Reinventing ‘Many Voices’: MacBride and a Digital New World Information and Communication Order

The MacBride Commission Report was arguably one of the most significant multilateral interventions in the history of international communication. This article charts its emergence at the time of deeply contested Cold War politics, coinciding with the rise of the southern voices in the global arena, led by the non-aligned nations. Thirty-five years after the report's publication, has the global media evolved into a more democratic system, demonstrating greater diversity of views and viewpoints? Despite the still formidable power of US-led western media, the article suggests that the globalisation and digitisation of communication has contributed to a multi-layered and more complex global media scene, demonstrating the “rise of the rest”

"The fruits of independence": Satyajit Ray, Indian nationhood and the spectre of empire

Challenging the longstanding consensus that Satyajit Ray's work is largely free of ideological concerns and notable only for its humanistic richness, this article shows with reference to representations of British colonialism and Indian nationhood that Ray's films and stories are marked deeply and consistently by a distinctively Bengali variety of liberalism. Drawn from an ongoing biographical project, it commences with an overview of the nationalist milieu in which Ray grew up and emphasizes the preoccupation with colonialism and nationalism that marked his earliest unfilmed scripts. It then shows with case studies of Kanchanjangha (1962), Charulata (1964), First Class Kamra (First-Class Compartment, 1981), Pratidwandi (The Adversary, 1970), Shatranj ke Khilari (The Chess Players, 1977), Agantuk (The Stranger, 1991) and Robertsoner Ruby (Robertson's Ruby, 1992) how Ray's mature work continued to combine a strongly anti-colonial viewpoint with a shifting perspective on Indian nationhood and an unequivocal commitment to cultural cosmopolitanism. Analysing how Ray articulated his ideological positions through the quintessentially liberal device of complexly staged debates that were apparently free, but in fact closed by the scenarist/director on ideologically specific notes, this article concludes that Ray's reputation as an all-forgiving, ‘everybody-has-his-reasons’ humanist is based on simplistic or even tendentious readings of his work

Mobilizing Pakistani heritage, approaching marriage

This paper examines the ongoing significance of Pakistani heritage in the lives of young British Pakistani Muslims. Drawing upon interviews with 56 women and men, it explores the link between Pakistani heritage and young peoples’ lives, focusing upon marriage. Pakistani heritage is widely regarded as a constraint and an anachronism, which young people are jettisoning in favour of religious or secular identities: as Muslims, British, or both. This is a half-truth, at most. Some young people are turning away from Pakistaniness, but others are embracing and exploring versions and elements of this heritage as they make decisions about whether, when and whom to marry. Whether they are rejecting or embracing Pakistani heritage, young people are actively mobilizing the terms “Pakistan” and “Pakistani” as springboards from which to identify and make life choices. They are exploring possibilities rather than acknowledging inevitabilities, and approaching heritage as a resource rather than a constraint

Plurality, Identity, Democracy, Globalization... A conversation with Sunil Khilnani

abstract Rossella Ciocca interviews Sunil Khilnani author of the much appraised The Idea of India: one of the best non-fictional introductions to the complexities of politics in contemporary India. The strengths and weaknesses of present-day uneven modernity are discussed around a few strategic topics. First of all plurality, which in its linguistic, cultural, religious, ethnic variety has been vindicated since Independence as a foundational value, is seen as the quintessential resource for achosen practice of syncretism but also in danger of becoming the very source of fragmentation and implosion in a country increasingly maimed by fundamentalism and fanaticism. Democracy is then interrogated between the comfortable perspective of the firmly established and normally operating mechanisms of democratic routine, on the one hand, and the flawsof a still dramatically unjust system of distribution of rights and opportunities, on the other. Identity politics is in turn analysed both in its positive action of mobilizing society around the problem of social upgrading and in its unwelcome side effects of increasing practices of rigid and restricted classification fomenting division and violent sectarianism. In the end Indian growing cultural appeal upon the globalized scene is questioned in its complex relationship with the country’s quest for a role of protagonist in political as well as economic affairs upon a new multilateral international stage