In October 2018, a couple of weeks after #MeToo Movement hit Indian social media and made its way into mainstream print and broadcast media, a young journalist called this reviewer to ask, ‘How did things come to such a pass in Indian media, where sexual harassment charges against senior editors were an open secret, and where silence meant complicity? Was the Indian media always so compromised?’
In an elliptical manner, some answer to this can be sought from Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s exhaustive revisiting of the transition of Indian media from its stated commitment to a greater social responsibility to a market-driven model in neo-liberalized India. Firmly locating the manner in which the media not just reflected but also actively participated in the creation of a changed gendered identity, she critically examines the effect of this makeover through the celebration of consumerism and individualism as empowerment, and ultimately spawned a new nationalism.
The book comprises twelve chapters, written and published in the span of twenty-five years. It therefore begins with a recap of contemporary historical events and arrives at the present, tracing the sea-change in the media in India with the new economic policies of globalization and liberalization in the 1990s. Hitherto, much of the focus of study has been on the growth of the media, especially of regional media, with considerable research on the ‘dumbing down’ of content in news media, the regressive programmes on television and rise of the Internet and new media. How do these seemingly disparate developments in the media contribute to the refashioning of the nation? And how central is the use of gender in the vision for a nation and a national identity?