Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India (review)

It has become conventional in the cultural analysis of postcolonial media to note that cinematic and televisual narratives are often cast in the gendered idiom of nationalisms. It has been more difficult to chart the relations between mass-mediated images and discourses and the formation of national and gendered subjects. Such relations are not straightforward matters of cause and effect, rather they are threaded through the aspirations, fears, desires, confusions, and pleasures experienced by both viewers and creators. This is the complex and uneven terrain upon which Purnima Mankekar has situated her book, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, a study of television viewership and production in India. She analyzes the role of television in the ideological construction of nation, womanhood, identity, and citizenship, observing that the state's deep and sustained investment in womanhood has been central to its ongoing struggle to define the nation. Her focus is on several popular teleserials broadcast by Doordarshan (India's state-run television network) in the 1980s and early 1990s. These serials, modeled originally on the telenovela genre of programming, were among the earliest types of commercial entertainment on Indian television and have remained staples on Doordarshan and on regional networks that, along with global broadcasters like CNN, have multiplied since the introduction of satellite television in 1991. Mankekar attends to their production, narrative and visual structures, and reception, finding that interpretations of the serials often differed according to viewers' class, ethnicity, gender, caste, and sect. More importantly, she goes on to address the concatenated processes by which gendered subjectivities, class identities, and nationalist attachments are generated in the production and viewing of these popular serials. These are urgent matters, given the political ascendancy of Hindu nationalism in India and India's deeper engagements with global capitalism in the 1990s.

Mankekar has employed diverse methods of investigation and analysis. Her fieldwork between 1990 and 1992 involved watching teleserials with middle-class viewers as well as talking to them about those serials and about others broadcast prior to 1990. She relied on documentary sources, including marketing and policy reports and popular periodicals; she interviewed television writers, directors, and producers; and she interpreted the narrative and visual structures of the serials and of the advertising that they carried. These diverse sources are put in "conversation" with each other, and it is a conversation in which she, herself, is a positioned participant rather than a detached mediator. She describes herself as having come "home" to the city of her childhood and adolescence and acknowledges her feminist orientation as well as her class and caste privilege. And though a member of India's Hindu majority, she is clearly anguished by the violence of nationhood, and by the ways that Hindu nationalists have conflated Hindu and Indian identity with a self-serving and exclusionary ideology. She intends the book, therefore, as a feminist intervention in nationalist and mass-mediated cultural forms, and manages this with both delicacy and commitment. She does not speak for the women with whom she worked, instead she exposes the interactions in which they and she engaged. She seeks insight from the disjunctions between her and their positions, desires, and critical interventions.

In Chapters Two and Three she discusses television's role in the reconstitution of Indian families during the 1980s. In Chapter Two she describes the changing historical and institutional contexts of television production and reception, noting its commercialization and its relation to the dramatic growth of consumption in India. In Chapter Three she examines the proliferation of televisual discourses on Indian womanhood and the deployment of this normative femininity (Hindu, middle-class, north Indian, upper-caste) in state-authorized discourses on nationalism and in market-driven discourses on consumption.

In Chapters Four and Five, which concern television's engendering of community, she analyzes the production, reception, and material effects of two serialized epics, the Mahabharat (1989-90) and the Ramayan (1987-88). The epics, with long histories of...