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Communications and capitalism in India, 1750-2010Robin Jeffreyaa La Trobe University,

To cite this Article Jeffrey, Robin(2002) 'Communications and capitalism in India, 1750-2010', South Asia: Journal of SouthAsian Studies, 25: 2, 61 75

To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00856400208723475URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856400208723475

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Communications and Capitalism in India,1750-2010Robin Jeffrey

La Trobe UniversityThe chapattis of 1857 were the ultimate semiotic of a pre-industrial time:mysterious, transitory, concrete and open to almost any interpretation.Yet within twenty years, India was imm ersed sufficiently in a printculture to make the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 seem (briefly), at leastto the colonial state, like a good idea. In dia's print culture of the nexthundred years recalls in some ways the role of print in Habermas'idealised eighteenth-century public sphere, in which cultured elitesdebated ideas and in which capitalism and mass consumption weredistant dream s or threats. Mass print culture, of the kind that began in theUSA and Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century and expandedacross the industrialised world from the 1890s, arrived in India in the1980s, simultaneouslyand therefore unprecedentedly with television.This essay identifies three periods in information transmission in India: i)the hand to hand and face to face of pre-industrial times; ii) the era ofgenteel print from the 1870s to the 1980s; and iii) mass print andtelevision from the 1980s. The paper examines the forces that led to theintroduction of new technologies of communication and the significancefor politics and society of the change. It concludes that econom ic chan ge,leading to pervasive capitalism, is the necessary precursor to each period;when capitalism strengthens, the media technology necessary to carryconsumption to new groups is invented or a cquired.This essay is simultaneously modest and grandiose: modest because itsets out, at the start anyway, to do no more than define and discuss three'modes' in the history of communications in India; grandiose because ittries to cover more than two hundred years of history and to characterisevast and complex processes. The risks of simple-minded recitation o rawe-inspiring misunderstanding are worth running, because we have not,I think, adequately taken account of the ways in which information hasbeen transmitted in India over the past two hundred yea rs. A focus on

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62 S O U T H A S I A

TABLEComparing 'Media Modes'

Method

Character-istics

How is itcarried?

Who canproduceit?Who canshare it?

Why dopeopleproduceit?

Whatmust itdo to beviable?

PeasantMode word ofmouth objects non-durable non-portable changeable by peoplemoving andtalking anyone

anyonewho can hear(or see) to tell,warn,influence to amuse,pass time to gainimportance,influence entertain be useful givepleasure toproducer

Print-EliteMode

print pictures,objects lasts travels does not change

by peoplecarrying an item

need a press,paper

literates

to influence to make money& earn a living to improve,change

make money gratifyproducer be wantedentertain, inform

Mass-MediaMode

print film, radio, TV, etc.

can last can travel instantly does not change

as with PEM by radio wavesacross distances need presses,cam eras, receivers,projectors, etc. anyone who can hear(or see)

to make money &earn a living to influence others

make money be wantedentertain, inform

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COMM UNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 63communications may help to explainby providing a missingingredientpolitical and social events which hitherto have been less thanadequately accounted for.I argue that a 'peasant mode' of communications prevailed in Indiabefore the extension of railways, telegraph, printing presses, steamengines and other attributes of the British colonial state. Informationtravelled and people com municated. But they did so largely by word ofmouth through m arkets, pilgrimage, marriage and soldiering. A tinycommercial and religious elite dealt in written words that were essentialto their vocations and to serving political regimes.1 It is worth pointingout that neither Akbar nor Ranjit Singh, two of India's most notablerulers, was literate in any language.From the 1870s, a second mode of communicationsa 'print-elitemode'took shape as a railway and telegraph network covered thecountry and cheap printing presses and Indian language fonts becameavailable througho ut urban India. The practices of the colonial statemade the printed word inescapable for those who sought power orinfluence. The British governm ent itself required mountains of printing,while Indians who wanted to benefit from government had to be able toparticipate in this printed-word system. Because they had reasons to doso, religious and commercial castes were usually the first Indians to bedrawn to the regu lar use of print. Fo r their part, the British had things tosell and to advertise, and they welcomed relief from the boredom ofcantonment life. The young Kipling separated the advertisements in theCivil and Military Gazette by reporting news and spinning yarns andverses . Indians in tow ns began to use print similarly, and by 1900,though literacy was only five percent of the population, newspapers likeThe Hindu and Amrita Bazar Patrika were a generation old. The factsthat both were in English and that literacy was five percent are importantfor underlining the elite nature of the 'print-elite m ode '. By thebeginning of the twentieth century, a host of Indian writers were usingprint to earn a living and promote ideas; while print helped to create anationwide nationalist movement that touched most of the elite andbeyond . This elite was largely upper caste, urban and genteel, and the'print-elite mode' co-existed with the 'peasant mode' of communication.2

