Fast Time Religion: News, Speculation and Risk in India

Critique of Anthropology

2016, Vol. 36(4) 397–418

! The Author(s) 2016

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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X16654550

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Article

Fast time religion: News,speculation, anddiscipline in India

Sahana UdupaSchool of Public Policy, Central European University, Budapest,

Hungary

Abstract

In this article, I take the expanding religious programs on private news television in

India, and Bangalore city in particular, as a lens to explore new intersections between

media and Hindu religiosities, and the conditions that facilitate synergies between reli-

gious enterprise, media creativity, and economic mediation in a liberalizing era. I suggest

that a new confluence of temporalities underlies this synergy. As the linear progressive

narrative of news discourse gives way for speculative temporalities and fast-time cycles,

the liberalizing economies and Hindu astrological predictions combine to articulate

anxieties for future that animate an uncertain present. In such a milieu, the rapidly

expanding commercial news media revive the orthodox Brahminical traditions of

ritual healing, although not without contestations. These mediatized religiosities, I

argue, overlay the Hindu nationalist project with notions of Hinduism as resources to

resolve life-course issues of individual viewers – a discourse removed further afar from

the realm of the nation-state.

Keywords

Media and religion, speculation, television news, India, Hindu religion

Behind the sprawling Football Stadium, across the two-lane road beset by theclamor of unending traffic in an upmarket locality in Bangalore, southern India,the headquarters of a widely viewed television news channel is abuzz with routineactivities of the day. The television channel, together with a growing number ofprivate news channels in India, prepares a daily mix of stories to run the bulletinsthrough day and night, and a heady concoction of sensational news and breaking

Corresponding author:

Sahana Udupa, School of Public Policy, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary.

Email: [email protected]

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news headlines to capture the ‘‘eyeballs’’ in an increasingly cluttered news market.On this warm evening of the April summer, the channel has invited two leadingastrologers, trained in the Hindu astrological practice of the orthodox Brahminical(upper caste) tradition, to participate on a panel to discuss the fortunes of a leadingbusinessman in the country. The discussion is slated for a live telecast in theevening prime time band, when television channels are assured of maximum view-ers and high advertisement flows. The businessman in question is Vijay Mallya, aBangalore-based industrialist and a member of the Indian Parliament, whose repu-tation as a flamboyant liquor baron (supplying Indian beer world over) and aForbes billionaire had taken a setback lately since his domestic airlines businesshad plunged into a deep financial mess and a massive 1.3 billion (US) dollars debt.Under pressure to rescue his much publicized venture, Mallya, the ‘‘Indian drinksmagnate,’’ as the BBC once described him, had resorted to many measures, in fullpublic view and some behind the doors. What caught the interest of the televisionnews channel, however, was his recent consultation with a leading Hindu astrol-oger to invoke the ritually elaborate As

_t_aman_gal

_a Prasne – a particular astrological

practice led by a Brahmin priest which posed questions to the divine authority inthe presence of ‘‘eight auspicious objects’’: kum_kuma (vermillion powder), mirror,flowers, aks

_ata (sacred rice), fruits, betel leaves, white cloth, and gold (hence the

name As_ta – eight, man_gal

_a – auspicious, Prasne – question). The editorial team at

the channel seized the ‘‘news peg’’ and the visually striking images of a savvybusinessman known for posing to the media with female models, race horses,and liquor, now down on his heels consulting orthodox Brahmin astrologers,much in line with many politicians and businessmen in the region who soughtastrological predictions at a fever pitch. For the overworked journalists spurredon by the recent success of astrology-related programs on their channel, the eventoccasioned a full blown panel discussion, with astrologers at the helm. A full hourpanel discussion is arranged, as a result. On the panel, the invited astrologersastutely combine their knowledge of Vedic scripts with television’s glamorousvisibility, to link Mallya’s personal past and present crisis, all the while pointingto the force of planetary movements and the power of ritual remedies to predictand manage what lies ahead for him in future.

The astrologers’ predictions on Mallya’s fortunes and prescriptions for ritualremedies are not a singular event in the unremitting news cycles of the leadingtelevision channel or an aberration to the routine. The astrologers’ nomination asexpert commentators on ‘‘topical’’ issues is an established practice in the channel,and only conforms with the general trend, as the dizzying number of all-newsprivate television channels across the country insert what journalists see as a ‘‘reli-gious angle’’ into current affairs discussions, alongside telecasting ‘‘religious’’ pro-grams based on astrology, paranormal, yoga, v �astu (Hindu architectural practice)and ritual prayers to Hindu temple deities in dedicated slots. Astrologers, Hindupriests, temple authorities, spiritual gurus, and esoteric black magicians have thusrisen to prominence on the television screen, infusing popular media with thelanguage of ‘‘the religious.’’

398 Critique of Anthropology 36(4)



The proliferation of religious personalities and the multitude of religious ima-geries, divine predictions, and prescriptions for ritual remedies manifest a newpublic visibility to popular religion which owes in large part to the dramaticgrowth of private media in India in the last two decades. The dismantling ofstate monopoly in television allowed multinational players and domestic entrepre-neurs to herald unprecedented media expansion in these years. Satellite and cabletelevision reached more than 450 million homes and close to 70% of households inurban India in 2013 – the third largest in the world in viewership size, after Chinaand the US.1 In such a vibrant field of expanding channels and swelling audiences,religion has entered media creative networks in multifarious ways and throughmultiple nexuses. Religious broadcasting by institutionalized religious groups –from Islamic proselytizers to Pentecostal Christians – compete for viewershipshare with entertainment and round-the-clock news channels, even as a widerange of new-age spiritual gurus drawing on Hindu iconographies and mythologiesbring their messages to the privacy of millions of homes through dedicated televi-sion channels. Such is the salience of religious content in a deregulated media fieldthat it now merits the nomenclature of ‘‘religious channels’’ as a separate genre formarket actors, with large market surveys tracking viewership scores for a categorymarked as ‘‘religious.’’ If specialized religious broadcasting caters to its nicheaudiences imagined as devotees or potential converts, religious content withinthe mainline mass media has also proliferated with live telecasts of Hindu religiousprocessions which aim to recreate spaces of worship, programs which profile pil-grimage centers as divine destinations, and others which provide a daily spell ofdevotional union with temple deities through recorded telecasts of puja and otherritual offers inside the sanctum sanctorum of sacred Hindu religious sites.

