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- Convenors:
-
Amelia Bonea
(University of Oxford)
Michael Mann (Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin)
- Location:
- Room 111
- Start time:
- 28 July, 2016 at
Time zone: Europe/Warsaw
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel aims to expand the repertoire of historical scholarship on print journalism in South Asia by focusing on little explored topics such as genres of journalism, journalism education, professionalization, advertising, theories of the press, copyright, technology, and sensationalism.
Long Abstract:
The newspaper press has been a popular area of investigation for historians of South Asia, as demonstrated by the impressive number of histories of the press and journalism published in the post-independence period. Despite this substantial record of publication, there has been little theoretical and methodological variation in the way histories of journalism have been written. For a long time scholars have followed the tradition of 'effect research'; it is only in recent years that the study of journalism in South Asia has begun to be infused with the concerns of other fields of inquiry such as book history, the history of telecommunications, and global history.
This panel proposes to revisit the history of journalism in modern South Asia at a time when practices and ideas of journalism are undergoing significant changes around the world. We invite papers which draw attention to the wide variety of journalistic practice in the Indian subcontinent and help us to expand the repertoire of historical scholarship on print journalism. Contributions should cover the period from the late eighteenth century until the Emergency. Potential topics include, but are not limited to: genres of journalism (science and medical journalism, cultural journalism, political journalism, business journalism, literary journalism), journalism education, the professionalization of journalism, theories of the press, technologies of journalism, journalism and copyright, advertising, anonymity, sensationalism, press correspondents, and press clubs.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Muhammed Niyas Ashraf (Freie University Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
This paper engages in identifying unambiguous connection between the proliferation of vernacular print in the context of Modernity through the manifestation of language as an apparatus fashioned for the formation of an identity by Makti Tangal to comprehend and expand Muslim public sphere in colonial Kerala.
Paper long abstract:
Recent work on Islam and the emergence of a modern Muslim identity in different parts of colonial South Asia have emphasized that print technology was key to their self-articulation as communities, politically, as well as in social and cultural terms. This study mainly explores how Sayyid Sanaullah Makti Tangal (1847-1912) utilized vernacular print to attain explores his vision of a modern Muslim and multi-dimensional nature of Muslim identity (Mappila, Muslim, Malayali) to comprehend and expand Muslim public sphere. First Muslim to write in Malayalam, he profoundly understood the significance of print and published widely in colonial Kerala. He emphasized learning Malayalam and English is completely consonant with Islamic values. This effort became fundamental to societal progress, emergence of a modern Muslim identity and a crucial aspect of his demands for the greater presence of Muslims in emerging Kerala public sphere. This reformist discourse was circulated through his Malayalam print. Nineteenth century India was marked by the proliferation of printed texts in a variety of languages; these sought to define the moral contours of religious and linguistic communities by delineating behaviour, language and texts appropriate for them. This emphasizes the centrality of language and emergence of print culture as key elements in the formation of a modern Muslim, both in terms of the public, as well as in the social imaginary. His writings intended to reconcile religion and worldly affairs and retorted how a Muslim could be modern within the bounds of Islam. His self-conscious about the importance of vernacular print for Muslim identity formation was crucial not just for the defense of the community but also for its reform.
Amitava Chatterjee (Kazi Nazrul University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the representations of the sporting events in the print media for a wider understanding of the process of transformation of sport from an orally transmitted popular culture to a mass culture with mass spectatorship and its effect in the socio-political ambience of colonial Bengal.
Paper long abstract:
Since the early part of the twentieth century sporting culture in South Asia began to feature as an aspect of mass culture. Different branches of sporting activity particularly team sports which blended with mass participation started attracting the notice of contemporary press of Colonial Bengal to an extent that newspaper coverage of such sport became more extensive from this period. It is unquestionable that mass communications have transformed sport from an orally transmitted popular culture to a mass culture with mass spectatorship. The content analysis of the newspaper accounts helped to decode the nature of journalism practiced by contemporary European as well the vernacular journals. Apart from the elite English sports, indigenous sports reporting also came to maturity. The Bengali intelligentsia also made a concerted move to establish sports journalism on a strong footing to install among Indians a sense of pride in their own achievements. The rise and proliferation of vernacular, in the Bengali sports writing can only be meaningful if viewed against the wider political canvas of the colonial state. This is not to say that one can read a straight forward narrative of the rise, spread and flowering of anti European sentiment into this body of literature. The games emerged as a mirror where in an Indian identity started to assess itself, and in that sense Bengali sports journalism can certainly be looked upon as a nationalist enterprise. The paper analyses the different aspects of sports reporting which were influenced by the sports ethos of colonial Bengal.
