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Communications and capitalism in India, 1750-2010


Robin Jeffreya
a
La Trobe University,

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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The 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 immersed sufficiently in a print
culture to make the Vernacular Press Act of 1878 seem (briefly), at least
to the colonial state, like a good idea. India's print culture of the next
hundred years recalls in some ways the role of print in Habermas'
idealised eighteenth-century public sphere, in which cultured elites
debated ideas and in which capitalism and mass consumption were
distant dreams or threats. Mass print culture, of the kind that began in the
USA and Britain from the middle of the nineteenth century and expanded
across the industrialised world from the 1890s, arrived in India in the
1980s, simultaneously—and 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 of
genteel print from the 1870s to the 1980s; and iii) mass print and
television from the 1980s. The paper examines the forces that led to the
introduction of new technologies of communication and the significance
for politics and society of the change. It concludes that economic change,
leading to pervasive capitalism, is the necessary precursor to each period;
when capitalism strengthens, the media technology necessary to carry
consumption to new groups is invented or acquired.

This essay is simultaneously modest and grandiose: modest because it


sets out, at the start anyway, to do no more than define and discuss three
'modes' in the history of communications in India; grandiose because it
tries to cover more than two hundred years of history and to characterise
vast and complex processes. The risks of simple-minded recitation or
awe-inspiring misunderstanding are worth running, because we have not,
I think, adequately taken account of the ways in which information has
been transmitted in India over the past two hundred years. A focus on
62 SOUTH ASIA

TABLE
Comparing 'Media Modes'

Peasant Print-Elite Mass-Media


Mode Mode Mode

Method • word of • print • print


mouth • pictures, • film, radio, TV, etc.
• objects objects

Character • non- • lasts • can last


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-istics durable • travels • can travel instantly


• non- • does not change • does not change
portable
• changeable

How is it • by people • by people • as with PEM


carried? moving and carrying an item • by radio waves
talking across distances

Who can • anyone • need a press, • need presses,


produce paper cameras, receivers,
it? projectors, etc.

Who can • anyone • literates • anyone who can hear


share it? who can hear (or see)
(or see)

Why do • to tell, • to influence • to make money &


people warn, • to make money earn a living
produce influence & earn a living • to influence others
it? • to amuse, • to improve,
pass time change
• to gain
importance,
influence

What • entertain • make money • make money


must it • be useful • gratify • be wanted—
do to be • give producer entertain, inform
viable? pleasure to • be wanted—
producer entertain, inform
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 63

communications may help to explain—by providing a missing


ingredient—political and social events which hitherto have been less than
adequately accounted for.

I argue that a 'peasant mode' of communications prevailed in India


before the extension of railways, telegraph, printing presses, steam
engines and other attributes of the British colonial state. Information
travelled and people communicated. But they did so largely by word of
mouth through markets, pilgrimage, marriage and soldiering. A tiny
commercial and religious elite dealt in written words that were essential
to their vocations and to serving political regimes.1 It is worth pointing
out that neither Akbar nor Ranjit Singh, two of India's most notable
rulers, was literate in any language.
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From the 1870s, a second mode of communications—a 'print-elite


mode'—took shape as a railway and telegraph network covered the
country and cheap printing presses and Indian language fonts became
available throughout urban India. The practices of the colonial state
made the printed word inescapable for those who sought power or
influence. The British government itself required mountains of printing,
while Indians who wanted to benefit from government had to be able to
participate in this printed-word system. Because they had reasons to do
so, religious and commercial castes were usually the first Indians to be
drawn to the regular use of print. For their part, the British had things to
sell and to advertise, and they welcomed relief from the boredom of
cantonment life. The young Kipling separated the advertisements in the
Civil and Military Gazette by reporting news and spinning yarns and
verses. Indians in towns began to use print similarly, and by 1900,
though literacy was only five percent of the population, newspapers like
The Hindu and Amrita Bazar Patrika were a generation old. The facts
that both were in English and that literacy was five percent are important
for underlining the elite nature of the 'print-elite mode'. By the
beginning of the twentieth century, a host of Indian writers were using
print to earn a living and promote ideas; while print helped to create a
nationwide nationalist movement that touched most of the elite and
beyond. 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. 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

The third mode—the 'mass mode'—was already forming in the early


twentieth century. It stems from the paradox that the more the language
of the rights of individuals becomes embedded in constitutions and
accepted as global truth, the greater is the tendency of the millions of
individuals to seek solace for themselves and to be treated by power-
holders as a mass—'the masses', mass-media, mass-marketing. Though
Gandhi is sometimes described as having built a 'mass movement', the
extent of Indian capitalism, and the media available, limited possibilities
until the 1980s. In 2002, all three modes of communication— peasant,
print-elite and mass—co-exist; but the balance shifts steadily to the mass
mode, to the delight (on the whole) of peasants and the dismay (on the
whole) of the old print elites. The mass mode has no built-in values—it
can work for hate, harmony or the simple selling of soap powder, which it
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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.

