4 The imagined community of Maa Tujhe Salaam

The global and the local in the postcolonial

Rangan Chakravarty

Though the word ‘global’ is over 400 years old, the use of such words as ‘globalisation’ only began in the 1960s. By the 1990s, globalisation developed into ‘a key idea by which we understand the transition of human society into the third millennium’ (Waters 1995: 1). According to McGrew, ‘[d]uring the 1980s, the concept of globalisation began to permeate a diverse body of literatures within the social sciences’. This was spurred by contemporary developments across the world, underpinning ‘the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation-states (and by implication the societies) which make up the modern world system’ (McGrew 1992: 65). The issue at stake seems to be the dislocation of stable structures of global→← national→←local as systems of hierarchical interrelationships, mediations, representations, and, therefore, stable anchorages for identities:

Since in the modern era the nation-state has been the main container and organiser of people's economic and political action as well as their social and cultural identity, its decline in the face of globalisation, if it is a decline, poses major questions as to what forms of social structure and legitimisation will take its place across the whole range of social actions, economic, political and cultural.

(Garnham 1993: 252)

The role of media has been seen as crucial in the emergent processes of power and as ‘undermining’ the nation-state:

[T]he growth of an increasingly integrated global market and of global media systems appears to be undermining the key locus of democratic power and accountability within the liberal model — namely the nation-state.

(Garnham 1993: 251)

How do we understand the impact of these globalising processes on the formations of global/local identities in the late twentieth century which are also described as a ‘postcolonial’ moment? What are the implications of the ‘decline of the nation-state’ for the imagining of communities? Defining the postcolonial is in itself a site of vigorous academic debates. Scholars do not only challenge its adequacy and epistemological legitimacy in describing the conditions of contemporary societies, but also question the politics of the emergence and uses of the term in the context of other, equally historically and politically constituted terms like the ‘third world’ or ‘neo-colonialism’.¹ In an incisive essay, Ella Shohat (1992) raises a number of crucial questions around our understanding of the term, ‘postcolonial’. She argues that using the term as an ‘universalising category’ which neutralises significant geopolitical differences between the ex-colonisers and the ex-colonies, and between the ex-colonies and the colonial-settler states can lead to a blurring of serious and important differences, undermining the political potential of understanding and analysing these societies. She also argues that ‘postcolonial’, when compared with terms like ‘neo-colonialism’, ‘comes equipped with little evocation of contemporary power relations’ (1992: 105). Responding to some of the criticisms of the theoretical implications of the term ‘postcolonial’, Stuart Hall says,

[T]he term ‘postcolonial’ is not merely descriptive of ‘this’ society rather than ‘that’, or of ‘then’ and ‘now’. It re-reads ‘colonisation’ as part of an essentially trans-national and transcultural ‘global’ process — and it produces a decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation-centred imperial grand narratives.

(Hall 1996: 247)

Along with Hall, I am willing to work with the term, acknowledging the differences within the space defined by it. I find ‘postcolonial’ to be a useful descriptor for an important period in the history of India and the world, when

‘the colonial’ is not dead, since it lives on in its ‘after-effects’, but its politics can certainly no longer be mapped completely back into, nor declared to be ‘the same’ in the postcolonial moment as it was during the period of the British [colonial] mandate.

(Hall 1996: 248)

But our understanding of ‘postcolonial’ as an analytic term to account for transnational and transcultural processes at a moment when ‘the colonial’ lives on (and even gets reconfigured) in its globalised ‘after-effects’, can have certain problems. Discussing culture as a strategy of survival, Homi Bhabha says:

Culture as a strategy of survival is both transnational and translational. It is transnational because contemporary postcolonial discourses are rooted in specific histories of cultural displacement, whether they are the ‘middle passage’ of slavery and indenture, the ‘voyage out’ of the civilising mission, the fraught accommodation of Third World migration to the West after the Second World War, or the traffic of economic and political refugees within and outside the Third World. Culture is transnational because such spatial histories of displacement — now accompanied by the territorial ambitions of ‘global’ media technologies — make the question of how culture signifies, or what is signified by culture, a rather complex issue.

