How Public Culture is Shaped
Roshni Sengupta
TELEVISION AT LARGE IN SOUTH ASIA by Aswin Punathambekar and Shanti Kumar Routledge, New Delhi, 2014, 269 pp., 795
February 2014, volume 38, No 2

In 2008, Nalin Mehta1 wrote about satellite television being not only a marker of the progress of the idea of India, but also being a fundamental contributor to it. Earlier in 2001, Robin Jeffrey2 had written about regional language newspapers being vital hinges on which the nation as a whole was supported. Satellite television, as it made its way into the Indian imagination through the 1990s—the country possessing a single state-owned source of entertainment—became the frontrunner to the cultural amalgam that could be simply categorized as television—a coming together of ideas, ideals, ideologies, images and imaginations across time and space.

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