Making News in Global India
Media, Publics, Politics

The first ethnography to examine the role of urban transformation, caste and language in shaping India's contemporary news culture.

Sahana Udupa (Author)

9781107492134, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 8 February 2018

292 pages
23 x 15.3 x 1.5 cm, 0.45 kg

'… the topic is engrossing, the interviews are full of insights, and the author's industry is unquestionable. The book adds another perspective on Bengaluru, India's most switched-on city, and how its swelling numbers of citizens relate to the media by which they connect to their world.' Robin Jeffrey, Asian Studies Review

In the decades following India's opening to foreign capital, the city of Bangalore emerged, quite unexpectedly, as the outsourcing hub for the global technology industry and the aspirational global city of liberalizing India. Through an ethnography of English and Kannada print news media in Bangalore, this ambitious and innovative new study reveals how the expanding private news culture played a critical role in shaping urban transformation in India, when the allegedly public profession of journalism became both an object and agent of global urbanization. Building on extensive fieldwork carried out with the Times of India group, the largest media house in India, between 2008 and 2012, Sahana Udupa argues that the class project of the 'global city' news discourse came into striking conflict with the cultural logics of regional language and caste practices. Advancing new theoretical concepts, Making News in Global India takes arguments in media scholarship beyond the dichotomy of public good and private accumulation.

Introduction: the twin mediations
1. Regimes of desire
2. Democracy by default
3. The difference machine: market and field logics of news production
4. Kannada J?gate: sounds and silences of the Bhasha media
5. 'Journalists are pimps': a triangulated axis of caste, language and politics
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Media, information & communication industries [KNT], Politics & government [JP], Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography [JHMC]