(Bhabha 1994: 172)

While recognising culture as both transnational and translational is an important insight, the privileging of ‘spatial histories of dislocation’ is likely to limit the possibilities of understanding differences in the postcolonial predicament(s). Aijaz Ahmad (1992) has noted a trend of privileging the immigrant and the diaspora across a vast body of postcolonial, post-modern scholarship. I tend to share his concern. I am by no means challenging the ‘postcoloniality’ of immigrant or diasporic cultures, or their right to be treated as such. I am saying that the politics of treating them as ‘the postcolonial’ is problematic and undermines some of the valuable contributions of postcolonial studies. Ahmad quotes Salman Rushdie as saying, ‘the ability to see at once from inside and out is a great thing, a piece of good fortune which the indigenous writer cannot enjoy’ (Ahmad 1992: 130). Here one begins to see the danger of a myopic vision of the postcolonial in which the ‘indigenous’ is the unfortunate one who has not been able to migrate. S/he is denied the depth of the postcolonial vision because of his/her location.

In this chapter, with a case study of a music television event produced on the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence, I argue that spatial dislocation need not be the only way that cultures become transnational and translational, and the spatially dislocated need not be treated as the only postcolonial voice. The dominant imagination of an Indian nation, formulated at a moment of anti-colonial movement, did not include all the inhabitants as equal members of a national community within the geographic boundaries of the colonial territories increasingly conquered and unified as India.² The processes of the rise of certain dominant social forces to take over the reins of anti-colonial movements and eventually succeed the coloniser to the throne of the nation-state were clearly mediated by power relations of class, caste, gender, religion, cultural capital and other social markers of privilege.³ In spite of the rhetoric of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ trumpeted around in the discourses of global consumerism, the transitions in the imagining of communities, produced by sweeping social and cultural changes in conjunction with economic liberalisation, are showing few signs of including all the inhabitants of nation-states in the emergent imaginations of communities. Thus there are many possibilities for probing ‘insides and outsides’, locations and dislocations within these national spaces as important sites of postcolonial histories. For a study of rapidly globalising media technologies, markets and audiences, the obsessive privileging of the ‘spatially dislocated’ can also seriously constrain the possibility of understanding some of the other dislocations occurring through the process of deterritorialisation, which Anthony Giddens has described as the ‘tearing away of space from place, and the tensions of fostering relations between “absent” others’ (1990: 18) — an experience that millions of people across the world, and away from the metropolitan centres, are facing today.

Let me now bring some of these concerns into my exploration of the ‘imagined community’ in a particular piece of cultural production, the TV music video Maa Tujhe Salaam, which was part of an extensive ‘Vande Mataram’ (Salutations to the Motherland) media campaign, produced on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence in 1997.

Marketing the mother nation

For a large part of its post-independence history, media transmission in India closely followed the larger model of a mixed economy. There was a dominant presence of the state in radio and television. Press and cinema had relative autonomy, while being subjected to rules of state censorship. By the middle of the 1980s, in tune with global shifts in power formations and balances, significant transitions started taking place in the economic, political, social and cultural arenas in the country. One of the predominant aspects of these transitions was the rise of large middle classes, marked by an increase in their purchasing power, the expansion of consumption habits, and a boom in consumer products.⁴ Between 1980 and 1989, India witnessed a consumer revolution with a 47.5 per cent increase in consumption expenditure (Dubey 1992: 150). The task of delivering these middle classes to an increasingly globalised market led to an unprecedented growth in media technologies and industries, primarily broadcast television and cable services. The reach of television grew dramatically from covering 9 per cent of total urban population in 1978 to 76 per cent in 1995.⁵

From the 1980s, commercial advertising became one of the main revenue sources for television in India. This altered the nature and structure of television programming in significant ways. An unprecedented number of commercials sold products directly to the emergent consumer society.⁶ As consumption power increasingly determined the value of audiences in a media industry supported by advertising revenue, the advertisers became eager to carry out extensive reorganisations of their knowledge of social spaces and communities to match their marketing needs more specifically. The Socio Economic Classification (SEC) — devised by the Market Research Society of India — categorised urban families into eight socio-economic groups. The classification was based on the education and occupation of the main wage-earner of the family — key factors assumed to determine attitudes and abilities to consume. A1 denoted the top rung and E the lowest.⁷