Derek Elliott (Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane)
Paper short abstract:
This paper argues that the focus on sensationalised forms of police torture in newspapers drew focus away from the more ubiquitous, yet banal, revenue violence, thus allowing a critique of Indians rather than colonial administrative modalities.
Paper long abstract:
In 1855 the Madras government of the East India Company officially admitted that torture was 'commonly practised' by its officials in the collection of revenue, and whilst securing criminal confessions. At the time the 'torture question', as it was known, caused an imperial outcry, with voices from both India and Britain calling for an end to the Company's rule. The sensationalism of torture was picked up by the press, who reported in grim details, the worst of the violence. Though some instances were severe in their brutality, the torture most commonly practiced in Madras was for revenue purposes and was rather banal. It involved stress positions, beatings and illegal incarceration. It was not the stuff of racks, devices and instruments of pain, conjured by popular images of the medieval European criminal justice system. Police torture, though less common, was more sensational in its violence and took on forms more gruesome. As such, it was reported on more regularly than instances of revenue violence. These news stories relied on and contributed to racialized British notions of Indians. In this sense, Indians were rendered simultaneously the victims of an unjust colonial government, and their own savagery. This paper argues that the focus on sensationalised forms of police torture in newspapers drew focus away from the more ubiquitous revenue violence, which permitted a critique of Indians rather than of the Company's administrative modalities. In doing so, torture was rendered an Indian, rather than a British problem.
Uma Ganesan (Manchester University, North Manchester, Indiana, USA)
Paper short abstract:
This paper analyses the Self-Respect journals that emerged in response to the need felt for a “non-Brahmin public sphere” to disseminate the Self-Respect movement’s radical views on caste and gender in late colonial South India.
Paper long abstract:
The discourse of 'Brahmin vs. non-Brahmin' formed the bedrock of the politics of the Dravidian movement and its various strands in the Madras presidency in late colonial South India. As the most radical strand of the Dravidian movement, the Self-Respect movement articulated a radical politics of caste and gender that foregrounded gender as an inalienable component in its larger critique of caste. While its counterparts in the Dravidian movement - the Justice Party and the Pure Tamil movement - manifested, respectively, the political and cultural aspects of non-Brahmin identity, the Self-Respect movement focused on the social effects of caste and gender inequalities.
For the Self-Respect movement, caste, in its contemporary configuration, transcended the original model of 'division of labor' to become a hegemonic system of oppression that comprised hierarchical social relations as well as the precepts and rules that informed, sustained, and justified this oppression. The oppression and subjugation of women was a crucial element in this configuration. The Movement embarked on a radical reform of Hindu society to rectify the inequities of the caste system - an endeavor that had little hope of reaching the wider public in view of Brahmin domination of the press in early twentieth century South India. The need for a "non-Brahmin public sphere" was apparent. The Self-Respect journals that emerged in response to this need provided an effective public platform for articulating the ideological differences between the nationalist movement and the Dravidian movement, and the Brahmins and non-Brahmins.
Hisae Komatsu (Otemon Gakuin University)
Paper short abstract:
The aim of this paper is to describe and analyze the role Hindi magazines played in giving women a voice in early 20th century India, focusing on the narratives by anonymous women in the readers’ columns.
Paper long abstract:
From around the 1910s to the 1930s, many women wrote letters or small notes to the editors of a variety of magazines, requesting that their names or addresses not be specified. In these writings, they expressed private things about themselves, especially their miserable home and marital situations. This paper will focus on these narratives as they were published in several Hindi magazines. For most women, the reader's columns in women's journals like Griha Lakshmi and Chand, were the first and only place where they could express their feelings freely, and by doing so, gain some sympathy and support from the editor and readers.