Religious content in ‘‘general entertainment media’’ is no doubt influential, butmore subtle, yet effective forms of religious content are expanding within the main-stream news media. Seen both in print and television, these new forms of religiouscontent yoke together the growing demand for news with religious sensibilities ofthe audiences, by transforming religion itself as a newsworthy theme. If religion’sappeal in Indian politics and its mediation in people’s experiences of politics hadalways remained an important theme for the news media (Rajagopal, 2001), privatenews media today offer religious experiences as news in their own right. Thesestories no longer remain as simple catalogs of newsworthy events where religionis part of the political arsenal of actors external to news media – as in the case of theright-wing Hindu nationalist parties in early 1990s India (Mankekar,1999;Rajagopal, 2001; Rao, 2010) or local religious-political actors prominent asleaders ofMat

_has, caste-based religious organizations in regions like Karnataka (of

which Bangalore is the capital). Aside from these ‘‘conventional’’ news stories,journalists actively invoke Hindu religiosity into discussions on a range of whatare framed as ‘‘current affairs’’ issues, the crippling airlines business of billionaireMallya included.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork among television producers, journalists,astrologers, and television audiences in Bangalore between 2011 and 2012, this

Udupa 399



article turns a critical eye to this booming phenomenon of inserting particularnotions of Hindu religiosity into the rapid cycles of news in the commercial newsfields of India, and how traditional religious practitioners came to occupy thecenter stage in the news narratives, at a time when the faltering fortunes of wealthybusinessmen had themselves come to be viewed as legitimate news. In advancingthis inquiry, I make three interrelated arguments.

My first argument is that the new forms of religious programming within privatetelevision news channels in a liberalized media environment represent the recon-stitution of the temporality of news as a cultural discourse. The linear progressivenarrative of news increasingly combines with the temporalities of liberalizing mili-eus where efforts to procure a secure future animate an uncertain present, for anexpanding class of informal labor as well as the middle class. However, ratherthan seeing the proliferation of Hindu religiosities in and through the media as amere epiphenomenon of an economic transition, I draw upon important non-Weberian arguments on ‘‘reenchantment of capitalism’’ (Van der Veer, 2012)and ‘‘financialization of daily life’’ (Martin, 2002) to approach both media andreligiosities as embodying the interlocking temporalities of risk and remedy, whichemerge as much from the production logics of news media and their susceptibilityto the elusive markers of market success as from religious enterprise that reflectsand feeds into everyday uncertainties. Underlying this approach is the argument onmass media’s constitutive role in shaping temporalities, as with the temporality ofmodern nation effected by newspaper reading (Anderson, 1991),2 and an even morefundamental anthropological argument which roots qualitative temporalities insocial (mediated) life and in the everyday practices of meaning-making (Munn,1990).3

Second, such a confluence of temporalities of news and liberalizing economiesrevive and recast Hindu religiosities as ‘‘fast time religion’’ which articulates anxi-eties for the future among audiences reimagined as individual viewers seekingutility value and celebrity glamor in news. Third, in so doing, the news mediareinforce orthodox Brahminical traditions in political cultures and intimateworlds of everyday living, although not without contestations and deflections.4

Despite the growing prominence of news media for religious regimes, and theexpanding scholarship on the connections between media, material culture, andreligion in diverse religious and national contexts (Eisenlohr, 2009; Hirschkind,2006; Meyer, 2006; Oosterbaan, 2009; Silverstein, 2008; Stolow, 2005) and insight-ful studies on mediated religiosities in India (Dwyer, 2006; Jain, 2007; Mankekar,1999; Pinney, 2004; Rajagopal, 2001), surprisingly little work has gone in the wayof highlighting commercial news media’s overlaps with popular religiosities, andeven less on the production side of the news–religion interface.

The article begins with an overview of news media expansion in Bangalore cityand how journalists in this iconic city of globalizing India understand Hindureligion and its importance for news audiences. I contextualize this with a briefdiscussion of the institutional shifts in the television sector in India, where themundane needs of an expanding cable television network led to the first spurt of




religious programming on private news channels. Charting the transition of privatetelevision from a domestic, quasi-legal cable enterprise to a hypercompetitive mul-tichannel field, I discuss the contours of what is defined as ‘‘fast time religion’’ andin the next section, the speculative temporality of the news discourse, to examinehow they both interlock with and shore up the promise of ritual healing for tele-vision viewers. I conclude with delineating how mass-mediated religiosities inter-vene the Hindu nationalist project with a distinct invocation of Hindu religiostiydesigned to address this-worldly life-course issues of oridinary audiences and‘celebrities’ – a discourse further afar from the realm of the nation-state.

Deregulated news: Chasing the success formula

Back in the studio, the two astrologers and a male news anchor have occupied theseats across a shining red table. In a formal western suit and a thick layer ofmakeup, Kumar,5 the anchor, seems quite seasoned in this job, and next to himare the two astrologers. One is in a gleaming, full-sleeved, brown shirt – a modernoutfit – and a long golden chain around the neck. He does not display the tradi-tional attires or symbols befitting an orthodox Hindu astrologer, not even a cus-tomary dot on the forehead. The astrologer next to him is in the traditionalcostume of a Brahmin priest of the Sm �arta subsect – white pam_ce in a soft singlepiece cotton fabric tied around the waist, vermillion dot, and three horizontal linesacross the forehead with vibh �uti, the sacred ash, and heavy beads hanging below histhick neck. The Chief Producer introduces the astrologers to me as ParamanandaSharma Guruji – the man in the full-sleeved shirt, and Gopala Shastri Guruji, inthe cotton pam_ce.

The panel discussion is part of a special one hour program, opening with a high-pitched presentation of news headlines, and following quickly by a detailed discus-sion on Mallya’s invocation of the ritually complex As

_t_aman_gal

_a Prasne. The

anchor sums up Mallya’s financial problems that had led him to raiseAs

_t_aman_gal

_a and consult a famed astrologer in the region. Mentioning the list of

20 richest people in India, he declares, in a stylized tone of alarm, that Mallya hadtoppled out of the prestigious list. After establishing the ‘‘context,’’ the anchorgives finer details about As

_t_aman_gal

_a and throws a slew of questions in a tone of

punching urgency: What is As_t_aman_gal

_a Prasne? Will Mallya’s problems be really

solved with this? Can common people believe this? Can they too perform this?Astrologers take turns to describe As

_t_aman_gal

_a and what virtues a person

should possess before qualifying to initiate this complicated astrological practice.Citing Sanskrit scriptures, Shastri lists the characteristics of the seeker: he shouldbe active in p �uje-punask �ara (ritual prayers), should know pam_ca siddh �anta (fiveprinciples of virtuosity), and possess d �evat �a siddhi (divine grace). Listening to thelong list of qualifying virtues to seek As

_t_aman_gal

_a, the anchor softly nods his head,

without raising a question on whether Mallya met these seemingly unachievableconditions of merit. Instead, the anchor chooses to ask if the questions posed by theseeker would get solutions at all. ‘‘For sure, they will be answered,’’ says Shastri

Udupa 401



confidently, ‘‘there will be answers for even those problems that man does notknow. But the crucial aspect of As

_t_aman_gal

_a is the qualification needed for the

seeker.’’ Sharma reiterates:

The person who seeks it should speak the truth and speak in a measured manner

(mitabh �as_i). For a person who drowns in liquor and enjoys the pleasure of many

women, the benefits of As_t_aman_gal

_a will never come by. It depends on the [moral]

worth of the individual.

