everyday interactions crossing
the boundaries as well as the symbolic power of the geopolitical imagination of
“South Asia”. To apply Steve Vertovec’s (1997) analytical framework of
diaspora in this context, we could argue that South Asia has been historically
salient as a social form, a type of consciousness and a mode of cultural produc-
tion. The interconnections among different nations and subnational areas of
South Asia underwrite recent media expansion in the region. Following the dis-
mantling of state monopoly in television and the entry of multinational players,
media in various formats and platforms have expanded in South Asia since the
1990s (McDowell, 1997; Rasul and McDowell, 2012, Udupa, 2015). In India,
the largest media market and a dominant player in the region, more than 300 sat-
ellite networks made their entry between 1995 and 2007 (Mehta, 2008). Industry
figures estimate that the satellite and cable television reaches over 450 million
homes, covering 70 percent of households in urban India. This is the third largest
in the world in viewership size, after China and the United States. In Pakistan, a
flurry of activities followed the government’s decision to allow private television
channels in 2000. Existing media firms and industry groups were quick to own
most of the news and television channels. Latest industry estimates point to 130
popular channels available in Pakistan, including many international and Indian
offerings, and there were 91 satellite television licenses listed by the Pakistan
Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA) in 2014.1 Bangladesh has at
least 26 licensed television stations, Sri Lanka has 11 licensed domestic channels
and Nepal has 23 channels.2 South Asian television channels are also included in
satellite and cable packages in countries around the world, and many can be
streamed live over web connections.
The growth of print media matches television expansion, funded by advertisers
aiming to reach consumers in diverse language markets and, as with television,
owners who wish to build and retain influence and social power. Newspaper
growth across the region offers a contrast to the sobering story of the declining
print media in Western economies. Twenty of the world’s 100 largest newspapers
are from India. Literacy among adults aged 15 plus, while high in Sri Lanka his-
torically, has risen from 45.9 percent in 1990 to 61.6 percent in 2010 in the region
overall, thus expanding the potential markets for print media producers.3
Wireline telephone subscription levels have not grown significantly in 15
years, but the explosive growth in wireless telephone subscriptions has been a
key to the expansion of access to electronic communication in South Asia. While
wired broadband subscriptions are also low by international standards, tele-
centers have expanded access modalities for these services outside home
subscriptions, and new media and social media usage have been gaining in
importance among youth, social movements, political campaigns and commer-
cial sector uses.
Introduction 3
With 350 million Internet users, India’s online user community is next only
in size to China and the United States. If Pakistan’s Internet users are close to 18
million4 and Bangladesh has 45 million Internet subscribers,5 other countries are
moving surely, if slowly, toward digital access. Despite the limited reach of
online media (between 15 and 25 percent of the total population), mobile phones
are fast emerging as the key modes of online access. In Sri Lanka and India,
there are more mobile phone subscriptions than the total population. The trans-
national infrastructure of the Internet has brought new connections and flows,
linking the South Asian diaspora and homeland publics in new ways. Market
interests have extended the transnational reach of new media with an array of
online applications, while initiatives such as Facebook’s Internet.org have prom-
ised the region with free Internet basics, in a rush to translate digital accessibility
into first-mover monopolies. Amidst market enterprise and partly in collabora-
tion with it, a range of civic initiatives have expanded, from mobile phone
microfinance in Bangladesh and traffic management apps in India to civil society
movements for democratic participation via social media in Pakistan and Sri
Lanka.
As a result, the vast cultural, religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity that
defines South Asia’s billion-and-a-half population is increasingly drawn into the
political and technological flux of media flows. The region is today mediated
and remediated by the criss-crossing networks of media images and practices.
Internet visuals of anti-Muslim violence in Myanmar, for instance, created waves
of panic across India in 2013, forcing an exodus of North-East migrants feeding
on short messaging services, Facebook posts and television reports. Elections in
Pakistan received extensive coverage in the Indian news media in 2013, while
the Tamil cause has found expression in popular media well and beyond Tamil
Nadu and Sri Lanka, and the Internet media have sparked new hopes of partici-
patory democracy across the region. The Lawyers’ movement against the Emer-
gency imposed by President Musharaff in 2007, the rise of the Aam Aadmi Party
(common man’s party) in India, digital activism of Tamil minorities in Sri
Lanka, the expansion of diaspora online Hindu nationalism, debates over the
right to information and ethnic minority rights in Nepal, controversies around
political blogs in Bangladesh and several similar developments illustrate the
diverse contestations for which media are central.
In a profound sense, media have reconfigured the material resources and sym-
bolic means of political participation, in a context where state-controlled media
have paved the way for varying degrees of deregulation, re-regulation and a
surge of commercial interests in the last two decades. The excitement around
media avenues of participation as well as continuities of cultural forms in the
new media environment have at times upset the older hierarchies and established
authorities, while also deepening newer conditions of exclusion and historically
shaped power structures.
Media visibilities and political action
How then do we analyze media expansion of the last two decades and its polit-
ical implications? How does such an inquiry illuminate aspects of global com-
munication and draw focus on South Asia as its increasingly important actor? At
the heart of exploring these questions lies the recognition of the mediated nature
of political subjectivities and political action. Circulation of media narratives and
objects produces particular kinds of political practices and social imaginaries
that reconfigure and co-constitute the field of politics. We understand politics
broadly as an arena of contestation for multiple claims through diverse cultural,
