SAHANA UDUPA

Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity

News media and contention over

“the local” in urban India

A B S T R A C T hortly before the Valentine’s Day celebration in 2009, for a period

Exploring the highly competitive bilingual news field
in urban India, I illustrate how localization of news
content has led to conflictual discourses around who
should constitute “the local” and for what end.
Mediatized contests over “the local” frame urban
politics along linguistic and cultural divides,
articulated through populist challenges to neoliberal
media discourses of “the global local.” In turning a
critical eye to these mediatized contests, I extend
the recent emphasis on the need to “ground”
globalization studies and explore the concrete ways
in which globalization imprints itself on local
spaces. I argue that local and global formations are
embedded in the dynamics of news fields in ways
that elude generalized claims advanced by
pessimists of cultural homogeneity as well as by
optimists of local resistance. [localization, news
production, India, mediatization, Bourdieu, global
media]
S
spilling a little over a month, the coastal city of Mangalore in south
India flared into view as a protagonist in news narratives across
the country and several e-linked corners of the world. It stood, at
least in news media portrayals, in perfect symmetry with the war-
torn, patriarchal fiefdom of Taliban Afghanistan, evoking the same danger
of violent erosion of women’s rights. This media framing and intensified
coverage of Mangalore was sparked by the attacks of right-wing Hindutva
activists on a group of young women in a suburban pub. The strong-arm
tactics of the male activists were captured by a television crew who had ac-
companied the attackers, armed with prior knowledge of the attacks and
ready with their camera. The first televised images showed the young men
forcibly dragging the women out of the pub, beating them, and parading
their will to “cleanse” their town of the “social evils” that allegedly enticed
young women into the traps of alcohol consumption. A group of e-enabled
women quickly denounced the attacks and marshaled support across state
and national borders by launching the symbolically charged “Pink Chaddi”
(“Pink Underpants”) campaign on Facebook. The ensuing media coverage
was striking in its divisive verdict: The English media raised alarm over
growing moral policing and vociferously asserted the women’s right to pub-
licly drink and dine, whereas a section of the regional-language (Kannada)
media regarded that stance with suspicion. It not only embodied a threat
to their local cultural autonomy but it also reinforced their own discomfort
with the growing commercialization of news and the discourses of global–
urban modernity peddled by the “new-age” English newspapers launched
or relaunched in the wake of India’s turn to a market-led policy regime in
the 1990s.
What does this incident—which I discuss in detail below—say about
the variegated mediation of “the local” and the expanding news media’s
deep entanglements with the changing urban landscapes of globalizing In-
dia? The distinct ways the English and regional-language media framed

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 819–834, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. C 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01397.x
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
the controversy prompt me to inquire into the particu-
lar outcomes of the bilingual dynamics of the news fields
in shaping everyday localities. How might this divergence
speak to the theoretical task of comprehending the na-
ture of “the local” in an age of global flows of capital and
media? I explore these questions in postliberalization In-
dia, where the media expanded at a blistering pace across
multiple platforms and the news media swept the coun-
try with their round-the-clock reporting and incessant roll-
out of packaged articles. As I navigated through and across
newsrooms and into the layers of meanings impinging on
news production in urban India, I was struck by a flurry of
local news stories and the rising stakes over framing “the
local” within the news fields. The changes were remark-
able in the globally visible high-tech city of Bangalore in
south India, where I conducted the bulk of my ethnographic
fieldwork.
The strategic shift toward local news, I show, was
significant in shaping a conflictual appropriation of “the
local” by the city’s English and Kannada newspapers,1 all
of which were subjected to interorganizational and market
pressure to localize content. Enhanced focus on local
stories enshrined the centrality of city-level news for the
nationally circulated multiedition English dailies, simulta-
neously triggering contests over the meaning of “the local”
in the bilingual news field. Whereas a formulaic, neoliberal
conception of “the global local” was successfully implanted
in some English newspapers, prominent Kannada news
dailies began to articulate a territorialized and culturalized
discourse of “the local,” leading to a reconfigured field of
news publics and urban politics in Bangalore.2 While this
does not suggest that the domains of English and Kannada
news are hermetically sealed, the structural and performa-
tive differences between the two articulate a disjunctive
political space such that “the local” is constantly under
negotiation and at the brink of conflictual appropriation
about who should constitute it and for what end.
To date, many studies of the mediated nature of “the
global” and “the local” have dwelled on an analysis of me-
dia representations or on larger geopolitical institutional
regimes impinging on news production. This article builds
on the limited body of anthropological literature on jour-
nalistic practices in post-1990s India to examine the interor-
ganizational and organizational dynamics of the news field
and to draw out the ways in which that bilingual field con-
structs the meanings of “the local” in one globalizing Indian
city. In it, I depart from extant literature on global−local de-
bates by approaching localization as a concrete and media-
tized form of politics and not merely an abstract appendage
to globalization or a consensual congruence of “global” and
“local” on a level playing field. I contend that localization
of news content has led to an intensification of the local—
the political consequences of which can be comprehended
only if its mediatized nature is unbundled. Drawing partly
820
on Pierre Bourdieu’s insights into mechanisms of cultural
production and dynamic relations between diverse cultural
producers, I illustrate that mediatized localism gets shaped
by a dialectical relation between struggles over the meaning
of the local within the field of news production—arising out
of multiple contestations for symbolic dominance within
that field—and a similar struggle in the wider society among
linguistically marked audiences. I argue that the discussions
of neoliberal as well as territorialized, parochial, and cultur-
alized versions of the local emerging at society’s intersec-
tions with the news field, are pertinent to any serious eval-
uation of the nature of localities in the age of global flows
and media expansion. This pertinence signals the need to
account for the dynamics of the field of news production in
the growing body of scholarship on globalization and local-
ization, since the media increasingly assume “definitional
power across the whole of social space” through what Nick
Couldry rightly recognizes as “media meta-capital” (Udupa
and Chakravartty 2012). For the Bourdieuian field theory,
this means factoring in the flows of transnational capital
that bring specific discourses about “the local” and audi-
ence structures to the field of news. Paying attention to
these flows and symbolic content is also a step toward res-
cuing the field theory from mere “positional epistemology”
(LiPuma 1994:23).
Grounding the local−global dialectic
There is little disagreement in globalization scholarship
today over the growing interpenetration of spaces across
national borders by such flows or about their increasing
complexity. The fixity and boundedness of places is being
replaced by what Anthony Giddens has described as “phan-
tasmagoric locales thoroughly penetrated by and shaped
in terms of social influences quite distant from them”
(1990:18). Ulrich Beck (2006) and Ulf Hannerz (1996) rec-
ognize this reconfiguration as arising from new forms of
cosmopolitanism that have overturned the inside–outside
episteme of nation-states, paving the way for closely inte-
grated spaces in which the “distinction between national
and international is transcended by a ‘both inside and
outside’” (Beck 2006:33). Within anthropology, a growing
number of studies recognize the local as a completely trans-
formed space with multiple registers of globality and lo-
cality (e.g., Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kraidy 2005). Another
influential strand of scholarship proposes that the local
should be understood as much temporally as spatially since
it signals a “structure of feeling, affect, temporality and re-
latedness in which the dyad global-local becomes nonsen-
sical as a nested or spatialized opposition” (Das and Poole
2007; also Das 2007).
Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge (1996),
Faye D. Ginsburg et al. (2002), and Frederic Jameson (1991),
among others, place media communication at the core of
 News media and contention over “the local” in urban India
globalization’s reconfigured social relations, as it disembeds
them from local contexts and rearranges them across “in-
finite spaces of time-space” (Giddens 1990:21). As Simon
Cottle (2009) rightly notes, influential theorists of globaliza-
tion have all recognized the constitutive role of media com-
munication in globalization processes. If several globaliza-
tion theorists contend that media are at once globalization’s
“infrastructural means and its privileged signs” (Mazzarella
2004:348), Appadurai points to media as central to “imagi-
nation” within the reconfigured landscapes, which are suf-
fused with images circulating across spaces; that is, the me-
dia “impel . . . the work of imagination” (Appadurai 1996:4).
However, the existing literature pays little attention to
the internal workings of the media, especially the news me-
dia at regional and national levels, that compel and shape
imagination or configure the local as “a structure of affect
and feeling.” What aspects of the field of news production
bear on the imagining and structuring of the local? How
do we approach the media as itself variegated such that
it relates to the local in divergent and often contradictory
ways? How does this mediated local shape and get shaped
by wider politics and political identities within transform-
ing urban landscapes of India or the global South, more
generally?
