[Reader-list] Re: Locally Produced Media in Jamia Nagar and Satellite Colonies

[Yousuf]

Dear Shakeb
Interesting subject - maybe we could interact on this
since I live in this area. But I have a few doubts
about your theme. In your first posting you are
assuming that all media produced in the Jamia Nagar
area is locally done and has only local presence or
implications. If you ask the producers of Afkar Milli,
Urdu Science or any other periodical, they would
disagree with you. On their own, they all assume
themselves to be national or international periodicals
– and they do have an international presence. Most of
these magazines (or their producers) have had a
history or origins elsewhere. But they are here now
because Jamia Nagar is fast becoming a convenient
centre of business and production for Muslim community
in general. It is safe and not so congested as say old
Delhi. In fact many Urdu publishers from old Delhi
have shifted their base here. But here they have
mostly editorial or business offices. The actual
production/printing still happens in the traditional
publishing centres of old or northwestern Delhi.

I also doubt whether the content of these media have
much local concerns. The Urdu science magazine, which
I have been following for some time, publishes
articles on Algebra and Arab sciences but hardly
anything on the local hygiene and health issues.
Similarly the religious magazines talk of Chechnya and
Iraq but never about the local mosque. In my view most
of the media produced here simply strengthen the
bonding among the community at large, but not much at
the local/demographical level. And while studying the
media of this place you cannot ignore the Urdu
publishing industry in general. What may also be
interesting to study is the newer (crass) sense of
design and visual aesthetics that is fast creeping
into the recent magazines, books and other media
published from the dingy studios of this area. 

Yousuf


--- shakeb ahmed <ahmed_shakeb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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
> 
=== message truncated ===


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