associational and state regulatory activities. Of particular interest is what Ulrich
Beck calls subpolitics: politics that are not “governmental, parliamentary, and
party politics,” but take place in “all the other fields of society” (Beck, 1997:
52). In delineating media as politics, we follow Chantal Mouffe’s (2000) theori-
zation of agonistic pluralism, which places antagonism, passions and collective
forms of identification at the center of democratic politics, in place of an ideal-
ized rational consensus. This approach to politics is advanced by a broad defini-
tion of “media” to cover not only the conventional formats of print, television,
radio and cinema but also emergent Internet-enabled media, “small frame”
capture on low-cost media (Chow, 2012) and new media technologies of govern-
ance such as state surveillance devices and biometric data.
The conception of politics as an arena of contestation along multiple modes
of engaging the social infrastructures of media and communication entails some
revisions in the approach to the study of media. First, a clear distinction between
media’s cultural, political and regulatory dimensions appears untenable, prompt-
ing a move beyond the disciplinary traditions that maintain a difference between
micro “cultural anthropology” and macro “policy.” The studies compiled here
gesture toward such a reworking of media’s analytical boundaries, although we
are mindful that this is only a preliminary step toward a larger effort to connect
micro media practices with the broader structures of regulation and political
economy.
Second, we maintain that media logics have become so widespread that the
state and society are together drawn into recursive media as sites and networks
of symbolic production and circulation. One way to approach this is what Nick
Couldry defines as “media meta-capital”: media’s “definitional power across the
social space” (2003: 669).6 The concept of media meta-capital departs from
accounts of media as ideological apparatuses of the state and market capital, or
in other words, media as mere conduits of ideological content produced outside
of them. Building on Bourdieu’s field theory, Couldry instead draws attention to
the “status of media institutions themselves in society generally or in specific
sectors of social life” (2003: 654). Meta-capital refers not only to the creation of
symbolic capital specific to particular fields (formal politics, art or education)
but also to media co-determining what counts as capital, akin to the symbolic
power of the state. In Couldry’s interpretation of Bourdieu, media meta-capital
produces “a structure of misrecognition that works precisely because of its
Introduction 5
pervasiveness across social space, on account of its totalizing force” (2003: 665).
However, far from a media deterministic perspective, we understand this frame-
work as a way to reconcile media’s internal contradictions as an institution and
media’s symbolic power in shaping social realities and political action (Couldry,
2003). Couldry suggests that this symbolic power lies in media’s ability to co-
create “categories of thought” that constitute our lived worlds, and the most
fundamental of them is the distinction between people, events and issues that are
“in” the media and those that are not. Couldry (2010) calls this the “myth of the
media center.” We trace the stakes in creating and sustaining this myth in South
Asia, although we depart from Couldry’s cognitive conception of symbolic
power to a more capacious term, “publicity,” which is at once performative,
affective and cognitive. We therefore turn to Michael Warner (2002) and postco-
lonial theories of visibility (Cody, 2011; Udupa, 2015) to approach media’s
political trajectories and promises as an aspect of the irreducible social.
The volume builds on the proposition that media practices intervene in pol-
itics primarily through the modality of publicity which is central to the formation
of “publics.” As “large-scale political subjects,” publics are “thinkable and prac-
ticable by means of mass mediated communication” (Cody, 2011: 38) and the
latest variants of “mass self-communication” on social media (Castells, 2009).
The principle of publicity as extendable and reflexive visibility distinguishes
publics from crowds or masses, in that publics are self-organized and emerge in
relation to discourse (Warner, 2002). A variety of sources and forces shape this
publicity – material infrastructures of media technology, market logics, cultural
practices, social structures and meanings of modernity cohering around media.
These underpin “the recursive processes of mass mediation and self-abstraction”
(Cody, 2011: 47).
Publicity implies collective political agency, but we maintain that this eman-
ates not as much from collective reason assumed by liberal-modernist formula-
tions or communicative rationality in the public sphere model (Habermas, 1989),
but as “structured visibility” shaped by concrete historical and social structures,
whether of language ideologies, ethnicity, religious identities, nation or caste
(Udupa, 2015), which interlace with “classed and gendered orientations to time
and space” (Cody, 2011: 43). This means we approach publicity not in terms of
already-existing rational choices of the public which flare into view in a pure act
of representation, but as an analytical exercise that takes account of the multi-
farious social and cultural conditions within which mass mediated political sub-
jects emerge and get constituted (Udupa, 2015). Among other things, structured
visibility − in contradistinction to the assumptions of homogenous and transpar-
ent visibility of mass mediations − draws attention to the histories of colonial
encounter, postcolonial nation-building efforts, and the actually existing struc-
tures of sociality that overlay the shifting ideas of media modernity (Abu-
Lughod, 2005; Comaroff and Comaroff, 1993; Kaviraj, 2010; Mankekar, 1999;
Rajagopal, 2001, 2009; Rao, 2010; Sundaram, 2013). This is especially signi-
ficant in the postcolonial context of South Asia, since notions of public opinion
and public reason were inseparable from the “rule of colonial difference”
(Chatterjee, 1993: 19), and liberal reason was part of the pedagogical discourse
of colonial power which was also appropriated in the local struggles for political
power by upper caste groups (Udupa, 2010).
“Structured visibility” acknowledges media’s co-creation of visible spaces
beyond the Foucauldian panopticon where the visibility of many to a few is an
act of power. However, it qualifies the seeming open-endedness of mediated vis-
ibility (Thompson, 2011) by conceptualizing intersections of media cultures with
the shifting forces of sociality which at once open up and limit the possibilities
of participation. The continued salience of religious identity and ethnic markers