1 C.A. B ayly offers a picture of this relationship in 'Co lonial Rule and the "Informational Order" inSouth As ia', in Nigel Crook (ed.). The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia (New D elhi: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996), pp.286-9.2 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,1983), p.226 makes the point about 1857 that 'a pre-literate culture [was] transiting slowly--veryslowly indeed--towards literacy'.

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64 SOUTH ASIAThe third modethe 'mass mode'was already forming in the earlytwentieth century. It stems from the paradox that the more the languageof the rights of individuals becomes embedded in constitutions andaccepted as global truth, the greater is the tendency of the millions ofindividuals to seek solace for themselves and to be treated by power-holders as a m ass 'the m asse s', mass-media, mass-marketing. ThoughGandhi is sometimes described as having built a 'mass movement', theextent of Indian capitalism, and the media available, limited possibilitiesuntil the 1980s. In 2002, all three modes of com munication peasant,print-elite and massco-exist; but the balance shifts steadily to the massmode, to the delight (on the whole) of peasants and the dismay (on thew hole) of the old print elites. The mass mode has no built-in values itcan work for hate, harmony or the simple selling of soap pow der, w hich itdoes extremely well. 'It w as surprising to see so many villagers usingtoothbrushes and toothpaste', Kirk Johnson wrote of his return to hischildhood village in M aharashtra in the mid-1990s. The villagers toldhim they had seen it on television, and the neem twig no longer seemedappropriate.3

In this essay, I touch on the lives, and stories about the lives, of the Raniof Jhansi, M.K. Gandhi and Phoolan Devi to try to illustrate aspects ofm y three 'm edia mod es '. The Rani of Jhansi was a pre-print figure,whose legend was 'perpetuated orally by the people of Bundelkhand andretold whenever poets gather'.4 M.K. Gandhi was, among other things,one of India's greatest twentieth-century journalists, whose reach andeffectiveness depended heav ily on print. Phoolan Devi, M P and formerbandit, murdered in New Delhi on 25 July 2001, came from the sameregion as the Rani of Jhansi but, unlike the Rani, was illiterate. PhoolanDevi became a mass-media icon.Her career provides a way of exploring the interactions betweencommunications and politics in India over the past two hundred years.India has always had leaders, bandits and murders. W hat is different isthe manner by which the bandit became a leader in the 1980s and thecircumstances of her murder. If Phoolan Devi had been born in 1763instead of 1963, she may still have been taken as a concubine by a gangof dacoits; she may even have come to lead them; and she might wellhave come to a violent end. But the story would have been played out inthe ravines of the Chambal, and stories about her would have survived infolksongs and verse. Instead, the legend of Phoolan Dev i coincidedprecisely with the transformation of India into a mass-media socie ty. Her3 Kirk Johnson, Television and Social C hange in Rural India (New Delhi: Sage Publications India,2000), p.201.4 Joyce Lebra-Chapman, The Rani of Jhansi (Honolulu: University of Haw aii Press, 1986),p .1 .

