Media discourse in contemporary India: a study of television news

Abstract

communities and national (and, before that, colonialist and missionary) value systems. The main prisms through which Dasgupta elucidates ‘tribal’ identity as an open concept involving multiple perspectives and dynamic processes of ordering and reordering are the Oraons of Chhotanagpur and their influential participation in the infamous Tana Bhagat movement. Alongside the Santals, Mundas, Bhumij, and Hos, ‘the Oraons’ are one of the dominant ‘tribal’ communities in southern Jharkhand, whose stereotypical presence in the colonial imaginary gave way in the preIndependence period to a culture of Gandhian protest. This became operational via a new aesthetics of devotion (bhakti) and demanded a new politics of representation. It is the overtly ‘Oraon’ (or tribal) politics of presenting rights, demands and aspirations as Adivasi that sustains Dasgupta’s multifaceted enquiry. This signals a broader objective: to deconstruct, and thereby to present a nuanced and critical account of, the constituent cultural voices and social agents that combined in this historic shift, which has assumed post-Independence resonance for many contemporary Oraons. A prolonged assessment of the internal dynamics and changing ecology of the Oraons’ agrarian polities (the ‘tanas’), and associated protest and heritage movements, therefore ensues. The author’s standing as one of the earliest and most committed exponents of Adivasi Studies in India itself a multidisciplinary project that attempts to ensure within the context of Higher Education the kinds of mutual understanding and respect outlined above means that the book will interest historians of India’s indigenous and minority peoples, as well as sociologists and anthropologists involved in reassessing the significance of national, Gandhian, revolutionary, judicial and historiographic projects in regions like Jharkhand. It is very interesting that the Adivasi and overtly Oraon worlds that are under consideration here are animated by important non-Adivasi figures within India’s anthropological, legal and political history, namely Sarat Chandra Roy, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and K.S. Singh. The stories and identities that emerge are simultaneously ‘tribal’ and Indigenous, regional and national.