Indian Media and Communication at the Turn of Liberalization

Description:

The collection at the heart of this project takes this history of media transition as its subject and aims to expand UW–Madison library’s focus on South Asian film and media.

The period of economic liberalization in the 1990s was also a period of significant media shifts. This was the time when the Indian mediascape saw the influx of global televisual content through cable television including Star TV, MTV, satellite television, internet, VHS, and video films. This period also saw the emergence of DD2, the entertainment arm of the state broadcaster Doordarshan—something unheard of in the earlier period which was dominated by just one channel (Doordarshan).

There were thus attendant shifts in culture including the emergence of rock music, independent pop music, and new forms of cosmopolitanism. The 1990s also saw sweeping changes in telecommunications as desktop computers, internet, pagers, and mobile phones began to change how people imagined their day-to-day lives, as well as films aimed at diasporic audiences and incorporating diasporic narratives.

The project focuses on the period of economic liberalization broadly but begins in the mid-1980s when these changes were on the threshold of becoming cultural fact and stops at the year 2001—just after the turn to the new millennium. Considering 1985-2001 as a key moment of cultural, economic, and media/communication infrastructural transition, the proposed collection includes magazines that focus on television and cinema, internet and computers, gender, sexuality and cosmopolitan culture, business and economy, apart from other media artifacts such as policy documents, disks, tapes etc.

The material will offer a view of the tensions around foreign media investment and contradictions around modernity, gender and sexuality, as well as discourses about “authentic” and “foreign” cultures. It also focuses on South Asian diasporic media produced in the United States and Canada in the 1990s, including print, visual and film material produced by the South Asian diaspora in the United States.

Principal Investigator:

Anirban Baishya, Assistant Professor of Communication Arts

Co-Principal Investigator:

Todd Michelson-Ambelang, South Asian Studies Librarian