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COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 65rise to prominence walks in step with the growth of Indian-languagenewspapers and Indian television. 'It is you Press pe op le', a policemantold Khushwant Singh in 1981, 'who have made a commoncriminal...into a heroine'.5 And the stories told about her, solidified intoprint and film, have become part of the political symbolism of mass-movement po litics across the whole of India and beyond.6Peasant ModeAmong Indians in the eighteenth century, let me suggest there were fourreasons for wanting to know things and sometimes for telling otherpeople wh at you knew . The reasons varied with peop le's access topower. M ore than ninety-five percent of the population depended on theland. For those connected to tilling the soil, mobility was limited in wayscom parable to peasant societies elsewhere. The wealthy and powerfulmight travel to worship or fight while the lowly might be caught up assoldiers or travel on pilgrimage, or they might walk to marriages andm arkets. Information came by word of mouth from those who m oved.The excitem ent generated by the arrival of a stranger in a village survivedwell into the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. Indeed, one ofGandhi's brilliant insights was to unite the 'march' or yatra withtwentieth-century politics and print: Gandhi's marches sent ripplesthrough the quiet countryside, but they entertained India and the world aswell. He was, we should recall, Time magazine's 'man of the year' in1930.7Differences of caste gave peasant India, however, an aspect to movementand information that peasant Europe lacked. O ne 's right to mobility waslimited in som e parts by on e's caste. Brahmins had the most widelyrecognised right to travel, and consequently were said to be used as spiesby rulers.8 In Kerala, where many of the practices of caste were refinedto a crystal, if absurd, clarity, most people's right to movement wasbounded by the two dozen rivers that subdivide the region. YetNambudiri Brahmins, Kerala's highest status group, provided priests tothe temple at Badrinath in north India long before British rule madetimetabled travel possible.9'Ordinary people'middle and lower castes connected to the landreceived information from travellersprobably pilgrims and soldiers in5 Khushw ant Singh in the Overseas Hindustan Times [hereafter OHT] (8 Oct. 1981), p.6.6 Sudha Pai, 'Phoolan Devi and Social Churning in UP', in the Economic and Political Weekly (11Aug. 2001), pp.3017-8.7 Tom W eber, On the Salt March (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), p.3998 William Lo gan, Malabar, Vol.I (M adras: Government Press, 1887, repr. 1951), p.129.9 Notice in the Travancore Government Gazette, Vol.32, no.45 (6 Nov . 1895), seeking applicationsfrom Nam budiris to b ecome priests at the Badrinath temple in British Garhw al.

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66 SOUTH ASIAthe mainand from their exchanges with relatives whom they happenedto meet while on pilgrimage or travelling to marriages. 10 What was'valu ab le' information, w e may infer, was what they were told about howbetter to achieve religious salvation, about affairs related to marriages andperhaps about the threats to life and property posed by the great andpowerful in the vicinity. The majority, I infer, were no t often connectedto external trading markets about which they knew or over which theycould exercise any choice or influence.Yet rulers, manufacturers and traders all existed in pre-colonial India.The literature on Indian trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriesis vast and trading communities were keen producers and consumers ofinformation. It is a mark of the connection betw een trade andinformation that India's oldest surviving newspaper in any language, theGujarati Mumbai Samachar, began in 1822 as a trader's paper, printingprices and trade stories from around India.11 Its Parsi owners gave itwide-ranging commercial interests.It wou ld be a m istake to suggest that people did not m ov e at all or that themajority knew and cared for nothing beyond their villages. R.K.Narayan's 'Grandmother's Tale', which draws on stories heard from hisown grandmother, tells of a Brahmin woman, deserted by her husband inThanjavur in the 1790s, who travels alone to Pune to find him . To besure, this is fiction; the woman had remarkably little information aboutthe nature of the journey she was embarking on; and she was a Brahmin.But the way in which she gathered and passed on information along herroute typifies one form of communication in peasant, pre-print times.Power-holders and state-builders needed information for war andsurvival. The M ughal system of governm ent and its officials were alsonews-gatherers and spym asters. They developed a system of intelligencethat involved magnates beholden to the empire, 'news-writing literatiliving in small towns', and ambassadors at the courts of surroundingrajas.12

In the 'peasant mode' of communications over which the Britishpresided, writing and print were used, but they often assumed thecharacter of any other transmissible signalan object or sound to beinterpreted, rather than simply read for its information. Gu ha points out10 Tom G. K essinger, Vilayatpur, 1848-1968 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp.35-6; and James Manor, Political Change In An Indian Slate (New Delhi: Manohar for ANUMonographs on South Asia, 1977), pp .40-2.11 Robin Jeffrey, India's Newspaper Revolution (London: C. Hurst, 2000), p.53 ; and Business India(14-27 July 1997), p.151.12 C.A. Bayly, Emp ire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversity Press, 1996),p.31.