This emphatic moralizing dictum is perfect for the anchor to announce a commer-cial break.

What are the logics of news production in a privatized news field that bringreligious practitioners like Sharma and Shastri to the heart of the newsroom? Howdo religious enterprise and television creativity mesh with one another to createcultures of ritual healing?

The trajectory of private media expansion in Bangalore city provides an impor-tant avenue to explore these questions. The city of Bangalore shot to fame in the1990s as a third world technopolis when the Indian state’s liberalization policiesand global capital flows transformed the emerging information technology industryinto an outsourcing destination for the global high tech economy. As India’s‘‘silicon valley,’’ Bangalore became a model for ‘‘successful’’ liberalization inIndia, and stood as a striking contrast to the trope of third world cities construedin the western imagination as unplanned and unmanageable. The rapidly expand-ing and deregulated news media played a key role in cocreating Bangalore as anicon of aspirational ‘‘New India’’ claiming its stake in the global economy. Despitemarket pressure for profitable viewer profile, and partly as a result of this, newsmedia became crucial in bringing a range of contrasting claims on the city into theremit of public discussion, constituting a shifting domain of multiple contestationsover who had the right to reside, work, and ‘‘prosper’’ in the expanding city (Udupa,2015). The discourse of news, in many ways, embodied the deeply uneven urbantransformation in Bangalore – the rising salience of high income groups linked totransnational capital and the political class reaping the benefits of liberalizationstood in stark contrast to the growing underserviced sections of unorganizedlabor, lower middle-class groups, and landless migrants in the city. However, whatswept these uneven layers of globalization were also the newly revived Hindu ritualpractices and astrology, when millionaires such as Mallya, mighty political leadersand middle-class residents alike invited Hindu religious practitioners for ‘‘problem-solving’’ through ritual remedies. Thus, Bangalore city, as an icon of aspirationalliberalizing India, embodied the curious expansion of liberalizing economies, priva-tized commercial media, and mediated Hindu religiosities at the same time.

In Bangalore, a particular understanding of ‘‘religious angle’’ as Hinduastrology, paranormal and ritual offers for divine favor (p �uje, Havana, h �oma)undergirded journalists’ practices of inserting Hindu religiosity into the news nar-ratives. This was seen within the six new round-the-clock news channels which




entered the regional market in a span of just five years in the 2000s.6 While mediaproduction was vibrant among the city’s Muslims and Christian communities, themainstream commercial news media approached religion primarily as Hindu tradi-tions, reflecting in part journalists’ own Hindu religious background and what theyunderstood as television audiences’ vulnerability for ritual healing and magicalremedies by Hindu priests. These programs were especially pronounced in theregional language channels, as the editor of a leading news channel in Kannada(regional language) summarized pithily:

The success of news channels depends on four Cs – cinema, cricket, crime

and . . . I forget the fourth one. Kannada channels are distinct in that the success

here also depends on how much content you give on astrology and superstition.

So much so that city people worry about the numerological implications before

they get their [registration] number plates for the vehicles.

As suggested by the editor’s portrait of audiences, journalists’ assured sense ofgrowing religious sensibility of audiences was often colored by deep sarcasm andcynical dismissal of religious practitioners as full of selfish business interests.However, this did not deter them from providing the formulaic news with four Csand ‘‘plenty of religion.’’ Significant here is the difference in the news ideologies ofthe English and regional language media in India, famously captured in the frame-work of ‘‘split public’’ by Arvind Rajagopal (2001), which points to the avowedvalues of objectivity and neutrality in the English media (reflecting English readers’privileged access to power) versus a more narrative slant of news in Hindi (reflectingvernacular publics’ more fraught relation with rulers). This split, according toRajagopal, symbolizes the larger tension between modernizing elites and the incom-plete secularization of polity in the postcolony. In the years of liberalization, thedifferences between English and regional language television news centered not asmuch on the objectivity-narrative axis, since multiple practices of objectivity, hype,and sensationalism pervaded the English media, prompting English news to turnaway from the state and toward the corporate world as the necessary locus tolegitimize the discourse of an aspirational New India7. Despite these shifts withinthe English media, the regional language television’s cultural-linguistic resourceswhich were in consonance with Kannada-speaking astrologers and ritual healers,as well as the historical association between regional Kannada media and religious-political actors (pontiffs of Mat

_has of Brahmins, Lingayats, and Veerashaivas) ren-

dered the representation of Hindu religious practices a legitimate form of journalismfor the Kannada news channels, compared to the English media’s studied distancefrom any direct association with religious practices, except as an ‘‘external’’ newsevent. Although futuristic predictions proliferated within a section of Englishtelevision news, the channels recruited female Tarot readers and framed these pro-grams as ‘‘lifestyle journalism’’‘ and not religious programming.

Religious programming within the Kannada news channels drew on earlyexperiments with radio broadcasts of Hindu devotional music and television

Udupa 403



broadcasts of religious mythologies on state-run media, which had roots, amongother factors, in the wide popularity of mythological films during the colonialperiod when leading film directors of the time created the devotional effects of‘‘real gods’’ on the screen (Dwyer, 2006; Prasad, 2009). Television’s particularhistory in India reveals that although the introduction of state-run television in1959 was part of the larger nationalist project of building a modern nation, itstarted to telecast mythological-religious serials partly to open up for private adver-tisers. This decision not only succeeded in creating mass audiences for television inthe 1980s, but it also allowed exclusionary nationalism based on Hindu religiousidentities to resurface in the political domain (Mankekar, 1999: 5�10). The deregu-lated television sector with hundreds of private news channels expanded in a con-text where the state-run television’s experiments with mythological serials anddevotional programs had established religious content as a significant theme fortelevision production. The salience of religion in the mass media forms and theincreased blurring of ‘‘entertainment,’’ ‘‘features,’’ and ‘‘news’’ in a privatized newsfield facilitated the assumption of guaranteed positive reception for Hindu religiousprogramming on news channels, representing a stock of themes with a ‘‘proven’’potential for market success.