Her career provides a way of exploring the interactions between


communications and politics in India over the past two hundred years.
India has always had leaders, bandits and murders. What is different is
the manner by which the bandit became a leader in the 1980s and the
circumstances of her murder. If Phoolan Devi had been born in 1763
instead of 1963, she may still have been taken as a concubine by a gang
of dacoits; she may even have come to lead them; and she might well
have come to a violent end. But the story would have been played out in
the ravines of the Chambal, and stories about her would have survived in
folksongs and verse. Instead, the legend of Phoolan Devi coincided
precisely with the transformation of India into a mass-media society. Her
3
Kirk Johnson, Television and Social Change in Rural India (New Delhi: Sage Publications India,
2000), p.201.
4
Joyce Lebra-Chapman, The Rani of Jhansi (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), p.1.
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 65

rise to prominence walks in step with the growth of Indian-language


newspapers and Indian television. 'It is you Press people', a policeman
told Khushwant Singh in 1981, 'who have made a common
criminal...into a heroine'.5 And the stories told about her, solidified into
print and film, have become part of the political symbolism of mass-
movement politics across the whole of India and beyond.6

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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comparable to peasant societies elsewhere. The wealthy and powerful


might travel to worship or fight while the lowly might be caught up as
soldiers or travel on pilgrimage, or they might walk to marriages and
markets. Information came by word of mouth from those who moved.
The excitement generated by the arrival of a stranger in a village survived
well into the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. Indeed, one of
Gandhi's brilliant insights was to unite the 'march' or yatra with
twentieth-century politics and print: Gandhi's marches sent ripples
through the quiet countryside, but they entertained India and the world as
well. He was, we should recall, Time magazine's 'man of the year' in
1930.7

Differences of caste gave peasant India, however, an aspect to movement


and information that peasant Europe lacked. One's right to mobility was
limited in some parts by one's caste. Brahmins had the most widely
recognised right to travel, and consequently were said to be used as spies
by rulers.8 In Kerala, where many of the practices of caste were refined
to a crystal, if absurd, clarity, most people's right to movement was
bounded by the two dozen rivers that subdivide the region. Yet
Nambudiri Brahmins, Kerala's highest status group, provided priests to
the temple at Badrinath in north India long before British rule made
timetabled travel possible.9

'Ordinary people'—middle and lower castes connected to the land—


received information from travellers—probably pilgrims and soldiers in

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.

Yet rulers, manufacturers and traders all existed in pre-colonial India.


The literature on Indian trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
is vast and trading communities were keen producers and consumers of
information. It is a mark of the connection between trade and
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information that India's oldest surviving newspaper in any language, the


Gujarati Mumbai Samachar, began in 1822 as a trader's paper, printing
prices and trade stories from around India.11 Its Parsi owners gave it
wide-ranging commercial interests.

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.

Power-holders and state-builders needed information for war and


survival. The Mughal system of government and its officials were also
news-gatherers and spymasters. They developed a system of intelligence
that involved magnates beholden to the empire, 'news-writing literati
living in small towns', and ambassadors at the courts of surrounding
rajas.12

In the 'peasant mode' of communications over which the British


presided, writing and print were used, but they often assumed the
character of any other transmissible signal—an object or sound to be
interpreted, rather than simply read for its information. Guha points out
10
Tom G. Kessinger, 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 ANU
Monographs 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, Empire and Information (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p.31.
COMMUNICATIONS AND CAPITALISM IN INDIA 67

the way in which printed or written documents could be displayed, in


much the same way as a holy relic, as potent symbols to win peasant
approval and support.13 Writing can be mystical; those who know how to
do it may parley their knowledge into influence and even power.

A 'peasant mode' of communication continues in rural India today and


interacts with other modes. The Phoolan Devi legend, for example,
illustrates how this occurs. There is considerable doubt about the detail
of the Phoolan Devi story before her surrender in 1983.14 In the early
1980s, journalists began to pick up on the fact that a woman was
prominent in dacoit gangs in the Chambal Valley badlands. Whether it
was the same woman on every occasion is not clear. Eventually, at her
highly publicised surrender, Phoolan Devi inherited many of the stories,
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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.

A significant web of Indian-owned newspapers dates from the 1870s. It


awaited supporting technology: the Suez Canal to bring more of the
products of the industrial revolution (small presses among them);
13
Guha, Elementary Aspects, p.248.
14
OHT (24 Feb. 1983), p.3.
15
See for example, Ajoy 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 and
Unwin, 1984); and Shekhar Kapoor's film Bandit Queen (1995).
68 SOUTH ASIA

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.

The oldest surviving newspapers tell something about the conditions.