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COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 67th e way in which printed or written documents could be displayed, inmuch the same way as a holy relic, as potent symbols to win peasantapproval and support.13 Writing can be mystical; those who know how todo it may parley their know ledge into influence and even p ower.A 'peasant mode' of communication continues in rural India today andinteracts with other modes. The Phoolan Devi legend, for example,illustrates how this occurs. There is considerable doubt about the detailof the Phoolan Devi story before her surrender in 1983.14 In the early1980s, journalists began to pick up on the fact that a woman wasprominent in dacoit gangs in the Cham bal Valley badlands. W hether itwas the same woman on every occasion is not clear. Eventually, at herhighly publicised surrender, Phoolan Devi inherited many of the stories,yet she may have been a kind of Robin Ho od, with actions of two or threewomen gang-leaders coalescing into the story attached to her alone oncethe mass media took them up.15 And since Phoolan Devi was illiterateand often contradicted herself, no convincing account came from herinspite of the biographies and films.16 Tales of women dacoits made finestuff for peasant communicationsand great copy for national newsmagazines (and later, television) too.Print-Elite ModeThe culture of print that slowly grew and occasionally entangled w ith thisrural-based system of information defined 'the Indian elite' that anyscholar who writes about India occasionally refers to. To be part of thatelite meant that one read printed material, probably but not necessarily inEnglish. If the definition is 'print in any language', it means fewer thanfive percent of all Indians in 1900perhaps fifteen million people. If thedefinition is 'print in English', it means less than one percent of allIndians at that timeperhaps a million people. It meant also adisproportionately influential clutch of European editors and newspapers.Much newspaper writing from the beginnings of a substantial Indianpress in the 1870s until at least the Gandhian nationalist movement of the1920s had an element of pose-strikingof European and Indian editorseach pontificating in front of their chosen aud ience.A significant web of Indian-owned newspapers dates from the 1870s. Itawaited supporting technology: the Suez Canal to bring more of theproducts of the industrial revolution (small presses among them);13 Guha, Elementary Aspects, p.248.14 OHT(24Feb. 1983), p.3.15 See for example, A joy Bose, 'Bandit Queens' , OHT(26 Mar. 1981), pp.8-9.16 See for example Mala Sen, India's Bandit Queen: the True Story of Phoolan Devi (London:Harvill, 1991); Richard Shears and Isobelle Gidley, Devi: the Bandit Queen (London: Allen andUnwin, 1984); andShekhar K apoor's film Bandit Queen (1995).

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68 SOUTH ASIArailways to carry such heavy equipment out of the great port cities; andtelegraphs and postal services to help with the assembling of news andthe distribution of newspapers. Probably few Indian newspaper ownersmade money from their new spape rs. The British estimated no more thanone hundred thousand newspaper readers in the whole of north India inthe 1870s,17 and only one newspaper in the old United Provinces had acirculation of more than 1,500 before 1905. Proprietors and editors weresaid to be 'poor and needy men, who levied blackmail on respectablepersons', though it was also asserted that some were 'respectable men,who spent thousands of rupees on their publications just for the publicgood'.18 Som e nevertheless manag ed to make a living; more than fiftynewspapers in the United Provinces survived for at least five years in the1880-1905 period.19Why did peop le run such new spapers? Money could be made out ofprinting pressschool books, government notices, handbills, visitingcards, stationery, office forms and ledgers. W hy not, as well, anewspaper to keep the press occupied regularly and perhaps earn a little?More attractively, outsiders might choose to contract to a commercialprinter the printing of a new spape r. The printer had to do nothing morethan print the copy given to him, ensure he got paid and worry that hisclients were not publishing material that would offend the governmentand close him dow n.The oldest surviving newspapers tell something about the conditions.Malayala Manorama, the Malayalam daily founded in 1889, belonged toa Syrian Christian family with a variety of interests in agriculture andcommerce. Amrita Bazar Patrika, the Bengali English daily, founded inBengal in 1868,20 and The Hindu of Madras, founded in 1878, grew outof the profitand satisfactionto be derived in a great city fromconfronting the English-owned press. The families that took up thestruggle had the wealth to do so, and a happy conjunction of place andtiming made their businesses profitable. Thousands of Indians likethemselves bought The Hindu and Amrita Bazar Patrika by 1900. For afew, there was a good living to be m ade.But it was not a living that w as widely available. To make money, anewspaper had to sell advertisements, and advertising required peoplewith things to sell and customers ready to buy. For English new spapers,17 Uma Dasgupta, Rise of an Indian Public (Calcutta: RDDHI India, 1977), pp.34, 276.18 Kirti Narain, Press, Politics and Society in Uttar Pradesh, 1885 -1914 (New D elhi: Manohar Press,1998), p.56.19 Ibid..20 It converted to English in 1878 to avoid the Vernacular Press Act; Jeffrey, India's NewspaperRevolution, pp. 129-30.