Fast time religion

During the break, at the studio, the panelists shed their formality, and quicklyexchange ideas for the next segment. The anchor tells the panelists that theback-end editorial team would display the horoscope of Mallya on the screensand they both should sum up his future in one minute. Shastri is instantly worried;he complains that one minute is too short to summarize Mallya’s prospects, but theanchor does not pay heed. Sharma, on the other hand, seems unfazed by the timelimit, for he quickly spruces up his posture to resume his comments with timelypunches, smiles, and pauses.

In the next segment, the anchor reads out Mallya’s date of birth, over theimage of his horoscope displayed in full screen. Sharma rolls out a list of astro-nomical details related to his birth – that he was born in the Kum_bha lagna, borninto the vris

_cika r �asi (Scorpion sign), which is also called k��ta r �asi (insect con-

stellation). Mallya, like others born into this sign, would excel in petroleumproducts and related industries. ‘‘Even alcohol is like a k��ta (insect), it is notgood for health. So, we include this in the list of favorable businesses for thevris

_cika r �asi,’’ he remarks, mocking again at Mallya’s alcoholic habits and his

massive liquor empire. Sharma gives a damning report of Mallya’s horoscope,predicting that his business would see a short spell of repair and recovery, butwas headed ultimately for a devastating downslide. The anchor then turns thequestion to Shastri, and he gives a completely opposite prediction. He providesyet another set of specialized terms – that sravan

_a naks

_atra (the star Shravana)

indicates that there was ‘‘sr��mam_ta yoga’’ (material wealth) and in thepam_camasth �ana (fifth position), there was sukra (Venus) in the janma r �asi




(astrological sign during the birth). According to the horoscope, Mallya is wellpoised for a good future. The anchor appears ill equipped to reconcile the twocontrasting predictions and, luckily enough, it is time for him to announce thenext commercial break.

During the break, the anchor admits plainly that he has exhausted the ques-tions – fed by the back-end editorial team as well his own ingenious improviza-tions. For the first two segments, there were constant feeds from the back-endteam on the anchor’s ear phone, guiding him on the next moves and next lines ofinquiry to elicit sharp 1min responses. Left with no fresh angles to pursue, heturns to the astrologers to feed him with the questions. ‘‘What question shall Iask? Do you have anything particular to say?’’ Sharma suggests a question onMallya’s occupation. Shastri suggests a question on health. The anchor looksrelieved and tells both the astrologers that he would ask these questions sepa-rately, so that their responses to each question would occupy a large portion ofthe remaining time. He also offers a piece of advice: ‘‘Instead of giving detailsabout grahagati (planetary movements) and what is in this mane (celestial house)or that, just tell us straight on what his future is.’’ As the tense anchor continueshis preparation for the next segment, Shastri and Sharma discuss the amountneeded for As

_t_aman_gal

_a. Sharma says the minimum amount needed would be

80,000 rupees (1524 USD). I realize that a single ritual of As_t_aman_gal

_a, at the

very minimum, would cost more than the annual per capita income in India,which stood at US$1500 in 2011 (67,500 rupees). If the famed astrologer whomMallya consulted had to be invited, the cost would be as high as half a millionrupees (9524 USD), he adds. In awe of the astrologer’s reputation, he says toShastri, ‘‘He has four body guards. He has at least one and a half kgs[kilograms] of gold on his body.’’ As the astrologers assess their colleague’sworth, the anchor looks increasingly tensed, and he jots down the questionsfed by the astrologers on his notepad, perhaps calculating their potential runningtime.

The anchor’s anxious solicitation of questions from the panelists (rather thanthe other way round), the stylistic demands for one minute responses, and theeditorial team’s feeding of the questions reveal two important aspects of whatcould be defined as ‘‘fast time religion.’’ First, the mundane pressure of filling upnews time in the deregulated television news fields, and second, the competitionsof audience ratings and the narrative charts of highs and lows in viewershipnumbers which shape the back-end editorial team’s program plans andimprovisations.

The representational practices of television and their intersection with religionwere shaped deeply by audience ratings surveys, which promised to provide puta-tively scientific accounts of audience viewing habits and the daily charts of view-ership volumes for thousands of programs beamed on television. It converged with,and fed into, the mounting pressure on news organizations to adopt seemingly‘‘systematic, impersonal and reliable ways’’ of mapping the audiences in order to‘‘institutionalize their quest’’ to comprehend them (Gitlin, 1983: 31) and to

Udupa 405



facilitate experiments with the ‘‘right mix’’ of news stories in an increasingly com-petitive news market. While the small sample size and other discrepancies in thesurvey design of TAM Research, the monopoly ratings agency, came increasinglyunder criticism within the industry itself, the agency’s audience ratings neverthelessremained influential. The agency attached over one thousand ‘‘people’s meters’’ tothe television sets of audiences in the urban pockets of Karnataka, concentratedmostly in the capital city of Bangalore, to monitor what the audiences viewed everyday and for how long. Based on the data collected through a thousand monitoringdevices, the agency gave viewership details for a massive 13 million viewers, theestimated total viewership above the age of four for all television channels in theregion. The severely constrained surveys of the ratings agencies for the televisionsector took away the narratives about audiences from most journalists. Ratherthan hypothesizing on the likes and dislikes of the audiences, the conversationwas forged directly between the ratings charts (as personified audience) and thejournalists. Many journalists spoke to me about the programs solely in terms of theratings they had managed to earn. The content or style of the program was over-shadowed by the rating figure annexed with the title. The journalists would tryvarious combinations of program formulae in a trial-and-error manner, view theratings chart to check how they fared, and take a snap decision on whether tocontinue or abandon them. The ratings industry in the television obscured ratherthan incited reflection on audiences. Ironically, it became more journalist driven,but in a manner of appeasing the numbers on the ratings card, reminding the 18th-century tale of spectacular magic in India in which the pungi player skillfully raisedthe tone of his little wind instrument to pop up the rope from its coil and have itascend into the air like a cobra. The journalists were similar in their efforts touncoil and shoot into the air, the elusive rope of viewers’ ratings.

According to the leading television ratings agencies, religious programs inBangalore, and Kannada channels in general, enjoyed the highest viewership inthe country compared to similar religious programs in other regions within India.The highest ranking program in any news channel in the region was ‘‘H��g �u Unt

_e’’

(Is this possible?) – a weekly program on supernatural forces, ritual healing, occult,and witchcraft, which occupied the top slot with uninterrupted regularity since itsvery first show five years ago. Despite the contested status of audience ratingssurveys, survey-based knowledge offered by the ratings agencies fuelled news prac-tices that continually reproduced the assumption of insatiable appetite for religiouscontent among the local television audiences, primarily Kannada viewers. Theoverworked journalists found in the ratings chart an ‘‘accurate’’ reflection ofhow their programs fared, and religious programs including astrological predic-tions became an important theme in the success story.