in the Indian, Nepali and Sri Lankan media cultures (Chapters 4, 10, 12 and 13,
this volume) illustrate this point.
Structured visibility is also a critique of impersonal stranger sociability
through the “economy of speech” and communicative reason as the quintessence
of publicity (Negt and Kluge, 1993). Instead, it directs attention to the affective,
embodied and performative production of publicity, which is crucial for media’s
constitution of the political. Across assemblages of disparate elements (Ong,
2006), leisure, ludic and spectacle are entangled to create new political spaces
where meanings of living are expressed, debated and absorbed. The hip-hop col-
lective of the Delhi malls in Dattatreyan’s chapter (Chapter 2) and the Sufi rock
musicians in Gill-Khan’s exploration (Chapter 3) in this volume capture the
embodied and performative means adopted by diverse groups and individuals as
they weave fields of visibility and media circulation within spaces not always
normatively disposed in their favor. Drawing on Chow’s (2012) distinction
between seeable and sayable, Dattatreyan goes further to suggest that sensory
immersion of capture technologies such as video challenge modernity’s norm-
ative taming of the subject with narrativization (“sayable”) and “flay open the
possibility of knowing and being known” as a radical political possibility.
The flip side of media-fed visibility is the organized effort at concealment and
containment, reflected in a variety of surveillance and censorship practices of the
state as well as symbolic control by market power and authorities from domains
such as organized religion and formal politics. Although critical theories in the
Marxist tradition emphasize precisely this concentration of discursive power, we
expand our critique beyond the determining power of the economic base, into a
range of spheres where discursive power is created through control, intimidation
and chilling suppression of voices, often by claiming to represent “national
interest” or “public good.” As Hassan, Gunatilleke, Pathak and Roy in this
volume demonstrate (Chapters 6, 10 and 11), regulation of publicity is the very
arena where sovereignty is staged, reified and, at times, brutally enforced
(Mazzarella, 2013).
Three frames
Keeping with the double-edged nature of publicity and concealment inherent in
media, the volume has organized the contributions around three frames: Parti-
cipation, Control and Friction. We suggest that the three frames provide a way to
Introduction 7
account for media-fed civic enthusiasm and proliferation of public expressions
but to also qualify the celebratory frame of media-enabled democratic resur-
gence by drawing attention to action, reflection and restriction that arise in inter-
related ways with multiple media forms. These frames no doubt overlap and
interpenetrate, but each frame signals, more pointedly than others, a distinct set
of activities around media. Participation captures the hopes and aspirations of
political debate enriched by media, control gestures toward organized efforts to
“manage” and rein in media, and friction as a frame pries open spaces where
these distinct impulses collide and collude.
Participation
The first of these frames – participation – is an inquiry into new avenues of polit-
ical participation co-created by media where public meanings are reworked and
counter-meanings are forged. The chapters explore activisms, struggles and con-
testations emerging in conjunction with expanding media, whether through
digital media as new technological affordances and cultural practices or via older
formats of radio and television. How do expanding media enable and inhibit new
kinds of political participation? How do media reshape the very ideas of public
participation and politics, and what are the historical continuities that underpin
them? What kinds of visibility and performances do such media practices create
and how do they bring new debates, actors and claims into the field of politics?
How do they challenge or reinforce social hierarchies coded in aesthetic and
symbolic forms?
In her exploration of the concept of “awami” or public space in Pakistan,
Gill-Khan (Chapter 3) addresses these questions with an ethnographic portrait of
the architect, planner, sociologist and writer Arif Hasan. Charting the media
practices, artistic journeys and biographical trajectories of Hasan as well as
popular musical bands actively using digital media in Pakistan, Gill-Khan
reveals that these activities represent a new wave of artistic production and
socio-political concerns that arose after President Musharaff relaxed the media
laws in the mid-2000s. Digital video has presented opportunities for Pakistanis
to “travel” and discover the nation, at a time when physical opportunities have
dwindled as a result of crumbling infrastructure. Gill-Khan argues that “Mass
media platforms or even satirical political protest songs in Pakistan do not
guarantee more democratic forms of expression, participation and representation,
but present opportunities for reorganizing social settings within which people
interact.”
A similar upsurge of enthusiasm is seen in Dattatreyan’s study of young hip-
hop performers in Delhi (Chapter 2) and Greenland and Wilmore’s analysis of
media practices among ethnic minorities in Nepal (Chapter 4). The case of
Tamang media producers is striking. As one of the most politically, economic-
ally and socially marginalized ethnic groups in Nepal, the Tamang community
was legally discriminated against in law until the 1950s. Now the community
finds a way to produce media in a relatively accessible media environment. This
is a significant shift from the not-too-distant past when all media forms were
controlled by the state, and media content was dictated by the one nation, one
language policy designed to support Nepali nationalism. Linguistic and ethnic
identity remains central to Tamang media production, signaling that the linguis-
tically coded Nepali nationalism is today overlaid by media expressions in
diverse languages which serve as vehicles and repositories of ethnic and cultural
identities.
Such expressive fecundity could occur with new media technologies in sur-
prising ways and at unconventional sites. Artistic practices of hip-hop and their
small-screen circulation on low-cost media on mobile phones, for instance, has
allowed the migrant youth from Africa and different parts of India to claim per-
formative spaces in the mega shopping malls of Delhi. As Dattatreyan elab
orates, spectators to the public performances of hip-hop groups inside the malls
use small frame technology to capture and (re)broadcast their performances, and
thus render these youth, otherwise invisible labor within Delhi’s rapidly devel-
oping urban complex, visible. “These performative disruptions,” he argues,
can be seen as inherently political, a tactic deployed by these young men to

