[Reader-list] Gyan Prakash on cities...

[Ravikant]

....Bunty and Bubbly and Nangla Machhi. With apologies to those who have read 
it in India Today's issue dated 3 july 2003.

cheers
ravikant

http://www.indiatoday.com/itoday/20060703/gs5.shtml&SET=T

Counterfeit Modernity

(Mass media encourages a voyeuristic consumption of the exploits of 
celebrities but it also allows for expansion of options for those hitherto 
denied access by a culture of high inequalities and low bandwidth.)
Gyan Prakash Professor Princeton University, (USA)

Whatever one may think of it as a film, the 2005 hit Bunty Aur Babli captured 
an important aspect of India's contemporary reality under globalisation-the 
cult of consumption and celebrity produced and circulated by the media. 
Rakesh and Vimmi flee their small-town lives in Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, 
respectively, to feed their ambitions. Desiring entrepreneurial success, 
Rakesh spurns a secure railway job, while Vimmi wants to compete in a beauty 
pageant to escape from a lifetime of making achaar. As the film shows them 
refashioning themselves into Bunty and Babli and taking to a life of crime, 
it brings into view the distance India has travelled from the Nehruvian era.

For several decades after Independence, Hindi cinema was engaged in themes of 
modern social change and welfare, and the problems and inequities of urban 
life. The state-controlled radio and television functioned as pedagogic 
instruments, disseminating the lessons of modernisation and development. 
Outside the state-controlled media, the press functioned as the classic 
Fourth Estate, robustly performing its role as speaking truth to power. Not 
surprisingly, attacks on press freedom accompanied the 1975 declaration of 
Emergency.

The situation changed in the mid-1980s when Rajiv Gandhi assumed power after 
Indira Gandhi's assassination. By this time, the Nehruvian consensus had 
unravelled. The failure of planned development and public sector-led growth 
to generate sufficient wealth and employment had caused widespread 
disenchantment. Mrs Gandhi's response to the crisis of state legitimacy with 
authoritarianism and populist politics only aggravated the problem. Rajiv 
Gandhi stepped in and won the admiration of the middle classes by promising 
consumption-led growth. Government and business interests advanced 
privatisation and a market economy as solutions to economic and political 
problems.

With the loosening of import and state controls, the 1990s witnessed a rapid 
expansion of the consumption economy. New commodities and global brands and 
images flooded the market. Advertising and entertainment acquired 
unprecedented prominence, forcing venerable newspapers and magazines to 
provide "infotainment" and not just news. In addition, Karan Johar and Yash 
Chopra released a spate of Hindi films expressing the global and consumerist 
desires of the urban middle classes.

Some lament the media's changing face as the demise of its function as the 
Fourth Estate. They grieve that the chronicles of Aishwarya Rai and Britney 
Spears appear to matter more than the violations of democratic rights and the 
condition of the poor. These are legitimate criticisms, for the media 
occupies a crucial place in a democratic society. The media's abdication of 
its responsibility to report "serious" news and bring the government to 
account is disturbing.

But the situation is altogether more complex than a straightforward narrative 
of decline would suggest. Newspapers have steadily increased their 
readership, and are estimated to reach nearly 240 million people. Terrestrial 
television reaches over 50 per cent of the Indian population, and 80 per cent 
of urban residents; cable and satellite television figures are 20 and 46 per 
cent, respectively. India has nearly three million computer users, and 
Internet usage is expected to reach 100 million soon. But there is no denying 
the existence of mass media. We should understand its diversity and not 
dismiss it as trash.

Visit any metro, and you will observe a media city of malls and multiplexes, 
cybercafes, televisions, mobile phones, newspapers, and magazines. Even 
provincial towns are beginning to acquire this circuit. So tight is the nexus 
between commodities, advertising, television, and celebritydom that cine idol 
Amitabh Bachchan achieved his rebirth as a TV star. Shah Rukh Khan, Aamir 
Khan and Sachin Tendulkar have become household names. Popular culture in 
urban India is media culture.

Like everything else in India, the media experience is highly varied. If it 
produces global desires and images of consumption and upward mobility, it 
also generates a shadow world of what the Delhi-based media scholar Ravi 
Sundaram calls a "pirate culture."

According to him, pirate culture is part of a dense transnational circuit that 
deploys versatile methods to reproduce and circulate music, video, and 
software in a society of "high inequalities and low bandwidth". It draws the 
urban population outside the globalising middle-class world into the realm of 
the consumption economy. Pirate culture also bleeds into the mainstream world 
when cable TV operators broadcast illegal versions of latest films. Piracy 
ensures that the culture of instant, immediate gratification becomes a 
commonplace urban experience.

Pirate modernity is not optional. It offers no alternative to the media 
experience that saturates urban lives. But critical media is not lacking. The 
growing presence of the mediascape has also meant a proliferation of options. 
The expansion and availability of media technologies has produced an 
increasing number of critical documentaries and short films, Web-based 
communities and interactions, and alternative print and visual media in 
regional languages. The very extension of the media circuit, so that it 
reaches an ever-larger part of the population, means that it also generates 
off-mainstream and critical media practices.

One example is the Mumbai-based Comet Media Foundation that produces and 
distributes innovative and non-traditional educational material in film and 
print. Yet another is Cybermohalla in the Nangla Maachi neighbourhood in 
Delhi. A collaborative project between Ankur, a Delhi- based NGO, and Sarai, 
a new media and urban research initiative, this initiative promotes an 
open-ended exploration of the digital and other media in a working-class 
neighbourhood setting.

If this existing mediascape produces Bunty and Babli as counterfeits that 
affirm the mainstream images of consumption and upward mobility, it also 
includes something like Cybermohalla in which working-class children write 
blogs to voice democratic opposition to the demolition drive in their 
neighbourhood.