Although the growing volume of global media literature
includes significant theoretical advances relating to the in-
stitutional shifts in media production, many studies are of-
ten constrained by the overarching research paradigms of
“global dominance” and the “global public sphere” and rep-
resent two opposing evaluative stances on media globaliza-
tion (Cottle 2009). On the one side is the dystopian cultural-
homogenization position, on the other the optimistic vision
of a cosmopolitan order or, in some cases, promises of lo-
cal resistance. Questions on regional media are bracketed
as “peripheral visions” (Cottle 2009:32), even as their impor-
tance in de-Westernizing media theories is acknowledged.
I contend that the workings of the news media at the re-
gional level are at the core of new linkages between global
imaginations and rearranged localities in ways that com-
plicate theoretical generalizations on media globalization.
Their explication is thus crucial for any serious understand-
ing of the ways in which global flows shape and get shaped
by the news media.
Recent studies of journalism in India have recognized
the global−local problematic as a salient aspect of contem-
porary news production, partly as a result of a huge in-
crease in the volume of local news reported by newspa-
pers across the language spectrum in the last two decades
(Ninan 2007; Rao 2009; Stahlberg 2002). Drawing on
Hannerz’s (1996) conception of globalization as a meta-
culture of similarity and difference, Per Stahlberg (2002)
posits a disjuncture between the “generic” form of jour-
nalism widely practiced across the world and the “spe-
cific” content it derives because of its contact with lo-
 American Ethnologist
cal practices, institutions, and power structures. He argues
that because of greater localization of news content led
by the regional-language press, “India in a sense has be-
come less globalized” (Stahlberg 2002:196). Shauntala Rao
(2009) uses the conceptual framework of “glocalization” (as
elaborated by Robertson 1997) to develop her arguments
on changing journalistic practices in postliberalization In-
dia. She rightly points out that, although journalistic prac-
tices such as training, technology transfer, and audience
feedback have a transnational footprint, content remains
firmly local. Acknowledging her adaptation of the glocal-
ization framework as helpful in pointing to the “rejuve-
nated local” (Rao 2009:474), I take these insights a step
further to understand how local content and mediated
imaginings of the local in relation to global capital flows
shape and get shaped by regional politics and the dynamics
of democratic participation. Departing from glocalization
and similarity–difference models that suggest a consen-
sual mixing of global journalistic practices and local con-
tent, I contend that the interpenetration of the global and
the local cannot be fully comprehended without discerning
the terms on which such infiltration happens and its exact
composition. The challenge is to turn critical attention to
the local conceived as a complex spatial–temporal matrix
that is both discursively and materially constructed. Central
to these issues are Saskia Sassen’s theoretical redirections
to “ground” the notion of “the local” by drawing attention
to “the concrete, localized processes through which glob-
alization takes shape” (2007:98; see also Castells 2000; Har-
vey 1990). While Sassen and other scholars rightly recognize
the constitutive role of economic globalization and recon-
figured production regimes in the formation of cities and
local “places,” including those in the global South (Canclini
2003), much remains to be written about the role of the
news media and the mediated nature of such formations
(see, for some exceptions, Davis 1999; Gibson 2004; Kratke
2003). This gap is even more pronounced in studies related
to Indian cities and the Indian media.
Addressing aspects of this gap, I conceive of the local
not as an a priori site but as a series of emerging discursive
and material spaces that are mediated and mediatized. My
discussion builds on the recent revisions within the anthro-
pological literature to consider the local as a structure of af-
fect and proposes that the local gets articulated at the very
nexus of news media dynamics, urban politics, and global
capital. While this perspective does not mean that the lo-
cal is entirely a creation of the media, it nevertheless points
to the increasingly mediatized nature of contemporary ur-
ban localities. In this conception, mediation is a “constitu-
tive process in social life” and refers to “the processes by
which a given social dispensation produces and reproduces
itself in and through a particular set of media” such that
claims to authentic knowledge of bounded cultures give
way to reflexive accounts of multiple “nodes of mediation
821
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
where value is often produced and contested” (Mazzarella
2004:345–346). Extending William Mazzarella’s recognition
of mediation as “practical loci of politics” (2004:356), I
use the term mediatized to refer to highly conscious me-
dia strategizing that involves struggles in the field of news
production for dominance, material gains, and difference
(Bourdieu 2005). These struggles partly stem from greater
differentiation and complexity of media ecology in the wake
of rapid growth in high-speed communications technolo-
gies and global capital flows (Boyer 2010; McNair 1998).
This approach follows the recent surge in scholarly in-
terest in the processes of mediatization, with its empha-
sis on the constitutive role of expanding media in shap-
ing contemporary societies and the growing prominence of
media resources for nonmedia spheres (Hjarvard 2008).
However, I bring to this generalized discussion the specific
sociocultural dynamics of contemporary India, in particu-
lar the internal dynamics of a bilingual commercial news
field embedded within branding and newsroom discourses.
As Friedrich Krotz (2009) rightly points out, mediatization,
by its very definition, is always temporally and culturally
specific.3 Mediation, as a social phenomenon, may or may
not include deliberate strategizing or an institutionalized
field of interventions.
Recognizing the mediatized nature of “the grounded
local” also entails examining the penetration of
local−global discourses within the news media as part
of news entities’ own need to locate, create, and target
specific audience groups. Thus, I foreground the dual play
of “local−global”—as external discourses impinging on
media production owing to flows of transnational capital
and as co-created media discourses shaping local politics.
Any exploration of this dynamic should take into account
the processes of media production, which have, as Pierre
Bourdieu (2005) rightly notes, their own logic and rules
of the game. Bourdieu’s field theory emphasizes the rela-
tional mode of structures in ways that open up questions
about how different players within a field vie for prestige,
legitimacy, and power by “incorporating empirical data on
individual journalists, newsbeats, and media organizations
into progressively larger systems of power” (Benson and
Neveu 2005:11). Crucially, according to Bourdieu, these
internal struggles among news players are overdetermined
by a similar field of social positions, of the audiences the
players correspond to, through the logic of homology: “The
functions they fulfill in the internal struggles are inevitably
accompanied by external functions, which are conferred
on them in the symbolic struggles among the fractions of
the dominant class and, in the long run at least, among the
classes” (1986:147).
Although it is possible to interpret the logic of homol-
ogy in functionalist terms and describe the symbolic or-
der as comprising instruments of power in which forms of
knowledge are effects of mere position taking by various
822
agents (LiPuma 1994), a more careful reading would allow
us to approach homology as a dialectic embodying spe-
cific cultural and symbolic content. Such an interpretation
offers a compelling conceptual framework in which both
the internal workings of the media and the larger struc-
tures of power can be brought into analysis in relation to
each other. Simultaneously, it provides a framework to cap-
ture the dynamics of news production without the theoret-
ical fixation with “order,” instead allowing for exploration
of the “complex workings of media in a net of culture in
flux” (Rao 2010a:147–148). Recent studies drawing on Bour-
dieu’s field theory have extensively researched journalistic
practices and outcomes and have made impressive theo-
retical advances in integrating field insights with empirical
work on journalistic production (Benson and Neveu 2005;
Champagne and Marchetti 2008). The emphasis in these
studies has largely been on national journalistic cultures,
and attention has yet to adequately focus on the role of
transnational capital in structuring the journalistic fields
and bringing specific symbolic content to bear on news
production. Using the particular case of the high-tech
“globalizing” city of Bangalore, I advance Rodney Benson’s
and other key explorations of Bourdieu’s field theory for
news production by focusing on the structuring factors of
global capital that invoke specific discourses about the lo-
cal within the journalistic field at a subregional level in In-
dia. Conversely, I show how global−local instantiations and
manifestations are highly mediatized and get shaped by the
struggles within the field of news and by their dialectical re-
lation with linguistically marked audiences—both of which
are subjected to larger flows of global capital within the city
of Bangalore.
My empirical data are drawn from 18 months of ethno-
graphic fieldwork in Bangalore between 2008 and 2010.
I spent time inside the newsrooms of two major English
newspapers (The Times of India [TOI] and Bangalore Mir-
ror [BM]) and a Kannada paper with one of the high-
est circulations in the city (Vijaya Karnataka [VK ]) as well
as at socializing and professionalizing sites such as the
Press Club of Bangalore, Reporters Guild of Bangalore, and
Vidhana Soudha (State Legislative House).4 I conducted a
total of 140 interviews with news executives representing
various departments at the three papers mentioned above,
including the editorial, advertising, circulation, and brand-
ing units, and with journalists from other major English
and Kannada newspapers. I collected organizational doc-
uments such as editorial policy handouts and formal in-
structions to journalists in these field sites. Interviews and
ethnographic observations were supplemented with quali-
tative content analysis of a sample of news clippings, on the
Mangalore controversy, in particular.
