What I am about to narrate is the story of the Chharas, one of the communities that constitutes the sixty million ‘denotified and nomadic peoples’ (DNTs) in India. This is not though, a ‘story of the Chharas’ in either a mythical or a historical sense, but is better described as an aerial shot of the media-channelled ripples effecting change in the lived conditions of the Chharas. It is centripetal to the extent that the loci of the narrative is grounded in the agency, cultural production and activism springing out of Chharanagar, a ‘ghetto of Chhara DNTs’ in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. One must also, it seems, locate the writing of this chapter itself in the context of these mediated socio-cultural ripples and acknowledge the crass limitations of cultural theory as a guide, even an accomplice, to social activism. As Stuart Hall said, speaking on the subject of AIDS in the 1990s, ‘against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in God's name is the point of cultural studies?’, adding that, at the same time, ‘AIDS raises politically important cultural questions too – who gets represented and who does not – that cultural studies alone has a privileged capacity to address’ (Procter 2004, 2). From this vantage point, this chapter explores the politics of Chhara cinema, deconstructing its production process, form and audience, in seeking to locate marginal cinemas within the larger discursive context of Indian media cultures.

Explaining the role of religion in societal progress has for long remained a major challenge to thinkers observing the varieties of success and failure in the progress of societies towards wealth and a better life for their people. In the Western world, from the full analysis by Adam Smith two and a half centuries ago, and his insistence on addressing the question of ‘moral sentiments’, to more recent returns to the same issue by writers such as Deidre McCloskey, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, the question of how such influence works remains open to clarification. This is the terrain walked over in this book. In doing so, the walk is taken in the company of scholars who have dedicated years of enquiry into specific countries and religions, and each of them is well recognized in his or her specialism. They have in addition been encouraged to explain not just their theories, but the facts on the ground as they exist in China, India, Russia, Indonesia, South Africa, and Eastern Europe. They do so on the basis of current studies in the environments they observe. An overall guide to world trends is provided at the outset, as is also a statement of the setting of the core question: how does religion sponsor or otherwise a society' progress towards prosperity?

The idea that societies have economic cultures as well as aesthetic, literary, and artistic cultures is well-embedded in a number of major studies attempting to identify the origins of national wealth and progress. From Adam Smith' s recognition of the role of moral sentiments, to the recent acknowledgement by Nobel prize-winning economic historian Douglass North that culture plays a key role in economic progress, there has always been awareness that it needed to be understood more completely. That it still is not speaks more to its complexity as a question than to the efforts devoted to its understanding.

Explanation in this field has to meet the challenge of the great number of factors in the equation, and the parallel challenge that many disciplines find culture hard to handle – too fuzzy, not visible or measurable enough, a residual perhaps after all the other more tangible things have been counted. Our aim here is to place it more centrally, not by further theoretical speculation, but by presenting evidence from several parts of the changing world about how the realm of the spirit affects the economy. The evidence comes from recent studies in Europe, Asia, Africa, Russia, and the US. The book is not entirely without theory, but its main intent is the presentation of new findings from the fields.

The initiative for this collection of work began with a collaboration between the Metanexus Institute, Pennsylvania, and the Institute on Culture, Religion and World Affairs of Boston University.

On 8 December 2007, anchorwoman Barkha Dutt from the English-language section of the private Indian national news broadcaster NDTV (New Delhi Television, that was until 2003 Star News, part of Rupert Murdoch's transnational News Corporation) had a very interesting article published in the Hindustan Times. Dated two weeks before Narendra Modi's second electoral triumph as Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat was made public, it was – in the last phase of the election campaign – concerned with the media's positioning vi-à-vis the infamous yet highly popular regional leader of the Hindu nationalist BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). The controversy around Modi arises from his personal and administrative support for the systematic killing of well over 2000 Muslims between March and May 2002, the investigation of which has been largely thwarted but which is basically beyond doubt. Publicisation of the controversy is closely linked to the national, and particularly the English-language media, that often took a scandalised and highly critical stance towards Modi at the time; and again when the Gujarat electorate confirmed Modi in office in December 2002. In her article written five years later, Dutt analyses the personality cult that grew in intervening years around the Chief Minister in Gujarat. She considers it reminiscent of a ‘monsters' ball’, that has pushed aside the dominance of traditional party hierarchies in the state.

