Organizer: Thomas R. Trautmann, University of Michigan
Chair: Catherine E. B. Asher, University of Minnesota
A Multi-Lingual State in a Media Revolution: Capitalism, Advertising and the
Vitality of (Certain) Cultures in India, 1947-96
Robin Jeffrey, La Trobe University, Australia
Capitalism and technology have transformed the Indian-language newspaper business since the end of the "emergency" in 1977. Circulation of Hindi dailies passed English in 1979, and the gap has steadily widened. Between 1976 and 1987, daily circulations, including English, increased by 250 per cent. Advertising expenditure in Indian-language newspapers exceeded U.S. $200 million a year in the mid-1990s.
This paper analyzes how and why capitalism and the Indian-language press embraced each other after 1977 It relates changes in printing technology and the timing of rapid circulation growth to the expansion of Indian capitalism and the advertising industry. The paper argues that these developments are deeply embedding ten of India's "official" major languages by making them more widely read than ever before.
Analogies with modern Europe might suggest that such developments-the growth of "print capitalism"-will lead to the development of aggressive new nationalisms based on local-language pride Until now, however, rather than fostering ideas of new nationhoods, the revolution in the Indian-language press has tended to promote a sense of Indian nationhood, largely as a result of the India-wide interests of newspaper proprietors.
Constructions of Femininity in Indian Advertising
Shoma Munshi, IIAS, Leiden, Netherlands
The paper examines the constructions of femininity in Indian advertising discourses over the last decade. The time period under review is crucial since India was to be taken "forward into the 21st century" under the aegis of Rajiv Gandhi's government, resulting in economic liberalization, and the great leveler-the advent of satellite television with its consequent far-reaching influences from the West.
Amidst other changes, recognition of women's individualism began to figure much more prominently in advertising discourse. An awareness of women's multi-faceted roles as homemaker, wife and mother, career woman are now clearly seen in Indian advertisements. What is interesting to note is how these different subjectivities constructed for women in consumer discourses exist without apparent friction. Modernity, as translated into an attitude of "caring-for-you-but-caring-for-me-too" has added a new challenge to the domestic role; but without disturbing its structural status. No longer content to believe that her life's mission is to cook endless meals, clean and scrub, it is now assumed that women will respond much more positively to constructions of identity that posit her, however superficially, with the perception that she is now more in control.
The paper will focus mainly on textual manifestations of advertising discourses in examining how this woman is now being constructed by producers of media, especially advertisers. It will also examine how such constructions are presented and re-presented, and how over time, these are reinvented against the social and cultural changes in women's lives.
National Roots of International Politics: Population Policy and the Women's
Movement in India
Aseema Sinha, Cornell University
The recent changes in the global population policy agenda that emerged from the Cairo Conference (Sept. 1994) appear to be related, in a number of complex ways, to a major domestic population policy initiative taken by the Government of India (April-May, 1994). This brings to the fore the question of the emergent relationship between transnational social movement networks and the domestic women's movement in India. This is the subject of my paper.
A recent position argues that these changes are a product of transnational social movements. I argue that while the "international women's movement" has acquired a momentum of its own, it needs to be analyzed in conjunction with national level changes. These domestic-level changes were made possible as a result of certain state sponsored programs (e.g. Women's Development Program, Mahila Samakhya Program) which, in contrast to past practice, involve women's groups in their formulation and implementation. These new institutional arenas led to the successful articulation of alternative perspectives on women's health issues. I go on to link these national level changes to the transnational level, examining the organizational networks forged in the international arenas and their impact on the Indian women's movement. This paper presents a re-assessment of the transnational movement phenomenon and arrives at some conclusion about the mechanisms through which the transnational networks influence the Indian women's movement and vice-versa. This enables me to examine the transnational women's movement in its specific political form.
Locating the Work of Art: A South Indian Textile and the Question of Context
Rebecca M. Brown, University of Minnesota
Over the past decade, historians of trade and culture have attempted to create a broader history of South Asia which moves beyond present-day political boundaries, and acknowledges the importance of the sub-continent in Asian history. This paper follows this path by probing the ways in which our applications of boundary inflect our interpretations of art, specifically the way in which we define art through location. Using a single nineteenth-century South Indian export textile, which traveled from South India to the U.S. via Siam, the problems of identification through location will be explored. While the attempt to locate this textile creates obvious conundrums, many of the issues raised with this piece are also applicable to architecture and painting, where definitions of the artist's homeland, influences, or cultural heritage continue to raise problems connected to location. In addition, important facets of the textile's production and subsequent change in context are lost in the close identification of generalized locations with a single work. Further, the use of nations as locating parameters poses problems in terms of the very question of nationhood in the nineteenth century. The solution offered in this paper involves two interrelated axes: one, a definition of the art object beginning with the object's production and use rather than its point of origin or location, and two, a definition of the object's location which allows for multiple, simultaneous locations. In essence, the paper opens a space for art historical analyses which more fully acknowledge inherent complexities in the historical contextualization of art-an opening which directly affects the study of South and Southeast Asian art works.
Sakti Experienced: Bengali Disciples' Personal Accounts of the Powers of the Guru
Suchitra Samanta, University of Richmond
My paper discusses the guru-disciple relationship among contemporary, urban, Hindu householder Bengalis from the perspective of disciples' personal experiences of the guru's miraculous powers. Such experiences include waking visions, after-death and dream communications, reincarnation in a disciple's family, and extraordinary healing abilities. These events are explained broadly in terms of the guru's divine Sakti (power, force).
Disciples' oral accounts emphasize these experiences as definitive of their relationship with the guru. Tapping into an eternal fountain of Sakti, the guru connects with his disciples both in life and after death. Themes in the accounts reveal an inner, and indigenous concept of Sakti as a protean power, manifesting itself through the guru to the deserving disciple in fortuitous events beyond logical explanation, therefore experienced rather than rationalized, and expressible only in personal stories.
In using these stories to understand the conceptual connection between the guru-disciple relationship and Sakti, I provide a fresh perspective on both. Drawing on relevant texts as well as on ethnographic data, I highlight the Hindu religious tradition's emphasis on the primacy of experiential knowledge. I suggest that previous interpretations of Sakti have missed its experiential dimension, and its integral location within a relationship, here between guru and disciple. In method, my paper gives voice to a way of "seeing" not given sufficient credence within a Western social "science" but which finds both acceptance and credibility in the everyday lives of Hindu householders.