I begin by briefly mapping the news field in Bangalore
and describing the intrainstitutional context that shaped
greater focus on local urban stories, especially the changes
 News media and contention over “the local” in urban India
in the news agenda initiated by the influential TOI. I then
discuss articulations of the local in VK and other major
Kannada newspapers. Subsequently, I take up organiza-
tional and interorganizational dynamics of news produc-
tion in relation to the mediated meanings of the local, lead-
ing to an ethnographic description and brief analysis of
news coverage of the urban controversy introduced at the
beginning of the article. This specific case study illustrates
and bears out my arguments on global−local tensions.
“Big bang” in Bangalore
In popular as well as bureaucratic discourses, Bangalore
is celebrated as the poster child for “successful” globaliza-
tion and liberalization in India. The city transformed it-
self from a relatively marginal center in the national land-
scape, known for its state-sponsored higher education and
public-sector enterprises in the 1960s and 1970s, into a
symbolically powerful outsourcing hub for postindustrial
Western economies in the 1990s. By 1998, Newsweek mag-
azine had inducted it into “an elite group of ten cities
energized by a surge of high-tech innovation” (Heitzman
2004:1). In the context of the global shifts toward post-
Fordist production regimes as well as economic liberaliza-
tion policies of the Indian state, Bangalore emerged as a
key node in the global network of high-tech production
(Heitzman 2004; Nair 2005; Upadhya 2009), fueling new
consumerist lifestyles, urban landscapes, and high-value
real estate. Critical scholarship has simultaneously pointed
to the highly uneven growth of the city, to a marked ur-
ban dualism (Benjamin 2000): Those enjoying rising mate-
rial dominance are young, cosmopolitan, and consuming
classes employed in the globally connected high-tech and
related industries as well as corporate and political classes
exploiting the boom in the economy. Their rise starkly con-
trasts with the experiences of exclusion and marginaliza-
tion of a growing number of lower-middle-class segments
and the urban poor, who face the brunt of rising real-estate
prices and spiraling costs of services, including education
and health, in the increasingly expensive and contested
city. The growth and transformation of the news media in
Bangalore paralleled the trajectory of the burgeoning city
while also reflecting the national trend toward rapid media
expansion in English and regional languages and greater in-
stitutional dependence on advertising revenue, foreign di-
rect investment, and private equity (Kohli-Khandekar 2006;
Ninan 2007; Thussu 2007; Udupa 2012).5
Although Bangalore’s media market is small compared
to those of large metros such as Mumbai and Delhi, it wit-
nessed rapid growth in the last two decades. Drawn by
the expanding advertising market in the city, which was es-
timated to be $197 million in 2008, as well as by swelling
readership, over the last decade both national and re-
gional players launched several new English and Kannada
 American Ethnologist
newspapers and Bangalore city editions of several na-
tional English dailies. According to state records, in
2005 the total number of daily newspapers published in
Karnataka stood at 266 and periodicals at 150 (Government
of Karnataka 2010). There has been an increase in reader-
ship in the last two decades, led by Kannada dailies, with a
readership share of 22 percent, followed by English dailies,
with 11 percent.
However, following the national trend, there was an
even more rapid expansion of satellite television in the
city, which drove print news publishers to reformulate their
business plans and news policies in terms of thematic fo-
cus, layout aesthetics, and organizational structures. Be-
tween 1995 and 2007, more than 300 satellite networks en-
tered the Indian market. More than 50 of these were 24-hour
news channels, broadcasting in 11 different languages—
the equivalent of more than 50 Indian CNNs (Mehta 2008).
The TOI was especially prescient about opportunities in
the newly exploding news avenues and was quick to intro-
duce significant qualitative changes into its news agenda in
the early 1990s. Several scholars recognize the influential
role of this paper in reshaping postliberalization news me-
dia in India (Sonwalkar 2002; Thussu 2007), leading a the-
matic and stylistic shift toward infotainment (Rao 2010b),6
and legitimizing neoliberal newsspeak, at least across much
of the urban middle class (Udupa and Chakravartty 2012).7
The TOI’s new management, under Samir Jain, openly em-
braced the market-driven model in the late 1980s to “dero-
manticize” news (Sonwalkar 2002:828) and liken it to other
consumer products such as soap and toothpaste, signal-
ing a shift from a focus on the “by-line to the bottom line”
(2002:829). At the same time, crucially, the national paper
localized news content in its multieditions to cater to niche
urban markets and profit from the rapid expansion of lo-
cal advertising sectors. This was a departure from the ear-
lier policies of the TOI and other English newspapers in
the country, which emphasized national and international
news and focused strongly on leader-centric narratives of
national politics (Rao 2010b).
“Mission Localyaan”
Reflecting the global trend “toward prioritizing local news”
(Boyer 2010:253) and partly in response to the expansion of
English television in the national news landscape, the Times
Group recognized that the local news markets promised un-
tapped potential for lucrative readership.8 As several print
journalists admitted during interviews, they felt insecure
about their own survival in the face of the growing pop-
ularity of television, although the viewership for national
English news channels constituted a meager 0.4 percent
of total viewership in the country according to the Indian
Readership Survey (Round 2 2009).9 At the same time, the
decision to increase local news coverage in the early 1990s
823
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
anticipated several trends, including possible growth in the
affluence of regional and local markets. Indeed, in 2004,
“print made roughly $264 million from local advertising,
that is, advertising directed at any local print vehicle, either
nationally or locally owned” (Kohli-Khandekar 2006:38).
Although, ironically, the agenda for “localization” was
set at the highest level of the organizational hierarchy
within the Times Group (in Delhi and Mumbai) and not
at its “local” centers, the new focus had gained great mo-
mentum in the Bangalore edition since its relaunch in
1997, resulting in increased circulation and better display of
city news. Together with aggressive marketing techniques,
greater focus on local news raised the paper from a dis-
tant fourth position in circulation and readership in the late
1980s to first place by the late 1990s. Senior editorial mem-
bers in Bangalore cited surveys done on the U.S. press to
justify the decision to “go local”:
We did a survey and saw that, in America, mainstream
papers did not sell as much as local newspapers. Miami
Herald did well. And then there was Washington Post
[which did not do well]. We found that people craved
for local news—[they were saying] you tell me what
is happening in my neighborhood first and then in
Washington or Mars or Jupiter . . . to give more of local
news, to give more of neighborhood news was a very
conscious decision.
Supporting this crucial decision was the branding team
in the TOI organization, which was a relatively new mem-
ber in the newsmaking community. Freshly armed with the
advertising mantra of “localizing” spelled out by the corpo-
rate advertising sector, especially in the decades following
economic liberalization,10 the newly empowered branding
team braced itself to build a distinct and appealing brand
image for the product, which in their case was a newspaper
started in the preindependence era. While the paper did not
want to lose its national image, it strategized to capture the
new market in Bangalore by offering to simultaneously con-
nect with and “befriend” the local, as it did in other cities
across the country. Branding strategies were readily offered
as essential to newsmaking whenever I spoke to the adver-
tising or brand executives at the TOI. Looking tired from her
tight deadlines and yet managing unusual warmth toward
an unknown interviewer, the brand manager lectured me
on the latest principles of branding—a lesson reproduced
quite cogently from her MBA classes in a top Indian busi-
ness school:
As a TOI reader, I am not a local person. TOI is not a
local brand. But there should be local connectivity. So
we need to balance between local and national . . . But,
to give a crude example, if you have to be in Bollywood,
you need to know Hindi. It is not okay to say you know
only English! It is how you position your brand these
824
days. Similarly, you need to be local. But you cannot
change your personality. It is a national brand!
In actual practice, these efforts to blend national and
local translated into clearly delineated geographies of news
audiences within the city. The scalar level of “the local” was
frozen at the metropolitan area, which was itself marked
in terms of lucrative localities, allowing for occasional ex-
ceptions to include economically advancing larger towns
in the region. The mandate before the circulation depart-
ment was not to enhance bulk volumes but to design target
circulation pockets such that the advertising department
would be able to optimally “monetize” them. The manage-
ment made extensive efforts to ensure that these circulation
pockets were consistent with the consumer groups targeted
by advertisers. In one of several conversations we had, the
jovial yet domineering manager of the circulation depart-
ment in TOI Bangalore described his strategy in vivid detail.