What these narratives show is that even though the strict social backdrop in those times called for absolute obedience and virtue, there were in fact voices that challenged the system at that time. Such narratives told by faceless and nameless women illustrated another dimension of women's lives in the modern period which has much value to contribute to the cultural history of India.
Lallianpuii Lallianpuii (Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
The aim is to understand the growth of Mizo newspapers. I argue that these newspapers were the base for articulation of identity and a significant means to connect to Mizo thought-which was viewed as “modern and connected" (Pachuau&Schendel,2015) as opposed to parochial.
Paper long abstract:
Newspapers have been in circulation in the now northeast Indian state of Mizoram since the late 19th century. From the start, they were in Lushai language, now classified as Mizo, a pan-ethnic language of the Zo descents. These newspapers were the base for the articulation of identity and important means to connect to Mizos thought, as they play a significant role in uniting the readers. In this paper, I want to counter assumptions on Indian newspapers vernacularisation in two ways. First, studies on vernacularisation of Indian newspapers usually focus on their regional circulation. Here, I want to look at Mizo newspapers' connection to the city, specifically the role of the colonial-set-up and the state that were considerable factors in urbanisation of Mizo newspapers. Aizawl, the capital city of Mizoram accounts for about 40 percent of the 1 million populations, exclusive of the Zo diaspora across borders. By this I will stress that newspapers relate to the formation of "an unexpected vanguard of easy-going transnational 'modernity' within India" (McDuie-Ra 2012). Secondly, I argue that in the case of Mizo newspapers, vernacularisation has been a long standing phenomena and it does not lead to rapid content localisation as assumed. News content was broad and cosmopolitan, suggesting newspapers that were 'modern and well-connected to the wider world' in outlook. (Pachuau&Schendel 2015).
This paper is based on three months fieldwork in Aizawl. My analysis is based on oral history, ethnographic fieldwork particularly interviews with veteran journalists and archival works.
Tara Puri (University of Bristol)
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on literary journalism and serialised fiction in English language periodicals in late 19th and early 20th century India, and their role in the formation of a new subjectivity.
Paper long abstract:
Indian periodicals at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century saw the emergence of the genre of literary journalism, along with the popularity of short fiction and serialised novels. This paper is interested in tracing the ways in which literary journalism and fiction reproduced in magazines was central to the development of a new subjectivity, closely connected with notions of citizenship and a newly defined relationship with the public sphere. The private subject came to be described with more interest and greater interiority, for this depth was central to the public role she/he would perform in a rapidly changing nation. This was particularly evident in the case of women writers, who increasingly used this new print medium for expressing the social and political roles of women, and for experimenting with new subject positions. The 'new woman' who materialised in these pages was educated, modern, and cultured. Not only was she able to negotiate with relative ease the traditional and domestic duties demanded of her but was marked by a cosmopolitan sensibility that allowed her to occupy an enlarged public space through print. Focusing on The Indian Ladies' Magazine and the Madras Christian College Magazine, I argue that this negotiation, to a large extent, was carried out through the kind of literary material that was printed in these magazine - fiction and poetry, as well as reviews - that fashioned the tastes of readers in ways that were subtle but also far reaching.
Ranjith Thankappan (The English and Foreign Languages University)
Paper short abstract:
The paper attempts to place magazines run by Dalits, the 'ex-untouchables', within Malayalam journalism, a modern vernacular cultural space where the nationalist articulations of a Malayalam speaking community find political expression in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala.
Paper long abstract:
The print journalism provided the newly imagined cultural space for modern articulations. For Dalits, the 'ex-untouchable' community who were kept out of power and knowledge due to their lowly caste status, the print envisioned a larger universal of an ethical society and power. The Dalit magazines mark the differing modalities of these political engagements within the space of Malayalam journalism. The paper proposes to tread through the historical trajectory of Dalit magazines and suggests the modalities through which the idea of modern is negotiated. The magazines Sadhujanaparipalini and Velakkaran debated the modern imaginations of Kerala as region with Dalit as the radically transformatory force- the former, at the early 20th century moment of Renaissance and the latter, at the formative moment of the region in the 1950s. This was later transformed through the SEEDIAN moment in the post-emergency period, which shows the shift from Marxist to an Ambedkarite politics with Soochakam in 2001. Dalits articulate the idea of being modern and Malayali through these representational print moments.