Analysis of the relative sizes of the classified groups showed that whereas the top four categories of families in urban areas together accounted for only 27.3 per cent of the urban population in India, the bottom four accounted for 72.4 per cent. In addition, urban population, according to the 1991 census, accounted for only 25.7 per cent of the total Indian population. Projections made for 1993–4, based on the last census report of 1991, clearly indicated that poverty in the rural belts remained higher than in the urban areas.⁸ The growing use and importance of SEC classification in the planning of marketing and media programming also indicated another important aspect: a sizeable affluent and educated population, although a substantial minority even in the India of the 1990s, became the core target audiences for the emergent market operations and media channels.

It is within this context of the rising middle classes, the expansion of consumerist economy and commercial messages, that we need to locate the project of marketing the media productions of ‘Vande Mataram’, a new version of Bankim's influential nationalist song, ‘Bande Mataram’, which had nearly become the national anthem of India. The project ‘Vande Mataram’ was the brainchild of Bharat (Bala), a well-known producer of advertising commercials. It was produced by Bala and Kanika on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Indian independence (1947–97). According to the producers:

Fifty years of freedom has inspired Bala to create an ‘Expression for the Celebration’ designed to give birth to the ‘Indian dream’ … Vande Mataram was not formulated with a commercial objective. This is not a pseudo-patriotic claim but the reality — a reality that has been relegated to the corners of our minds and is pleading to be recognised. And to achieve our objective — to spread our message of oneness to the people of India, two tools of communication were applied — MUSIC and TELEVISION.⁹

‘Vande Mataram’ was a massive media campaign. It included a music album on audio cassette and CD marketed by Sony, a music video based on three songs from the album, and 250 one-minute films telecast over a period of six months on Doordarshan (state-controlled national television) and various other satellite channels in India. It has been estimated that the campaign reached out to 537 million homes, including 228 million from rural areas (Fax). For reasons of space, in this chapter I shall primarily discuss the music video Maa Tujhe Salaam from the ‘Vande Mataram’ campaign. The music director for the project was A. R. Rahman, arguably the most talented and popular music director of the film and music industry in India today. Rahman became particularly famous in the early 1990s for his nationalistic score for the film Roja, directed by Manirathnam, a film which won awards from the Indian government for its contribution to the cause of national integration.¹⁰ He was obviously the right choice for this album.

Bharat Bala productions also produced another piece of music television based on a re-rendered version of Bankim Chandra's ‘Bande Mataram’. The theme for this song was ‘Timeless India’ and ‘the remotest of tribes in Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and from all of the North Eastern India were filmed’. This piece of music television was designed to bring out the ‘essence of India in the form of her natural splendour and people’ (Fax). Talking about the meaning of black music in colonial and postcolonial contexts, Simon Frith has observed:

there is a long history in Romanticism of defining black culture, specifically African culture, as the body, the other of the bourgeois mind. Such a contrast is derived from the Romantic opposition of nature and culture: the primitive or pre-civilised can thus be held up against the sophisticated or over-civilised — one strand of the Romantic argument was that primitive people were innocent people, uncorrupted by culture, still close to a human ‘essence’.

(Frith 1996: 127)

The anti-colonial Indian nationalist had to handle a complex politics of ambivalence in articulating his nationalist identity. In the colonial discourse, the body of the colonised was divided for different principles of discipline and punishment. Some were seen as animal-like, fierce and mindless, fit for building a vast colonial army. Some others, like the educated Bengalis, were seen as feminine and essentially cowardly. The dominant nationalist patriarch emphasised the civilised nature of his mind to negate the impact of the body. The ‘nation’ in Bankim's ‘Bande Mataram’ was first feminised as ‘Mother’ to represent purity of essence and then made to inhabit a mythical space of pristine nature, away from the physical realm of the pre-civilised multitudes. Here are the first few lines of Bankim's ‘Bande Mataram’:

Here is an imagined nation, constructed as a realm of nature in its perfect pristine beauty and fertility, inhabited by the lone figure of the Mother Nation, conceived on the lines of a Hindu goddess, and invoked through a high cultural code of classicist language and musical composition. Maa Tujhe Salaam presents a very different imagination of nation, offering us an opportunity to explore some of the emergent shifts in the ways of imagining communities in contemporary India, within the specific contexts of transitions unleashed by the processes of globalisation, and their implications for the formation of identity. It also underlines some of the new impetuses in global/local exchanges at a postcolonial moment. According to the producers:

‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’ represents the colour saffron sung by Rahman and filmed in the various landscapes of India — as in deserts of Rajasthan, the peaks at Ladakh and the fertile lands of Kerala. ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam’ was canned with thousands of people as a human chain filmed in the above landscapes. This stirs the feelings of pride and passion of Indians.

(Fax)

As the music video begins, we see desert landscapes and mountains. In spite of some green expanses, there is an overwhelming sense of barrenness. Gone are the images of harvest festivals with smiling peasants and their sickles and tractors, and foundation ceremonies of factories with concrete mixers and smoking chimneys that once dominated the cultural transmissions of the postcolonial nation-state. Against these largely barren landscapes, we see women in ‘ethnic’ costumes with water pots, smiling children, older men with their elaborate headgear, camels, elephants, folk dances — all frozen in their exotic otherness rather than engaging in any social act. This is the backdrop against which we see the modern ‘son’ of Mother India -Rahman himself, clad in jeans and shirt, walking around and singing. The ‘son’¹² in Rahman's song, the subject of Rahman and Bala's nationalist product, seems to represent the vision of the upwardly mobile middle-class consumer citizen. In the world order of the market, the citizen-consumer cannot conceive of any links or transactions with fellow beings dispossessed of buying power. There does not seem to be any relationship or point of contact between the protagonist and the rest of the nation. There is no communication between the locals themselves either.¹³ While they form ‘human chains’, apparently as a symbol of community and togetherness, they remain distinctly silent, aloof and static, fixed in their ‘timelessness’ by the gaze of the protagonist and, potentially, the spectators. In fact, these ‘human chains’, against the backdrop of arid deserted landscapes and stagnant pools of water, tend to resemble queues for food rations in years of drought or other disasters. The national view, designed for the upper levels of citizen-consumers, seems to be marked by a certain sense of delinking and abandonment. This space does not stand in any productive relationship with the new vision, except as a site of ethnic tourism.

The visual language of this music video operates within a convention of con-sumerist television, producing images of incessant consumption by and celebration of the middle classes against a backdrop of passive others. This single-minded persuasion of affluent target audiences has virtually banished the poor from market-sponsored Indian television.¹⁴ In commercial after commercial, rural people are used either as silent and static backdrops for the action of upper-class urban heroes/heroines or as clumsy stereotypes of nervous premodern people, entering modernity through consumer goods. Reminiscent of the Romantic tradition that Frith talks about, we are invited to see them as a ‘timeless’ premodern past, part of ‘nature’ — the other to our modern cultured self. Talking about the objective behind the ‘Vande Mataram’ project, the producers stated:

We set out with a thought — ‘How will it sound if 900 million people chant with one voice … The passion in each Indian that it's HIS country, had to be rekindled. The occasion was the 50th year of Independence and was the apt time to arouse this spirit. Our sole aim was to reach to the masses with our message that, whatever may be our differences, the inevitable truth is that we are ONE COUNTRY’.

(Fax)

But the visual representation in the music video clearly marks out the difference between domains of consuming and non-consuming bodies. The agency to ‘salute the motherland’ and celebrate 50 years of Indian independence cannot be given to people who do not seem to have the essential qualification for inclusion in the emergent nation — buying power. The jeans-clad body of Rahman is a marker and a site of consumption. He is the only one who sings in the video, while the others remain mute spectators.

Identity, market, state

If a new consumerist vision of nation is underlining emergent divisions in the imagining of communities, we cannot see these as produced only by national or local processes and relations of power. The patterns of economic growth, as well as decline, in the postcolonial world are complex and overlapping, demanding acknowledgement of new global/local relations:

[T]oday's sophisticated marketers are recognising that there are probably more social differences between Midtown Manhattan and the Bronx, two sectors of the same city, than between Midtown Manhattan and the 7th Arrondissement of Paris. This means that when a manufacturer contemplates expansion of his business, consumer similarities in demography and habits rather than geographic proximity will increasingly affect his decisions … All this underlines the economic logic of the global approach.