establish a right to their city as the children of migrants who occupy caste,
class, and ethnic positions that limit their access to Delhi as a global city in
the making.
Drawing from Foucault and Deleuze, he argues that it is precisely at this

moment, where migrant youth are once again decontextualized and traveling,
that there exists the potentiality for new political subjects to emerge.
In all the cases, media practice is inseparable from the social location of actors
in a shifting landscape – whether of the city they migrated to or the volatile scen-
ario of conflict and ethnic politics. How do mediated practices of visibility unfold
in relation to the broader transformative processes of the state and market? Green-
land and Wilmore (Chapter 4) point to the political scenario in the post-civil war,
federal, republican nation-state of Nepal as a crucial factor in shaping the new
media environment. Gunatilleke (Chapter 10) describes a vibrant new media
culture of criticism emerging in the very midst of the climate of fear and repres-
sion in postwar Sri Lanka, but adds that new media initiatives of daring journal-
ists are also increasingly subjected to state intimidation. Dattatreyan forwards a
critical analysis of the transformation of Delhi in the decades of economic liberal-
ization in India, arguing that mobile video’s performative spaces may work to
reify the economic and social narratives that valorize the remaking of Delhi as a
world-class city. Hence, he concludes with a sobering note that the broader pro-
cesses of recirculation “which link physical space and the bodies that occupy it to
a larger public sphere, work to tame these initially political tactics of recognition
and effectively render them part of capital’s performance.”
While much of this dynamic occurs within the national and local media
worlds, the role of diaspora publics and the transnational traces of media
practices cannot be overlooked, as Dennis (Chapter 12), Gill-Khan (Chapter 3),
Introduction 9
Gunatilleke (Chapter 10), and Udupa (Chapter 13) demonstrate in their chapters.
According to a large number of recent studies, the salience of “digital diasporas”
today is a global phenomenon (Axel, 2002; Brinkerhoff, 2009; Ignacio, 2005;
Knott and McLoughlin, 2010; Werbner, 1998). As one of the largest diaspora
communities in the world, the South Asian diaspora is active in the cultural and
political spheres (Vertovec, 1997). The rising prominence of South Asian
diaspora voices in recent years coincides with the growth of media, which has
opened up new channels of participation for migrants spread across the globe,
and a sizeable expansion of migration from South Asia to the Western eco-
nomies since the 1990s. Diasporic participation can have serious ramifications in
post-conflict scenarios, as Gunatilleke argues in the case of exiled and diaspora
journalists who use proxy servers and mirror sites to escape and subvert state
intimidation in Sri Lanka. Home or abroad, media cultures have thus become
increasingly important for people of South Asia, as they create a multiplicity of
claims and new “maps of desire and of attachment” (Breckenridge and Appa-
durai, 1989: i).
Media participation cannot be naively romanticized. Uprety’s study of online
debates in Nepal (Chapter 5) forwards this caution by exploring the intriguing
practice of assigning gendered notions of masculinity and femininity to debate
India–Nepal relations. With a historical perspective, Uprety argues that con-
temporary blogosphere limits meaningful political discussions on Nepal’s rela-
tion with India because they deploy gendered constructions such as dalals
(pimps) and charitraheen (characterless) for political actors and relations
between the nations. One cannot ignore here the broader online climate of gen-
dered debate cultures with the rise of ad hominem strategies targeting female
online users and political leaders on social media (Udupa, 2017). Uprety reveals
that bloggers in Nepal describe female political leaders of the country as charit-
raheen or characterless. Not only do they reinforce traditional norms concerning
what it means to be a woman, but they also shape online forms of nationalism in
curious ways, and often with disturbing gendered implications.
Control
Proliferating media have spawned a range of policy and regulatory measures by
the state to delimit the democratic possibilities of media practices, while also
engaging media for development and governance techniques. Equally, estab-
lished interest groups such as religious organizations have begun to engage
media in ways to radically revise the purported status of media as secularizing
machines. Market power continues to influence what gets spoken and silenced
on media, which is evidenced in the effects of advertising and ratings led media
industry. In this section, we uncover the varied ways through which authorities
and established interest groups control, delimit and reshape the domains of
public debate and political expression. How do state actors as well as market
forces engage and manage media at a time when media continue to grow beyond
the limits envisioned by earlier regulatory regimes? How do they respond to
voices emerging through a dizzying array of media? How are these authority
structures and techniques of governance transforming in relation to the
entrenched media logics? In addressing these questions the chapters in this
section reveal a complex regulatory environment across South Asia. Uneven
media deregulation has led to contradictory and puzzling outcomes. This is illus-
trated strikingly by Pakistan’s recent move to liberalize the broadcasting sector
under a military dictatorship. In Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, state digitization
agendas stand in an ambiguous relation with growing state control over social
media (Chapter 11, this volume).
