Culture, power and representation: Construction of 'national' culture on state-run television in India, 1982--1998

The domain of broadcast policies and television programs provide a useful point of entry for exploring the epistemological underpinnings of national culture in postcolonial India. The construction of national culture during 1982–98, revealed a series of contradictory articulations of power and representation through state ideologies of territoriality, sovereignty and citizenship. As an index of the hegemonic movement of the postcolonial Indian state, these ideologies constitute part of a larger problematic: the crisis of the nation-state.; The dissertation explores representations of nation in television documentary and entertainment programming on Kashmir and Punjab and in state policies regarding television. Discourse and narrative analysis was used to explore the relationships among textual, policy and larger sociopolitical contexts. One of the tasks of the discourse and narrative analysis was to identify main themes and patterns that shaped representations of nation. Five main themes— myth of origins, geography & region, us & them, remaking postcolonial citizen-subjects, and secularism—were identified in the policies and programs that convey attempts to articulate the discourse of national culture.; The analysis revealed particular ideological elaborations of the themes in the social construction of national culture. Though the policies and programs worked within the dominant field of representations, they exhibited marked internal contradictions. For instance, both policies and programs brought the inherent shortcomings of secularism to the surface. The broadcast policies promoted the state-based account of secularism by interpreting religion in rational terms. In arguing for the primacy of the universal (secularism) over the particular (religion), it effectively glossed over the specificities of religious identities.; Theoretically, the dissertation outlined several arguments. First, it situated the particularities and shifts in the discourse of national culture on state-run television vis-à-vis state and politics. Second, it offered a critique of the existing theories of nation in cultural and literary studies that take as their point of departure novels and literature without paying attention either to the specificities of audio-visual forms of communication or the communicative dimensions of nation and national culture. Third, it presented a theoretical perspective sensitive to the postcolonial contexts, particularly a multi-religious and multi-ethnic society like India.