Punctuated by puns and parody, his narrative had a certain
grandeur, as if he expected me to applaud the wonders he
brought into the once-ailing circulation figures:
We don’t go all over the world like the villages. I rather
have it at Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities. Even within it, I rather
have it in Cantonment [area] where there is disposable
income so that my advertiser who wants to sell a plot
or a Honda city car would be interested. As you know,
Koramangala, Indiranagar and such areas have peo-
ple from that [desirable] income group. We don’t fo-
cus more on Chickpet or other such areas. Therefore,
with the paradigm shift [news as product], what kind of
readers you want also gets redefined. It is ad-relevant
circulation. So, I will not be wasting time having agents
all over the place. I want them in Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities.
Even within them, I slice and dice.11
The “slices” of the local were not empty market cate-
gories drawn out to capture lucrative readerships but were
imbued with cultural meanings, since there was growing
pressure on the journalists and other department heads to
make sense of this newly carved-out market space, in terms
of how it translated into specific reading preferences for de-
sired audiences. Drawing on the wider discourse of glob-
alization advanced by elite corporate actors and strategic
bureaucratic actors in liberalized India to integrate cities
into economic circuits of unconstrained geographies (Nair
2005), the management and news actors at the TOI together
filled “the local” with specific cultural content. The demo-
graphic transformation of the city in the 1990s helped the
paper’s management spell out a news formula and identify
a “new reader” in the city, following a decade of similar in-
novations at the national level. Bangalore appeared to be a
particularly relevant site for the new vision of news, since
in the years following the tech boom in the late 1980s, it
had experienced an influx of migrants from various parts of
 News media and contention over “the local” in urban India
the country to occupy high-paying technology jobs as well
as greater movement of transnational tech workers within
the city (Upadhya 2009).12 Sensing these shifts, manage-
ment imagined the newly defined “local” to be free from
obdurate fixations with “place”; the local was seen to em-
body “cosmopolitanism” that shunned “traditionalism” and
dubbed all linkages with place as reactionary. The ideal in-
habitant of this local was mobile, flexible, economically as-
cendant, culturally accommodating, and young. Spurred
by my questions about “stereotyping” localities and read-
ers in Bangalore, a senior executive at the TOI expressively
argued, “They are not stereotypes. We call them percep-
tions. Cosmo-Bangaloreans are accepting, accommodating
and with a scientific bend of mind, who would order beer
when his family is around without any hesitation.”
Thus, in one move, the local was divorced from the ru-
ral. In the next, the local was given a “character” and a de-
marcated geography within the city. Ironically, this spatial
remapping within the city was guided by a sense of the lo-
cal as despatialized and rich with global connections. This
despatialized local was valorized and idealized in an effort
to cater to “the new reader.” Taking a long pause before
answering the barrage of questions I had posed, a senior
editorial member with the reputation as a key “journalist
thinker” in the region candidly described this strategy:
Even localization is not local in the geographical sense.
It is local in my context. This is what is driving news-
papers postliberalization. So my value system should
change with that context in mind. What are the impli-
cations? I may not have a story on farmers’ suicide in
Nashik.13 News is driven by the value of immediacy to
me [the reader]. It is easy to romanticize the other side
of India and say that we ignore them. Of course I have
to ignore them; they don’t read my paper.
While “the local” was consciously marked as “urban,”
since urban readers constituted the primary and most prof-
itable readership market for the paper, the exclusively ur-
ban local was seen as needing correction, both in terms of
physical infrastructure and cultural etiquette, to meet the
ideals of an impeccable global city. If the rapid growth of the
city and the attendant infrastructure problems (traffic con-
gestion, water and power issues, etc.) fed into this notion of
inadequacy, a sense of cultural lag stemmed from the pa-
per’s perception of itself and its audiences as occupying an
exalted and elevated position vis-à-vis the local-language
papers and their publics as well as the older English papers
in the region. The effect, if not the original intent, of this po-
sitioning was to render the Kannada media as incompatible
with the new ethos of upward mobility. A senior member of
the editorial team at the TOI drew the contrast between his
paper and Kannada papers:
 American Ethnologist
[Urban physical] infrastructure is not local for them
[Kannada papers] . . . Local means local culture [he
stresses this phrase to imply that this is something neg-
ative], rural farmer, tr–a–di–tion [expands the word to
emphasize] . . . “we are like this only” [they insist] . . .
We broke those shackles and we said, “Go beyond.” If
this meant Westernized, never mind, but think global.
In the ongoing struggle for market gains as well as
cultural distinction, the TOI marked “the global local” by
defining itself as the true voice of “empowering” global
modernity, relegating the Kannada papers and older En-
glish newspapers in the region to the position of outdated
and obstinate traditionalists. Thus, the TOI’s appropriation
of the discourse of “emancipated global local” as a sense-
making device for delineating “new” audiences as well as
its strategic move to dominate other players within the field
of news production co-created and reinforced the allure of
“cosmo-Bangaloreans” and “ideal global local.” Predictably,
the discourse was peddled with a cautious acknowledgment
of “regional culture,” to avoid possible confrontation with
dissident groups. Some English papers embraced regional
cultures within the capitalist logic of difference (Jain 2007)
as well as for their own legitimacy (Schudson 2003). No
doubt there were several contestations and fissures in the
TOI’s editorial mandate on “ideal local,” partly owing to the
recent influx of Kannada journalists with provincial roots
to cover local politics and crime beats. However, the orga-
nizational streamlining of editorial functions as well as ur-
ban middle-class journalists’ own personal accounts of a
“corrupt” postcolonial Indian state cemented, if not evenly
legitimated, the discourse of “the global local” within the
TOI newsroom. If politicians were the metaphor for the cor-
rupt state, the captains of the new economy, with their “en-
trepreneurial spirit,” stood in stark contrast to them. A jour-
nalist at the TOI had little doubt about these normative
poles underlying the discourse of the ideal global local, aim-
ing especially scathing remarks at the political class: “They
[politicians] have obscene amount of wealth. Anything that
they are otherwise doing . . . bringing dignity to the poor or
OBCs [Other Backward Classes] . . . does not justify this ob-
scene kind of wealth.” The “obscenity” of wealth, neverthe-
less, justified journalists’ embrace of global Bangalore, since
this ideal local promised to unshackle not only the country’s
potential for growth but also the prospects of their own kith
and kin in private enterprise.
The domination of the TOI—both symbolic and mate-
rial14 —resulted in “mimetic isomorphism” (DiMaggio and
Powell 1983) in the field of news production, which is
itself characterized by “internal struggles for the impo-
sition of the dominant principle of vision and division”
(Bourdieu 2005:36). This isomorphism is especially pro-
nounced, since news organizations rely on their peers
for “attentional and evaluative cues,” embodying what
825
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
Dominic Boyer calls “harmonized attentions of the contem-
porary news industry” in the era of information explosion
and “fast-time journalism” (2010:252). Localization was un-
critically imported as urbanization of news by many En-
glish dailies, and the “TOI formula” became the ideal recipe
for market success.15 Many journalists, often grudgingly, ad-
mitted to the dominance of the TOI’s vision of news, thus,
further legitimizing, normalizing, and even distorting the
TOI discourse. The rise of the TOI was accompanied by
several myths about its success, and journalists themselves
felt pushed to generalize and adopt the neoliberal redefi-
nition of “the local” as “cosmopolitan” interests in lifestyle,
personal career growth, individual fitness, and world-class
civic infrastructure as well as a strong suspicion of the po-
litical class.