Alongside survey rationality and ratings war, the anchor’s tense moments tobuild a list of questions draw attention to the mundane production pressure of‘‘filling up’’ the time in round-the-clock news channels. The temporally intensifiednews cycles demanded that the efforts to ‘‘feed the beast’’, as many journalistsbrusquely described, entailed ingenious and improvizational techniques of creating




content at reasonable costs. As opposed to long outdoor shoots or public discus-sions in open auditoriums which needed hired cameras, editing panels, and soundequipment, astrological discussions inside the in-house studio involved very littlecost for the 24/7 news channels. The senior editor of Suvarna News, expressedbluntly: ‘‘We give astrology not because it helps us to reap profits, but because itinvolves no cost. We just make an astrologer sit and talk, what cost does itinvolve?’’ The act of ‘‘filling up’’ time at reasonable costs thus intersected withratings economy, to invite, insert, and offer as news the varying forms of Hindureligiosity and ritual remedies.

The particular institutional history of the television sector is significant in thiscontext. The Indian state’s fragmented and largely piecemeal efforts to allowprivate television into the country led to a spurt in the unorganized cable net-works in the early 1990s, when hundreds of enterprising petty businessmenmounted dishes and laid cables in the local neighborhoods to downlink satellitefeed from the foreign channels and beam it into the neighborhood television sets,often below the radar of state regulation.8 As this nascent local industry struggledto stabilize its business, cable operators ran their own feed, first by playingpirated video of popular cinema in Hindi and the regional languages, and laterdiversifying their content to include low budget studio programs with anchorswho invited phone calls from the viewers to play lists of songs and clips frompopular cinema. Local advertisement scrolls provided the bulk of revenue for thecable operators in the beginning, alongside still montages of advertisements pro-duced on shoestring budgets by local traders who seized the opportunity of low-cost advertising on a lively medium. Business enterprises were not alone in dis-covering the promise of quick and affordable publicity. A diverse group of mediasavvy individuals, including local level political leaders, corporators (electedmembers for the city council), heads of private educational institutes, technologytrainers, and a sundry mix of healers, medical practitioners, private tutors, magi-cians, party organizers, entertainers, beauticians, cooks and food caterers, jostledto access the new avenue for public expression and advertisement. Hindu astrol-ogers and leaders of local Hindu temples did not fall behind. Astrologers wereamong the first to seek out the rapidly mushrooming cable networks, as theystruck deals with local cable operators to provide astrological predictions ontheir networks by buying 1 h slots for a sum ranging from 1000 rupees (US$20)to 5000 rupees (US$100). Such was the enthusiasm around these magic cablesthat astrologers competed to find a slot and did not hesitate to increase their feeto the cable operators since even a modest measure of publicity within a modestcircle of viewership held out the promise of new clientele, not to speak of bolster-ing the existing ones. A senior journalist narrated to me the case of a semiem-ployed astrologer who had approached him at a public park, pouring out his woesand hardships of living with a paltry income in the big city: ‘‘In the beginning, Iwas surprised. Why is this man sharing all his problems with me? But after awhile, he pleaded me, ‘Give me a program in your channel. My future will itselfchange’.’’ Such encounters between astrologers and journalists were at times

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mediated by their shared caste background, when Brahmin journalists ceded tothe requests of a fellow Brahmin. At his small office tucked away in a fadingbuilding along a narrow street of Malleswaram, one of the oldest localities inBangalore, Jagadish, the Vice President of Karnataka Cable TV Chamber ofCommerce, recalled the earliest years of cable operations in the region whenthe magic cables had stirred excitement among middle-class viewers and publicityseekers. Astrologers, he pointed out, provided the running capital to partlyrecover, the costs of daily operations.

The ‘‘success’’ of astrology-based programs and devotional songs featuringHindu deities and temples thus arose from the mundane needs of running thelocal cable networks – unexpected and largely unplanned entrants into the medialandscape – in their earliest years of slapdash expansion. For the commercial tele-vision channels and those controlled by politician-businessmen in the region,9

astrology and devotional programs provided one of the most economical meansof providing content, assuring reasonable viewership ratings.

In the Mallya discussion, the design was then less an indication of journalists’ready celebration of private wealth or Hindu religious practice, even less of Hindufanaticism, than their own everyday content pressure and recent market success inastrology-related programs reflected by a highly contested ratings survey. This fasttime religion – quick astrological predictions on personal lives, astrological com-mentaries on ‘‘current affairs’’ and capsules of ritual healing channeled throughweekly ratings charts and snap editorial decisions – was a sign and symptom of abroader ecology encasing the news industry, what Dominic Boyercaptivatingly summarizes as the condition of ‘‘the social phenomenology of fast-time practice’’:

. . . the sheer volume of information flows and the temporal intensification of evaluat-

ing and publicizing information . . . [have] significantly encroached upon personal and

organizational time set aside for critical reflection upon newsworthiness, for pursuing

ideas and projects that seem less temporally immediate . . . If not quite the instanta-

neity suggested by the popular label real-time, news journalism operates very much in

a ‘fast-time’ mode, often unwinding its crucial evaluative principles (principles such as

‘what is important for people to know’) into more individualized, intuitive, and

uncoordinated practices. (2010: 248)

It was in this nexus of circumstances – piecemeal deregulation of the televisionsector, the rise of fast-time news cycles, the grip of the numbers game, the unremit-ting pressure to fill up time at reasonable costs and journalists’ own uncritical, ifunavoidable, embrace of ratings charts as the final verdict on their labor – thatHindu religiosity emerged as an important theme for the news channels. Seated onhis black swivel chair, and never once turning his glance away from the sevenmonitors mounted on the wall before him to keep a close watch on all the newschannels of the region beaming on them, the editor of Suvarna News, a Kannada




news channel, revealed:

We are connecting anything and everything to religion. This is because people watch

it. This is the only safe bet today. The moment you take something as ‘Dharma’, the

[viewer] numbers are assured. We say the Times of India has Page 3 from page 1 to

page 12. In our case, it is Dharma.

