Media power and women: In quest of identities

by Abir Chattopadhyay

As in India the notions of both ‘media’ and ‘feminist’ stance (that often further be reduced to somewhere women, female etc.) after having been spelt in millions of moments are still being articulated as one of the most churned out issues that transform the existing social surface a lot. Both categories evoked much debate since their birth as a ‘category’ in the Indian subcontinent. As other two supra-social categories like ‘power’ and ‘subordination’ being often binarily installed respectively over media and feminism always remained under the supreme hold of colonization, such articulations, at most, missed the widest exposure in Indian perspective compared to other European modernities. Colonization in its fullest categorical extent, here, had therefore formulated the media operation in native categories and also established control over the dimensions of socio-cultural movements that included women movements on various subcultural issues of that time. As said earlier, the two above supra-social categories ‘power and subordination’, were often signified in a quite reductionist terms and exposure so far available to the native population because the urban privileged natives largely declined to recognize any revolutionary Indian mass uprising, women education, free media etc except some iconic figures of nineteenth century. It had culminated in the first war of Indian independence where urban Bengal intelligentsia quite deliberately missed the articulation of various truly revolutionary struggles of the common Indian mass ever since Sanyashi movement. Bengal intelligentsia in those days behaved always quite reactionary until the sudden rise of middle class as an inventory leadership of social struggle in the post ‘Sepoy Mutiny’ era and that pronounced an indubitable rise of Indian bourgeoisie in all movements later. But as commonly perceived, the growth of media and women movement got a new momentum where many important events occurred that certainly ensured the growth of these two categories etc., Indian subcontinent nevertheless saw some stray events, though very important, mostly in media and literary works in all subsequent episodes of freedom struggle.

The prime symbolic events of British Indian modernity like media, women movements including women education movement, literacy movement, anti-superstition movement, western education movement were developed quite logocentrically on the debris of long-ignored class and ethnic movements like Sanyashi movement, Wahabi movement, Chuad movement, Santhal movement etc. The logocentric approaches of Indian history however have drawn out an anomalous continuity of such stray movements creating high elite social format that successfully christened and led a general stream of liberal constellation of movements that included movements on the basis of era i.e. Sepoy Mutiny era, Bengal Partition movement era, non-cooperation movement era, civil disobedience era etc. The last three decades of freedom struggle were thus by and large signified by three unfinished movements of Gandhi. Indian mainstream history thus in the pre-independence period hardly recognized class uprisings such as workers’ strike, violent uproars, peasant uprising, consolidation of women on ‘class’ identity basis beyond mere symbolic structural iconicity of a period, an era, an individual, idealistic nomenclature of a time-frame etc. So the dominant structural identity of a pervasive ‘identity politics’ always ruled the colonial era where public spheres also were brutally reduced by its own history.

Media and women issues therefore have had hardly any option but to be developed by some iconic efforts often collaborated jointly by foreign initiatives. Here also some noble icons like James Silk Buckingham, Norman Bethune, Charles Metcalfe, and David Hare who really gave required patronage to Indian media precisely newspapers and women issues in particular. The above statement for any reason does not undermine the historic efforts of Raja Rammohan Roy, Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, Iswar Chandra Gupta, Harish Mukherjee, Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar, Michael Madhusudan Dutta, Rev. Krishnamohan Banerjee, Kristo Das Pal, Dwarakanath Vidyabhusan, Gnanadanandini Debi, Akshay Kumar Dutta and many others who worked as individual categories beyond their contemporarities. But we are talking about the dialectical gap between these two categories being ruthlessly abridged by the dominant colonial structure which had thrown out the third revolutionary category: the ‘class uprising’ which the Indian history witnessed in Indigo revolutionary struggle. So quite resultantly in post indigo movement the dialectical gap was neither mitigated nor widened because the dominant abridging factor was surprisingly shared by both imperialist colony and Indian bourgeoisie alongside. British Indian League, British Indian Association, Indian Association and finally Indian National Congress were primarily established to spread a general liberal view toward both colonial settlements and the common mass.