Introduction

‘Tasveer is an Urdu word,’ said Aziz, the assistant manager at Tosbir Mohol cinema hall. He explained the unfamiliar word that gave the theatre its name: Tosbir Mohol, or Picture Palace. It was written in bold Bengali letters, transliterating the tasveer to tosbir, over the entrance of the small cinema hall in Jessore. I had traveled to the district town to witness the screening of a Bangladeshi action film. I had been studying the production and consumption of this film, that I call Mintu the Murderer, for nearly a year. After many months of production, it was during Eid 2005 that the film was finally released. One of the theatres in which it opened was Tosbir Mohol in Jessore. For two weeks, Mintu the Murderer competed there with the offerings at the four rival Jessore cinema halls: Chitra, Nirala, Monihar, and Manushi.

In this chapter I will give an account of contemporary Bangladeshi cinema written from the perspective of the cinema halls in a single Bangladeshi city. Film studies throughout South Asia is generally deeply committed to textual studies (Raju 2006; Gazdar 1997; Gopalan 2002), so much so that the question of representation comes to overshadow questions of audience and the contexts of production and consumption (Hughes 2003). In this chapter, I approach contemporary Bangladeshi cinema through the theatres of Jessore. Ethnographic data from these halls yields new insights about contemporary Bangladeshi cinema.

Graduation. Procession. Pomp and Circumstance. Credit hard-won achievement and recognize the devotion of time and resources by others that made it all possible. The graduate might face an uncertain future. But let that wait – first celebrate the milestone.

“Graduation” is the World Bank Group's jargon for its process of ushering a borrower out of eligibility for aid from the Bank's special soft-loan facility, the International Development Association (IDA), and into a new status as a “middle-income borrower” of only the Bank's standard loans, through the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD). The end of aid – of access to IDA “credits” – is the essence of this graduation.

Introduction

During the course of the coverage of the attacks of 26 November 2008 in Bombay, the New Delhi TV (NDTV) anchorperson, Barkha Dutt (whose remarks also open the previous chapter by Britta Ohm) commented upon the resemblance of the events unfolding to those in a film. Another viewer interviewed by NDTV also made the same remark. Both comments expressed disbelief that these were real attacks suggesting that it is possible to become inured to violence and the idea of terrorism in the post 9/11 era, which has become the most represented theme in film contributing to the mythology of Islamic terrorism. In recent films from the Hindi cinema not only is the main subject about terrorism, in some cases the events are played out within the film but on television via simulations of news broadcasts. In Mission Kashmir (2000, dir. Vidhu Vinodh Chopra) Sufi Parvez was a television anchor; in Fanaa (Destruction, 2006 dir. Kunal Kohli) a blind woman befriends a Kashmiri terrorist; in LOC Kargil (2003, dir. J. P. Dutta) Preity Zinta's character became a reporter; the mission in the film Mission Istanbul (July 2008 dir. Apoorva Lakhia. MI hereafter) was to thwart terrorist attacks on Indian cities, with obvious reference to Bombay, a television station owner in Istanbul being identified as the mastermind. The actual reporting by NDTV jounrnalists on 26 November 2008 was no different from much that is depicted within Hindi films.

One of the great coincidences of late last century was the emergence of a ‘third wave’ of democratization at the same time that much of the world was undergoing a powerful religious revival. Although religious organizations played a supporting role in democratic transitions in Spain, Poland, the Philippines, and Indonesia, many political analysts seemed to feel that democratization and religious revival had little to do with each other. Indeed, if they took notice of the revival at all, most analysts viewed it with concern. They worried that religion might stir up sentiments incompatible with democracy, opening the way to the scenario outlined in Samuel Huntington's ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington 1996).

Another indication of the ships-passing-in-the night approach to these two events was that one of the more potent theoretical concepts developed in the 1990s for understanding democratization, i.e., the concept of social capital, was at first rarely applied to religious organizations. In the literature on politics and democracy, social capital has been the subject of myriad definitions, not all of them compatible (see below). In the 1990s, however, Robert Putnam's seminal works on civic traditions in modern Italy (Putnam 1993) and the putative decline of social capital in the United States (Putnam 1995, 2000) catapulted the concept to the centre of political discussion.

Putnam defined social capital as ‘features of social life – networks, norms, and trust – that enable participants to act together more effectively to pursue shared objectives’ (1995, 664–5).

