Fast time religion: News, speculation, and discipline in India

Udupa, Sahana (2016): Fast time religion: News, speculation, and discipline in India. In: Critique of Anthropology, Vol. 36, No. 4: pp. 397-418

Abstract

In this article, I take the expanding religious programs on private news television in India, and Bangalore city in particular, as a lens to explore new intersections between media and Hindu religiosities, and the conditions that facilitate synergies between religious enterprise, media creativity, and economic mediation in a liberalizing era. I suggest that a new confluence of temporalities underlies this synergy. As the linear progressive narrative of news discourse gives way for speculative temporalities and fast-time cycles, the liberalizing economies and Hindu astrological predictions combine to articulate anxieties for future that animate an uncertain present. In such a milieu, the rapidly expanding commercial news media revive the orthodox Brahminical traditions of ritual healing, although not without contestations. These mediatized religiosities, I argue, overlay the Hindu nationalist project with notions of Hinduism as resources to resolve life-course issues of individual viewers – a discourse removed further afar from the realm of the nation-state.

• Item Type: Journal article
• Faculties: Cultural Studies > Department of Ancient and Modern Cultures > Ethnology
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• ISSN: 0308-275X
• Language: English