(NOTE! THE CONFERENCE IS FREE AND REQUIRES NO REGISTRATION. MANY PEOPLE HAVE ASKED ABOUT THIS SO THOUGHT IT WOULD BETTER TO ANNOUNCE IT HERE EXPLICITLY. JUST SHOW UP AND WE HOPE TO SEE YOU ALL THERE FOR A VIBRANT DEBATE).

SACREDMEDIACOW and the
Centre for Film and Media Studies present:
INDIAN MASS MEDIA
AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGE

One-day conference for Postgraduates & Early Career Researchers
School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)
Khalili Lecture Theatre
Saturday, Oct 13th, 2007
9:45 am-18:30 pm (followed by a party)

Welcome address: Prof Paul Webley (Director and Principal, SOAS)
Keynote Speaker: Prof John Hutnyk
Endnote Speaker: Prof Laura Mulvey

SCHEDULE

9:45 am- 10:15 am

COFFEE

10:15 am- 10:30 am

Welcome Address
Prof. Paul Webley, Director & Principal, SOAS.

10:30 am- 11:30 am
Key Note Address
Prof. John Hutnyk,
Goldsmiths, University of London
‘On Televisionaries’: Elementary aspects of the small screen from the Mahabharata to NDTV and beyond.
Chair: Dr.Mark Hobart

Session I

11:30 am- 12:30 pm
Chair: Dr.Mark Hobart

11:30-12:00 noon

‘The Political Economy of Going Hindi: Private News Channels and Transnational Soap Operas in the Indian Television Landscape’
-Britta Ohm
Europa-University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany

12:00- 12:30 pm

A Dialogue on the Indian Software Revolution and Practice-based Research’
- Matti Pohjonen & Soumyadeep Paul
SOAS, Nanocast

12:30 pm- 1:30 pm- Lunch Break
(Suggestions: SOAS Refectory in the basement, Students Union, Brunswick (Opp. Russell Sq. Tube Station).

Session II

1:30 pm- 3:30 pm
Chair: Prof. Annabelle Sreberny

1:30 pm- 2:00 pm

‘Environmentalism through the media: construction of environmental attitudes among the middle classes in India.’-
-Deepti Sastry
BirkBeck.

2:00 pm- 2:30 pm

‘Slogans have no footnotes:’ collaborative mis-recognition and the weaving of queerness into India’s ‘problem of modernity.’
-Akshay Khanna
University of Edinburgh

2:30 pm- 3:00 pm

‘Notes from the Field:’ Gender Behind the Scenes in Mumbai TV Production
-Deborah Matzner
New York University

3:00 pm- 3:30 pm

‘How the Bawdy matters: Tradition and Now’
-Ratnakar Tripathy
Asian Development Research Institute (ADRI), Patna, India.

3:30 pm- 4:00 pm

COFFEE

SESSION III

4:00- 5:00 pm
Chair: Prof. Rachel Dwyer

4:00- 4:30pm-

‘A Less Privileged View: Marriage, Gender and Social Change According to Access Trained Filmmakers in Chhattisgarh.’
- Margaret Dickinson
Marker Films

4:30 pm- 5:00pm-

‘Dress Indian and Say no to Rum’: Cultural Performance and Managing Authentic India.
-Atticus Narain
Goldsmiths

5:00 pm- 6:00 pm
End Note Address
Prof. Laura Mulvey
‘Intertwining the old and the new: thoughts on change and delay’.
Chair: Prof. Rachel Dwyer

6:00 - 6:20pm

Short Film Screening
Horn Ok Please
Q &A with director Jasbeer Singh
Discussion moderated by Prof. Annabelle Sreberny

6:20 pm- 6:30 pm- Closing note by Prof. Annabelle Sreberny.

6:30pm- After-Party in the JCR

The names and a short introduction to the speakers and the papers are given below the poster for the conference.