(Saatchi & Saatchi Annual Report 1985, quoted in Mattelart 1991: 52–3)

As the rise of the middle classes in India illustrates, there are communities in the subcontinent (as elsewhere in the ex-colonies), who can compete with some of their Western counterparts in consumption power. A specific construction and celebration of Indianness as an essential component of the emergent consumer ethos in the 1980s and 1990s also emphasises the inadequacy of understanding these cultural processes as simple manifestations of ‘Westernisation’. Partha Chatterjee (1993) has discussed how the dominant construction of the Indian nation was based on distinctions between the material and the spiritual. He has illustrated how Western modernity and statecraft were seen as useful in providing material strategies and structures in advancing a nationalist project, which was spiritually ‘Indian’. This view of a complex engagement with modernity is borne out by the myriad narratives of the market in contemporary media. Global product promises are constantly promoted in the name of Indian values, Indian womanhood, the Indian family, Indian sociability, etc. The marking out of differences enables the assertion of an ‘Indianness’ while participating in a globalised consumerist modernity.¹⁵ A general failure of dubbed global programmes on cable and satellite in India, and the simultaneous success of national programming with globalised consumer values, emphasises how the mediation of a ‘national’ culture remains crucial in the pursuit of global consumerism.¹⁶ Like the nation, the market must also be articulated in both identification and difference.

This double act, central to the self-perception of the new middle classes, is marking out a new set of distances and proximities in the formation of their cultural geographies of identity — processes which are essentially global in nature. Commenting on the role of advertising in the creation of social consensus, Mattelart has observed:

[B]ehind the concept of advertising in its instrumental sense — namely, ‘the multiple and impersonal announcement of goods, services or commercial ideas by a named advertiser, who pays an ad agency and a transmitter (the medium, or advertising support) to deliver his message to the market’ … is hidden another, an idea deeply rooted in the history of the mode of communications: that of a new model of social organisation, a new means of creating consensus, of forging the general will.

(Mattelart 1991: 31)

Signs of what Mattelart has identified as ‘a new model of social organisation, a new means of creating consensus’, underlying ‘announcements of goods, services or commercial ideas’ are already evident in the music video, Maa Tujhe Salaam. Whom we meet and do not meet at the supermarket, whom we see and do not see as capable of sharing our dreams, and realising them through consumption, who are present and not present as protagonists in the instant and constant narratives of conspicuous consumption in emergent media and cultural spaces — all of these contribute towards whom we can imagine as part of our community and whom we cannot. It is interesting to note that one of the categories for describing people in contemporary market research is ‘PLUs’, or ‘People Like Us’. And these inclusions and exclusions need not be bound by national boundaries. In its October 1998 UK edition, the magazine Elle had a travel report on India. In this report, the music video Maa Tujhe Salaam was put on the ‘DON'T COME BACK WITHOUT’ list along with sarees, pashmina shawls and tiger locks. This is what Elle (October 1998: 357) wrote: ‘Maa Tujhe Salaam by A. R. Rahman — the biggest hit in Indian music in years. Bring back the CD to impress your friends while showing your photos’.¹⁷ It is not difficult to see how the vision of ‘India’ as represented by Maa Tujhe Salaam can be compatible with the representational politics of the global traveller ‘doing’ an exotic India, and more importantly how this view can now be shared by some Indians themselves.

In view of Garnham's concern for a possible ‘decline’ of the nation-state which ‘has been the main container and organiser of people's economic and political action as well as their social and cultural identity’ in ‘the modern era’, in the face of globalisation, and particularly the role of media as ‘undermining the key locus of democratic power and accountability within the liberal model — namely the nation-state’ (Garnham 1993: 251–2), it is worthwhile asking the question: how does the emergent vision of a global consumer society, under the auspices of a global market, as evident in Maa Tujhe Salaam, imagine the role of the nation-state in the context of the new social order? The last section of the music video, Maa Tujhe Salaam, can provide us with some possible clues.

