Media Research Beyond Bollywood. Some Thoughts on a Systematic Media Perspective in India-related Research

Abstract

Recently, academia has discovered Bollywood and made it into a favourite new topic. Generally speaking, this is a very welcome development. Yet how do things stand with regard to research on all the other ‘old’ and ‘new’ media? These have experienced such an extraordinary boom in India in  recent years that media development itself can be viewed as a crucial driving force of the new Indian “economic miracle”. An enormous rift reveals itself, when one considers how little has been published hitherto about the country’s press, for example, which continues to flourish in all languages spoken in India, or about the radio, over which the state recently relaxed its control. Also, how sensible is it for media-related research to continue to focus largely on individual media, given today’s increasing media convergence and cross-media communication? And finally, what is the social science stance as regards processes of social change that are closely linked with the accelerated increase of mediated communication, a new field of research which has rapidly gained acceptance within the framework of media and communication studies? These are the three questions addressed in this article.