SPEAKERS AND ABSTRACTS:
Notes from the Field: Gender Behind the Scenes in Mumbai TV Production
-Deborah Matzner

The Mumbai-based industry producing Indian television programming is providing novel opportunities for a large and growing number of young women. On the small screen, female characters might display their piety through repetition of puja in ornate, spacious rooms. Behind the scenes, however, the action occurs in recently-constructed buildings in the northern “suburbs” of Andheri or Malad, alongside call centers and advertising houses, other products of the globalization that is altering the shape of the city. Here, in offices or cubicles, young Indian women are writing scripts, negotiating with producers or actors, shaping new female characters and scenarios that they hope will appeal to an audience they imagine to be predominantly female, but quite unlike themselves. They are producing gendered workspaces, creating young, female equivalents of “old boys clubs” in an industry that, until recently, often neglected to provide women’s restrooms. My talk is a report from the middle of my dissertation ethnography-in-progress, and a request for feedback and advice for the second half of my field research. Several questions inform my work which I will address in this talk: What are the conditions that the women I’m working with are experiencing, and which are they attempting to change? What larger notions of “the audience”, “India” and their “change” inform their work? How are the class and gender self-understandings of female media workers produced in relation or distinction to the representations they create of and for others? In sum, how is media production in Mumbai constituting a novel site of cultural change with implications for the Indian elite and middle class and Indian culture more broadly?

Deborah Matzner is a PhD candidate at New York University’s Department of Anthropology, where she has received a certificate in Culture and Media and a Masters degree. She is interested in media, urban experience, feminism and consumerism in post-liberalization India. She is in Mumbai for 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with female documentary filmmakers and television programming producers in the city.

**

‘The Political Economy of Going Hindi: Private News Channels and Transnational Soap Operas in the Indian Television Landscape’
-Britta Ohm

My paper will focus on one of the most striking and significant developments in the Indian television landscape over the past few years: its increasing vernacularisation and particularly the trajectory from English to Hindi on the transnational and private national mainstream channels. While Hindi, represented mainly by Zee TV, was during the 1990s still a fairly ‘normal’, and in relation to English often belittled, component in the unfolding commercial television landscape, it has since the beginning of the new century seen a very conscious push, particularly through India’s first 24-hour Hindi news channel Aaj Tak. This push was motivated partly by the ideological aim of making Hindi into a topic in the global/(post-) postcolonial context and to prove its cultural equality with, if not its superiority to English, and partly by the insight of facing growing audiences – and thus prospective consumers - of television who understand Hindi (‘Hindustani’) rather than English, if not regional languages. This motion has since been taken up and carried rather forcibly further by transnational channels, particularly by Rupert Murdoch’s Star TV, in the endeavour to shed their Western identifiability and English-language dominance and to win ever-growing audiences. I will argue that this motion can be framed in terms of a trajectory from a ‘nation of values’ towards a ‘nation of numbers’, which is directly connected to the ideology of upward mobility in Indian society. In its course is not only Hindi itself re-invented and transformed from being a political and cultural argument into a commercial asset; it has also led to what one might call a de-hybridisation of Hindi and English that leaves English-language executives of Hindi programming, notably in the entertainment channel Star Plus, in a new form of ‘no man’s land’.

Britta Ohm, Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology, Europa-University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany; thesis on “The Televised Community. Culture, Politics and Market of Visual Representation in India” (submitted in Feb., currently under review with Routledge India); studied history, political science, and visual communications in Hamburg, London, and Berlin; co-author of documentaries and a feature film; worked as a journalist and cutter for German public TV; first monograph (2001) on the transnationalisation of Indian television; current research on the reconstruction of national identity on Turkish television