The editor, who had just shifted from a newspaper to head a television channel,spoke about the pace of newsmaking for round-the-clock news television which wasfar more accelerated compared to the rhythms of print news production. However,his reference points were still drawn from the print media, suggesting the blurredboundaries and shared tropes between print and television news production. Hisexplicit reference to Page 3 journalism was telling. For the Times of India, the largestcirculated English newspaper in India, which spearheaded the changes in the newsmedia in the liberalization decades and aligned the news field firmly with marketinterests, Page 3 connoted a combination of celebrity journalism and entertainmentnews, aimed at generating a ‘‘positive feel’’ among the readers by celebrating perso-nal wealth, bodily decor, and consumption; and recasting them as legitimate popularaspiration. the Times of India brought significant changes in its editorial policy andintroduced freshly minted lists of news themes, much in anticipation of a threat fromthe burgeoning television sector.The nascent television industry on the other handexchanged news tropes and frames with proven market success with its print counter-part. The interorganizational field of news ensured a crossover of genres, tropes, andframes, often blurring their origins and contexts. Two frames stood out significantamong them: speculative news and personalization of news. These frames, I suggest,provided the conditions for Hindu religious content to thrive and multiply in aneconomy of ratings and fast-time news, signaling a conjuncture of new temporalitiesof news and the liberalizing economy.

Connecting with readers: Speculation and risk

The panel discussion has picked up the pace, inching closer to the final segment.The anchor asks astrologer Sharma if Mallya’s future is indeed in trouble. Sharmais emphatic:

Mallya’s Sanidese (the rule of Saturn) will continue till 2020. When there is Sanidese, it

means that the person topples down from the peak of fame and wealth. Richard

Nixon was at the peak of his career when Watergate broke out and he came tumbling

down. Sani can push even the most virtuous and powerful into a spell of depression.

The anchor appears delighted about the reference to a well-known global figure.‘‘I can say with authority that there is trouble,’’ continues Sharma, ‘‘Mallya will getsome harm from his son, but there are simple solutions like chanting Mrityunjaya

Udupa 409



mantra [Vedic chants] or Navagraha S �anti [ritual appeasement of the nine planetarysystems].’’ The anchor looks satisfied. An expert glance into the future iscomplete with the prescriptions for ritual remedy. What lies ahead for Mallyabecomes news.

If the ideological foundations underlying news as a social and cultural construc-tion allude to their origins in Western modernity despite substantial variationsacross the world, the current transformations confirm a definitive shift in thecultural vocabulary and professional ethos of news. Lurking behind the formula-tion of news for the public was the idea of progress, most clearly expressed in thetemporal constitution of news which ‘‘promotes an emphasis on and a positivevaluation of the new. . .and encourages a progressive rather than cyclical orrecursive sense of time’’ (Anderson, 1991; Schudson, 2003: 12). On this count,journalism was conjoined with the interlinked notions of modernity and progress,to emerge as, in John Hartley’s words, ‘‘the sense-making practice of modernity’’(1996: 32), which historically evolved with the growth of modern knowledge crea-tion in the West.

By the turn of the millennium, the positive evaluation of the new had becomeentrenched with speculative frames which sliced, diced, and chopped future timesto render them useful, manageable, and monetizable for middle-class audienceswith reasonable access to financial and consumer markets. News embodiedthe broader shift when ‘‘modern finance. . .acquired the reputation of economicnecessity and scientific respectability when less than two centuries ago it stoodcondemned as irreputable gambling and fraud’’ (De Goede, 2005). Media werecentral in popularizing modern finance and speculations, and legitimating themas a rational mode of planning personal life. As Gordon Clark et al. rightly argue,finance became a media event – ‘‘a never-ending series of daily stories’’ handed outby the pink pages of broadsheets, television, and real-time online media (2004:290). The changes were striking in the US news market: a steep rise in the spec-ulative news stories advising, guiding, cautioning, and forbidding viewers from avariety of middle to low range investment options cemented an emergent form of‘‘speculative news frame’’ (Chakravartty and Schiller, 2010). This was evident whenthe US network news television doubled the time for stock market coverage(Miller, 2010). These frames legitimated the discourse which asked ‘‘people fromall walks of life to accept risks into their homes that were hitherto the province ofprofessionals’’ (Martin, 2002: 12).

The reconfiguration of risk constitutes a distinct temporality, as Jane Guyer(2007) discusses in her illuminating essay on the consonance of the temporalframes of ‘‘monetarism’’ of late capitalism with Christian evangelical time.According to Guyer, the shift in the temporal framing in late capitalism ‘‘hasinvolved a double move, toward both very short and very long sightedness, witha symmetrical evacuation of the near past and the near future’’ (410). Whilethe very short temporal focus is captured in the widely influential argument ontime–space compression by David Harvey (1990) and ‘‘non-temporal pattern ofimmediacies’’ leading to ‘‘the reduction to the present’’ in postmodern theory




(Jameson, 2002: 17), Guyer notes that monetarism in the neoliberal era has led tointensified efforts to remove the independent influence of currency value fluctua-tions on economic growth by state regulation of currency printing in the present, toensure complete creativity of markets in the interim (with all the errors and correc-tions), in anticipation of the ‘‘long-term’’ effects of economic progress. Thisneoliberal logic of linking microeconomy to long-term growth is consonant withevangelical Christian temporalities of prophetism and ‘‘expectant waiting’’ in theongoing present – the here and now which has no definitive length and ‘‘no neces-sary end in sight,’’ as opposed to definite lengths of other dispensational agesbetween the first and the second comings of the Messiah. In macroeconomics, asimilar evacuation of near future has replaced phased planning for near future (e.g.five-year plans) with event-related punctuation (debt payments, audits, contracts,and hope in religious practices). Clarifying that the near future is not evacuatedbut seeped by ‘‘speculation’’ by the very mechanisms of late capitalism, JonathanFriedman (2007) qualifies in a succeeding commentary that speculation and deri-vatives, especially financial speculation, have gained salience as part of the recur-ring and cyclical phenomenon of capital (2007: 427). This however does not takeway Guyer’s key argument that

. . . there is a historical specificity to uncertainty now. It is an emerging

chronotope . . . honed into technologies that can deliberately unsettle and create arbit-

rage opportunities and gridlocks as well as logistical feats of extraordinary precision

and power. This particular near future, unhitched ideologically from the present

and the distant future, becomes a regime (or series of regimes) in its own right.

(2007: 418)

In the liberalizing milieu of India, the broader temporalities of macroeconomy andits infusion of arbitrages in the near future left their definitive effects on newsmedia, evident in the temporal framing of news as risk, remedy, and speculation.With stock markets and various financial instruments expanding their presence inIndia and reaching the daily budgets of a growing class of middle income groups inthe cities, an emergent genre of financial news gained momentum in print as well astelevision, often refashioning money as ‘‘the pleasure of finance’’ (Martin, 2002: 2).Coinciding with prominent news companies’ foray into the financial markets, therewas greater financialization of the news industry – ‘‘a process whereby financialmarkets and financial institutions gain greater influence in the operation of acompany’’ (Parthasarathi, 2011: 32). Capital structure of large television newschannels reflected this process, just as the news frames they adopted to normalizediscussions around stock markets and a range of financial instruments.