However, despite the pressure to import the dominant
news recipe, some Kannada newspapers—which were un-
der similar pressure to delineate their readers—set out to
mark “the local” through different registers and trajecto-
ries. The field of cultural (media) production, as Bourdieu
(2005) rightly points out, is also a field of struggle for dif-
ference. If, on the one hand, symbol producers struggle to
impose their principles of vision and division and “have
them recognized as legitimate categories of construction of
the social world” (Bourdieu 2005:37), on the other hand, a
struggle for difference is driven by other symbol produc-
ers with a different set of principles of vision–division. It
is this tension that provides the dynamism for the field
of cultural (media) production. Coupled with journalists’
differentiated habitus and the distinct social history of
“Kannada” that entered journalistic imagination in mul-
tifarious forms, “the local” assumed a different character,
often oppositional to the dominant TOI discourse, within
several Kannada papers. The difference in the social back-
ground of journalists working for English and Kannada
newspapers was strikingly evident, as a majority of Kan-
nada journalists were first-generation migrants from the ru-
ral and semirural areas to the metropolitan area.16 Although
TOI-led news formats and several news themes made their
way into some Kannada papers, the differences in jour-
nalists’ background, class differences between English and
Kannada readers (as shown by surveys such as Indian Read-
ership Surveys), and, more importantly, cultural differences
assumed by journalists shaped a distinct discourse about
“the local” within the Kannada press. The 2006 Indian Read-
ership Survey (Round 2), for example, showed that the num-
ber of Kannada readers with monthly household incomes
below $215 was twice as large as the number of English
readers at that income level. The number of English read-
ers with incomes above this figure was close to double that
of Kannada readers. Although this does not mean that class
groups double up as news publics (Kannada papers, e.g.,
are increasingly aware of an elite, yet small, group of bilin-
gual readers and nonresident Kannada speakers living in
other countries), readership surveys and shared narratives
826
influenced journalists’ perceptions of their reading publics
and reinforced their belief that these publics inhabit a dif-
ferent and, in most cases, “true local.” Challenging the TOI
hegemony, a section of the Kannada press, in its own strug-
gles to differentiate itself in the common field of news pro-
duction as well as through the habitus of Kannada journal-
ists, characterized “the local” as a ground for janasāmānya
(the common man) and, more importantly, as inextricably
linked to local culture. Although Kannada papers heavily
depended on the city news markets for their revenue, they
resisted framing “the local” as deterritorialized urban and,
instead, derided the urban form for its cultural emptiness.
The editor of a major Kannada daily reflectively summa-
rized, “Urban thinking is anything that is not associated
with the roots, anything that is not related to the land and
culture. This is merely about food, living and a certain su-
perficial culture of a community. Urban thinking is false
thinking.”
The important hinge between imagining “the local”
and discourses of a territorialized culture was the language
in which the media operated. Arvind Rajagopal argues that
two models of globalization are operating in postliberaliza-
tion India—one is English led, “convinced of its place in
the forefront of Indian modernization and globalization,”
and the other is backed by the Indian-language media, is
“more often mofussil in location, and harkens back to in-
digenous questions, interests, and styles, even as these are
changing” (2009:17). While the Indian-language media are
not “more often mofussil” in location (Kannada newspa-
pers enjoy their largest readership in cities like Bangalore),
Kannada has always culturally distinguished itself from the
economically mighty English language and its distinct colo-
nial history in the region on constantly shifting grounds
of difference (Udupa 2010). In the years following liberal-
ization, the “division of labor between different languages”
(Nair 2005:242) has left Kannada, among other grounds of
difference, to patronize distinct politics of territorialized
culture in relation to the global capital flows with which it
negotiates. Kannada’s historical association with the con-
ceptions of land and water (nela-jala-nud.i, land–water–
language triad) implied that the domain of what I call the
“bhasha” media articulated an opposition to transnational
orientation through its claims to cultural autonomy.17
Bhasha is distinct from the “vernacular” domain in
that its power position is multiple and contradictory and
not always subordinate, as the term vernacular thickly sug-
gests. Bhasha indexes claims to cultural richness and dis-
tinctness, often with popular imaginations of geocultural
spaces of political expression (Pollock 1998) and particu-
lar sets of sedimented meanings conveyed through their
position as vehicles of nearness, intimacy, and familiarity.
The long history of regional languages in traditional In-
dia, which were born out of a “slow process of differentia-
tion” between “the commonness of Sanskrit at the high end
and the easy neighborly intelligibility of the dialects below”
 News media and contention over “the local” in urban India
(Kaviraj 1992:38), and their mode of address in intimate and
familiar terms in the 12th-century bhakti tradition (devo-
tionalism) shape the bhasha domain as at once intimate,
familiar, and authentic. This was the case of Hindi in prein-
dependence India, when efforts were made to assign “au-
thenticity” to the Hindi press. Hindi was positioned against
English, “the language of imperialist rule,” and Urdu, which
was portrayed as “the language of a debauched and tyran-
nical elite” (Orsini 2002:30). Therefore, in the realm of pop-
ular nationalist struggles, “It was especially the duty of the
vernacular press [Hindi] to mirror the real nation” and re-
flect the sādhāran
. samāj (nonelite public domain) by sym-
bolically refusing the hierarchy between “superior” English
and “inferior” vernacular (Orsini 2009:130–133). In a dif-
ferent context, “structures of affect and sentiment” that
developed around the South Indian Tamil language “trans-
formed [it] into an object of devotion” among Tamil speak-
ers through diverse discourses interwoven with the lan-
guage (Ramaswamy 1998:6).
Beyond the perceptions of intimacy, constructions of
authenticity, and sentiments of love and devotion centering
on it, bhasha also signals the latest phase of resurgence and
confidence in the regional-language news markets.18 This
resurgence mirrors the revival of regional-language literary
markets across the country under the reinvigorated cate-
gory of “bhasha,” which set in motion subtle changes in the
power equations between the “superior” realm of English
and “the dominated” regional-language spheres (Hindu
2011).19 The market-inflected revival of the bhasha liter-
ary domain as well as the regional-language news media
points to growing assertive positions of regional-language
media and their interaction with discourses around “the
global local.” Bhasha speaks to the specificities of the
current social–political context of a second wave of re-
vival of regional-language news markets (after what Robin
Jeffrey termed the “vernacular news revolution”). At the
same time, it acknowledges the sedimented meanings and
distinct modes of address, marked by a sociality that is
“ambivalent about the exuberant globalizing market place
and its forms of public culture, and [whose members] are
self-consciously removed from this, and even occasion-
ally indulge in imagining they are constituted outside it
or prior to it” (Talwalker 2009:86). Bhasha does not de-
note a realm severed from the larger ethos of market cen-
trality. Rather, it is self-consciously set within the over-
arching context of urban transformation and consumer
modernity and defined by its organic links with the domain
of formal politics and caste loyalties. It embodies a “sur-
plus of connotations” (Pandian 1996:3323),20 with its mo-
ments of giving voice to the subaltern-as-disenfranchised
(Chattopadhyay and Sarkar 2005:359),21 but overlaps also
with elite politics based on caste and linguistic territoriality.
Owing to the contradictory movements of the bhasha me-
dia, the claims to cultural autonomy are caught up in the
 American Ethnologist
struggle over meanings of culture that are themselves lin-
guistically marked.
This analysis should not lead to the assumption that
the Kannada news domain is necessarily parochial or that
the English media do not embody the bhasha media in
any way. The disjunction between the bhasha-inflected “lo-
cal” and “the global local” goes beyond a simple divide be-
tween English and Kannada media. However, I argue that,
in the context of the ongoing struggle for dominance and
difference within the field of news production and of wider
changes in the globalizing city that hold uneven benefits
for various sectors (Nair 2005; Upadhya 2009), the linguis-
tic terrain of Kannada serves pragmatic ends. It both fa-
cilitates and entrenches the meanings of local culture as
ways of negotiating with the symbolic dominance of global
modernity and new forms of elite urbanism represented
by the corporate classes and the upper middle classes, if
not the political classes who also benefit from the current
boom. Kannada-inflected culture thus provides a symboli-
cally rich arena for articulating difference from “the global
local” discourses of the TOI and other English media—
pointing to a dialectical relation between the ways jour-
nalists imagine their audiences and an array of related so-
cial positions in the wider field of power (Bourdieu 2005).
The culturalized reappropriation of “the local” played out
vividly during the recent controversy over the attacks on the
women in the Mangalore pub and the subsequent protest
in Bangalore that came to be called the “Pink Chaddi”
campaign.
The Pink Chaddi campaign
On January 27, 2009, a middle-aged bachelor, sporting a
cotton kurta (a loose cotton shirt) and a distinct vermil-
ion bindi (a decorative dot on the forehead), held a press
conference at Kannad.a Sahitya Bhavan (Kannada Literary
House) in Belgaum, a large town in South Karnataka. As he
walked out of the press conference, a team of police officers
took him into custody and transferred him soon after to a
local jail, amid a thick gathering of the media and general
public. The arrest had no connection with anything he said
at the press conference. Rather, it was the event prompting
the press conference that made his arrest significant for the
media. The event had unfolded on Kannada TV news chan-
nels a few days earlier, almost amounting to live coverage.
English and Hindi national channels eagerly borrowed the
images and ran them continuously over several news bul-
letins and panel discussions, followed by high-pitched “live
narratives” of on-the-spot reporters. These images showed
a group of teenage men dragging young women from a pub
and beating them before a television crew, who had accom-
panied the attackers specifically to record what they did.
