CONSUMING MODERNITY This page intentionally left blank CONSUMING MODERNITY Public Culture in a South Asian World CAROL A. BRECKENRIDGE, EDITOR UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA PRESS Minneapolis / London Copyright 1995 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290, Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper http://www.upress.umn.edu Second Printing, 1998 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Consuming modernity : public culture in a South Asian world / Carol A. Breckenridge, editor. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 0-8166-2305-8 ISBN 0-8166-2306-6 (pbk.) 1. Popular culture—India. 2. India—Social life and customs. I. Breckenridge, Carol Appadurai, 1942- DS423.C577 1995 306'.0954—dc20 94-46772 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Preface vn One. Public Modernity in India Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenridge i Part I. The Historical Past Two. Playing with Modernity: The Decolonization of Indian Cricket Arjun Appadurai 23 Three. Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio David Lelyveld 49 Four. The Indian Princes as Fantasy: Palace Hotels, Palace Museums, and Palace on Wheels Barbara N. Ramusack 66 Five. Dining Out in Bombay Frank F. Conlon 90 Part II. The Historical Present Six. Consuming Utopia: Film Watching in Tamil Nadu Sara Dickey 131 v VI CONTENTS Seven. Melodrama and the Negotiation of Morality in Mainstream Hindi Film Rosie Thomas 157 Eight. Repositioning the Body, Practice, Power, and Self in an Indian Martial Art Phillip B. Zarrilli 183 Nine. Nation, Economy, and Tradition Displayed: The Indian Crafts Museum, New Delhi Paul Greenough 216 Contributors 249 Index 251 Preface In the mid-1980s, when the project reflected in this book was first con- ceived, it was clear that significant changes were under way in India. The consumer economy catering to an apparently growing middle class was a sure sign of a surplus in the domestic economy, and an avalanche of adver- tisements heralded major lifestyle changes. Rajiv Gandhi's government was speeding up privatization and the denationalization of industry, thus admit- ting a steady stream of multinational and transnational corporations into India with their products and projects. Signs that Nehruvian secularism was at risk were everywhere. It was becoming clear that the Indian diaspora in England and the United States could play a binational role in a changing world. Thus the term nonresident Indian—shortened to NRI—came to be used by the Indian state to lay claim to the skills, technologies, and finances of its "nationals" abroad by offering them favorable schemes for investment in India. And new fault lines in civil society were created by controversial events like the debate around the legal issues regarding Ayodhya's Babri Masjid, Muslim civil law in regard to the divorced woman Shahbano (1985), the immolation of Roop Kanwar on her husband's funeral pyre (1987), the publication of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989), the increase in bride burnings, and the Mandal Commission Report that proposed state- initiated changes in regard to caste in India. The dilemma for the student of India working in the area studies tradi- vn VIII PREFACE tion in the United States was to frame a project about India's new forms of public modernity that would not repeat the earlier, triumphalist errors of modernization theory. In 1986 and 1987, under the research rubric "public culture in late-twentieth-century India," Arjun Appadurai and I sought to open a space of debate in regard to the many issues associated with the enormous shifts under way in India. Along the way it became clear that the connection between public culture and global cultural flows was at the heart of the matter. In search of a framework for clarifying this connection comparatively and transnationally, we began the journal Public Culture in 1988. Though the nation, the state, and the market represented other possible points of entry into these "postcolonial" issues, the idea of the public seemed more open, more inclusive, more flexible. Then and now (despite the subse- quent publication of the English translation of Jiirgen Habermas's book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989) the category of the public seemed an undertheorized aspect of collective life. Many of the changes we could see were informed by changes in global capital and in the cultural flows that it appeared to encourage. Thus the public sphere also looked like a promising entry into the local reception and transformation of global cultural flows. At the same time it was clear that this project was larger than the two of us, and we sought colleagues who would join us to explore the cultural dy- namics of contemporary India through the lens of public culture. To that end I organized a double panel at the South Asia Meetings of the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1988, and we began discussions with the Joint Committee on South Asia of the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) and the American Council of Learned Societies. The Joint Committee sup- ported a trip to India in late 1986 to discuss the public culture project with colleagues in Delhi and two workshops that we organized, one more gener- ally on public culture in 1988 and the other on global advertising in 1991. Many of the essays in this volume began at the 1988 South Asia Meetings or at these SSRC workshops. I owe the authors an apology for the inordinate time that it has taken to see their work into print. Many individuals have helped to shape the ideas contained in this vol- ume over the past few years. But for their initial enthusiasm and encourage- ment, when the very idea of public culture seemed fragile and ambiguous, I wish to thank Bernard S. Cohn and Toby Volkman, whose support of this project continues unabated; for her patience and willingness to assume more than her share of the responsibility for the production process, I thank PREFACE IX Janaki Bakhle; and for their varying attention to other matters large and small, I am grateful to Sarah Diamond, Victoria Farmer, Ritty Lukose, Rob Mosimann, and Namita Gupta Wiggers. Carol A. Breckenridge Chicago, April 1994