Papers by Arvind Rajagopal
tasveerghar, 2009
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How Film Histories Were Made, 2023
In this paper, I argue that a deeply influential turn in Indian history was signaled and influenc... more In this paper, I argue that a deeply influential turn in Indian history was signaled and influenced by a series of videos circulated by Hindu nationalists in the late 1980s. This turn in Indian history helped prepare the political sphere for its rejection of secularism, and for the onset of more exclusionary forms of nationalism. These videos conveyed a largely fictious history in the style of a factual film, with soundtrack and voiceover mimicking newsreel or documentary footage. Rather than treat this cinematic detour as irrelevant or epiphenomenal, as the prevailing scholarly division of labor has assumed, this paper seeks to outline a series of mediatic forms that accompany the ascendance of Hindu nationalism, and to clarify the mechanism of their succession.
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in Bhaswati Bhattacharya and Henrike Donner (eds). Globalising Everyday Consumption in India: History and Ethnography. Routledge, 2020
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in Clifford Siskin and William Warner eds. This is Enlightenment, 2010
In this paper I draw attention to the category of communication as a means of highlighting the li... more In this paper I draw attention to the category of communication as a means of highlighting the limits of the state's pedagogical efforts, and of illuminating the transition from state-led developmentalism
to market-centered economic growth. As an activity apparently conceived as external to the developmental process and to the work of planners, communication enables a symptomatic reading of the state's
consensus-formation practices and illuminates shifts across changing
political configurations.
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Global Bollywood ed. Anandam Kavoori and Aswin Punathambekar, NYU Press, 2008, pp 300-306., 2008
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Civic Sociology
Comment on Matteo Bortolini’s A Joyfully Serious Man: The Life of Robert Bellah
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Civic Sociology, 2022
An essay on a leading sociologist and area studies scholar of the postwar period, asking what his... more An essay on a leading sociologist and area studies scholar of the postwar period, asking what his success can tell us about the broader contours of social science in the Cold War era. This essay is part of a special issue on Matteo Bortolini's intellectual biography of Robert Bellah
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Public Culture, 2020
Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American l... more Werner Sollors is one of the first scholars of American literature to focus on African American literature before it was thought to constitute a canon in the academy. Unlike many other scholars who shared his focus, he completed his education in postwar Germany. The title of his doctoral dissertation on LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), completed at the Free University of Berlin in 1975, has a still-contemporary ring: “The Quest for a ‘Populist Modernism.’” He taught at Columbia University, received a Guggenheim fellowship, and spent the bulk of his career in the United States. In this interview he discusses his intellectual formation and offers reflections on the development of his field, the evolving institutional culture of the university, and 1970s-era multiculturalism.
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South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2016
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Motherland: Pushpamala N's Woman and Nation, 2021
Apart from its other qualities, Pushpamala's Mother India series reflects a lacuna in art histori... more Apart from its other qualities, Pushpamala's Mother India series reflects a lacuna in art historical scholarship, or more precisely a certain irresolution, on the place , religion in modern Indian artistic practice. Influential art historians defined modern Indian as constituting a break from the past. They were partisans rather than neutral observers in this process. My essay comments on Pushpamala's reflection of this partisanship back to its secular educated audience, and what we might learn from it.
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Outlook (New Delhi), Aug 15, 2004
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New Media, Old Media, 2004
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Economic and Political Weekly, 2016
The promotion of Hindutva through the circuits of commodities gave commntunal politics miuCich gr... more The promotion of Hindutva through the circuits of commodities gave commntunal politics miuCich greater visibilit) and, therebv, access to a far wider public. The move to retailing Hindu identity declared an intention to seek and build on far more partial formns of support, with the explicit ainm of securinlg political power. Liberalisation proceeds with its reor-ganisation of public anid private spaces in ways that are articulated to thle Hindu right's political project but not necessarily, identical with it. Late capitalisn 's attempts to revitalise itself demonstrate an eruption of the contradictions of community onto the stage of capital, and an effort to hartiess these conitraidictions in furthering accuimulation.
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Economic and Political Weekly, 2011
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In this chapter I argue that accounts produced by the advertising agency tend to treat the progre... more In this chapter I argue that accounts produced by the advertising agency tend to treat the progression from the classified advertisement to advertisements promoting modern consumer brands, as a natural evolution and as representing the development of the advertisement as such. The advertising agency has in fact sought to become the custodian of its own history, keeping larger issues of capitalism’s history constant, as fixtures adorning the evolution of the modern ad. A comparative approach however, leads us to reverse the direction of inquiry, to ask what we can learn about a given historical context by examining advertisements and debates accompanying their production. While modern manufacturers (here I consider the Lever and Tata in the soap market) and bazaar merchants both used advertisements, they relate to each other as signal to noise in advertising agency accounts: bazaar advertisements are treated as curiosities at best, while advertisements produced by the agency are trea...
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Papers by Arvind Rajagopal
to market-centered economic growth. As an activity apparently conceived as external to the developmental process and to the work of planners, communication enables a symptomatic reading of the state's
consensus-formation practices and illuminates shifts across changing
political configurations.
to market-centered economic growth. As an activity apparently conceived as external to the developmental process and to the work of planners, communication enables a symptomatic reading of the state's
consensus-formation practices and illuminates shifts across changing
political configurations.