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COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 69salaried, urban Europeans constantly on the move needed advertisementsto learn when ice had arrived, what wines and spirits were available andwhen ships sailed and trains arrived. Indian-language newspapers cateredfor far fewer people who needed the fruits of the industrial revolution.Indeed, it was the 1990s before such newspapers rejoiced at the creationof a market for classified real estate advertising.21Though Indian newspapers, especially Indian-language newspapers, hadtiny circulations seldom exceeding a few hundred copies, they worriedBritish officials. Lytto n's blundering Vernacular Press Act of 1878targeted Indian-language publications, and the 'Native NewspaperReports' or 'Vernacular Newspaper Reports' (VNR) dating from thesame time, represent an attempt by the colonial state to keep track ofwhat was being said about it. W ithout the VNR, we would know littleabout the content or organisation of newspapers from the 1870s to the1920s, since nearly all have been lost or destroyed. The fact of creatingand sustaining the VNR for fifty years underlines the fear of plots'clouds no bigger than men's hands', to use one of the 1857 metaphorsthat loom behind this elaborate exercise in surveillance.Who read these newspapers beside the translators to government who hadto do digests of them every fortnight? Urban men of affairsteachers,lawy ers, doc tors, government servants, and merchants. Although B aylyquotes reports of a claim by officials in UP in the 1860s that a newspapernow 'could be found in most villages',22 this sounds an exaggerationwhen we recall that before 1905, the largest circulating publication in UPhad a print run of no m ore than 1,700 cop ies.23Gan dhi was a prod uct of the printing press and the 'print-elite mode '. Aninspired journalist, his careful analyses of himself and his country weredesigned to educate and improve; and they were published with nointerest in financ ial gain. In their tone, they perhaps had characteristicsof the oral sermons of gurus and ascetics. But Gandhi's sermons lasted,travelled and introduced ideas about 'nations' and 'national' virtues.Here was the great contrast with the works of the holy men and patriots:Tipu Sultan, tlte Rani of Jhansi and the swamis of Gandhi's childhoodKathiawar did not publish essays.This picture of Gandhi the journalist and essay-writer invokes for meHabermas' idealised 'public sphere' of eighteenth-century Europe.There, as in the India of the 'print-elite mode', respectable, highly21 Ibid., p.69.22 Bayly, Empire and Information, p.335.23 Kirti Narain, Press, Politics and Society, p.57.

