Movement, state, and market: Case studies in the social organization of meaning in modernizing India

摘要

This study explores the social organization of the manufacture and circulation of symbolic form in twentieth-century India. In an effort to open up the ways that meaning gets put in the service of social and economic power, I examine four case studies in communication in modern India. The following representations and their contexts of power will be examined: (1) the reconfiguration of the cultural meaning of homespun cotton cloth (khadi) by Mahatma Gandhi in the effort to mobilize peasants into the Nationalist Movement; (2) a 1950s UNESCO/Indian government developmental radio project, The Farm Radio Forums, which was grounded in the dominant (top-down) paradigm of development communications and modernization; (3) the transformation of Doordarshan, India' s state-operated television system, in the context of recent economic liberalization policies, from a developmentalist medium to a promotional one carrying advertising, externally -funded programming, and targeting India's upper- and middle-classes; and (4) a Bajaj scooter ad campaign that relies on the rhetoric of the nation and themes of national integration to promote the sale of this particular consumer good. The study is based on historical and ethnographic research (in Bangalore, Kamataka) and aims to theorize the sources and substances of power that underlie communication process while advancing a specific position within culture studies that orients itself to a "system of provision" approach to communication (one that attends to the contexts within which cultural meaning is produced, circulated, and consumed/used). With this approach I hope to balance approaches to cultural analysis that are purely populist and/or that concentrate on textual meaning free of socio-historical and economic context. Additionally, the study furthers a ritual understanding of communication (as opposed to a transmission perspective), especially in regards to the ways intensive meanings, backed by social and economic power, are used to construction national and other solidarities at several moments in recent India history. Finally, the study should further an understanding of modernization processes generally, but most especially India's modernization, in relation to communication and the above outlined macro-social contexts of power.