Jump Cuts and Unusual Angles

In looking across histories, national borders, urban and rural regions, social classes, genders, ethnicities, cultural practices and political traditions in the South Asian region to give a sense of the contexts in which media producers and audiences make meaning and texts are formed and used, the contributors in this volume have not taken a uniform approach. Herein lies the richness of this collection, but also the difficulty in drawing conclusions that are in agreement with all chapters' findings and orientations. I do not, therefore, intend to restate the complex findings of individual chapters but simply to draw out common theoretical strands, questions and absences.

Reading through the collection, it becomes apparent that the South Asian audience, singular, does not exist. Nor does the Indian or the Sri Lankan audience. Nor does the child audience or the rural audience, per se. There is also no overarching, publicly funded, government-controlled national media framework in any of the countries that has not, by 2009, been compelled to interact with and cede much of its market to local and international commercial media interests. Nevertheless, all the variety of media interests in each of the countries included in this collection clearly operate within and against the backdrop of the existing cultural ideologies of various civil society actors and national, regional or state political regimes. There can be no doubt, therefore, about the very political nature of the processes surrounding and inflecting all production and consumption of media across the subcontinent.