Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site crystal.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!godot!harvard!seismo!uwvax!crystal!ravi
From: ravi@crystal.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang.india
Subject: Re: India and the Media
Message-ID: <406@crystal.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 3-Mar-85 16:16:04 EST
Article-I.D.: crystal.406
Posted: Sun Mar  3 16:16:04 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 7-Mar-85 05:33:04 EST
References: <2440@hplabsc.UUCP>
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 65

> India as a country does not figure too prominently in the news
> media in the United States, but when it does, it is more often
> depicted as a poor, hot, overcrowded, undernourished, ex-British
> colony, rather than the new, emerging nation that it is.  Few of
> my American-born friends are free from the stereotype of India 
> that the media cultivates.  One of the new issues of Newsweek
> has an essay about the "Jewel in the Crown" series and the state
> of the country it is set in.  The thesis of the article seems to
> be that India is in very poor shape, and that the Indians have
> no one but themselves to blame.
> 
> As someone who was born in independent India, I find stories
> about the Raj quite boring.  To look at present day
> India through the eyes of an ex-Indian army Englishman, who is 
> really critiquing a series based on books written many years ago
> about Britishers who have left, is not really to look at India.
> While everything the media reports is mostly true, it is only
> half of the truth that is India.  India today grows enough grain
> to feed itself.  It will soon be self-sufficient in petroleum
> (it actually exports crude today, since its own refineries don't
> have the capacity!).  And its democracy, young as it is, has 
> taken a firm hold, as was obvious during the recent general 
> elections, in a continent where totalitarian regimes are
> the rule.

I, for one, couldn't agree more.  The "Jewel in the Crown" does not even 
offer insights into the India of the forties, let alone the India of the
eighties.  But I really don't think it really was intended to provide any
insights into India at all.  It is (at least so far) an inane, pointless
soap about the lifestyles of a bunch of confused colonials.  For Englishmen,
it may be a retrospect, a half-look backwards at what they were like, and
what they did, and perhaps even how they lost the empire.  In some subliminal
way, perhaps, even a re-living of some of those times, a prolonged breath of 
nostalgia.  The myths do endure, it would seem.  I think they realize that as 
a nation, they never really understood India; perhaps to some of them at 
least, the characters may now seem as quaint and out-of-place as they seem
to us Indians born after independence.

I don't think the "Jewel in the Crown" can really mean anything to anybody
who is not British.  Americans who form impressions of India from the
series will be even farther removed from the India of today than the characters
in the series were from the India of their time.  If Americans try to form
impressions of the British, their impressions will be way off; never having
been a colony (I know about George Washington, but they are kidding if they
really say they were ever a "colony"), they have no way of taking into account
the psychology of colonial rule, let alone the peculiarities of the Raj or the
complexities of the relationship between Indians and the British.  To Indians,
a detailed account of how the British thought and lived in the forties means
a shrug of the shoulders.  To everyone except the British, it is a soap about 
confused colonials, and little more.

I saw the report in Newsweek too.  The problem with American journalists is
that they do that to everyone except Americans:  They, like the characters
in the "Jewel in the Crown", live in a world they don't really understand.
And like the characters in the series, they don't think they need to take 
the trouble to understand.  Like British colonials, they make periodic forays
into the alien world, and then return into the only environment they really 
comprehend (usually none the wiser for the experience), to bring back with 
them strange stuffed creatures and mythology.

There is an article in the latest Harper's by a Sovietologist who has a similar 
complaint about the reporting in this country about Russia.  Besides the fact
that the media tends to tow the government line, he says, the real problem is
that journalists in this country are too lazy to read enough to find out the
truth.  I think he has point there.