Author: Purnima Mankekar
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2000
Language: English
Pages: 429
ISBN/UPC (if available): 019 565 3262
Description
This work presents a cutting edge ethnography of television viewing in India. Mankekar focuses on the responses of upwardly mobile, middle-class urban women to state-sponsored entertainment serial (including Ramayan, Mahabharat and Hum Log).
She demonstrates how television in India has profoundly shaped women’s place in the family, community and nation and how it has played a crucial role in the realignment of class, caste, consumption, religion and politics.
Mankekar examines entertainment narratives and advertisements designed to convey particular ideas about the nation. Organizing her study around recurring narrative themes in TV programmes-Indian womanhood, family, community, constructions of historical memory, development, integration, and sometimes violence- she dissects both the messages and her New Delhi subjects perceptions of and reactions to these messages. Her ethnographic analysis reveals the texture of women’s daily lives, social relationships and everyday practices.
Throughout her study she remains attentive to the tumultuous historical and political context of the Integrationalist messages in TV programmes, the cultural diversity of the viewer ship, and her own role as an ethnographer. In an enlightening epilogue the author describes how understandings of national sovereignty and gender were again reconstituted in response to satellite television and transnational programming in India since the 1990s.
This compelling read on the crucial role of TV in the production of postcolonial ideologies of nation, gender, and family is essential for all those intrigued by the role and impact of television in India, as well as for students and scholars of media and film studies, culture studies, gender studies, sociology and anthropology.
PRAISE FOR SCREENING CULTURE, VIEWING POLITICS
An outstanding work by a brilliant and passionate scholar. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics is a rare jewel. Not only does Mankekar explore a key historical moment in India's history, but she brings a vibrant feminist critique to her understanding of the construction of the modern Indian state. This book will become a classic.
- Ann Gray, university of Birmingham
Contents
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER 1
Culture Wars
PART I
Fields of Power: The National Television Family
CHAPTER 2
National Television and the Viewing Family
CHAPTER 3
Women-Oriented Narratives and the New Indian Woman
PART II
Engendering Communities
CHAPTER 4
Mediating Modernities: The Ramayan and the Creation of Community and Nation
CHAPTER 5
Television Tales, National Narratives, and a Woman’s
Rage: Multiple Interpretations of Draupadi’s Disrobing
PART III
Technologies of Violence
CHAPTER 6
Air Force Women Don’t Cry:
Militaristic Nationalism and Representations of Gender
CHAPTER 7
Popular Narrative, the Politics of Location, and Memory
Epilogue: Sky Wars
Notes
Bibliography
Index