Hassan (Chapter 6) notes that when military dictator General Musharraf liber-
alized Pakistan’s broadcasting sector in 2002, he surprised many. Pakistani
media liberalization under military dictatorship contradicts conventional argu-
ments that dictatorships lead to media repression. Delineating the conditions that
prompted General Musharraf to liberalize the broadcasting sector in 2002,
Hassan describes how Pakistan found itself in the midst of a wave of economic
reforms surrounding its Asian neighbors. She argues that General Musharaff ’s
liberalization policies were in tandem with his aspiration to gain support from
the largest media houses in the country, leading to “phoney” democracy fawned
over by a section of the media. A brief comparison with Fidel Castro, Saddam
Hussain and Samora Machel brings to focus the specificities of media control in
Pakistan’s dictatorial regimes as they prepare to establish legitimacy vis-à-vis
civilian governments while also holding out the promise of economic progress
for the nation. Colonial media regulatory history, Hassan reminds us, continues
to influence the media regulatory efforts of the dictatorial regime.
The scenario is far from military dictatorship in contemporary Sri Lanka, but
civil war and postwar tensions have “systematically distorted” print media and
electronic media, reveal Crawley and Page (Chapter 7). Although the promise of
a Right to Information law has sparked optimism about the guarantees for
freedom of expression, civil society demands for reform of the state-controlled
media and the creation of an Independent Broadcasting Authority are yet to be
realized. The chapter notes with concern the “heavy handed commercial and
political control contributing to a loss of credibility for the old media.”
The easy alliance between commercial media interests and political elites is
prominent in Bangladesh. The state opened up the media for private media enter-
prise in the 1990s, ending years of state monopoly in television and radio.
Although the global discourse of “multi stakeholder policy” is received with
great enthusiasm among policy makers in Bangladesh, Rahman, Reza and Haq
(Chapter 8) argue that “multi-stakeholder policy approach … is never enough to
ensure democratization of communications since the problem is deeply embed-
ded in the social inequalities and undemocratic political practices.” Local appro-
priations of global policy templates speak to the complex landscapes of national
and local politics that underwrite media systems. Rahman et al. define the inter-
twining of political and commercial interests among elite media owners and pol-
iticians in the region as a “hegemonic politico-commercial nexus,” and urge for
a broad-based social movement for media reform.
Introduction 11
Market interests and state control morph into diverse techniques of govern-
mentality in the new media age, as Rao (Chapter 9) demonstrates in her ethno-
graphy of biometric data for social welfare in India. Control here hovers not only
at the high levels of media policy and large commercial establishments, but
impacts the everyday experiences of being a citizen. No longer used only in the
security environment of airports or other “risk heavy” zones, biometric techno-
logy is increasingly mobilized to ascertain identity vis-à-vis the state, which
determines the very means of recognition as a citizen. While techno-optimists
celebrate technological innovations as tools for transparency and efficient gov-
ernance, critics point to the ways technology produces new forms of discrimina-
tion. These observations are important, since they correct naively optimistic
policy statements that treat biometric technology as a means for neutral classifi-
cations of bodies. Building on her ethnographic work on biometric governance
in India, Rao offers a trenchant critique of the “uncertain body-machine encoun-
ter” forced by biometric identification for welfare distribution. She considers this
as a new politics of self. Rao’s analysis prompts us to widen the scope of what is
considered as communications and media “control” by revealing the ways com-
munication technologies and the state entwine in the digital age to determine cit-
izenship by affecting the most intimate sphere – the human body – that should
be kept in readiness for a successful biometric identification.
Friction
This section in a way brings the previous lines of analyses on a single plane, to
understand how media are implicated in contestations over citizenship and
recognition. How do established power structures and emergent voices collide
and collude in and through media? How and why do certain groups become mar-
ginal and others visible along these mediated spaces of friction? The chapters
analyze the violence and exclusion as well as moments of inclusion for various
groups that arise with media practices. They examine the tensions that arise
when authorities resort to violent measures to control media at a time when
media practices continue to expand and create new avenues for debate. One key
theme that emerges in this section is the revived forms of mediated nationalism
and national identity which are tied to ethnic, religious and linguistic markers.
These are often peddled through vituperative and humorous debate cultures of
online media.
Gunatilleke (Chapter 10) reveals with chilling details the attacks on journal-
ists and media organizations in a climate of violent ethnic conflicts in Sri Lanka.
The “deep and pervasive culture of fear and secrecy” throughout the period of
civil war and also in the postwar years made the mainstream media “subservient
to the state.” The decades of the new millennium produced “two critical
moments of transition” in Sri Lanka. In 2009, a 30-year war came to a brutal
end. In early 2015, the regime responsible for ending the war was ousted from
power after ten years of autocratic rule. Although media are normatively positioned
