The political debate in India over Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and “anti-nationals” is part of a larger political narrative which seeks to substitute political Hindutva, which may not be accepted by all, with a simple nationalism, whose...
In early- 2014, when India’s over 400 TV news channels were enmeshed in a bitter fight for ratings to cover the most significant election of their lifetimes – with then-challenger Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya Janata Party taking on the...
“India is Modi. Modi is India” screamed the headline in India’s most popular pink paper, The Economic Times, the day after the new Prime Minister’s historic electoral victory, the greatest by the Indian Right and the first clear-cut majority...
Abstract This article outlines how fresh historical evidence recently made available in a new digital archive necessitates a nuanced rewriting of the complex linkages between colonial structures, early-Indian capitalism and the incipient...
ABSTRACT Satellite TV has been the greatest social development of the past thirty years in India. With over 800 TV channels in 11 languages, the emergence of live TV news significantly changed politics, culture and society. How did this massive...
Abstract With over 800 television channels, India is not only the world’s third largest television market but also its most varied. Indian television for the past decade has been defined by an upward trend of continuous growth – in...
In early 2008, India’s Zee News broadcast a ‘special investigation’. With a loud, red banner labelling the inquiry an ‘exclusive’, the program made two claims: first, it professed to have found definitive proof that Ravana, the mythical villain...
Extracts from Olympics: The India Story, rev. and updated 2012 edition
The world turns on its axis, night comes after day, the Olympic Games are held every four years. The Olympics are so ubiquitous, so much a predictable, fixed feature of the rhythms of the world that it is easy to forget that they essentially...
ABSTRACT India’s Olympic encounter has been a battle ground where an emerging nation’s internal dissensions were given full play: issues of national representation, colonial and postcolonial resistance, sports diffusion and participation at the...
Abstract This article presents the results of a field study of the 2008 Olympic Flame Relay in Delhi, India, where Tibetan and pro-Tibetan protests against the Chinese Olympic hosts generated a state security transformation of Olympic ritual and...
Debating the role of the President in the Constituent Assembly on 21 July 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru articulated some of the dominant political expectations of the time, arguing that even though ‘we did not give him any real powers’ in the proposed...