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70 SOUTH ASIAeducated people read and discussed. What Indians in the twen tiethcentury were not able to do very much of, however, was to influencegovernments and policy; and it was that inability that took themas ithad taken the reading and writing American public 130 years beforeinto political organisation and challenge. Is a relatively free press in'print-e lite' times incompatible with unrepresentative governm ent? Andis the extension of this proposition the sobering one that mass mediabreed apathy and indifference?Given the size of India's population, it is remarkable that the 'print-elitem ode ' was challenged only in the 1980s. The challenge camesimultaneously from television and mass-circulation Indian-languagenewspapers, propelled by Indian capitalism and its need to enlargemarkets by reaching the countryside.4 By the 1990s old elites acrossIndia were lamenting the passing of 'good M alayalam' o r 'goo d M arath i',and the prevalence of colloquial speech in print in newly-growingpopular newspapers and, by the late 1990s, on television. In thisenvironment, they say, children may go to school, but they emerge semi-literate, unable to read a serious publication like, for example,Mathrubhumi Weekly, Kerala's venerable magazine of writing and ideas.'Readers for serious publications have dwindled', the editor ofMathrubhumi Weekly said in 1993 . Young people, he wro te, ' . . .s ay , "Ica n't understand.... I have studied only up to the Fifth Standard. Icannot read Mathrubhumi [Weekly]'"}5 What they could read werelowbrow, mass circulation weeklies like Mangalam and ManoramaWeekly. In 2000 the latter two sold 1.7 million copies a week,Mathrubhumi [Weekly], 50,000 cop ies.26Mass Media ModeThe landmark for the burgeoning of mass culture is 1977 and the end ofM rs Gand hi's 'em ergency '. The fact that she felt the need to holdelections indicated her perception of irresistible, though vague, forces thatneeded to be ridden or channelled. With the end of the 'em erg en cy ', thefree enterprise that her son Sanjay seemed to favour, and for whosebenefits hundreds of thousands of younger Indian yearned, began toassert itself. We see this in the relaxation of some of the restrictions onthe import of printing equipment and the rapid technical change inIndian-language newspapers.27

24 F o r f u r t h e r d e t a i l s , see the c h a p t e r s o n ' T r a n s f o r m i n g ' and ' A d v e r t i s i n g ' in J e f f r e y , I n d i a ' sN e w s p a p e r R e v o l u t i o n , p p . 2 0 - 7 4 .25 I n t e r v i e w , M . T . V a s u d e v a n N a i r , K o z h i k o d e , 3 A p r . 1 9 9 3 .26 A u d i t B u r e a u of C i r c u l a t i o n s . P r e l i m i n a r y L i s t . . . p e r i o d e n d e d 31st D e c e m b e r 2 0 0 0 ( M u m b a i :A B C , 2001).27 Ibid., pp.42-4.

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COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 71Profit drove these changes. New spaper-owning families saw theirnewspapers bought eagerly after the end of the emergency. They set outto convince producers of basic consumer goods that markets existed insmall towns and the countryside and that it was worth advertising inIndian-language newspapers. Manufacturers like Hindustan Lev eralready knew that this was so, and advertising, which fuelled newspaperexpansion, began to flow to enterprising newspapers that sought itaggressively and expanded beyond their traditional areas.It was not as if Indian capitalism had been invented during the nineteenmonths of the 'emergency'. It had existed for a hundred years andmanifested itself in forms of mass media organisation from the time ofindependence. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, founded in 1948 tocheck newspaper and magazine circulations, is one landmark of this; thefirst National Readership Survey (NRS-I) of 1970 and its successors,another. These activities aimed to provide data to advertisers, advertisingagencies and market researchers that would allow them to placeadvertising effectively. But it was newspapers and magazines themselvesthat helped to drive both processes. The ABC has always been a privateorganisation, funded by annual fees from its membersnewspapers,advertisers and advertising agencies. From the 1970s, Indian-languagenewspaper families became increasingly aware of the way in whichnational advertising could enhance the profits of their newspapers. TheNational Readership Surveys arose partly from their need to convincemajor advertisers that there were readers and consumers worth reachingin small-town, non-English-reading India and in the countryside. By the1990s, they had done so. In spite of the competition of television,advertising in Indian-language newspapers steadily increased, and theIndian advertising industry grew at rates reaching fifty percent a year(1994-5) and never less than seventeen percent a year.28 But theseincreases in advertising volume also resulted from, and responded to,demonstrated increases in circulation of new spapers. Advertisers wereprepared to buy more advertisements because media outlets could showevidence that more people with purchasing power were payingattentionbuying newspapers or watching television.The television story is a crucial component of the 'massification' ofcommunication in India from the 1980s. When the emergency ended in1977, India had nine television transmitters, broadcasting for a few hoursa day in black and white to an area within about a one-hundred-mileradius of the transmitter. There were estimated to be just over a million28 Ibid, pp.58-9; and Robin Jeffrey, 'Monitoring Newspapers and Understanding the State: India,1948-93', inAsian Survey, Vol.34, no.9 (Sept. 1994), pp.748-63.

