Screening Culture, Viewing Politics

Purnima Mankekar is Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology at Stanford University.

“An outstanding work by a brilliant and passionate scholar. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics is a rare jewel. Not only does Mankekar explore a key historical moment in India’s history, but she brings a vibrant feminist political critique to her understanding of the construction of the modern Indian state. This book will become a classic.”-Ann Gray, University of Birmingham “In India, where nothing stands still, least of all, tradition, it is remarkable how the unwavering eye of Purnima Mankekar has studied the ceaseless working and reworking of the gendered anxieties of a nationalized, post-colonial, febrile middle under the flickering light of Doordharshan-India’s state run television. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics is a must for anyone interested in culture in the broadest and most fecund sense of that term.”-E. Valentine Daniel, author of Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence “Purnima Mankekar has crafted a compelling and richly informed account of one of the most difficult of anthropological topics: the power of television to turn local and gendered intimacies into-literally-gripping allegories of national identity. Fusing scholarship and elegance in an exceptionally accessible narrative, she attends to audiences as well as texts. In this way, she provides an exemplary demonstration of how superb ethnography can best disentangle the actual complexities behind the usual cant about modernity, nationalism, and the media.”-Michael Herzfeld, author of Portrait of a Greek Imagination

• Acknowledgments ix1. Culture Wars 1Part 1: Fields of Power: The National Television Family 2. National Television and the “Viewing Family” 453. “Women-Oriented” Narratives and the New Indian Woman 104Part II: Engendering Communities 4. Mediating Modernities: The Ramayan and the Creation of Community and Nation 1655. Television Tales, National Narratives, and a Woman’s Rage: Multiple Interpretations of Draupadi’s “Disrobing” 224Part III: Technologies of Violence 6. “Air Force Women Don’t Cry”: Militaristic Nationalism and Representations of Gender 2597. Popular Narrative, the Politics of Location, and Memory 289Epilogue: Sky Wars 335Notes 359Bibliography 395Index 417