If the specialized business news media continued to target ‘‘high net worth’’ classgroups through various programs for monetary investments, real estate, and spec-ulative budgeting, the effects spilled over into a burgeoning television sector inregional languages catering to a multifarious mix of audiences including theworking class, just when diverse financial instruments entered the liberalized

Udupa 411



Indian market and millions of middle-class households. Mega financial schemes ofmultinational companies riding on mass media advertising competed with the olderfields of gray finance, where trust and familiarity along caste and communityloyalties bred numerous financial schemes with promised high returns, alongsidestate-backed cooperative banking writ in the socialist ethos. Within all-news regio-nal television channels, the speculative news frame underlying a boom in the newsprograms on stock market fluctuations, retail investment options, mutual funds,pension plans, insurance schemes, chit funds, and a range of financial instruments,including several ‘‘Ponzi schemes’’ (Dalal, 2012), often yoked together astrologicalpredictions with ‘‘money talk,’’. This led to hybrid forms of religion–market dis-cussions such as ‘‘Has

_a Bhavis

_ya’’ (predictions for money) and news programs that

combined astrology and ritual remedies with business upsets – as the panel discus-sion on Mallya held evidence.

Many programs with a ‘‘religious angle,’’ especially Hindu astrology, were castin a speculative news frame articulating anxieties of future and remedies for the life-course issues of audiences reimagined as ‘‘individuals’’ who sought ‘‘utility value’’in news rather than circumscribed narratives about a shared world of publicdiscourse, now viewed as distant and removed from the immediate concerns ofindividual viewers. Pointing to this related process of personalization of news,Swamy, news editor of a Kannada channel, described: ‘‘We have begun to usenews in a way that it is transformed from those concerning ‘ours’ to those thatconcern ‘mine’.’’

Toying with varying possibilities of the future, speculative news frame articulatedanxiety and recommended healing, mostly at individualized levels, by drawing indi-vidual viewers into the circuits of news production and inviting them to share theirproblems on money, marriage, and other personal problems (Udupa, 2017). A con-tent analysis of 38 episodes of astrological programs across four Kannada televisionnews channels (Public TV, Samaya News, Kasturi News, and Suvarna News) in AprilandMay 2012 revealed that all the questions from the audiences to astrologers relatedto the near future personal events of marriage, job, new business plans and savings,and the solutions offered by the astrologers were largely temple visits remedial p �uje,and chanting Vedic hymns and devotional verses for the Hindu deities, as well asmoral prescriptions on donations to the underprivileged or reducing individual ego.The producer of a successful program on the paranormal in a leading Kannada newschannel piquantly summarized what he called the ‘‘formula’’:

There is a formula of five problems: adultery, suspicion of illicit relationship and

alcohol which destroys families, son not studying well or not finding a job, or daugh-

ter not getting married, psychological distress needing quick relief, and wealth, to

become rich. These are the five problems. We call it the news peg. There is a place

near Bangalore where they sacrifice hens to punish alcoholic husbands, to get the

daughters married and so on. As news channels, we take this as our first support

and develop the story. If we give the reality, and explain Newton’s fifth law or what-

ever, people do not watch it.




Speculative news thus manifested as secular frames of speculation about financeand equally easily morphed into what journalists understood as religious frames ofritual healing and astrological predictions, both drawing on the same narrativedevices of fear, speculation, anxiety, risk and reader-connectivity, and imaginationsof audiences as risk-bearing individuals. In large part, it reinforced the ‘‘funda-mental morality of investments’’ (De Goede, 2010: 1), whether financial or religiousritual. It reflected the complex forms of ‘‘reenchanted capitalism’’ of the last dec-ades of the 20th century – derivatives and a variety of financial instruments – whichare defined by the norms and practices resembling ‘‘the sequences of metonymand metaphor identified by Evans-Pritchard as primary properties of magicalpractices’’ (Vander Veer, 2012: 185). Although precariousness has been a normthan an exception in the Indian case (Cross, 2010), the shifts in the liberalizationdecades were evident in the growing legitimization and institutionalization ofprecariousness in labor and everyday life. These were, as we saw, increasinglymediated by the practices of televised religion.

The effect was palpable. The city was suffused with announcements on ritualhealing at local temples, often telecast live by the television channels. Politiciansinvoked astrological predictions and ritual remedies in full public view, so muchthat the head of the ruling government and the opposition party leader, in 2011,decided to settle their fight over corruption charges not inside the Legislative Housebut at a Hindu temple in a popular pilgrim center by taking oath in the name ofGod before the media. Politicians often refused to occupy offices in theState Legislative House in Bangalore, complaining of defects in v �astu, theHindu architectural practice that prescribes accurate design to maximize the ben-efits of natural resources (sun shine and wind) and divine forces. New networksof religious healers sprung up, and retail stationery stores were ready withritual materials to sell as ‘‘packets,’’ based on what the major astrologers of thetelevision channels had prescribed on their daily show. These mediations reinforcedHindi-Vedic orthodoxy in political cultures, but by 2013, the sheer spurt ofBrahmin astrological practices and commercial networks of ritual healingprompted the left-leaning socialist political leader who headed the regional stateto draft an antisuperstition bill proposing to ban all Vedic rituals inside govern-ment offices and an agenda to actively discourage people from seeking ritual reme-dies.10 The bill voiced the concerns of a growing number of activist groups andpublic intellectuals chiding the commercial media’s easy alliance, if not willingconnivance, with Brahmin orthodox religious practitioners. These voices remainedas an important oppositional discourse to mediated religiosities. Some of thesevoices were actively relayed by the television news channels themselves (sometimesin two different slots of ‘‘scientific’’ and ‘‘astrology’’ programs within the samechannel), signaling an ambivalent, yet widespread embrace of ritual-remedial prac-tices channeled through ratings rationality and speculative temporality. Togetherwith criticisms, jokes about astrologers and rituals circulated even among theaudiences. However the broader mediated milieu defined by the economy of riskand the very provision of ritual remedy in accessible forms cocreated a largely

Udupa 413



inescapable trap of performance and the notion of religion as ritual remedies tonegotiate uncertainties.