Towards the end of the music video, conspicuously marked by the passivity of the large number of people who appear in it ostensibly to provide exotic objects for the protagonist's (and our) gaze, we see inhabitants of the Indian nation space suddenly getting mobilised. Children run with the Indian flag. Processions of grim faces move towards a central gathering. Close-ups of running feet heighten the tension. There is a sense of premonition, of an impending conflict for which the people must be formed into forces. As the desert backdrop of Rajasthan reminds one of India's border zones, and more specifically its recent nuclear-testing grounds, crowds collect around the national flag. We also see helicopters flying in. In a music video, celebrating 50 years of independent India, these helicopters mark the only presence of the nation-state in the life of an otherwise abandoned, poor, premodern people.

Masao Miyoshi has suggested that in the imaginary of a global market, led by multinational conglomerates, the role of the nation-states will increasingly be that of a global military protector of market interests. Miyoshi (1993: 726–51) argues that the absence of state control in vast areas of social life in the USA, along with the global role of the military might of the USA in protecting the interests of organisations like the IMF, the World Bank and others, and enforcing treaties like GATT, etc., shows that such a model is already in place. The specific invocation of the nation-state in Maa Tujhe Salaam seems to be strikingly close to such a vision.

Conclusion

Hall has warned us against any tendency to get carried away by the contemporaneity of transitions and analysing them in ahistoric ways. He points out that the complex links of today's global, national and local cannot be understood without understanding their roots in a much longer history:

[W]hen we are talking about globalisation in the present context, we are talking about some of the new forms, some of the new rhythms, some of the new impetuses in the globalising process.

(Hall 1991: 20)

The interactions between global, national and local formations and processes of power, therefore, need to be viewed as transitions within the continually shifting dynamics of our histories. Gayatri Spivak has said, ‘India is not a place. It's really a sort of political construct’ (Spivak 1990: 87). We may remember at this point that this political construct was created by interactions of the global, or globalising forces of colonisation and local cultures and powers, rather than any pre-existing national imagination, and that this community of the Indian nation, based on the administrative structures of a colony and the complex political formations and visions of an anti-colonial movement, is only 50 years old. As my discussion of emergent shifts in the imagining of communities suggests, transitions in societies, in national and even local levels of cultural production and circulation, reveal multiple interactions between forces that have been global in nature for long periods in our colonial and postcolonial histories. The dominant construction of the Indian nation, the gendering of the Mother Nation and the nationalist as her son, had its roots in the transnational processes of colonial domination, and the expansion of Western modernity and nationalist negotiations with, and resistance to, some of these ideologies and structures. A dominant nationalist vision of nation was then systematically circulated through state-controlled media in the post-independence period with its own politics of cultural inclusions and exclusions. The currently ascendant discourse of a ‘free’ market, produced by the globalised restructuring of economies, cultures and political structures, is producing new imaginations of communities, citizenships and subjecthoods in our societies. If these transitions are resulting in new divisions within communities, they are also creating new alliances, in which notions of ‘local’ and ‘global’ can only be understood as floating signifiers,¹⁸ symbolising shifting power relations and formations, rather than fixed, trans-historical markers of geographic, political or cultural boundaries.

My discussion also underlines how we can witness and explore processes of dislocation, marginalisation and disenfranchisement within the boundaries of nation-states, which can illustrate significant aspects of the postcolonial condition. As my study of a particular media production, under the aegis of the global market, suggests, processes of cultural production and circulation as processes of power can be both ‘translational’ and ‘transnational’ in locales where people living their lives within geographic boundaries of nation-states can still be ‘exiled’ from imagined communities. Without taking away from the importance of the ‘postcoloniality’ of immigrant or diasporic cultures or their right to be treated as such, I feel a need to claim greater attention in postcolonial studies to the vast number of cultural and political ‘refugees’, the disenfranchised millions in their own lands, increasingly exiled by a regressive political shift from nation-state to market as the dominant social guardian. These are people who were legitimate members of a national community. The narration of nation, from the pulpits of the nation-state, however hypocritically and reluctantly, had to address them, and include them in its vision. Under the elaborate messages of consumer choice and access, the governing reality is clearly that of buying power. More and more public service functions, traditionally associated with the responsibilities of nation-states, are being handed over to the private sector. What is at stake is a shift from citizenship rights to consumer privileges. It is often argued that in a country like India, burdened with an inefficient and corrupt state machinery, facilities like education or health were never really accessible to the ordinary citizen. This argument, often brought forward by champions of a free market, cleverly covers up the fact that the shift will remove the legitimate platform of statehood to fight from. A consumerist principle of citizenship will delegitimise any demand for political rights, further marginalising millions who do not have buying power — signs which are already evident in the changing imagination of Maa Tujhe Salaam.