**

‘How the Bawdy matters: Tradition and Now’
- Ratnakar Tripathy

Investigating the idea of the ‘obscene, bawdy, ribald, bad taste, objectionable etc’ is inherently interesting. this is so because along with the rights/staus of women this family of concepts is a good indicator of how tolerant a society is. liberalness of a society should not be conflated/merged with/into other values such a equality and freedom etc. and tolerance should remain an independent category. for example, in a feudal society marked by inequalities, tolerance of humour targeted at the rich and powerful can be a huge relief- making a difference to the quality of life. second, comparison between the different standards of obscenity etc allows us to focus on the differences between cultures and between the past and the present. it is interesting to find out why something is found ‘obscene’. very often ‘tradition’ is used to justify such claims. on closer examination, tradition through its multiple voices would not seem to support claims of obscenity. two examples illustrate it best. the Khajuraho sculptures leave very little to imagination and one should expect Indians to show a similar tolerance if they really wish to stick to ‘tradition’ as the moral premise. in traditional ‘ladies sangeet’[wedding songs] were often full of jocular insinuations - such as the bride’s father having a liaison with his sister in law and even incest etc. this tradition still carries on but it can understandably create a riot under the wrong circumstances. finally the Dostoevskian question - is everything permissible- such as sacrilege on one extreme and libellous conduct on the other? execrating or ridiculing someone else’s [or one’s own] God is still an unresolved issue that needs to be addressed. my paper will will examine a variety of positions but i do not promise any resolutions. i will try to reconcile the concepts however.

Ratnakar Tripathy has a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Poona. He has been working in print and television media for the past two decades. in the past ten years he has been drawn towards research on themes around the politics of popular culture and media and has worked on Bombay cinema, folk music and theatre, and am currently doing a project on Bhojpuri cinema. Presently he is a Senior Research fellow at the Asian Development Research Institute {ADRI}, Patna, India.

(NOTE! We wil be having a video presentation of Ratnakar Tripathy from India, followed by a Q&A done hopefully through video chatting and webcam).

**

‘A Less Privileged View: Marriage, Gender and Social Change According to Access Trained Filmmakers in Chhattisgarh.’
- Margaret Dickinson

My presentation will centre round the portrayal of changing marriage and gender relations in documentaries made in Chhattisgarh State by students and former students of an access course in digital video. The course was initially linked with anthropological research on industrialisation and the first students were encouraged to make films about their personal experiences of social change. They proved to be most interested in gender, family and marriage, topics which have continued to be popular with students in subsequent years. The clips from the Chhattisgarhi films will relate to an assumption which seems implicit in most products of the metropolitan media, that ‘Indian tradition’ required, particularly from women, lifelong monogamy and that more permissive attitudes to sex and marriage are a product of ‘modernity’ or Western influence. Some of the clips appear to endorse this view, others do not. I will suggest that metropolitan media assumptions about trajectories of change are skewed by the near monopoly of jobs enjoyed by people from forward castes and well off families. I will argue that, up to a point, different stories emerge if you offer people from other social strata access to the media but that the process is far from automatic or simplistic. The relationship between lived experience and representation is always complex and I will point to factors which, in this case, encourage filmmakers to ignore or censor their own experience.

Margaret Dickinson is an independent filmmaker who works from her London based company, Marker. From 1998 to 2001 she co-ordinated Jandarshan/Images in Social Change, a network in Europe and India encouraging co-operation in the fields of social documentary, visual anthropology and community media. She was one of the founders of Vertigo Magazine and writes on film and the British film business. Her books on the subject are: Cinema and State. (co-authored with Sarah Street) and Rogue Reels (ed.) both from BFI publishing.

