Media and Religious Identity in Contemporary India

By Serene Kasim

The hypothesis behind this paper is that we live in a “hyper-connected” world. Information , for most of us, lies , quite literally, at our fingertips. Television, the internet, newspapers and other media are within easy reach of most of the population regardless , it would seem, of class or even literacy or education. Under these circumstances it seemed a natural enough to question what role the media plays in perceptions of identity and pluralism.

It seems obvious that certain popular discourses enter the social “imagination” via the media. The vocabulary of secularism , however this may be understood, comes to be thrown around quite freely it would seem. And yet, we do not really know how people understand the term secularism as a lived reality.
Even more important perhaps, is the way people understand their identities, specifically religious identities, and the identities of those around them. The media has often been accused of stereotyping certain communities. But does this necessarily lead to certain perceptions of identity?
The current debates in India on the proliferation of so-called religious channels under the guise of a secular sounding spirituality feeds directly into global concerns with the revitalization of religion and the failure of the secularization thesis. Pradip Ninan Thomas has conducted one of the very few studies on the effects of these channels in India. He has conducted research into the channels providing Christian programming and their impact on audiences in the Indian city of Chennai. His findings are that while these programmes allow the faithful to come together and offer them an opportunity to reinforce their belief, they also provide space for negotiating religious identity as national identity. In some ways these findings corroborate those of Aravind Rajagopal’s study of the impact of the Ramayana series.
This essay calls for more research as it is my opinion that we do not currently have enough empirical data to determine how the media impacts notions of pluralism. There is some evidence that it does have an impact on the way certain discourses are formed in society particularly with regard to notions of identity both religious and otherwise. But keeping in mind that discourses are formed out of several different inputs from society, it seems reasonable to conclude that more research needs to be conducted to determine the effects of media on religious identity and pluralism in contemporary India.