The incident had occurred in the coastal city of Mangalore
in southern Karnataka. The attackers later identified
827
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
themselves as activists of a right-wing Hindu group, Sri
Rama Sene (Sri Ram’s Army). The man who spoke to the
press on January 27 was Pramod Muthalik, the chief of
Rama Sene. He tendered an apology for the attacks at the
press conference and was then arrested for a different case
pending against him. The venue he chose for the press con-
ference was a public auditorium used for Kannada literary
activities.
The voluminous media coverage of the attacks both
drew on and reinforced a cultural fault line that had
become more pronounced partly owing to simmering com-
munal tensions in the coastal region of Karnataka. In addi-
tion, in the larger context of the growing policing of sexu-
ality by the Hindu Right since the 1990s, the opening up of
media “made sexuality [more] visible in the public spaces”
(Menon and Nigam 2007:93) and sparked “panic over the
perceived proliferation of visual sexual images under glob-
alization” (John and Niranjana 1999:583). While Rama Sene
activists claimed that pub visits by women were against
“our culture,” echoing and reinventing “nationalism’s patri-
archal ideologies of middle class morality, female sexuality
and male superiority” (Parameshwaran 2009:72), “progres-
sives” backed by the English media condemned the attacks
and vociferously upheld women’s “right to drink, dine and
dance.” A group of e-enabled women activists in Bangalore,
who called themselves a “Consortium of Pub-Going, Loose
and Forward Women,” started a campaign named Pink
Chaddi on Facebook to protest the attacks, and they urged
women to send pink underpants to the architect of the
attacks and chief of Rama Sene on Valentine’s Day. The
protest’s use of pink chaddi as a symbol overturned the no-
tion of privacy as a mode of political struggle through its
clever reference to the brown shorts worn by members of
the right-wing RSS (invoking the popular sobriquet “chaddi
brigade” by which they are known).22 The protest was also
significant for its use of new media (Internet) that enabled
the activists to draw support from unexpected corners of
the world. The campaign reflected the larger trend toward
more sexual openness in postliberalized India, with new
feminist voices in the country seeking to assert women’s
sexuality and sexual agency (Menon and Nigam 2008;
Sunder Rajan 1993).
The episode itself was a brief, yet intense, “media mo-
ment” in a long and complex history marked by commu-
nal tensions, regional politics, and a gendered rendition of
Indian culture to resist the “depredations” of “Westerniza-
tion” and globalization—a particularly influential trope that
intricately links questions of sexuality with discourses
of nation, tradition, and modernity (Fernandes 2000;
Parameshwaran 2004; Upadhya 1998). Without going into
this complex history here, I use the episode to illustrate how
the struggles within the bilingual field of the news media
and their institutional transformation shaped news cover-
age and contests over the meaning of “the local.”
828
I undertook qualitative content analysis of the cor-
pus of stories that appeared in the TOI, BM, and VK be-
tween January and March 2009, examining the framing
practices of the newspapers that together ordered, em-
phasized, eclipsed, and excluded a range of publics and
voices. I also interacted ethnographically with the journal-
ists who were involved in reporting, editing, or deciding on
the news outputs within these organizations. Because the
Pink Chaddi controversy broke out while my ethnographic
work inside the Times Group newsrooms was underway, I
include observations of news activities around the theme in
my analysis, to elaborate and contextualize the representa-
tional practices of the press in English and Kannada.
Management’s decision within the TOI to emphasize
local news was accompanied by the installation of a “for-
mulaic” local, which, along with its “globalness” and “cos-
mopolitanism,” had distinct cultural traits marked as free
spirited, youth friendly, and urbane. On the one hand, it
promoted a “libertarian” self-perspective and, therefore,
upheld free will and individual freedom. On the other hand,
celebratory discourses of lifestyle and fitness were bound
up with “aspirational” icons such as successful corporate
leaders, fashion gurus, and new-age spiritual healers. Thus,
both liberal and neoliberal discourses of self, individual-
ity, and self-discipline pervaded the meaning of the TOI’s
“ideal local,” set within the overarching context of global
consumerist modernity and “classist ideologies of global-
ization” (Parameshwaran 2004:374). This formulaic global
local, ideally occupied by free-spirited youth, came out in
full support of the Pink Chaddi campaigners and raised an
offensive against the attackers through voluminous cover-
age of the issue, after framing the episode as evidence of
“Talibanization.” As I navigated between different news-
rooms, the discourses changed significantly, and the aggres-
sive posturing of each faction often demanded that I con-
cede their reasoning. A senior member of the editorial team
asserted the TOI’s position during one increasingly heated
exchange:
K: We are progressive. We don’t tolerate Muthaliks. How
can Talibanization be allowed in Karnataka?
S: Where does this cultural vision come from?
K: Again, again . . . The Times Group’s vision. We have
been told—we have editorial meetings at the highest
level and we keep taking notes—this is our thinking.
This is what we should do. This is Times philosophy.
Whenever such things happen [it says] take a strong
stand. Get at it, people will like it. It is a big issue!
Concurrent with the “Times philosophy,” news stories ag-
gressively opposed the attacks to “reflect” the anguish
of youth. “Stop this emosanalatyachar (emotional harass-
ment),” urged a headline in the TOI, followed by consistent
support of the Pink Chaddi campaigners through vibrant
 News media and contention over “the local” in urban India
visual representations, favorable editorials, and charitable
coverage in the news columns. In its explicit support of the
protest, the paper cited unnamed feminists who compared
the campaign to the “bra burning” movement in the United
States in the 1960s and the “Take Back the Night” campaign
projected as a global movement since the early 1990s. Al-
though the campaign was initiated through the new social
media and sparked interest across several e-enabled groups
around the world on Facebook, it stood little chance of scal-
ing up its effect within the country without the support of
English newspapers such as the TOI, Daily News and Anal-
ysis (DNA), and Deccan Chronicle and their collective dis-
course on the “global city,” which inscribed e-enabled ur-
banites as their audience proper. Most prominently within
the TOI, the Pink Chaddi campaign and Valentine’s Day cel-
ebrations emerged as crucial symbolic elements of the pa-
per’s larger emphasis on youth culture and gendered ur-
ban modernity, in which the images of youth and of urban
women as consumers were emblematic of the “emancipa-
tory potential” of privatization and globalization.
The episode grew into a political controversy when op-
position parties questioned the ruling BJP government’s
competence in handling and possible connivance in the
attacks, and various interest groups sparred over the pa-
rameters of public morality. The newspapers in the city,
across the language spectrum, wrote extensively on vari-
ous dimensions of the story. No leading Kannada newspa-
per directly supported the attacks. Editorials in the Kannada
dailies not only condemned them but they also urged the
government to protect ordinary citizens from violent pol-
itics. Even pro-Kannada activist groups such as Kannad.a
Cal.uval.i Vātāl. Paks.a (Kannada Movement Party) and a fac-
tion of Karnāt.aka Raks.an.a Vēdike (Karnataka Protection
Forum) condemned Sri Rama Sene for “harping on Valen-
tine’s day celebration . . . [when] there are several other
issues concerning Kannada and the state” (Times of In-
dia 2009a:4).23 However, despite the ambiguities and vari-
ances, what was striking about the coverage by some in
the Kannada press was the repeated attempt to debunk
the English media’s cultural marking of the local as “free-
going” and “cosmopolitan.” The discourse in the Kannada
press was underscored as much by antagonism toward
the English press (and the material privileges enjoyed by
English journalists) as by its own belief in the infringe-
ment of “big metros” and “global place” on local cultural
autonomy. The allegations of moral pollution made their
way into the Kannada news field as legitimate and seri-
ous concerns of an “authentic Kannada public,” assumed
to be at once rooted, rural–provincial, and threatened by
cultural invasion. In one of the bylined columns in VK, a
news correspondent expressed his anxiety: “In their zeal
to condemn the attackers, the national [English] media
have ended up projecting alcohol consumption as part of
our culture. They are showing it as women’s right . . . They
 American Ethnologist
have urged women to hold their glasses high!! [Such] me-
dia reports are more horrible than the conduct of Sri Rama
Sene activists who attacked the pub!” (Bhat 2009, emphasis
added).
