English-language television news and the great Indian middle class: Made for each other?

Abstract

This article highlights the interdependence of the urban Indian middle class and English-language news television in terms of their particular mixing of neo-liberal commercial interests, a newfound lifestyle focus and an assertive nationalism that is largely insular. After a brief analysis of a small sample of billboard advertisements for Indian news outlets in the context of the middle-class audience for news (and advertising), the article then focuses on mapping and identifying the particular values of the emerging Indian middle class and its media. For this, the article draws on Pavan K. Varma’s polemical work on the emergence and failings of the post-liberalization middle class, on Leela Fernandes’ fieldwork and interviews with the media and advertisers, and also on Nalin Mehta’s research on India’s argumentative tradition as remade on 24-hour news television. Mostly, however, the methodological approach here is to deconstruct the news producers’ construction of the middle-class audience through industry interviews and print media commentary, and highlight how this diverges from real-life middle-class complexities and further excludes the lower classes.

From ‘De-wogged’ Migrants to ‘Rabble Rousers’: Mapping the Indian Diaspora in Australia

“…At the same time, there is no doubt, as former journalist and Indian television scholar Nalin Mehta (2010) puts it, that the centrality of 24-hour private satellite news is a new factor in the Indian political and social matrix. Extending his argument further, I have argued elsewhere that this centrality is made possible by India's urban middle class finding a Journal of Intercultural Studies 255 voice (and power) through the news channels (Khorana 2012). This class is making use of that voice to construct an increasingly assertive expression of the nation as it closes the gap between India and the industrialised West.…”

Coping with change in India’s media: Struggles of English-language journalists in an evolving mediascape

“…In all, the number of television channels ballooned to more than 90, with India now the 'third largest cable TV-viewing nation in the world, after China and the United States' (Rao, 2009, p. 478). The expansion of television, particularly English-language satellite television, has been attributed to increases in advertising income, increases in consumption of consumer goods, the growth of the middle class (Mehta, 2008), and the production of entertainment programs such as reality television, lifestyle shows, and the crime genre (Khorana, 2012;Mehta, 2008Mehta, & 2014Neyazi, 2011).…”

The Five-Point Indian: Caste, Masculinity, and English Language in the Paratexts of Chetan Bhagat

“…There is, thus, a strong argument to be made for scrutinizing the savarna male’s dominance that is constantly reproduced in cultural texts and knowledge structures, creating a Brahmin-supremacist patriarchal discourse that requires a complex analytic to disrupt his hegemony (Ramdas, 2015). Indian English-language news media, in particular, has had a consistent history of producing narratives centering the role of Hindu savarnas that have often been presented as pan-Indian narratives (Khorana, 2012; Kumar, 2005; Shah, 1994). Examining how the Brahmin or savarna male can afford to have his identity go unnoticed, even as he dominates the English-language public sphere, can be a key approach in unraveling how caste and patriarchy operate in this milieu (Deshpande, 2013).…”

“…Along with material capital, English speakers are often afforded much more social and cultural capital, in terms of space and attention in mainstream English-language news media. As Khorana (2012) suggests in the context of television news, media commentators make claims about representing the nation through the narrative discourses they construct about a homogenous middle class while consciously erasing and silencing lived experiences of lower castes and classes (p. 25). Similarly, Shah (1994) in his textual analysis of The Times of India ’s coverage of caste-based affirmative action protests notes that its reporters—predominantly English-educated and savarna—perpetually painted savarna protestors as revolutionary and democratic, and Dalit-Bahujan beneficiaries of affirmative action as incompetent, mediocre, and undeserving of state support (pp.…”