MOTHER'S DAY SPECIALS! SHOW ME MORE
Suruchi Mazumdar (PhD) is an Associate Professor with O.P. Jindal Global University India. She has teaching and research interests in mediated politics and movements, digital activisms, and everyday digital cultures. She has been part of multiple transdisciplinary collaborative research projects. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as International Journal of Communication, Journalism, Global Media and China, and Television & New Media, and edited volumes.
This book recovers the prehistory of the partisan hybrid digital media landscape using the case of the Singur and Nandigram protests. Through a multilayered analysis, she shows how the interaction between the complex partisan media and popular grassroots politics has given rise to contemporary politics in India. The book compellingly demonstrates how commercial logic and political logic played out in the media’s representation of the populist uprisings and public debates on industrial development, which created the fertile ground to displace the Left’s ideological dominance in the state with the practice of a new politics that was a creative mix of maa-mati-manush with ideological ambiguity. Anup Kumar, Ph.D. Professor, School of Communication, Cleveland State University. ____________________ In Divided Media, Suruchi Mazumdar provides a historically grounded study of print and digital news media in the state of West Bengal. The crux of the book focuses on an often under-explored but vital area of research in media studies, the anti-democratic privatization of land and its mediated contestation against the backdrop of growing ethnonationalism. The book is thus a careful political economic analysis of the shifting terrain of 21st century capitalist news-cultures with lessons for scholars of media and democracy well beyond India. Paula Chakravartty, James Weldon Johnson Associate Professor, MCC and Gallatin, NYU. ______________ Suruchi Mazumdar’s book is welcome precisely because the story of regional media is highly specific, shaped by both national and regional contexts, by the compulsions of political economy, regional politics and the context-specific singularities of mediation. Suruchi deals with the contested mediascape in West Bengal. The narrative is compelling precisely because of its regional specificities. And it is this makes it an important addition to the literature on the media in India. Pradip Thomas, University of Queensland. _________________ Suruchi Mazumdar’s book is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding the intricate dynamics at the intersection of media, politics, and social movements in India. It not only explores the tensions and interactions between mainstream media’s political and commercial imperatives and grassroots activism, but also offers a nuanced examination of how these forces shape public discourse and democratic engagement in the context of rapid economic and digital transformations. Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Associate Professor & Director of Digital Campaign Asia Project, Department of Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore. _____________________