to play a pivotal and often transformative role in these moments of transition, the
past decade witnessed one of the worst years for media freedom in Sri Lanka’s
recent history. Prominent journalists were killed or abducted, anti-government
media organizations were burnt to the ground, and the general climate of media
freedom rapidly deteriorated. By 2014, the mainstream media “had been reduced
to self-censorship, self-doubt and servility to the state.” Meanwhile, an unpre-
dictable yet dynamic alternative media began to emerge outside the mainstream
media, largely with social media. Within the security of anonymity, a critical
voice of opposition was cultivated during the postwar years. This alternative
force was instrumental in bringing the abuses of government to the public’s
attention, which eventually culminated in one of the most remarkable and
unlikely regime changes in Sri Lanka’s recent history. Sri Lankan media has
thus developed a “double head”: the systematic repression of mainstream media
on the one hand, and on the other, the emergence of a vibrant online culture of
criticism.
That new media are the locus of new voices and contestations is evidenced
again by Pathak’s and Roy’s analysis of the blogosphere in South Asia (Chapter
11). In their study of the blogosphere in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and the Maldives,
they note the tensions between secular and religious ideologies, and the active
online cultures of hilarity, parody and scandal that lie behind them. From blogs on
online news portals (jdsrilankablogspot.com, ravaya.lk, blog.onlanka.com, politics.
lk) and individual blogs in Sri Lanka (dbsjeyaraj.com, anvermanatunga.net) to
blogs facing restrictions in the Maldives (raajjeislam.com, souley.org, gasim08.
com) and the vibrant blogosphere of young writers in Bangladesh (mukto-mona.
com, amarblog.com, ishtision.com, nagorikblog.com, sachalayatan.com, chotur-
marik.com), they scan the blogosphere in South Asia to reveal a volatile political
scenario of state crackdowns, political intimidation and brutal murders in the midst
of growing enthusiasm for blogging. Online altercations between secularists
blamed as “gay atheists” and religious enthusiasts in the Maldives are one instance
of the new forms of confrontation emerging on digital media.
Dennis’ study turns the focus on the highly charged assertion in the Nepali
public domain that “Buddha was born in Nepal” (Chapter 12). This contention,
she elaborates, animates the everyday lives of media-consuming young people in
urban Nepal. On the one hand, the passions evoked by Nepal as Buddha’s birth-
place subsumes ethnic differences to articulate a collective national identity, but
on the other hand, the very trope is deployed to challenge the territorial integrity
of the Nepali state. The “ambivalent tensions surrounding the claim that Buddha
was born in Nepal” reveal the fissures among different ethnic groups of Nepal’s
diverse society, which stand in tension with the newly adopted state policy of
secularism. The expanding Internet-enabled media are at the center of these
debates. Along with the private television channels, Internet media are an
important channel for nationalist sentiments to come to the fore. Dennis’ ethno-
graphic description shows how the diaspora and homeland publics come together
to challenge India’s perceived push to claim Buddha’s birthplace as its own,
even as the symbol of Buddha brings out deep ruptures in Nepali society, the
state oppression of Buddhist citizens in particular. The contested nature of this
Introduction 13
nationalism – masking and revealing differences at the same time – plays out
sharply on new media petition sites, YouTube, television channels as well as the
older newspapers.
Udupa (Chapter 13) shifts the focus from blogs and websites to WhatsApp
and mobile Internet media, with an ethnographic discussion of a riot in Mumbai
city. Many commentators described the riot on the Azad Maidan public ground
in 2012 as a “social media riot.” This was because the rapid spread of a video
clip with morphed images of violence on smart phones prior to the riot was
believed to have “inflamed” the protestors. Claimed as visual evidence for
Muslim massacre in Myanmar and North-East India, the video signaled a new
mediated landscape of rumor, intrigue and evidence reconfiguring religious dif-
ference as a political ideology in South Asia. The circulation of video images
and online discussions of their violent and cryptic representations linked dis-
parate locations spread across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and India, and
forged new spaces of religious imagination and friction. Udupa asks if the trails
of circulation provoked by small-screen mobile media could lead to new visibil-
ity for religious minorities in India, or if they gravitate back to the broader social
field of power within which media – old and new – are embedded.
The political stakes of secularism debates and the salience of religion in the
public domain is evident across all the contexts. In Nepal, mediated claims that
“Buddha was born in Nepal” pivots around the deep divide over state secularism
and Nepali national identity. In Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, media debates con-
cerning secularism and religious identity have led to some of the most violent
confrontations and attacks on individuals and groups. The entrenched majority–
minority distinction on religious lines constitutes an important feature of new
media politics in India. Contestations over state secularism, ethnic recognition
and religious identities have revived mediated forms of nationalism in the region,
with debates proliferating on the blogs, websites, Facebook and YouTube and a
variety of traditional media outlets.
South Asian media and global communication research