 

 

‘Environmentalism through the media: construction of environmental attitudes among the middle classes in India.’
-Deepti Sastry

The paper attempts to explore how the middle class in Delhi constructs their environmentalisms through media messages. Middle class environmentalisms are mediated and constructed through a complex process involving a range of factors including, more importantly, the influences of the media and the role played by income, age and demographic variables. Using an ethnographic study of middle class attitudes towards the environment, this paper attempts to focus specifically on the role played by media images on middle class understandings of the environment and environmental issues. The literatures on environmental attitudes in India are concentrated around the ideas of ‘green’ and ‘brown’ environmentalisms, making distinctions between concerns of an aesthetic nature and those concerns, which address the daily grit and pollution associated with living in cities and polluted areas. This paper argues that the traditional ‘green’ and ‘brown’ concerns do not adequately address the complex web around which environmental attitudes are framed. By providing a more detailed account of lifestyle choices and ‘habitus’ this paper argues that the ‘environment’ is being constantly defined, re-defined and re-constituted by individuals as part of their interactive lives with the spaces that they live in and engage with. Through interviews, questionnaires and primary data sources the study arrives at a set of preliminary ideas on the nature of environmentalisms and the construction of environmental attitudes. The study identifies the role of media messages in formulating these attitudes and elaborates on the manner in which the messages are translated into environmentalisms.

Deepti Sastry is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck College. She is interested in the environmental affiliations and concerns of the middle class in India. Her work looks at the political, economic and social aspects of environmental attitudes in middle class India. She also works more generally on global environmental issues at the global level and the involvement of Southern nations in these global negotiations and is working on a book dealing with the reporting of global environmental news in the media in India.

 

 

‘A Dialogue on the Indian Software “Revolution” and Practice-based Research’
- Matti Pohjonen & Soumyadeep Paul

This presentation consists of a dialogue between a researcher and practitioner working with digital media in India. However, instead of a classical paper, it will take the form of a dialogue between a researcher looking at Indian media and an Indian software architect working for a high-profile web 2.0 company in India. The presentation thus aims at addressing two different things. Firstly, it will look at the problems one faces when one wants to understand the politics of a rapidly-changing field such as new media software development in the Indian context. Secondly, it will look at practice-based research as a possible methodology to address some of the problems that are raised. Using an example of a software developent project that the two are working on together at the moment, the presentation will therefore look at some of the theoretical and practical problems that get raised when the boundaries between research and practice become blurred and the roles between the academic and the professional get sometimes reversed. What are the benefits and risks of such an approach?

Matti Pohjonen is currently a Teaching Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, where he is also finishing his PhD from. He is also one of the co-founders of Sacredmediacow, the media collective on Indian media at SOAS who is organising this conference. Prior to this, Matti Pohjonen completed an MA in Anthropology of Media and two BAs in International Studies and Journalism. Having worked in both the practical side of media as well as as critical theory and research, his current interests lie in combining critical anthropology / cultural studies with recent developments in information, cybernetic and digital theory, with a special focus on the practical and experimental sides of computing and new technologies for artistic and social purposes.

Soumyadeep Paulis a filmmaker, technologist and entrepreneur from Mumbai, India. He is currently working as the Senior Architect in the founding Indian team of a venture-backed disruptive media-technology startup called Nanocast that’s about to launch its product in Web 2.0 and New Media space. He completed his B.Tech. in Computer Sc. and Engg. From IIT (Indian Institute of Technology), Kanpur, and then continued his interest in Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence through research projects in Graphics Lab at EPFL, Lausanne and AI Lab at University of Zurich. He also spent three years working in embedded technologies in a Silicon Valley firm. In addition to his work in the technology sector, Soumyadeep Paul has also made several short films, some of which have been broadcast in the past and he continues to create content for the internet video space as a platform for artistic experiments. In filmmaking, his interests lie in exploring traditional forms through internet based artistic collaborations, generative art, storytelling systems / interactive fiction and other emerging forms of artistic expressions.

