This book examines the historical trajectory of the growth of the television news and critically analyzes the role of private television news in framing the nature of public discourse in contemporary India. Set in the context of a transformed media landscape, the book attempts to understand and analyze the role of two private national news channels, NDTV 24×7 and Aaj Tak, in producing mediatized narratives that offer a commentary on the various social, political, cultural, religious and economic issues in the public domain. This is achieved by critically examining the process and techniques of production, representation and consumption of current affairs programs such as studio debates, panel discussions, audience talk shows and documentaries aired on both the channels. Highlighting some of the key trends that impinge on the structure and mode of operation of television news media in contemporary India, the book offers a simultaneous examination of how the production, representation and consumption of the mediatized discourses shape the nature of public discourse and have social-political ramifications for the functioning of Indian democracy. The book will be of interest to researchers in sociology, media and communication studies, popular culture and South Asian Studies.

"More than just a fascinating description of newsmaking and practice in an Indian city, this book has implications for theories of news and communication that make it a timely and significant contribution to the literature on journalism and newsmaking in the changing global environment.'--Mark Peterson, Miami University --

Human trafficking is the trade of humans for the purpose of forced labor, sexual slavery, or commercial sexual exploitation for the trafficker or others. This may encompass providing a spouse in the context of forced marriage, or the extraction of organs or tissues, including for surrogacy and ovaryremoval. Human trafficking can occur within a country or trans-nationally. Human trafficking is a crime against the person because of the violation of the victim's rights of movement through coercion and because of the commercial exploitation. Human trafficking is the trade in people, especially women and children, and does not necessarily involve the movement of the person from one place to another.

This book examines instances of transformative dissent, turning points or shifts in popular mobilisation patterns in contemporary India, while adopting a historical approach and analysing past events. Exploring the different continuities and discontinuities in mobilising patterns and dissident agency in India, the authors present a heterogeneous insurrectional pattern that pivoted around issues of caste, class, religion, land reform, labour, taxation and territorial control, with anti-colonialism movements becoming prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. The authors move beyond this to explore more recent templates of mobilisation which surfaced towards the end of the twentieth century, during India’s liberalisation period. With growing marketisation and technological advancement, unprecedented changes in social relations, growing economic opportunities and cultural transfusion taking place, the country became a ‘New India’ - one which aspired to be a global player in the wider technological public sphere. Tracing the historical trajectories of social movements in India, this book examines recent trends in digitised dissidence and explores new frontiers of protests, providing fresh insights for those researching the history of social movements, South Asian and Indian history and postcolonial studies.

This book attempts a representation of society in contemporary India through an ethnography woven around long-standing intractable conflicts — of displacement and rehabilitation, patriarchy, insurgency and counter-insurgency operations, and climate change. Each chapter in this volume offers a critical transformative narrative in response to these conflicts. It asks how social justice and equality is to be constructed and provides a fresh perspective. It is argued that social movements can no longer be concerned only with itemizing a checklist of demands; it is now necessary to be free of the hegemony of current frames, categories, concepts and principles, and to rethink the ‘promise’. The volume maintains that this effort to step out of the ‘endless waiting’ for delivery of a ‘promised value’ draws out the labour of transformative action. A valuable contribution to understanding social movements in India, this work challenges the established discourses around grassroots politics, progressive policies and legislations as well as radical mass movements. The book will interest students and researchers of social movements, conflict and peace studies, sociology and social anthropology, political science and development studies. It will also be useful to those working in the areas of human rights, social exclusion and inclusive policies.

This volume looks at the emerging forms of intimacies in contemporary India. Drawing on rigorous academic research and pop culture phenomena, the volume: Brings together themes of nationhood, motherhood, disability, masculinity, ethnicity, kinship, and sexuality, and attempts to understand them within a more complex web of issues related to space, social justice, marginality, and communication; Focuses on the struggles for intimacy by the disabled, queer, Dalit, and other subalterns, as well as people with non-human intimacies, to propose an alternative theory of the politics of belonging; Explores the role of social and new media in understanding and negotiating intimacies and anxieties. Comprehensive and thought-provoking, this book will be useful to scholars and researchers of political studies, sociology, sexuality and gender studies, women’s studies, cultural studies, and minority studies.

Beyond Alterity contests a core tendency in postcolonial studies as well as emerging critiques of neoliberalism—to assume that nations of the Global South are categorically distinct from their counterparts in the North and that they provide an alternative, or even an antidote, to the competitive and individualistic cultures of the advanced capitalist world. Through a textured analysis of cultural production from contemporary India, Shakti Jaising argues that neoliberal capitalism has produced significant continuities in class dynamics and subjective experience across the North-South divide—continuities that are at least as worthy of our consideration as differences arising from colonialism and its aftereffects. The book engages an array of political, economic, and cultural narratives, while focusing in particular on widely circulating Indian English-language novels and their audio-visual adaptations that demonstrate the growing currency of a neoliberal script extoling values like privatization and deregulation as conduits to both individual growth and national development, as well as freedom from poverty. With their potent enactments of personal and national maturation, contemporary Indian novels and films offer striking illustrations of the imaginative means by which the neoliberal script proliferates— even as economic precarity and inequality worsen in India, much like elsewhere in the world. Whereas literary scholars tend to approach the Indian English novel as an exemplar of resistance from the formerly colonized world, Beyond Alterity contends that far from inevitably modelling resistance, this genre’s contemporary examples instead encapsulate the challenges of disentangling literature from the all-pervasive logics and narratives of neoliberal capitalism.

This book explores the forms, patterns, and trends in political communication in India in the twenty-first century. It underlies the influence of context in political messaging laying bare its complex, overlapping, and multidimensional structures. The volume: Examines how political decision-making is shaped by media — through political speeches, community opinion leaders, and formal and informal public conversations. Explores a range of political communication channels— from community radio to social media. Presents an overview of the problems associated with message designing and message dissemination through communication channels in a political setting. Highlights how political communication impacts critical aspects of democracy and governance and goes beyond mere rhetoric. A comprehensive work on the production, diffusion, transmission, and impact of information in a political environment, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, governance, democracy, media and communication studies, journalism, cultural studies, and South Asian studies.

India is the second largest country in the world with regard to population, the world’s largest democracy and by far the largest country in South Asia, and one of the most diverse and pluralistic nations in the world in terms of official languages, cultures, religions and social identities. Indians have for centuries exchanged ideas with other cultures globally and some traditions have been transformed in those transnational and transcultural encounters and become successful innovations with an extraordinary global popularity. India is an emerging global power in terms of economy, but in spite of India’s impressive economic growth over the last decades, some of the most serious problems of Indian society such as poverty, repression of women, inequality both in terms of living conditions and of opportunities such as access to education, employment, and the economic resources of the state persist and do not seem to go away. This Handbook contains chapters by the field’s foremost scholars dealing with fundamental issues in India’s current cultural and social transformation and concentrates on India as it emerged after the economic reforms and the new economic policy of the 1980s and 1990s and as it develops in the twenty-first century. Following an introduction by the editor, the book is divided into five parts: Part I: Foundation Part II: India and the world Part III: Society, class, caste and gender Part IV: Religion and diversity Part V: Cultural change and innovations Exploring the cultural changes and innovations relating a number of contexts in contemporary India, this Handbook is essential reading for students and scholars interested in Indian and South Asian culture, politics and society. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.