Consuming modernity : public culture in a South Asian world

272 Pages·1995·15.218 MB·English

by  Carol A. Breckenridge

CONSUMING MODERNITY
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CONSUMING MODERNITY
Public Culture in a South Asian World
CAROL A. BRECKENRIDGE, EDITOR
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS
Minneapolis / London
Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Second Printing, 1998
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Consuming modernity : public culture in a South Asian world /
Carol A. Breckenridge, editor.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-8166-2305-8
ISBN 0-8166-2306-6 (pbk.)
1. Popular culture—India. 2. India—Social life and customs.
I. Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai, 1942-
DS423.C577 1995
306'.0954—dc20 94-46772
The University of Minnesota is an
equal-opportunity educator and employer.
Contents
Preface vn
One. Public Modernity in India
Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge i
Part I. The Historical Past
Two. Playing with Modernity:
The Decolonization of Indian Cricket
Arjun Appadurai 23
Three. Upon the Subdominant:
Administering Music on All-India Radio
David Lelyveld 49
Four. The Indian Princes as Fantasy: Palace Hotels,
Palace Museums, and Palace on Wheels
Barbara N. Ramusack 66
Five. Dining Out in Bombay
Frank F. Conlon 90
Part II. The Historical Present
Six. Consuming Utopia: Film Watching in Tamil Nadu
Sara Dickey 131
v
VI CONTENTS
Seven. Melodrama and the Negotiation
of Morality in Mainstream Hindi Film
Rosie Thomas 157
Eight. Repositioning the Body, Practice, Power,
and Self in an Indian Martial Art
Phillip B. Zarrilli 183
Nine. Nation, Economy, and Tradition Displayed:
The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi
Paul Greenough 216
Contributors 249
Index 251
Preface
In the mid-1980s, when the project reflected in this book was first con-
ceived, it was clear that significant changes were under way in India. The
consumer economy catering to an apparently growing middle class was a
sure sign of a surplus in the domestic economy, and an avalanche of adver-
tisements heralded major lifestyle changes. Rajiv Gandhi's government was
speeding up privatization and the denationalization of industry, thus admit-
ting a steady stream of multinational and transnational corporations into
India with their products and projects. Signs that Nehruvian secularism was
at risk were everywhere. It was becoming clear that the Indian diaspora in
England and the United States could play a binational role in a changing
world. Thus the term nonresident Indian—shortened to NRI—came to be
used by the Indian state to lay claim to the skills, technologies, and finances
of its "nationals" abroad by offering them favorable schemes for investment
in India. And new fault lines in civil society were created by controversial
events like the debate around the legal issues regarding Ayodhya's Babri
Masjid, Muslim civil law in regard to the divorced woman Shahbano (1985),
the immolation of Roop Kanwar on her husband's funeral pyre (1987), the
publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989), the increase in
bride burnings, and the Mandal Commission Report that proposed state-
initiated changes in regard to caste in India.
The dilemma for the student of India working in the area studies tradi-
vn
VIII PREFACE
tion in the United States was to frame a project about India's new forms of
public modernity that would not repeat the earlier, triumphalist errors of
modernization theory. In 1986 and 1987, under the research rubric "public
culture in late-twentieth-century India," Arjun Appadurai and I sought to
open a space of debate in regard to the many issues associated with the
enormous shifts under way in India. Along the way it became clear that the
connection between public culture and global cultural flows was at the
heart of the matter. In search of a framework for clarifying this connection
comparatively and transnationally, we began the journal Public Culture in
1988.
Though the nation, the state, and the market represented other possible
points of entry into these "postcolonial" issues, the idea of the public seemed
more open, more inclusive, more flexible. Then and now (despite the subse-
quent publication of the English translation of Jiirgen Habermas's book The
Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989) the category of the
public seemed an undertheorized aspect of collective life. Many of the
changes we could see were informed by changes in global capital and in the
cultural flows that it appeared to encourage. Thus the public sphere also
looked like a promising entry into the local reception and transformation of
global cultural flows.
At the same time it was clear that this project was larger than the two of
us, and we sought colleagues who would join us to explore the cultural dy-
namics of contemporary India through the lens of public culture. To that
end I organized a double panel at the South Asia Meetings of the University
of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988, and we began discussions with the Joint
Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
and the American Council of Learned Societies. The Joint Committee sup-
ported a trip to India in late 1986 to discuss the public culture project with
colleagues in Delhi and two workshops that we organized, one more gener-
ally on public culture in 1988 and the other on global advertising in 1991.
Many of the essays in this volume began at the 1988 South Asia Meetings or
at these SSRC workshops. I owe the authors an apology for the inordinate
time that it has taken to see their work into print.
Many individuals have helped to shape the ideas contained in this vol-
ume over the past few years. But for their initial enthusiasm and encourage-
ment, when the very idea of public culture seemed fragile and ambiguous, I
wish to thank Bernard S. Cohn and Toby Volkman, whose support of this
project continues unabated; for her patience and willingness to assume
more than her share of the responsibility for the production process, I thank
PREFACE IX
Janaki Bakhle; and for their varying attention to other matters large and
small, I am grateful to Sarah Diamond, Victoria Farmer, Ritty Lukose, Rob
Mosimann, and Namita Gupta Wiggers.
Carol A. Breckenridge
Chicago, April 1994