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To cite this Article Jeffrey, Robin(2002) 'Communications and capitalism in India, 1750-2010', South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies, 25: 2, 61 — 75
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/00856400208723475
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856400208723475
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Communications and Capitalism in India,
1750-2010
Robin Jeffrey
La Trobe University
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TABLE
Comparing 'Media Modes'
1
C.A. Bayly offers a picture of this relationship in 'Colonial Rule and the "Informational Order" in
South Asia', in Nigel Crook (ed.). The Transmission of Knowledge in South Asia (New Delhi: Oxford
University 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--very
slowly indeed--towards literacy'.
64 SOUTH ASIA
does extremely well. 'It was surprising to see so many villagers using
toothbrushes and toothpaste', Kirk Johnson wrote of his return to his
childhood village in Maharashtra in the mid-1990s. The villagers told
him they had seen it on television, and the neem twig no longer seemed
appropriate.3
In this essay, I touch on the lives, and stories about the lives, of the Rani
of Jhansi, M.K. Gandhi and Phoolan Devi to try to illustrate aspects of
my three 'media modes'. The Rani of Jhansi was a pre-print figure,
whose legend was 'perpetuated orally by the people of Bundelkhand and
retold whenever poets gather'.4 M.K. Gandhi was, among other things,
one of India's greatest twentieth-century journalists, whose reach and
effectiveness depended heavily on print. Phoolan Devi, MP and former
bandit, murdered in New Delhi on 25 July 2001, came from the same
region as the Rani of Jhansi but, unlike the Rani, was illiterate. Phoolan
Devi became a mass-media icon.
Peasant Mode
Among Indians in the eighteenth century, let me suggest there were four
reasons for wanting to know things and sometimes for telling other
people what you knew. The reasons varied with people's access to
power. More than ninety-five percent of the population depended on the
land. For those connected to tilling the soil, mobility was limited in ways
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5
Khushwant 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 (11
Aug. 2001), pp.3017-8.
7
Tom Weber, On the Salt March (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), p.399
8
William Logan, Malabar, Vol.I (Madras: Government Press, 1887, repr. 1951), p.129.
9
Notice in the Travancore Government Gazette, Vol.32, no.45 (6 Nov. 1895), seeking applications
from Nambudiris to become priests at the Badrinath temple in British Garhwal.
66 SOUTH ASIA
the main—and from their exchanges with relatives whom they happened
to meet while on pilgrimage or travelling to marriages.10 What was
'valuable' information, we may infer, was what they were told about how
better to achieve religious salvation, about affairs related to marriages and
perhaps about the threats to life and property posed by the great and
powerful in the vicinity. The majority, I infer, were not often connected
to external trading markets about which they knew or over which they
could exercise any choice or influence.
It would be a mistake to suggest that people did not move at all or that the
majority knew and cared for nothing beyond their villages. R.K.
Narayan's 'Grandmother's Tale', which draws on stories heard from his
own grandmother, tells of a Brahmin woman, deserted by her husband in
Thanjavur in the 1790s, who travels alone to Pune to find him. To be
sure, this is fiction; the woman had remarkably little information about
the 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 her
route typifies one form of communication in peasant, pre-print times.
yet she may have been a kind of Robin Hood, with actions of two or three
women gang-leaders coalescing into the story attached to her alone once
the mass media took them up.15 And since Phoolan Devi was illiterate
and often contradicted herself, no convincing account came from her—in
spite of the biographies and films.16 Tales of women dacoits made fine
stuff for peasant communications—and great copy for national news
magazines (and later, television) too.
Print-Elite Mode
The culture of print that slowly grew and occasionally entangled with this
rural-based system of information defined 'the Indian elite' that any
scholar who writes about India occasionally refers to. To be part of that
elite meant that one read printed material, probably but not necessarily in
English. If the definition is 'print in any language', it means fewer than
five percent of all Indians in 1900—perhaps fifteen million people. If the
definition is 'print in English', it means less than one percent of all
Indians at that time—perhaps a million people. It meant also a
disproportionately influential clutch of European editors and newspapers.
Much newspaper writing from the beginnings of a substantial Indian
press in the 1870s until at least the Gandhian nationalist movement of the
1920s had an element of pose-striking—of European and Indian editors
each pontificating in front of their chosen audience.
railways to carry such heavy equipment out of the great port cities; and
telegraphs and postal services to help with the assembling of news and
the distribution of newspapers. Probably few Indian newspaper owners
made money from their newspapers. The British estimated no more than
one hundred thousand newspaper readers in the whole of north India in
the 1870s,17 and only one newspaper in the old United Provinces had a
circulation of more than 1,500 before 1905. Proprietors and editors were
said to be 'poor and needy men, who levied blackmail on respectable
persons', though it was also asserted that some were 'respectable men,
who spent thousands of rupees on their publications just for the public
good'.18 Some nevertheless managed to make a living; more than fifty
newspapers in the United Provinces survived for at least five years in the
1880-1905 period.19
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Why did people run such newspapers? Money could be made out of
printing press—school books, government notices, handbills, visiting
cards, stationery, office forms and ledgers. Why not, as well, a
newspaper to keep the press occupied regularly and perhaps earn a little?
More attractively, outsiders might choose to contract to a commercial
printer the printing of a newspaper. The printer had to do nothing more
than print the copy given to him, ensure he got paid and worry that his
clients were not publishing material that would offend the government
and close him down.