The diverse experiences of media growth in South Asia hold a mirror to the
shifting landscape of global communication. They emphasize, once again, the
need to account for the distinct trajectories of media growth in various regions of
the world rather than theorizing media based solely on Western contexts. With
an eye for the historical specificities and contextual embedding of media within
the South Asian region, the chapters in the volume make a departure from some
of the standing paradigms of global communication research. For one, they
advance lines of analysis different from the Habermasian public sphere model
(1987), which constructs media’s presence in strict terms of rational-critical
debate. A significant section of communication literature accepts public sphere
as a universal model for communicative action, with little acknowledgment of
the historical variations and colonial encounters which define the conditions
within which concepts of liberal publicity entered regions like South Asia.
Embracing contextually rooted concepts such as “structured visibility” (Udupa,
2015) and broader concepts such as publics as “political subjects that know
themselves and act by means of mass-mediated communication” (Cody 2011:
37; Warner, 2002) is one way to grasp the various stakes forged around media in
South Asia. The chapters here build on the postcolonial critiques to recognize
diverse modes of sociality and contemporary mediatic structures that shape pub-
licness and visibility. The analysis captures the possibilities of participation and
related closures when media intersect with historically shaped structures of
sociality along the lines of class, religion, caste and language, rather than pro-
ceeding with the Kantian assumption that public reason resulting from stranger
sociability is the only constitutive principle of media publicity.
Second, the volume gestures toward a critique of methodological nationalism
that continues to dominate studies of media in South Asia and elsewhere. It is
not a study of individual national case studies or a comparative study between
them, but an acknowledgment of the intricate global, national and local flows
which define media practices. Although the national frame defines the selection
of chapters in this volume to represent all areas of South Asia and most chapters
dwell on the specific histories of particular nation-states, the range of connec-
tions among global, national and local contexts of media flows provide an
important setting for examining media’s political implications. From Dattatrey-
an’s study of hip-hop dancers to Udupa’s analysis of a riot scene, the chapters
foreground the intricate interconnections among and along media forms that
bring the local, global and the national worlds to proximate webs of meaning
and imaginaries. Nepali net users are concerned about how India identifies the
birthplace of Buddha, and the tension between recently adopted state secularism
and the political pressure to return to state Hinduism reflect the broader tension
between secularism and religious identity in the subcontinent. Dennis argues that
the BJP’s recent rise to power in India has added momentum to Nepali Hindu
nationalism.
As Hassan and Rahman’s analysis suggest, the perspective to see the connec-
tions among different parts of South Asia or Asia more broadly is useful even
for discussions of media regulation and policy – a branch of study in communi-
cations which has more staunchly used the national frame of analysis. Hassan
notes that economic reforms in the neighboring Asian countries played an
important role in the puzzling liberalization of media under military dictatorship
in Pakistan. Rahman shows that the global model of “multi-stakeholderism” has
begun to influence media regulation policy in Bangladesh, but it has ironically
led to new nexus between political elites and commercial media interests.
Crawley and Page recognize the influence of India upon print and broadcasting
policy in Sri Lanka.
At the same time, a turn away from methodological nationalism implies a
challenge to the orientalist assumptions that there must be something essentially
distinct about cultures that are “non-Western.” Methodological nationalism tends
to consider national cultures as bounded wholes with a propensity to essentialize
national cultures. The volume critiques this culturalist argument that regions like
Introduction 15
South Asia are determined by different traditions with some essential civiliza-
tional identity. Instead, it brings to scrutiny colonial histories and the current
moment of global connections that together define the media landscape and the
contours of its political possibilities. For instance, the chapters on hip-hop in
Delhi, riot in Mumbai or music video in Pakistan illustrate that the global dis-
semination of digital media have brought different regions in a close, everyday
connection. Gunatilleke argues that the global phenomenon of digital activism
has “motivated social media usage” and digital politics in Sri Lanka. These cir-
culations are representative of the kind of transformations and challenges facing
different parts of the world in inter-connected ways, as global flows of media
and technological infrastructure meet particular histories and cultures of national
and local media.
Finally, for the most part, the volume has taken the “practice framework” in
media research, to ask, first and foremost, “what are people doing that is related
to media” (Couldry, 2010). This implies examining media not merely as texts or
production economy. Instead, the chapters have asked how common people and
the authorities put the media to a variety of use and how such practices are
shaped by the broader political, cultural and economic conditions. Aside from
textual analysis, therefore, the volume has privileged field-based studies of
media, with a special emphasis on ethnography and long interviews. The field
view on contextual conditioning of media practice and structures of control
qualifies the “active audience” frame of cultural studies, which often pitches
audience as the polar opposite of control and dominance. That media worlds can
neither be flattened on the pole of control nor inflated on the pole of active audi-
ence is a lesson that South Asian media proffer, as aspirations to express and the
urge to control collide on a daily basis to animate the terms that define what it
means to live in South Asia today.
Notes
1 PEMRA Report, 2010–2014, www.pemra.gov.pk/pemra/, accessed June 13, 2015.
2 www.asiawaves.net/sri-lanka-tv.htm; Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory
Commission, Annual Report 2012–2013, www.btrc.gov.bd/broadcasting, accessed
June 13, 2015.
3 www.indexmundi.com/facts/south-asia/literacy-rate#SE.ADT.LITR.ZS, accessed June
11, 2015.
4 www.pas.org.pk/the-internet-in-pakistan/, accessed June 14, 2015.
5 www.btrc.gov.bd/content/internet-subscribers-bangladesh-april-2015, accessed June
14, 2015.
6 This phenomenon is also understood as “mediatization” (Couldry, 2008), but we hasten
to add that mediatization is always culturally and temporally specific (Krotz, 2009).
This point is emphasized in the subsequent discussion on structured visibility and
publicity.
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Media As A Politics in SA

