Contested Religion, Media, and Culture in India

This paper deals with the contested nature of religion, media, and culture in India. Beginning with an analysis of structural functionalist accounts of an unchanging and essentialised Hindu culture, it explores a key rupture-- the cultural politics of the anti-Brahmin movements in Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu. Turning to accounts of mediated Hindu nationalism, which have provided the bulk of writings on contested religion in India, it argues that the lack of a comparative literature on mediations in minority religions remains a major gap. It concludes with an assessment of new writings on the contested nature of media, religion, and culture in relation to Islam and Christianity in India.