But it was not a living that was widely available. To make money, a
newspaper had to sell advertisements, and advertising required people
with things to sell and customers ready to buy. For English newspapers,
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 Delhi: Manohar Press,
1998), p.56.
19
Ibid..
20
It converted to English in 1878 to avoid the Vernacular Press Act; Jeffrey, India's Newspaper
Revolution, pp. 129-30.
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 69
Who read these newspapers beside the translators to government who had
to do digests of them every fortnight? Urban men of affairs—teachers,
lawyers, doctors, government servants, and merchants. Although Bayly
quotes reports of a claim by officials in UP in the 1860s that a newspaper
now 'could be found in most villages',22 this sounds an exaggeration
when we recall that before 1905, the largest circulating publication in UP
had a print run of no more than 1,700 copies.23
Gandhi was a product of the printing press and the 'print-elite mode'. An
inspired journalist, his careful analyses of himself and his country were
designed to educate and improve; and they were published with no
interest in financial gain. In their tone, they perhaps had characteristics
of 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 childhood
Kathiawar did not publish essays.
24
For further details, see the chapters on 'Transforming' and 'Advertising' in Jeffrey, India's
Newspaper Revolution, pp.20-74.
25
Interview, M.T. Vasudevan Nair, Kozhikode, 3 Apr. 1993.
26
Audit Bureau of Circulations. Preliminary List...period ended 31st December 2000 (Mumbai:
ABC, 2001).
27
Ibid., pp.42-4.
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 71
It was not as if Indian capitalism had been invented during the nineteen
months of the 'emergency'. It had existed for a hundred years and
manifested itself in forms of mass media organisation from the time of
independence. The Audit Bureau of Circulations, founded in 1948 to
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28
Ibid, pp.58-9; and Robin Jeffrey, 'Monitoring Newspapers and Understanding the State: India,
1948-93', in Asian Survey, Vol.34, no.9 (Sept. 1994), pp.748-63.
72 SOUTH ASIA
television sets in India, more than half in Delhi and Mumbai.29 By 2001
Doordarshan-1, the main government land-based television network, had
more than one thousand transmitters and covered seventy-five percent of
India's territory and reached almost ninety percent of its people with
colour, almost-round-the-clock television. India is estimated to have
seventy million television homes, which suggests that perhaps thirty-five
percent of the population have a television where they live.30
29
Mass Media in India. 1980-1 ( N e w Delhi: Publications Division, Ministry o f Information and
Broadcasting, 1982), p p . 1 0 5 , 159-60, 193.
30
Media Guide India (Mumbai: Lowe Lintas and Partners, 2001), pp. 12-13; a n d David Page and
William Crawley, Satellites over South Asia (New Delhi: Sage Publications 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 in
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p.277.
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 73
of the significance:
Rajagopal does not argue that the two television serials led directly to
BJP election victories; rather, he contends that the BJP was able to use
the television serials to manufacture mass messages never before
possible. These messages crossed most of India and strove to unite ideas
about a homogenous Hindu-ness—Hindutva—with messages of national
revival based on a golden age of Hinduism (seen, as advertisers say, on
TV). It was, moreover, a national message that coincided with many of
the practices of the north Indian, caste-Hindu constituency of the old BJP
and Jana Sangh.
Conclusion
Let me conclude by examining Phoolan Devi's career as an example
affected by all three of the modes I have identified. She was herself in a
tradition that prevailed even among rulers—she was illiterate, like Akbar
and Ranjit Singh. Her legend in the Chambal Valley spread by word of
mouth. Indeed it cannot be conclusively proved, I believe, that there was
only one Phoolan Devi. Tales of a number of women associated with
dacoit gangs in the 1970s may have become wrapped up in a single
Phoolan Devi story. Such tales found a media industry reaching to the
33
Jeffrey, India's Newspaper Revolution, p.133.
34
Rajagopal, Politics after Television, pp. 104, 118.
74 SOUTH ASIA
countryside for stories and sales. Phoolan Devi made the cover of India
Today?5 In the next fifteen years, the Phoolan Devi story leapt from the
'peasant mode' to the 'mass-media mode' with films, television stories
and books. This led—inevitably perhaps—to a political dimension.
Phoolan Devi became a Backward Caste (OBC) hero, winning the
parliamentary seat of Mirzapur in UP in 1996, losing it in 1998 and
winning it back in 1999 for the Samajwadi Party of Mulayam Singh
Yadav. Her' special interests were described as 'bringing awareness
among the poor, exploited, downtrodden, backward and minorities and
fighting for their dignity'; she had, her biography continued, been
'detained in various prisons on fake changes for about thirteen years'.36
First, at a basic level, too little attention has been paid in modern India to
the way in which people receive information and what they do with it.
Many books and articles have mined the 'vernacular press reports', but
usually only to recount what was being said, rather than who was saying
it, who was paying to produce it, who was profiting from it, how people
got hold of it and how it affected their actions. For the past, none of this
is especially easy to do, but the questions are rarely asked.37 That is one
reason for suggesting that the 'peasant mode' and the 'print-elite
mode'—and their co-existence from the last quarter of the nineteenth
century—are worth probing.
35
IndiaToday (1-15 Mar. 1981), pp.30-3, for the account of the 'Behmai massacre'.
36
Thirteenth Lok Sabha Who's Who (New Delhi: Lok Sabha Secretariat, 2000), pp.769-70.
37
Guha does some o f this in the chapter 'Transmission' in Elementary Aspects and Bayly tackles
aspects o f it in Empire and Information.
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 75