Tales of a Nation Unbound: Mass Media and the Remaking of Gender, Caste and Religion in Post-Reform India

Situated at the intersection of global media studies, feminist political economy and critical/cultural studies, my dissertation examines the significant role of popular media in winning consent for a set of economic reform policies collectively called neo-liberalism in contemporary India. By reading news, commentary, policy, and entertainment media together, my dissertation makes an explicit methodological intervention and reveals the repeated citation of narrative tropes and signs in a range of diverse texts. This repeated citation blurs the line between fact and fiction, between report and representation and calls particular identities -- the cosmopolitan entrepreneur, the developmentalist, the possessive individual -- into being. My project shows therefore that popular culture is neither incidental to, nor is it reflective of political economy; Instead it argues that popular culture is constitutive of political economy. Secondly, my dissertation shows that neo-liberalism in India is being constituted as the event of national renewal. Event here apart from encoding the experience of rupture by subjects of neo-liberal India also works as a category of representation suturing disparate ideological discourses and political struggles together into a single script about progress and rupture.;The nation is narrated and given affective shape through yet another sign -- the 'people,' specifically, as this project shows, the gendered subaltern. Thirdly therefore, I demonstrate that contrary to the received wisdom about the absence of the poor and poverty from the narratives that celebrate India's economic growth rates, the story of renewal takes form precisely through representations of poverty and the poor as having arrived at a point of possibility of upward mobility through the practice of entrepreneurship. Narrated as a consumer, a desiring subject, an entrepreneur embodying possessive individualism, the marginalized help write the story of national renewal in the time of globalization, as political actors demanding redistribution, they, however, stand disarticulated from the narrative.