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Media as Politics in South

106 Devotional Islam in 113 India’s Approach to

111 Activist Documentary Film in 117 Gender, Nation and Popular

112 Culture, Health and 118 Media as Politics in South

Edited by Sahana Udupa and

ISBN: 978-1-138-28943-7 (hbk)

Notes on contributors vii

1 Introduction: beyond the “public sphere” 1

2 Small frame politics: public performance in the digital age 21

3 Envisioning Pakistan: urban ‘awami’ space, travel and the

4 Media and minority ethnic political identity in Nepal 46

5 Pimps, paranoia and politics: narratives of masculinities

6 Why did a military dictator liberalize the electronic media

8 The politico-­commercial nexus and the broadcast policy

9 Writing, typing and scanning: distributive justice and the

10 Two faces of Sri Lankan media: censorship and resistance 143

11 Politics of clicking: blogs and political participation in South

12 Mediating claims to Buddha’s birthplace and Nepali

13 Viral video: mobile media, riot and religious politics 190

14 Closing comments: media as politics and mediated politics 206

William Crawley is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Common-

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a visual anthropologist. He finished his Ph.D. in

Dannah Dennis is a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at the University of Vir-

can be seen as inherently political, a tactic deployed by these young men to

Drawing from Foucault and Deleuze, he argues that it is precisely at this

South Asian media and global communication research

Small frame politics

Media and minority ethnic political identity in Nepal

Pimps, paranoia and politics

Why did a military dictator liberalize the electronic media in Pakistan?

Re-inventing normality in Sri Lankas media systems

The politico-commercial nexus and the broadcast policy reform in Bangladesh

Writing, typing and scanning

Two faces of Sri Lankan media

Mediating claims to Buddhas birthplace and Nepali national identity

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Notes on contributors vii

1 Introduction: beyond the “public sphere” 1

2 Small frame politics: public performance in the digital age 21

4 Media and minority ethnic political identity in Nepal 46

8 The politico-commercial nexus and the broadcast policy

10 Two faces of Sri Lankan media: censorship and resistance 143

13 Viral video: mobile media, riot and religious politics 190

14 Closing comments: media as politics and mediated politics 206