**

‘Slogans have no footnotes:’ collaborative mis-recognition and the weaving of queerness into India’s ‘problem of modernity’
-Akshay Khanna

This paper meanders through a series of interfaces between (mass?) media assemblages and queer activist collectives to explore the conditions under which the question of queerness (same-sex desire, gender transgression and other challenges to heteronormative assemblages) comes to be articulated as yet another aspect or instance of what may be considered India’s ‘problem of modernity’. There is a multiplicity of ways in which sex, its significance and politics are experienced, understood, negotiated and spoken about in India. It may be argued, infact, that queerness must be considered as an integral aspect of the political and cultural landscape that is considered ‘India’. Yet, it seems, the only way in which sexuality may articulate as an object in ‘mass media’ is as a product of conflictual cultural interfaces resulting from ‘globalisation’. Every articulation of ’sexuality’ must thus necessarily resolve an apparent conflict between modernity and tradition. ‘Change’ is thus always already a ponderous aspect of such articulations. This, i argue, is an effect of collaborative mis-recognition that is quite literally negotiated between media assemblages and queer activist collectives. It is such collaborations that allow a ’slogan’ for change to exist without the footnotes that elaborate the conditions of its relevance (and therefore also its irrelevance). I go on to argue that rather than considering practices of representation as sparks to self-reflexivity, we need to consider them as moments when a crisis of representation (a disjuncture between the urban middle-class activist and an abstract queer body that s/he is called upon to represent) comes to be managed through mis-recognition. This opens up the possibility for the examination of the conditions that make such collaboration possible. Briefly, these relate to class, the implication of these media practices themselves in neo-liberal expansion and the relative location of participants to each other, and in the terrain of India’s ‘problem of modernity’.

Akshay Khanna is a presently based in Edinburgh where s/he is producing words that will at some point take the form of a PhD thesis in Social Anthropology. Her/is present research relates to activism relating to sexuality, sexualness and desire in India. S/He also often goes by the introduction of Queer activist, being a founder member of Prism, an activist collective based in Delhi. s/he is most concerned with addressing the disjuncture between sexual activity and sexuality activism, with bringing the sexual back into sexuality (and actually, bringing the sexual into most things).

**

‘Dress Indian and Say no to Rum’: Cultural Performance and Managing Authentic India.
-Atticus Narain

Melas are festivals showcasing a variety of cultural attributes through a range of musical, visual, physical and edible delights. At present they exemplify a selective construction evocative of diasporic endeavours to recreate communities of culture through an array of metaphors, performances, objects and texts. Perfomatively they articulate a set of guiding principals for an inclusive cultural identity for the Indian Diaspora in Guyana. The structure and performance of Melas in Guyana draw heavily from Indian films that reiterate their importance in informing local versions of ‘Indianness’. Which characteristics of Indian identity are utilized, invested and promoted give an indication of the selective reconstructions on offer. Melas cooption and appropriation of Indian film aesthetics and Hindu inspired narratives are sites which represent cultural, social and religious values that in turn evoke and reify nation, culture and identity as decidedly Indian

Given the ethnic diversity and fragile political landscape of Guyana any emphasis on the interests of one ‘community’ is problematic and Melas deliberately exploit the narrative of Indian marginality. One focused on the drama of their ‘arrival’ and is ambiguously woven through a Bollywood inspired modernity. The duality between tradition and modernity played out on stage reconfigures Indian subjectivity for public consumption in ‘progressive’ yet essentialist guises. Bollywood’s growing focus on NRI’s in the West has become characteristic and holds particular emotional, aspirational and economic resonance for Indo-Guyanese. The ‘subaltern Indian’ in this paper questions the flow of capital and culture from India to the West by presenting a series of ambivalent exchanges between Indian film, identity and nation.

Atticus Narain, a Doctorate in Social Anthropology (2006) at Goldsmiths College, focused on the relationship between Indian Film and Indo-Guyanese identity; diaspora, race and visual culture, a Doctorate in Social Anthropology (2006) at Goldsmiths College, focused on the relationship between Indian Film and Indo-Guyanese identity; diaspora, race and visual culture.

SHORT-FILM SCREENIN

Horn Ok Please-Jasbeer Singh

Horn Ok Please is short animation film on a day in the life of a Indian Taxi Driver.

