Arvind Rajagopal

In January 1987, the Indian state-run television began broadcasting a Hindu epic in serial form, The Ramayana, to nationwide audiences, violating a decades-old taboo on religious partisanship. What resulted was the largest political campaign in post-independence times, around the symbol of Lord Ram, led by Hindu nationalists. The complexion of Indian politics was irrevocably changed thereafter. In this book, Arvind Rajagopal analyses this extraordinary series of events. While audiences may have thought they were harking back to an epic golden age, Hindu nationalist leaders were embracing the prospects of neoliberalism and globalisation. Television was the device that hinged these movements together, symbolising the new possibilities of politics, at once more inclusive and authoritarian. Simultaneously, this study examines how the larger historical context was woven into and changed the character of Hindu nationalism.

This volume brings critical theory to bear on a familiar feature of our daily lives- the evening news on television- in order to clarify what it means to talk about hegemony. This book's approach makes accesible to a wider audience another way of seeing an otherwise taken-for-granted dimension of daily life and political culture. By empirically and theoretically reading a text taken from the evening news students can inspect, in a language familiar to them, what issues of ideology and legitimation are about.

This volume brings critical theory to bear on a familiar feature of our daily lives- the evening news on television- in order to clarify what it means to talk about hegemony. This book's approach makes accesible to a wider audience another way of seeing an otherwise taken-for-granted dimension of daily life and political culture. By empirically and theoretically reading a text taken from the evening news students can inspect, in a language familiar to them, what issues of ideology and legitimation are about.