The particular territorial imaginations of global moder-
nity as metropolitan, in contrast to a rooted, local cul-
ture of the rural and provisional, shaped some Kannada
journalists’ approach to the campaign, even as the hy-
pervisibility of a group of urban women and their inter-
pellation as consuming subjects under globalization dove-
tailed with the “new middle class” discourse of the TOI,
deepening the controversy along the gender axis. Many
articles in the Kannada press openly criticized the En-
glish media, euphemized as the “national” media, for sen-
timentalizing and exaggerating the controversy. They ar-
gued that pub culture would unleash other social evils such
as illicit relationships, rape, murder, and gambling. Sev-
eral Kannada newspapers questioned the English media’s
moral justification for openly advocating pub culture. Jour-
nalists at VK were determined to give minimal coverage
to the Pink Chaddi campaigners because they envisioned
Kannada news publics as different from English news
publics. The episode, according to some Kannada journal-
ists, exposed the hypocrisy of the English press. They ac-
cused the English press of class and urban bias and of bla-
tantly abandoning objectivity to side with the Pink Chaddi
campaigners. When I raised the issue of the Pink Chaddi
campaign at VK, a visibly upset senior editorial staffer
vented his anger, directly confronting the TOI discourse:
Why should we campaign for the Pink Chaddi protest?
What purpose will it serve? Our stand is that we have
nothing to do with the Valentine’s Day. What is there in
this issue [to fight for]? We have better things to report.
Women are harassed in garment factories. Which En-
glish papers have written about them? [his voice turns
sharper with impatience and anger] Is it a story for
them if there is no water supply in a locality for one
week? No! It is not! They write about traffic jams! And,
Coke, Pepsi and PVR! They have abandoned the tenet
of objectivity!24
The Kannada news field’s critique of the TOI’s hyper-
commercial news ethos, even by Kannada papers belong-
ing to the Times Group, reveals modes of articulation be-
tween Kannada ideologies of territorialized culture, on the
one hand, and journalistic ethics, objectivity, and resistance
to classist underpinnings of global modernity, on the other.
This articulated conjunction, however, also embraced read-
ily available Hindu-right politics, since the culturalist cri-
tiques of the Hindutva forces overlapped and converged
with the Kannada journalists’ own discomfort with the
embrace of global modernity, most strikingly when the
female body was summoned as the site of contestation.
However, the overlap was not a mere coincidence, since
829
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
pro-Hindu sentiments and ideologies had been present, if
not overwhelmingly salient, in Kannada nationalist narra-
tives since the late colonial years. This came out in the open
repeatedly in the years of Kannada unification movements
and, more recently, in the agitation led by Kannada activist
groups against the decision to telecast Urdu news on the
state-owned television channel in 1994 (Nair 1996).25 Led by
an editor who was a Hindutva sympathizer and by a large
team of pro-Hindutva editorial members (who were also
equally pragmatic in their political positions), VK was at the
forefront in aligning the differences of the Kannada news
field with right-wing politics, and it was most aggressive in
its critique of the Pink Chaddi campaigners. The campaign
brought together seemingly disjointed strands of territori-
alized culture, Hindutva, and a critique of neoliberal news
visions of the TOI into a cohesive and authentic account for
Kannada news publics. If consumer modernity undergirded
the TOI’s support for women’s rights to “dance and dine,”
the illiberal framing of “the local” by the Kannada news field
exposed its own instability, vulnerability, and at times, bla-
tant connivance with Hindutva forces. Within the “regnant
order of global capitalism” (Jain 2007:21), then, and mani-
fest as global–urban desire in the city of Bangalore, medi-
ated discourse around “the local” that is forged in opposi-
tion to the neoliberal framing of the city and shaped by the
bhasha ethos can itself assume divergent forms of expres-
sion and embody diverse and often contradictory political
subjectivities.
The deep antagonisms within the news field indicated
by this controversy reflect the larger ruptures underlying
contests over “the local” in the increasingly variegated glob-
alizing city of Bangalore. While several schisms mark the
urban landscape and several mediated registers are drawn
on to frame “the local,” the disjunction between the dis-
courses of territorialized culture and “the global local” is
particularly pertinent, as the Pink Chaddi case demon-
strates. At the same time, the distance between English
and regional-language (here, Kannada) news media has be-
come increasingly defined by the social conditions of the
linguistic groups and the particular social functions taken
on by the languages rather than by differences in news val-
ues such as objectivity, as suggested by Rajagopal (2001).
Equally important is the need felt by newspapers to define
themselves variously as “global local” or “cultural local” in
an attempt to mark and capture subgroups of readers, sig-
naling the deep entanglements of commercial news me-
dia and their institutional histories in the contradictory and
conflictual framing of “the local.” These dynamics also re-
veal that the global local and cultural local constitute but
one of the several binaries that shape the cultural politics
of journalistic work. The binary is not the final word in
an ontological sense, which might be argued to underlie
Rajagopal’s (2001) “split public” thesis. Rather, its efficacy
lies in its epistemological and performative functions—the
830
ways in which it shapes journalistic praxis such that the dis-
courses of global–modern Bangalore are constantly brought
to negotiation in divergent forms.
Conclusions
Although globalization theorists are right in emphasizing
the increasing flow of images, people, and capital, the out-
comes of such flows are varied and complex, as several
scholars have already elaborated. Attention to the inter-
nal workings of the news media suggests that the uneven
flows of globality (Appadurai and Breckenridge 1996) re-
late directly to unevenness within the field of the news me-
dia and to struggles for dominance and difference. Even
as local spaces become more and more fluid because of
the pervasive flows of globality, processes of precipitation
harden and sharpen boundaries within everyday and imag-
ined localities in response to these very processes of medi-
ated flows and discourses. Mediascapes and other spaces
of global flows, therefore, do not always divorce locality
from parochiality. As Stuart Hall argues, globalization may
lead to an “even deeper trough of defensive exclusivism”
(1997:25), both in the spaces of the global postmodern and
the marginal local. As a result, “a new world-space of cul-
tural production . . . is . . . simultaneously becoming more
globalized (unified around dynamics of capitalogic mov-
ing across borders) and more localized (fragmented into
contestory enclaves of difference, coalition, and resistance)
in everyday texture and composition” (Wilson and Dis-
sanayake 1996:1).
Equally important, a mediatized local emerges as in-
tensified hyperlocality where stakes over the local are more
keenly fought and contested. The workings of the commer-
cial news media are deeply imbricated in these struggles.
Commercial news organizations’ efforts to locate and fash-
ion distinct audience geographies as well as the ways they
enter into a dialectical relation with wider social struggles
for material and symbolic resources shape intensified local-
ities where cultural meanings get objectified and gain polit-
ical velocity.
Thus, a conception of local–global both as an inter-
nal heuristic for news professionals to get a sense of their
audiences and as a larger discursive structure of transna-
tional capital bearing on the news media would enable us
to recognize the processes of precipitation that sharpen
the boundaries between communities and news publics
and to critically explore their ramifications. In Bangalore,
the bhasha-inflected local deflects, disfigures, or simply re-
mains oblivious to the discourse of “the global local” while
embracing diverse political subjectivities, ranging from lin-
guistic community to Hindu public, and revealing, in turn,
its own unstable if not uniformly retrogressive politics. The
fleeting nature of the bhasha-inflected local and its deep
entanglements with corrupt regional politicians make it
 News media and contention over “the local” in urban India
harder to assume any normative position. However, neither
the progressive politics cast in a uniform template of class-
based activism nor an outright dismissal of Kannada move-
ments as ethnocultural nationalism would bode well for ef-
forts to locate the potential of struggles forged through the
bhasha to bring diverse demands into media visibility and
possible political redress (Udupa 2012). These activisms, in-
termittent and fleeting as they are, work themselves out
through the bilingual dynamics of the news field and how
news actors relate with the local and to each other.
Commensuration and correspondence between strug-
gles within the field of news production and structures of
“the local,” then, should be explored and accounted for
through a grounded understanding of the multiple moves
of globalization. While it is extremely important to focus on
the workings of the media, a comprehensive account also
needs to refocus on the workings inside the media. This,
among other things, means that local–global formations are
embedded in the dynamics of translocal and reterritorial-
ized fields of news and, therefore, cannot be reduced to gen-
eralized claims advanced either by pessimists of cultural
homogeneity and capital-imprinted difference or by opti-
mists of local resistance. Rather than considering localities
as mere outcomes of difference-producing capitalist ma-
chinery or as authentic, preexisting sites of cultural com-
mon sense, it is fruitful to examine the web of mediations
and divergent practices of the media. This is especially per-
tinent at a time when the local has gained significance for
the news media as at once an object of representation and
a mediating context.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank the members of the Times of India
Group for wholeheartedly sharing their news floors with me and
readily offering insights into the ebbs and flows of news produc-
tion. I acknowledge the generous doctoral research grant awarded
by the National Institute of Advanced Studies, India, and the excel-
lent guidance of Carol Upadhya in conducting this research.