South Asia through the Lens of Totalising Events

Throughout this volume ‘media cultures’ refers to the complex interactions between particular audiences, their practices of meaning-making and use, and specific texts, representations, formats or media. It also refers to the interplay of politics, history and finance in the relationships between media producers and texts, ideologies and social contexts. The chapters collected here present a wide range of media cultures and associated cultural practices from across South Asia. At the same time they explain those cultures and practices through a set of historical, political and theoretical engagements that share many common elements. This might be, for instance, in relation to violence and peace, ethnic divisions and state responses or conflicts between supposed tradition and erstwhile modernity. Or it may be in relation to pleasure and learning, autonomy, morality and resistance on the part of marginalised peoples or highly controlled groups. All of these have been explored by the authors in their research, and practice, in the areas of media audiences, texts and contexts in South Asia. Before treading new ground, however, it is worth asking why the kind of approach taken in this volume is so necessary, and why now.

Several cohorts of university students in London, listing what came immediately to mind in relation to the five best known countries in the South Asian region, almost uniformly linked India to words such as ‘vast’, ‘amazing’, ‘spiritual’, ‘Bollywood’, ‘non-violence’, ‘poverty’, ‘IT/call centres’, ‘large democracy’ and ‘beautiful’, Pakistan to the phrases ‘terrorism’, ‘Islam’ and ‘near Afghanistan’, Sri Lanka to ‘war’ and ‘honeymoons’, Nepal to ‘Mount Everest’ and Bangladesh to a single phrase: ‘always flooding’.

Introduction

It is 8.30 pm in Sri Lanka. The prime time television slot, immediately after the Sinhala News on Rupavahini, the State Television channel, is usually reserved for viewing the most popular teledramas. Families across the country sit together expecting images of ‘reality’ to bombard their screens. In the last twenty years, ‘bombard’ has taken on many connotations, as television producers/directors, actors and actresses attempt to capture the two crucial trajectories that have shaped the fabric of the nation: war and peace, that Sri Lanka has endured for the last three decades.

Although this has now broken down irrevocably in 2008–9, a de-escalation of the ethnic conflict and a temporary ceasefire agreement in 2002 between the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) created a tenuous peace. After the Peace Accord, the mood of euphoria was contagious and everyone jumped on the ‘peace bandwagon’, including the television industry. An exploration of selected episodes from two popular teledramas that were scripted and screened during the ceasefire is a conduit to uncovering the political meanings underlying messages of peace in popular television. These messages need to be contextualised in relation to the larger discourses of nationhood within which peace is circulated and established in the public consciousness.

In this chapter, I will argue that the configurations of peace in television not only resonate closely with the dominant public and political discourses, but also invoke and are inscribed by discourses of identity, and racial and cultural purity, that have marked the ideological terrain of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka thus far.

Introduction

4 November 2007 was witness to a very unusual sight in Pakistan: hundreds of students marching in a political protest. The protest was launched at a small, elite university, LUMS, and the students were protesting the arrest of faculty members in the aftermath of the emergency declared in Pakistan on 3 November. The sight of students protesting was to become increasingly familiar as the weeks of emergency dragged on. Initially, the movement seemed to be composed of a number of independent and unrelated individuals. However, over time, certain foci of attention emerged and eventually led to the formation of SACs, student action committees, at different colleges and universities.

These SACs worked in conjunction and individually on political agendas that continued to evolve over time. The students were faced with many challenges: the authoritarian response of the government to any public dissent; the mass-media blackout imposed by the regime; a need for anonymity; and the need to organise rapidly. The most logical solution turned out to be the personal new media these students had access to, particularly mobile phones and the World Wide Web. They used these media to piece together a discourse that quickly found its way into local media discussions as well as the international media.

The theoretical framework for this chapter will be drawn from concepts of youth political activism, particularly in urban areas, and the impacts of new media on civic engagement amongst young people.

There exists today a widespread presumption that all religions must be regarded as of equal worth, and in any event are not to be the object of comparative value judgments. That presumption – let's label it religious relativism, a corollary of cultural relativism – is the dominant one in the West, and surely in our universities. However, when it comes to the relationship between religion and human progress, I find compelling evidence that some religions do better than others in promoting the goals of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights: democratic politics, social justice, and prosperity.

Figure 2.1 at the appendix of this chapter is the summary of an idealized typology of 25 cultural factors that are viewed very differently in cultures prone to progress and those that resist it. As you will appreciate, religious doctrine and practice influence virtually all of these 25 factors.

As an example of a religion that is highly resistant to progress, consider Voodoo, the dominant religion of Haiti and a surrogate for the many traditional religions of Africa, the birthplace of Voodoo. Haiti is by far the poorest, least literate, most misgoverned country in the Western Hemisphere. Voodoo is a religion of sorcery in which hundreds of spirits, very human and capricious, control human destinies. The only way to gain leverage over what happens in one's life is to propitiate the spirits through the ceremonial intervention of the Voodoo priests and priestesses.