Surge Protectors: Cultural Regulation in Contemporary India

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This project revises the way we think about censorship as a form of cultural regulation in two ways: first, by analyzing formal (state-sanctioned) censorship practices alongside and in relation to informal (spontaneous, activist and/or violent) modes of public cultural regulation; second, by exploring the relation between censorship and cultural globalization in the world's largest democracy, India. Ethnographically, the study focuses on contemporary struggles over "obscene" images and texts in the mass media. But in so doing, it also calls into question the implications of applying legal norms and definitions established under British colonial rule to a postcolonial context characterized not only by democratic political institutions but also by major new transnational media networks. Previous studies of censorship, particularly in the so-called developing world, have understood censorship primarily as the silencing or blocking action of states, and have reduced the social field of censorship practices to struggles between "modern" and "traditional" agendas. This study, in contrast, starts from the proposition that such interpretive models cannot make sense of the cultural and political implications of regulating the media in contemporary non-Western societies. Through archival research and in-depth interviews with activists, cultural producers and government officials in India, the study explores the hypothesis that censorship is not primarily about blocking information flows per se but rather about contesting acceptable boundaries of class, caste, religion and citizenship by managing the public circulation of affect-intensive images and texts. This work is urgent and timely because it offers a detailed and rigorous examination of problems that are today of crucial interest to social scientists and policy makers alike: the compatibility of media censorship and democracy, the relationship between the consumption of media content and participation in civic life, the tension between the national political citizenship and participation in globalizing consumer markets, and the volatile public life of visual images, not least in contexts of widespread illiteracy.