Malayala Manorama, the Malayalam daily founded in 1889, belonged to
a Syrian Christian family with a variety of interests in agriculture and
commerce. Amrita Bazar Patrika, the Bengali English daily, founded in
Bengal in 1868,20 and The Hindu of Madras, founded in 1878, grew out
of the profit—and satisfaction—to be derived in a great city from
confronting the English-owned press. The families that took up the
struggle had the wealth to do so, and a happy conjunction of place and
timing made their businesses profitable. Thousands of Indians like
themselves bought The Hindu and Amrita Bazar Patrika by 1900. For a
few, there was a good living to be made.

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

salaried, urban Europeans constantly on the move needed advertisements


to learn when ice had arrived, what wines and spirits were available and
when ships sailed and trains arrived. Indian-language newspapers catered
for far fewer people who needed the fruits of the industrial revolution.
Indeed, it was the 1990s before such newspapers rejoiced at the creation
of a market for classified real estate advertising.21

Though Indian newspapers, especially Indian-language newspapers, had


tiny circulations seldom exceeding a few hundred copies, they worried
British officials. Lytton's blundering Vernacular Press Act of 1878
targeted Indian-language publications, and the 'Native Newspaper
Reports' or 'Vernacular Newspaper Reports' (VNR) dating from the
same time, represent an attempt by the colonial state to keep track of
what was being said about it. Without the VNR, we would know little
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about the content or organisation of newspapers from the 1870s to the


1920s, since nearly all have been lost or destroyed. The fact of creating
and sustaining the VNR for fifty years underlines the fear of plots—
'clouds no bigger than men's hands', to use one of the 1857 metaphors
that loom behind this elaborate exercise in surveillance.

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.

This picture of Gandhi the journalist and essay-writer invokes for me


Habermas' idealised 'public sphere' of eighteenth-century Europe.
There, as in the India of the 'print-elite mode', respectable, highly
21
Ibid., p.69.
22
Bayly, Empire and Information, p.335.
23
Kirti Narain, Press, Politics and Society, p.57.
70 SOUTH ASIA

educated people read and discussed. What Indians in the twentieth


century were not able to do very much of, however, was to influence
governments and policy; and it was that inability that took them—as it
had taken the reading and writing American public 130 years before—
into political organisation and challenge. Is a relatively free press in
'print-elite' times incompatible with unrepresentative government? And
is the extension of this proposition the sobering one that mass media
breed apathy and indifference?

Given the size of India's population, it is remarkable that the 'print-elite


mode' was challenged only in the 1980s. The challenge came
simultaneously from television and mass-circulation Indian-language
newspapers, propelled by Indian capitalism and its need to enlarge
markets by reaching the countryside.4 By the 1990s old elites across
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India were lamenting the passing of 'good Malayalam' or 'good Marathi',


and the prevalence of colloquial speech in print in newly-growing
popular newspapers and, by the late 1990s, on television. In this
environment, 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 of
Mathrubhumi Weekly said in 1993. Young people, he wrote, '...say, "I
can't understand.... I have studied only up to the Fifth Standard. I
cannot read Mathrubhumi [Weekly]'"}5 What they could read were
lowbrow, mass circulation weeklies like Mangalam and Manorama
Weekly. In 2000 the latter two sold 1.7 million copies a week,
Mathrubhumi [Weekly], 50,000 copies.26

Mass Media Mode


The landmark for the burgeoning of mass culture is 1977 and the end of
Mrs Gandhi's 'emergency'. The fact that she felt the need to hold
elections indicated her perception of irresistible, though vague, forces that
needed to be ridden or channelled. With the end of the 'emergency', the
free enterprise that her son Sanjay seemed to favour, and for whose
benefits hundreds of thousands of younger Indian yearned, began to
assert itself. We see this in the relaxation of some of the restrictions on
the import of printing equipment and the rapid technical change in
Indian-language newspapers.27

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

Profit drove these changes. Newspaper-owning families saw their


newspapers bought eagerly after the end of the emergency. They set out
to convince producers of basic consumer goods that markets existed in
small towns and the countryside and that it was worth advertising in
Indian-language newspapers. Manufacturers like Hindustan Lever
already knew that this was so, and advertising, which fuelled newspaper
expansion, began to flow to enterprising newspapers that sought it
aggressively and expanded beyond their traditional areas.