Notes

Part of the same material has been used in a different context in an article published as ‘Music and Imagined Communities in Contemporary India’, in Identity, Locality and Globalization, Indian Council of Social Science Research, New Delhi, 2001, pp. 400–23.

1 For a comprehensive discussion of the debate, see Mongia (1996: 1–18).

2 In 1983 Benedict Anderson discussed nation as an ‘imagined community’, and this has been an extremely influential concept in cultural and media studies. Homi Bhabha has said, ‘Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully realise their horizons in the mind's eye’ (Bhabha 1990: 1). In my work ‘imagination’ refers to the active process of ‘the nation's “coming into being” as a system of cultural signification’ (Bhabha 1990: 1), with the communities as active agents, rather than any static forms or images.

3 This is one of the most written-about aspects of Indian history. See, among others, Chatterjee (1986; 1993).

4 I am grateful to Nandini Gooptu for insights into the larger historical perspective of the rise of the middle classes in India. I am here summarising the argument we have made in a joint article. See Chakravarty and Gooptu (2000).

5 See National Readership Survey, II, III, IV and V.

6 The advertising budget in the country increased from Rs2.5 billion in 1981 to 12.5 billion in 1990 and is projected to have reached 30 billion by the new millennium. The advertising industry estimated that advertisers would reach 95 per cent of the urban population and 75 per cent of the rural population by 1995 (see Dubey 1992: 152).

7 Currently SEC, as a classifier, is used only in urban India. This classification is not valid for rural areas in the country.

8 For relevant information, see Bhandare and Mukhopadhyay (1997).

9 I am grateful to the producers of ‘Vande Mataram’ for their cooperation with my research project. This and other quotes from the producers are from a fax message sent on 30 May 1998, hereafter referred to as ‘Fax’.

10 There was an extensive debate around the cultural politics of Roja in the context of emergent shifts in India in Economic and Political Weekly. A number of points, relevant to my discussion were raised. See Bharucha (1994), Chakravarthy and Pandian (1994), Niranjana (1994), Prasad (1994), Srinivas (1994) and Vasudevan (1994).

11 Translated by Sugata Bose. See Bose (1997: 53).

12 The image of the nation as the mother and the nationalist as the son has a long history in Indian nationalist music and other cultural productions. The daughters remain conspicuous by their continued absence from these realms.

13 I am grateful to Satish Deshpande for his comments on an earlier draft of this section.

14 For a related discussion in the context of Indian cinema, see Bharucha (1995).

15 I am summarising here an argument that Nandini Gooptu and I have made in a joint article. See Chakravarty and Gooptu (2000).

16 Dubbed programmes have not taken off in India. One reason could be the fact that the lifestyles that are portrayed, the exotic locales, the bad quality of dubbing and the mismatch of cultural/moral values and principles all combine to make them look alien and ‘out of touch’ with the Indian viewers' psyche. Both Sony and Star Plus did try and experiment with dubbed programmes, but due to lack of acceptance they have been forced to abandon most of them. Sony continues with three dubbed programmes, which are essentially targeted at children, and Star Plus has one dubbed programme again aimed at children. Maybe children across the world are more ‘global’ in their comprehension and acceptance of anything new. Source: personal communication with Amit Roy, media director, Mudra Communications.

17 The travel tips also featured Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things (1997) on its ‘DON'T LEAVE HOME WITHOUT’ list along with soap, pillow, rubber plug, socks, a Maglite torch and other items, and said, ‘[R]ead it on the plane to get hooked on the atmosphere of India’.

18 I am borrowing an expression that Hall has used in the context of race.