Refashioning India: Gender, Media and a transformed public discourse, Maitrayee Chaudhuri, Orient Black Swan; Rs.895; Pages 344 In October 2018, a couple of weeks after the #MeToo Movement hit Indian social media and made its way into mainstream print and broadcast media, a young journalist called this reviewer to ask: ‘How did things come to such a pass in Indian media, where sexual harassment charges against senior editors were an open secret, and where silence meant complicity? Was the Indian media always so compromised?’ In an elliptical manner, some answers to this urgent question can be found in Maitrayee Chaudhuri’s Refashioning India – an exhaustive analysis of the transition of Indian media from its commitment to social responsibility to a market-driven model in neo-liberal India. Reciting the manner in which the media has actively participated in the creation of a changed gendered identity, she links this makeover to the celebration of consumerism and individualism which is spawning a new nationalism. Chaudhuri’s Refashioning India examines these crucial issues through the lens of gender as she recounts the way public discourse shifted from the ideals of sacrifice and the greater common good, pluralism and diversity in a newly independent nation to the celebration of individualistic aspirations heavily shaped by advertising. The discourse segues into aggressive nationalism with the rise of the BJP and the ideological turn towards Hindutva, aided by a transformed media that is both pliant and actively participant. In the Introductory chapter written in 1995, Chaudhuri provides a fascinating account of the early critical decades of the nation-building project through the National Planning Committee (NPC) set up in 1938. She analyses the work of the ‘Women’s Role in Planned Economy (WRPE) Sub-Committee’ and traces its terms of reference from, among others, an examination of women in the family, in employment and “social conditions that preclude women from taking her full share in a planned economy”. But even as it acknowledges the role of the woman as a ‘productive worker’, WRPE clearly asserted the importance of private property and accords women the position of repository of culture and tradition. Post-liberalisation India underwent a marked change and the author devotes a major portion of her analysis to the role played by advertising in catalysing this change. She draws upon numerous instances of advertisements that signal the shift towards unprecedented individual freedom and choice, and the increasing privatisation of the economy as well as of the media. Advertising that extolls the arrival of the globalised Indian woman and man, the comments of former Times of India CEO, Bhaskar Das, describing readers primarily as targets of advertisers, the near total dependence of the media on advertising revenue — all of these add up to the vast changes in print media and its objectives. This also fed into a new brand of corporatised and market-friendly feminism, most evident in print media of the mid and late 1990s, with its extensive focus on the ‘New Woman’: beauty contests, lifestyle, coverage of celebrities and a near total…