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72 SOUTH AS IAtelevision sets in India, more than half in Delhi and Mumbai. 29 By 2001Doordarshan-1, the main government land-based television network, hadmore than one thousand transmitters and covered seventy-five percent ofIndia's territory and reached almost ninety percent of its people withcolour, almost-round-the-clock telev ision. India is estimated to haveseventy million television homes, which suggests that perhaps thirty-fivepercent of the population have a television where they live.30The social and political consequences of television in India aremaddeningly vast. 'People are sleeping m uch less than ten years ag o' ,Kirk Johnson discovered in his childhood village in rural Maharashtra.'Since we got television', one of his informants tells him, 'my wife and Ihave becom e interested in each other. W e see how married peoplebehave on television and we act like th at .' Politically, old patterns ofinformation control and voter control are undermined. 'Tradition ally',Johnson writes, 'a few powerful individuals in the communitymonopolised information, and these people were the only ones to initiatechange.... Television has changed th is. '3 1 At a broad political level,Arvind Rajagopal argues that the variant of 'nationalism' that haspropelled the BJP's success from the late 1980s relied on 'media andmarkets...and new methods of political mobilisation...and signals thereconfiguration of politics following the institution of a new mode ofcomm unication, specifically, television'.32I think what Rajagopal is identifying is the paradox I noted earlier. Thetendency and capacity of individuals'the people'to worshipthemselves and their individuality produces simultaneously the need toassemble (or be assembled) as a mass'the people'and to beconsulted, sold things and entertained.From the early 1980s, 'new media'large-circulation Indian-languagenewspapers, audio and videocassettes and eventually televisionbeganto shape political and social events. In Pun jab, Bhindranwa le's speechesand songs made the rounds of gurdwaras and homes as audiocassettes.Videotapes of Sikhs celebrating Mrs Gandhi's assassination in Londonand New York were said to have been carried to India within hours andhelped to incite the riots against Sikhs in New Delhi in the first two daysof Novem ber 1984. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party rose on29 Mass Media in India. 19 80 -1 ( N e w Delhi: Publicat ions Division, Ministry o f Information a n dBroadcasting, 1982), pp.105, 159-60, 193.30 Media Guide India (Mumbai : Lowe Lintas a n d Par tners , 2001) , p p . 1 2 - 1 3 ; a n d David Page a n dWilliam Crawley, Satellites over South Asia (New Delhi: Sage Publicat ions India, 2001), pp.100-4.31 Johnson, Television and Social Change in Rural India, pp.183-4 , 210.32 Arvind Rajagopal, Politics after Television. Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public inIndia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.277.

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COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 73the back of the most spectacularly successful Indian-language newspaperof the decade Eenadu. To be sure, the film star N .T . Rama Rao enjoyedwide public recognition and support, but he lacked the organisation thatthe DMK in Tamil Nadu had created for twenty years before its leaderswon power in 1967. On the other hand Rama Rao had the backing ofEenadu and its proprietor, and prior to his first victorious election in1983, the newspaper's offices throughout the state provided him with anorganisational base while the newspaper itself promoted himhandsomely.33The most celebrated of such transformations, however, is often held to bethe popular success of the Mahabharata and Ramayana television seriesbetween 1987 and 1990, and the rise of the BJP. Rajagopal has no doubtof the significance:

...the claim of a panacea for modern society in an ancientHindu culture, offered as a nationalist message on a statemedium, has clear political implications.... The Hindunationalists, with their supple combination of parliamentaryand non-parliamentary wings...were able to steal theadvantage intended for the ruling party itself34

