Indian mass media and the politics of change / editors, Somnath Batabyal ... [and others].

Includes bibliographical references and index.

NDTV 24 X 7, the hanging channel: news media or horror show? / John Hutnyk -- Editorial! Where art thou? News practices in Indian television / Somnath Batabyal -- The Roja debate and the limits of secular nationalism / Meenu Gaur -- Identities in ferment: reflections on the predicament of Bhojpuri cinema, music and language in Bihar / Ratnakar Tripathy and Jitendra Verma -- MMS scandals and challenges to the authority of news mediation / Angad Chowdhry -- Circulating intimacies: sex-surveys, marriage and other facts of life in urban India / Kriti Kapila -- Indian haunting: representing failure as 'change' in contemporary Mumbai / Angad Chowdhry and Aditya Sarkar -- Theory and practice in emerging digital cultures in India / Matti Pohjonen and Soumyadeep Paul -- The uncomfortable truth behind corporate media's imagination of India / Naresh Fernandes -- Epilogue: Thinking about India and change: the BRICS and the brats / Annabelle Sreberny.

India has been the focus of international attention in the past few years. Rhetoric concerning its rapid economic growth and the burgeoning middle classes suggests that something new and significant is taking place. Something has changed, we are told: India is shining, the elephant is rising, and the 21st century will be Indian. What unites these powerful re-imaginings of the Indian nation is the notion of change and its many ramifications. Election campaigns, media commentators, scholars, activists and drawing room debates all cut their teeth around this complex notion. Who is it that benefits from this change? Do such re-imaginings of nationhood really reflect the complex social reality of large parts of the Indian population? The book starts with the premise that it is within the mass media where we can best understand how this change is imagined. From a kaleidoscope of perspectives the book interrogates this articulation and the myriad forms it takes {u2013} across India's newsrooms, television sets, cinema halls, mobile phones and computer screens.