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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check newspaper and magazine circulations, is one landmark of this; the


first National Readership Survey (NRS-I) of 1970 and its successors,
another. These activities aimed to provide data to advertisers, advertising
agencies and market researchers that would allow them to place
advertising effectively. But it was newspapers and magazines themselves
that helped to drive both processes. The ABC has always been a private
organisation, funded by annual fees from its members—newspapers,
advertisers and advertising agencies. From the 1970s, Indian-language
newspaper families became increasingly aware of the way in which
national advertising could enhance the profits of their newspapers. The
National Readership Surveys arose partly from their need to convince
major advertisers that there were readers and consumers worth reaching
in small-town, non-English-reading India and in the countryside. By the
1990s, they had done so. In spite of the competition of television,
advertising in Indian-language newspapers steadily increased, and the
Indian advertising industry grew at rates reaching fifty percent a year
(1994-5) and never less than seventeen percent a year.28 But these
increases in advertising volume also resulted from, and responded to,
demonstrated increases in circulation of newspapers. Advertisers were
prepared to buy more advertisements because media outlets could show
evidence that more people with purchasing power were paying
attention—buying newspapers or watching television.

The television story is a crucial component of the 'massification' of


communication in India from the 1980s. When the emergency ended in
1977, India had nine television transmitters, broadcasting for a few hours
a day in black and white to an area within about a one-hundred-mile
radius of the transmitter. There were estimated to be just over a million

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

The social and political consequences of television in India are


maddeningly vast. 'People are sleeping much less than ten years ago',
Kirk Johnson discovered in his childhood village in rural Maharashtra.
'Since we got television', one of his informants tells him, 'my wife and I
have become interested in each other. We see how married people
behave on television and we act like that.' Politically, old patterns of
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information control and voter control are undermined. 'Traditionally',


Johnson writes, 'a few powerful individuals in the community
monopolised information, and these people were the only ones to initiate
change.... Television has changed this.' 31 At a broad political level,
Arvind Rajagopal argues that the variant of 'nationalism' that has
propelled the BJP's success from the late 1980s relied on 'media and
markets...and new methods of political mobilisation...and signals the
reconfiguration of politics following the institution of a new mode of
communication, specifically, television'.32

I think what Rajagopal is identifying is the paradox I noted earlier. The


tendency and capacity of individuals—'the people'—to worship
themselves and their individuality produces simultaneously the need to
assemble (or be assembled) as a mass—'the people'—and to be
consulted, sold things and entertained.

From the early 1980s, 'new media'—large-circulation Indian-language


newspapers, audio and videocassettes and eventually television—began
to shape political and social events. In Punjab, Bhindranwale's speeches
and songs made the rounds of gurdwaras and homes as audiocassettes.
Videotapes of Sikhs celebrating Mrs Gandhi's assassination in London
and New York were said to have been carried to India within hours and
helped to incite the riots against Sikhs in New Delhi in the first two days
of November 1984. In Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party rose on

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

the back of the most spectacularly successful Indian-language newspaper


of the decade—Eenadu. To be sure, the film star N.T. Rama Rao enjoyed
wide public recognition and support, but he lacked the organisation that
the DMK in Tamil Nadu had created for twenty years before its leaders
won power in 1967. On the other hand Rama Rao had the backing of
Eenadu and its proprietor, and prior to his first victorious election in
1983, the newspaper's offices throughout the state provided him with an
organisational base while the newspaper itself promoted him
handsomely.33

The most celebrated of such transformations, however, is often held to be


the popular success of the Mahabharata and Ramayana television series
between 1987 and 1990, and the rise of the BJP. Rajagopal has no doubt
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of the significance:

...the claim of a panacea for modern society in an ancient


Hindu culture, offered as a nationalist message on a state
medium, has clear political implications.... The Hindu
nationalists, with their supple combination of parliamentary
and non-parliamentary wings...were able to steal the
advantage intended for the ruling party itself34

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

For people of the 'print-elite mode', Phoolan Devi's illiteracy, crudity,


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lower-caste origins and role as a symbol of 'OBC-ness' were all


distasteful. Newspapers and magazines could not afford to ignore her,
because she was outstanding copy; but many owners and journalists
found her an embarrassment. Her naive prevarication and obvious
bewilderment at much of what she was a part of squared poorly with the
serious, almost pious treatment of politics that people schooled in the
'print-elite mode' took for granted. They were, in some ways, almost as
bemused at her rise as she. Their bemusement, however, lay in the
difficulty in comprehending the mind-spinning change that accompanied
widespread literacy, newspapers and television and the way in which the
availability of vast quantities of information dissolved accepted chains of
command, lines of communication and bonds of discipline.

What value is there in imposing definitions on ways of communicating


and then speculating about their effects on society and politics?

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

Second, the dominant media mode reflects the economic relations of a


time. A dominant mass media, interacting with enthusiastic audiences, is
a product of capitalism, just as the 'print-elite mode' reflects the
emergence of merchants and artisans as wealthier, more influential
constituents of a society. The press is the ultimate symbol of this
emergence: it requires the artisan to make it work and the merchant to
make it pay; yet its attraction depends on something neither of them can
necessarily provide: a talent with words and for understanding readers'
requirements. When a media mode noticeably changes in a place, new
kinds of economic activity will underlie the change.
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