Rajagopal does not argue that the two television serials led directly toBJP election victories; rather, he contends that the BJP was able to usethe television serials to manufacture mass messages never beforepossible. These messages crossed most of India and strove to unite ideasabout a homogenous Hindu-ness Hindutvawith messages of nationalrevival based on a golden age of Hinduism (seen, as advertisers say, onTV). It was, moreover, a national message that coincided with many ofthe practices of the north Indian, caste-Hindu constituency of the old BJPand Jana Sangh.ConclusionLet me conclude by examining Phoolan Devi's career as an exampleaffected by all three of the modes I have identified. She was herself in atradition that prevailed even among rulersshe was illiterate, like Akbarand Ranjit Singh. Her legend in the Chambal Valley spread by word ofmouth. Indeed it cannot be conclusively proved, I believe, that there wasonly one Phoolan Devi. Tale s of a number of women associated withdacoit gangs in the 1970s may have become wrapped up in a singlePhoo lan D evi story. Such tale s found a media industry reaching to the33 Jeffrey, India's New spaper Revolution, p.133.34 Rajagopal, Politics after Te levision,pp. 104, 118.

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74 SOUTH AS IAcountryside for stories and sales. Phoolan Devi made the cover of IndiaToday?5 In the next fifteen years, the Phoolan Devi story leapt from the'peasant mode' to the 'mass-media mode' with films, television storiesand books. This ledinevitably perhaps to a political dimension .Phoolan Devi became a Backward Caste (OBC) hero, winning theparliamentary seat of Mirzapur in UP in 1996, losing it in 1998 andwinning it back in 1999 for the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam SinghYadav. Her' special interests were described as 'bring ing aw arenessamong the poor, exploited, downtrodden, backward and minorities andfighting for their dignity'; she had, her biography continued, been'detained in various prisons on fake changes for about thirteen years'.36For people of the 'print-elite mode', Phoolan Devi's illiteracy, crudity,lower-caste origins and role as a symbol of 'OBC-ness' were alldistasteful. New spapers and magazines could not afford to ignore her,because she was outstanding copy; but many owners and journalistsfound her an embarrassment. Her naive prevarication and obv iousbewilderment at much of what she was a part of squared poorly with theserious, almost pious treatment of politics that people schooled in the'print-elite mod e' took for granted. They w ere, in some ways, almost asbemused at he r rise as she. Their bemusement, how ever, lay in thedifficulty in comprehend ing the mind-spinning change that accompaniedwidespread literacy, newspapers and television and the way in which theavailability of vast quantities of information dissolved accepted chains ofcommand, lines of communication and bonds of discipline.What value is there in imposing definitions on ways of communicatingand then speculating about their effects on society and politics?First, at a basic level, too little attention has been paid in modern India tothe way in which people receive information and what they do with it.Many books and articles have mined the 'vernacular press reports', butusually only to recount what was being said, rather than who was sayingit, who was paying to produce it, who was profiting from it, how peoplegot hold of it and how it affected their actions. For the past, none of thisis especially easy to do, but the questions are rarely asked.37 That is onereason for suggesting that the 'peasant mode' and the 'print-elitemode'and their co-existence from the last quarter of the nineteenthcenturyare worth probing.

35 I n d i a T o d a y ( 1 - 1 5 M a r . 1 9 8 1 ) , p p . 3 0 - 3 , f o r t h e a c c o u n t o f t h e ' B e h m a i m a s s a c r e ' .36 T h i r t e e n t h Lok S a b h a W h o 's W h o ( N e w D e l h i : L o k S a b h a S e c r e t a r i a t , 2 0 0 0 ) , p p . 7 6 9 - 7 0 .37 G u h a d o e s s o m e o f t h i s i n t h e c h a p t e r ' T r a n s m i s s i o n ' in E l e m e n t a r y A s p e c t s a n d B a y l y t a c k l e sa s p e c t s o f i t i n E m p i r e and I n f o r m a t i o n .

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COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 75Second, the dominant media mode reflects the economic relations of atime. A dominant mass media, interacting with enthusiastic aud ience s, isa product of capitalism, just as the 'print-elite mode' reflects theemergence of merchants and artisans as wealthier, more influentialconstituents of a society. The press is the ultimate symbol of thisemergence: it requires the artisan to make it work and the merchant tomake it pay; yet its attraction depends on something neither of them cannecessarily provide: a talent with words and for understanding readers'requirements. W hen a med ia mode noticeably changes in a place, newkinds of economic activity will underlie the change.

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3 Jeffrey Communication Capitalism

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