Readers may be suspicious about my root-point of contention as because this type of articulation often appears to have an elite middle-class orientation, I am also imbibed by or with, that often symbolizes and exerts power in making of every such category in their literary and journalistic works. But I don’t have also any elitist hiccup with some extremely (elitist) critical notions; where ‘Rammohan, often fatuously argued, could have tried to organize rural forces’ like statements work in the name of obsessed class-ruled analysis. This extremely critical notion, I strongly believe would merge into liberal functionalist approaches further that denounce any form of individuality both in ‘social’ and ‘cultural’. I don’t however need to rewrite or reprove the history of colonial India. My stance would first critically deal with only the mainstream historiography created for the two above categories within a strict and dominant nationalist frame, which treated ‘women’ as a ‘stagnant’ category that covers an easily ‘determinable’ social space by virtue of its mere physical existence and media as only an organ of Indian bourgeoisie in the colonial period and secondly the gradual mutation/dissolution of these two sign-categories with the time. Redears however may find Urvashi Butalia’s argument interesting here in this context that will also help them understanding the basic theoretical jolt: During the 18 years that India had a woman as Prime Minister the country also saw increasing incidents of violence and discrimination against women. This is no different from any other time: a casual visitor to any Indian city – for example Mumbai – will see hundreds of women, young and old, working in all kinds of professions: doctors, nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists... and yet newspapers in India are full of stories of violent incidents against women, of rape, sexual harassment, sometimes even murder. But to have a woman in the highest office of the State and to simultaneously have extreme violence against women are merely the two ends of the scale. As always, a more complex reality lies in between.

Howsoever from colonial era there were myriad of efforts from the native end overruling the colonial and imperialist repressions, many of that could have been transformed into a revolutionary struggle. But the so called dominant liberal view of organizing a symbolic movement got always a major recognition in the history of urban symbolic reform movements compared to the ‘swadeshi’ violent incidents and organized class struggle. For mainstream media also, it was a concomitant pathway throughout the colonial period to go along with the growth of elite Indian bourgeoisie and all symbolic movements led by them.

So to say something about the tradition of colonial history of this subcontinent, major recognition was quite naturally attributed to the symbolic and unequal development of Indian bourgeoisie mostly ‘banias’, second generation landlords migrated from earlier rural settlements, and their peti-bourgeois accompanists, educated elite social-class along with the foreigners’ settlements. Therefore confronting a severe oppositional binarity notions of class and other socio-cultural identities like peasantry, women, media, and other working class nowhere achieved even a subsistent recognition as an independent category both in the history, so far written by non-Marxist historians, and in reality too. Both media and women remained predominantly the same isomorphic category until the age of the unforgettable novel ‘Gora’ (where Rabindranath rediscovered the dialectics of subcultural identities of Indian social modernity like, history of peasantry, subaltern religious groups, elite religious identities, natural fragmentations in human identities, and finally caveat of the supreme category; mother or woman or country far beyond even dominant ‘Bharatmata’ or Mother India’) that not only to be developed but also to be equally subordinated as well. From ‘widow’ rituals to matrimonial advertisements of today’s newspapers the tradition is however still persistent in the Indian nationalist frame beyond any age boundary.

As I am concerned with only the social development of these two categories it is needless to say that Indian leadership from its colonial identities to the contemporary age is still finding out the developmental quotients partly through the colonial spill or foreign conceptual assistance and partly through some occasional way-outs whichever is available at any point of time. Theory of both categories is still being instilled after that given path. From socio-religious orthodoxy to the contemporary liberal postmodern feminism both development and fragmentation were largely carried out either by the dominant pockets or groups of an operating society or by the governance itself. This is a typical Indian ‘leadership’ outfit that once being associated with any dominant structure always merges into its dominant identity. Left politics however right from its foundation in Indian socio-political scenario recognized women and media as independent organizational categories having its own archaeology to organize their selves.

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