[Reader-list] Subject: First Posting. Research Abstract - Locally Produced Media in Jamia Nagar and Satellite Colonies

[shakeb ahmed]

RESEARCH ABSTRACT:
LOCALLY PRODUCED MEDIA AND ASSOCIATED PRACTICES IN
JAMIA NAGAR, AND THE SATELLITE COLONIES

Debates around the influence of mass media in
production of public and private meanings,
construction of plausible images of reality,
fashioning ways of negotiating power, fabricating maps
of a public sphere itself have been there for some
time. More recent are the questions around large-scale
corporate consolidations, which co-merge and
homogenize mass media.

Still, under the milling shadows of gargantuan media
corporatism we notice the growth of proportionally
miniscule yet robust parallel media cultures.
Alternative media practices spring out of specific
geographical swathes, nurtured by certain demographic
minorities, and prominently deploy socio-cultural
languages that are Different. Mapping these is also to
interrogate the formation of certain city spaces and
selves around a complex relationship between feelings
of fear, collective assertion of identities and the
desire for a culture of the familiar- Mahaul as one
could put it. 

The area of research I propose is the mass-media and
associated practices originating locally in Jamia
Nagar and some satellite colonies around, namely,
Okhla Gaon, Joga Bai, Batla House, Abul Fazal, Noor
Nagar, Johri Farm, Ghaffar Manzil, and Zakir Nagar.
For larger part these revolve around newspapers,
literary magazines, pamphlets, women’s pocket books,
science digests, children’s literature, health and
nutrition tabloids, which in the absence of the
infrastructure for a local television or radio station
make full use of the mechanisms of Print-media, and
are very concernedly and proudly produced.  I propose
a study of the variegated publications that come out
of this small part of Delhi, and the diversity of the
relations the community living here has with them
through mechanisms of opinion, ownership and
consumption. Exploration encompasses a spectrum of
features of these publications ranging from the
rationale for their existence, engagements with the
questions centered on economic viability, the
characteristic politics of them, and importantly the
immediate end purposes they would or would not serve
for the localities where they are brought out.
Interestingly, many of these are now available as
e-publications. Cyberspace has become for them a site
of collapse of notions of what is understood as local
and global knowledge.  

Having lived in this geographical area since my
childhood days I have a sustained interest in the
social institutions it produced over a long period of
time. The media originating herein is one such
important institution. The community living in this
locality is, almost, singularly Muslim. Hence, its
social institutions offer an excellent opportunity to
get a view from the edge of the complex whole of the
lives of at least a section of them. The publications
issuing from here through the diversity in their
nature and scope constitute a kaleidoscopic
articulation of the collective self of the resident
community. In these texts of oblique cultural
documentation can be glimpsed the highly contingent
and liminal nature not just of the social constitution
of this community’s lived everyday reality, but at the
same time both the imagined and the practiced notions
regarding the production of knowledge about itself
either from within (call it Local) or without (call it
extra-Local). Interestingly, I remember the term
‘local’ acquire more currency and specific meanings in
its public usage in this neighborhood post 1992; also
increased significance came in the wake of the
commerce that strategically emerged in the area to
counter the larger communal national politics with
development of a more indigenous self-sustaining
economy. More recently, the owner of Shahaab
Communications, Zakir Nagar, has been in practice of
putting up a blackboard on the wall facing his PCO-STD
booth, which every day he updates with local news
items and information in Urdu. Today, it carried a
poster of NICT institute for computer training. I
explore the area of my research in relation to such
events and practices. 

The relation of print media originating in this
locality with both the apparatus, and the idea of mass
media, is negotiated in varied forms, and varied uses
of that is then envisioned, practiced, and advocated.
The very nature of the print media (“it offers more
breadth of analysis then television or radio; and
allows visibility of social sections on fringes far
better then electronic media…” Editor of newsmagazine,
Ifkare Milli), and co-opting of modern tools like
Internet (“I think now with the help of Internet we
having a web presence are to be seen more as global
media then as local…” Editor, Milli Times) are only a
few examples of the debates going about amongst the
producers of this media in the locality. In hair-cut
saloons, chai stalls, tambaku-cigarette kiosks,
Internet cafes and numerous places where we can
encounter a dynamic exchange of cultural and social
ideas and practices, can be heard more of these
debates from the user-end side - the range varies from
exchanging views on the politics to discussing notions
of pleasure practiced and available in these
publications. Sample detail of some print media
produced in the are follows:

Institute of Objective Studies (IOS), Zakir Nagar,
regularly brings out various studies regarding the
demographic statistics, education dissemination,
health care accessibility etc amongst the community,
and Muslims throughout the nation.

Achha Saathi (The Comely Companion), Johri Farm, is a
publication for children and engages with the
questions of what is children’s literature, and why
should such literature be made available in Urdu for
the readers in this locality?

Khatun-e-Mashrique (Women of the East), Batla House,
is devoted to literature for women. It has been
publishing since last seventy years, having changed
hands through two generations. 

Science, Zakir Nagar, publishes an accessible layman’s
magazine on Science.  It uses Urdu to reach out to
many in the community who have not received an English
education, and lag behind in the knowledge of science,
which largely disseminates through publications in
English.

Markazi Maktaba Islami, Abul Fazal Enclave, is host to
a number of publications ranging from books that are
exegetic treatises on Islam, to news-magazines
entertaining social and political issues about the
Muslim world as well as secular global and national
themes. The Maktaba prints its content in mainstream
Urdu, English, and Hindi and at the same time also
gets some work translated in a number of regional
languages.

Zahn-e-Jadid (The Modern Mind), Zakir Nagar, is an
Urdu literary journal notable for its engagement with
the modernist thought, and its implication for the
local community and Muslims in general. It publishes
short stories, poetry, critical essays, and often
translations of the works of European and other
intellectuals who were regarded championing the
Modernist thought.

The publications mentioned above then constitute a
small sample of the vibrant and heterogeneous print
media culture in Jamia and the nearby colonies. The
need for a research here results also from a thought
that the findings can effect an ordering of the local
knowledge about its very own media, making it more
accessible and more productively usable.

On parallel lines then the research can be seen
documenting histories about the place, its cultural,
social, political and demographic composition- a
mapping which in this case could generate knowledge
towards the idea and need of understanding borderlines
(topographically or otherwise) of communal selves.
Indigenous practices around the media could also be
interrogated as strategies partly evolved to assert a
collective Islamic identity in the wake of having
encountered imagined or real violence along communal
lines, the rationale or the extent of which need to be
carefully studied. Conversations one catches on the
chowk or gali abound with words such as Maashra
(community), Shamiliat (collective), Mahaul
(atmosphere), Ilakaa (area). The locally produced
media also lend to the production of a culture of
Familiar in the locality. It produces modalities
governing the home, the everyday and community life
also. This is not to say that the process has not
faced resistance from within. I would be interested in
exploring this complicated set of relationships
located in the everyday practices and conversations of
the community. The trail would yield, to state once
again, interesting local narratives about the
community’s responses to knowledge of its traits from
within and without. 

SHAKEB AHMED
SARAI Independent Research Fellow 2004


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