Jasbeer Singh is from Pehowa in Haryana and completed his Fine Arts degree in sculpture from M.S. University in Baroda. He has worked on myriad projects ranging from documentaries, TV commercials and computer games. His current focus is clay animation and has made several short films for the BBC and UTV. Presently he is working with Flickerpix Studios.

The speakers are requested to let us know in advance if they would like us to organize projectors, or any other special requirements that they might have.

For further information, please contact the SACREDMEDIACOW collective below.

Somnath Batabyal

Meenu Gaur
Matti Pohjonen
Angad Chowdhry

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

SACRED MEDIA COW
and The Centre for Film and Media Studies Presents
INDIAN MASS MEDIA AND THE POLITICS OF CHANGE
Call for Papers

Advisors:
Prof Annabelle Sreberny
Dr Mark Hobart
Prof Rachel Dwyer

India has been the focus of much attention in the international media in the recent years. Rhetoric concerning its rapid economic growth, spearheaded by its IT industry and its burgeoning middle classes, suggest that something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining; the elephant is rising; the 21st century will be an Indian century. Even a recent election campaign was debated around this image. India was/was not shining, with disastrous results for the leading political party in power.

What unites many of the debates concerning such re-imaginings of India is the notion of change and its different ramifications. Elections, commentators, drawing room debates and activists all cut their teeth around this complex notion. Who, it is debated, benefits from change? Who is left out from these fantasies of progress and economic growth? Do such re-imaginings really reflect the complex economic reality of large parts of Indian populations ’somewhere out there’? In any case, what is certain is that ‘change’ has now become the new articulating principle par excellence when we speak about India and its contested future.

One of the crucial sites where such debates take place is the Indian mass media: its newspapers, TV channels, advertisements and burgeoning online communities. It is also the loci, we argue, where the politics of change are most visibly played out and that needs to be carefully looked at in order to understand the complex reality of India today. It is important to note here that we believe the nation state is one of categories that needs to be critically investigated when we look at India and change and therefore include the wider Indian diaspora into our definition of what contemporary India is. With this in mind, The Politics of Change conference aims to bring together researchers looking at the Indian film and media interested in the question of change. We therefore now welcome abstract for papers and presentations of 20 minutes each from post-graduate and early career researchers. Specifically, we are inviting papers that would broadly address the following questions:

• How is change imagined in different forms of Indian media? How are the press, television, film and online communities involved in this imagining? How do different media differ in how they imagine change?

• What kind of day-to-day practices are deployed to articulate these imaginings change? What kind of verbal and visual imagery is used towards such imaginings and how do they differ between the media? What are the differences between the English-speaking and the vernacular media? What about the disaporic media?

• What are the politics of such imaginings? Who are such articulations thought to benefit? Who in turn do they disarticulate? What is the political economy of imagining change?

• How have these articulations changed historically? Can we trace historical precedents to such current imaginings? What are the similarities? What are the differences?

• Is there something distinctive about how this change is imagined in (India as opposed to other rapidly-developing countries such as China?) What do these similarities and differences tell us about Indian media and society?

The conference jointly is organized by SACREDMEDIACOW, an independent student-led research centre on Indian media, and the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the School Of Oriental and African Studies. Having said that, SACREDMEDIACOW is not really a centre for India media research (perhaps, a periphery of Indian media research would be a more appropriate title), but more of a Collective. Either way, being both practitioners as well as academics interested in the India media, one of our key aims to build bridges between academics and media practitioners globally. Therefore, a significant portion of the activities around the conference will also take place on our website. Our aim is to include the people we talk about when we research Indian media as much as possible in the dialogue and debates through the possibilities allowed by new technologies: by distributing conference material online, by creating an online platform where the questions raised can be debated during the conference and by allowing distance participation as much as possible through teleconferencing, video broadcast and other such means.