1. Although India’s news market is multilingual, at regional lev-
els, newspapers in English and the official language of the state
largely dominate the readership. Bangalore is the capital city of
the southern state of Karnataka, and Kannada is its officially rec-
ognized language. Although there are more non-Kannada speakers
in Bangalore than Kannada speakers, the latter still constitute the
largest single linguistic group in the city (Census of India 2001).
2. While neoliberalism is a highly contested term, I use it here to
specify media discourses that signal an erosion of the ideology of
the developmentalist state, legitimization of greater private-sector
participation in urban development, and growing salience of con-
sumer modernity. For media ideologies in postcolonial countries
such as India, this has meant a definitive retreat from a “develop-
ment aesthetic” (Abu-Lughod 2001:210) and a turn to new imagi-
nations of private sector–led urban growth and the ideal of the con-
suming citizen. Also see N. 7.
3. By staying with Krotz’s analysis of mediatization as a “meta
process” that is context specific and historical, I steer clear of the
 American Ethnologist
traces of modernization theory and assumption of singular “media
logic” in Stig Hjarvard’s arguments.
4. All three of these newspapers are owned by Bennett, Coleman
and Co. Limited (aka the Times of India Group, the Times Group)—
the largest media house in India, which also owns television and
Internet outlets. The group is managed by the Sahu Jain family.
The 2008 Indian Readership Survey (Round 2) estimated the TOI’s
readership in Bangalore to be 395,000; its nearest rivals were the
Deccan Herald (240,000) and the Hindu (50,000). For more, specif-
ically, on the TOI’s global print and online circulation, see Times of
India 2009b. While many of my interviews and observations were
facilitated through previous acquaintances and snowballing tech-
niques, research activities within Times Group offices, including
newsrooms, were undertaken with the approval of management.
However, the management executives and the editors did not in-
terfere in my choice of interviewees or specific sites for observa-
tions within the organization. This did not mean that the research
lens could extend into spaces of confidential meetings between the
editorial, circulation, branding, and advertisement departments or
into meetings among journalists when they did not wish to have
an onlooker. However, the daily editorial meetings, reporters’ meet-
ings, and other newsroom activities were made available for obser-
vation and, at times, participation with few or no restrictions.
5. Industry estimates claim that there were investments to the
tune of $440 million in the Indian media and entertainment in-
dustry over 2004 and 2005 (Kohli-Khandekar 2006:15). The televi-
sion broadcasting industry led the sector, with $4 billion in annual
revenue in 2005, followed by the print media, with $2.09 billion,
and films, with $ 1.7 billion (Kohli-Khandekar 2006:16). Since 1990,
the Indian advertising industry has grown by an average of 30 per-
cent a year (Jeffrey 2000). Underlying these flows are significant
shifts in the media policies of the Indian state. The Broadcasting
Bill of 1997 permitted private broadcasting within India, ending the
state’s monopoly. In June 2002, the Government of India removed
the ban on foreign investment in newspapers that had been in force
since 1955. Foreign direct investment (FDI) of up to 26 percent was
allowed in news and current affairs print media, but with several
conditions, including the rule that three-quarters of the board of
directors of a print media company with FDI should be Indians.
6. This echoes the worldwide trend toward infotainment. See, for
example, Anderson and Ward 2007.
7. Drawing on Bourdieu and Waquant 2001, Paula Chakravartty
and I define neoliberal newspeak as legitimizing and publicizing ef-
forts of the news media in drawing a contrast between “the neg-
ative pole of the state and the public against the positive pole of
the free market and the individual” (in press). For a detailed dis-
cussion on neoliberal newspeak in the U.S. media, see Chakravartty
and Schiller 2010.
8. Yaan in Sanskrit (and in Kannada) signifies journey and travel.
Localyaan denotes the journey toward “the local” initiated by the
mainstream English and Kannada press. “Mission Localyaan” was
an ambitious and focused effort by the mainstream news dailies
at a time when the country talked confidently about “Mission
Chandrayaan”—India’s first lunar probe.
9. The Indian Readership Survey (IRS) is carried out by the Media
Research Users Council (MRUC), comprising advertisers, adver-
tisement agencies, and media owners, and Hansa Research, a mar-
ket research company. The survey covered a sample size of 250,000
households in 2009 across the country, capturing media consump-
tion patterns for various platforms, including newspapers, televi-
sion, and the Internet.
10. This was also a time when the advertising world was rapidly
changing in India (see Mazzarella 2003; Rajagopal 1999). Transfor-
mations within the ad world affected the cultures of interaction
831
American Ethnologist  Volume 39 Number 4 November 2012
between the news media and the advertising sector (Kohli-
Khandekar 2006).
11. Koramangala and Indiranagar are localities in Bangalore with
a concentration of high-income groups, and Chickpet is an old,
low-income, yet commercially vibrant locality known for its small,
unorganized retail stores.
12. The TOI also advocated new forms of partnerships between
market actors to further its urban expansion and development, a
point elaborated in Udupa and Chakravartty 2012. Here, I focus
more on the cultural dimension of global−local tension.
13. Nashik is a small town in Maharashtra in west India.
14. A detailed account of the accumulation of symbolic capital
by the TOI through various reader-connect initiatives and city-level
campaigns, among others, is beyond the scope of this article.
15. There were, of course, a few exceptions within the English
news media.
16. Of the 24 editorial members at VK, 20 were first-generation
migrants to the city and 14 came from agricultural families.
17. The land–water–language association dates back to Kavira-
jamarga, the earliest available literary text in Kannada, which de-
fined cultural–literary geographies rooted in Kannada in the ninth
century C.E. (Pollock 1998). The recent articulations of Kannada as
the symbol of cultural autonomy and authenticity resembles what
Lila Abu-Lughod notices in Egypt as the growing assertion of “local
authenticity” in the face of the “power and appeal of the transna-
tional” (2005:159).
18. This occurred in the context of greater focus on “subprime”
and “semiprime” markets in the advertising and consumer com-
modity sectors, increasingly targeting the expanding base of lower-
middle-class consumers.
19. In the widely publicized Jaipur Literary Festival, an annual
literary event in the tourist-friendly state of Rajastan, the organiz-
ers were keen to establish a forum for Indian-language writers to
discuss their work and explore avenues for translating their key
literary contributions. William Dalrymple, an English writer and
the codirector of the event, emphasized during press interviews
that a strong bhasha presence was a unique attribute of the liter-
ary fest (see Hindu 2011). If critics pointed to this inclusion as a
way of averting accusations of elite bias, the growing market for
regional-language literary works was evident in that diverse liter-
ary genres in 12 languages were promoted through translations
and panel discussions at the event. According to Pricewaterhouse-
Coopers, the book industry in India grew at 5 percent annually
in the last decade (see Altalang.com 2010). Namita Gokhale, co-
organizer of the event, reiterated during interviews to journalists
that French, Spanish, and Italian publishers showed a keen in-
terest in the translated literary works of several Indian languages
(Livemint.com 2011). While bhasha represented literary work in all
the Indian languages in these invocations of the term, I use it to em-
phasize the specificity of each language culture while at the same
time recognizing the resurgence and enthusiasm around regional
languages that bhasha signifies. This is a more recent phenomenon
that the term vernacular fails to suggest.
20. M. S. S. Pandian, quoted in the text, does not himself use the
term bhasha.
21. This builds on Swati Chattopadhyay and Bhaskar Sarkar’s in-
vitation to examine the effects of “relaxing the Gramscian assump-
tion that the subaltern is defined by insufficient access to modes of
representation” (2005:359) and how this can redefine our theoreti-
cal practice and empirical investigation.
22. RSS (Rashtreeya Swayam Sevaka Sangha) is the central
organization for the Hindutva movements in India, providing
ideological and organizational assistance to the BJP (Bharatiya
Janata Party), a prominent right-wing Hindu nationalist party.
832
23. This position by the pro-Kannada organizations could also
be interpreted as stymieing the efforts of right-wing forces to draw
on the discourses of language-based regional culture.
24. PVR is one of the many large shopping and multiplex theater
complexes built after the tech boom in the 1990s.
25. Janaki Nair cites early Kannada nationalists’ explanations for
the dominated status of Kannada to reveal the deep entanglements
between Hindutva and “Karnāt.akatva” (Karnataka-ness). In narra-
tivizations of the dominated status of Kannada, the symbolic vio-
lence of colonial knowledge regimes was considered less important
than the decline of the Vijayanagara empire and the rise of the Adil
Shahi–Bahmani sultanate in the 16th century (Nair 2004:251).
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Sahana Udupa
Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity
Department of Religious Diversity
Goettingen
Germany
udupa@mmg.mpg.de
sahanaudupa.nk@gmail.com