Conclusions: Religion and precarity

This article has argued that the temporalities of speculation and fast-time news cyclesof private news media inflect magic and religion in specific ways, for example,investing risk and speculation, and ideas relating to finance capital more generally,with astrological calculations, and with Sanskrit incantation and ritual. This mightdraw attention to some of the earlier Indological studies and their arguments that thecategory of religion for Hindu practices is untenable, and that, following the Kantianposition, to the extent that bargaining with the gods (I give you x if you give me y)dominated over ethical principles (I will do x regardless of the consequences, becauseit is right to do so), Hindus formed a series of cults rather than a religion likeChristianity11. Although the combination of mass media growth, competitivemarket pressure to gain audiences, and insecurity in the liberalizing years appearto together erode the more ethical dimensions of religious practice, the key shift liesnot as much in the orientalist views of Hinduism as magical propitiation and culticpractice, but rather in how it redirects divine authority onto individual lives andprivatized risk domains through a combination of magic and morality. This narra-tive binds moral practices with divine bargains, often viewed as powerful interven-tions in the karmic time mediated by specialist ritual healers. As with Sharma’sadmonishment of Mallya’s personal habits – alcohol consumption, lasciviousness,and proclivity for bahustr�� sukha (pleasure with multiple women) – and the cautionthat the ritual would pay no benefits if he does not observe these moral standards,astrologers and ritual healers relentlessly exhorted their audiences, mostly womenaudiences, to undertake fasting, chant mantras, bathe, observe periods of ritualsilence or organize ritual gatherings, perform pujas strictly with the prescribedritual paraphernalia, and a range of proscriptions on food, dress, and decorum.These practices signal ‘‘incorporation of religious regimes of discipline, virtuousconduct or ecstatic performance in embodied everyday life contexts, and in thecultivation of self’’ (Stolow,2005: 125).

Does this preponderance of Hindu ritual practices and images in the mass mediaand their reach over everyday disciplines suggest a fertile symbolic ground forHindu nationalism? Scholars have noted the political efficacy of mass circulationof religious imagery for Hindu fundamentalism, especially through the years of thestate-run television’s monopoly and the visual-temporal field of meanings instan-tiated by the telecast of Ramayana, the mythological teleserial (Rajagopal, 2001).In contrast to the visual field of Ramayana teleserial and the regime of the visualcreated by the state-led television, religious programs on private television channelsimagine audiences as individuals of extraordinary merit or ‘‘common people,’’beset by uncertainties and risks in their life course, but ‘‘loaded’’ with a range ofsolutions in miracle, rituals, or this-worldly bodily (and financial) discipline –loaded in the double sense of burden and abundance.




The implications of the current boom in religious content in the news channelsmight lie precisely in its fragmented and individualized nature, and in the‘‘precariousness of sacred aura’’ (Stolow, 2005: 129), since news channels con-tinue to reinvent ‘‘religious formula’’ through snap market decisions, allowingcertain modes of articulation and religious expression to thrive for as long as theratings charts appear encouraging. It could be argued that this ‘‘precarious mediareligion’’ installs a regime of everyday Hinduism– making Vedic (Brahminical)rituals a common sense practice of everyday living and political cultures, but inso doing, it respatializes Hinduism in local and everyday contexts, further fromthe realm of the nation-state. I suggest that the relation between the imagining ofa Hindu self, national community, and political action through mass media ismediated by new registers of the religious as healing, self-discipline, and avertingrisk to personal well-being. This does not suggest that Hindutva mobilization ona national scale is a thing of the past – it is, to the contrary, a deeply contestedyet deepening political ideology. The cultural repertoire of ‘‘Hindu nation’’ how-ever is increasingly overlaid by diverse media narratives that enlist Hinduism asresources to speculate and manage the vicissitudes of everyday living, even asthese narratives emerge from the quotidian strategies of news makers to negotiatethe precarity of everyday news cycles. Religious enterprise, economic mediation,and the fast-cycles of news creativity have thus combined to normalize newanxieties for personal futures and Hindu ritual orthodoxy that promises aremedy.

Acknowledgement

A version of this paper was presented at the Grasse Museum and Institute for Ethnology,

University of Leipzig, in 2013. I thank Ursula Rao, the organizer of the event, for her veryhelpful comments as well as the anonymous reviewers of this paper. I thank journalists at thetelevision channels for their time and insights.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-

ship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication

of this article.

Notes

1. According to industry estimates, the size of the television sector in India was close to

seven billion USD in 2011. http://www.deloitte.com/assets/dcom-india/local%20assets/documents/me%20-%20whitepaper%20for%20assocham.pdf (accessed on 2 October2013).

2. I refer here only to Anderson’s emphasis on mass mediation in defining temporalities tobe of national belonging, and not to his claims on homogenous empty time which heargues the quintessence of national temporality.

Udupa 415



3. I understand them in relation to the Durkheimian notion of time as constituting sub-stantive cultural categories as well as a process unfolding in activities refracted throughcultural and religious concepts of time (Durkheim, 1976).

4. In forwarding this analysis, I rely on the rich scholarship on media and religion whichincreasingly recognizes religion as a ‘‘practice of mediation’’ shaped by particular social-cultural contexts (De Vries, 2008; Meyer, 2006). Such a formulation stands in stark

contrast to assumptions of religion as embodying a transhistorical essence or unchan-ging belief. This approach also allows us to move beyond the integuments of orientalistscholarship which sees the East, especially India, as always spiritual, mystical, and

undeniably religious, to instead understand mediated religiosities as part of the broaderwave of globalization that has transformed cities and media cultures around the world.

5. All names are changed to protect confidentiality.6. These channels, however, never failed to feature religious festivals of all major religious

groups in the region as news events.7. I capture these shifts in the post reforms years with the framework of ‘bhasha media’

which signals the overlaps and divergences between English and regional langauge

media that cannot be mapped on to distinct publics. (Udupa, 2015).8. Cable operators sprang into action at about the same time as large multinational cor-

porations eyed India as a new market. Taking advantage of new communication tech-

nologies and ambiguities in regulation, private broadcasters began to beam programsinto India as early as 1991.

9. Of the seven Kannada news channels in Karnataka, the largest viewed channel, TV9,was owned by a domestic company backed with US global venture capital. Four news

channels (Janashree, Suvarna News, Samaya News, and Kasturi News) were directlyunder the control of prominent politician-businessmen in the region.

10. The regional government of Karnataka drafted a bill, The Karnataka Prevention of

Superstitious Practices Bill, 2013, which proposed to list 13 rituals, including blackmagic and circumambulation of temples in naked as criminal offences, and penalizebroadcasting of ‘‘superstitious practices.’’ The bill also proposed to set up a new state

regulatory authority to prevent ‘‘superstition.’’ The bill defined ‘‘superstition’’ as gravephysical or mental harm, financial or sexual exploitation or practices which offendhuman dignity (Kumar, 2013).

11. I thank the anonymous reviewer of the article for drawing attention to this importantpoint.

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Author Biography

Sahana Udupa is associate professor of Journalism and Media studies at the Schoolof Public Policy, Central European University, and senior research partner at theMax Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany.




Fast Time Religion: News, Speculation and Risk in India

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