Introducing the field of discourse

Jain Studios is a media software production company located in New Delhi. Set up in 1985, it has produced over one hundred political videos related to Parliamentary and Assembly elections in India as well as issue-based videos on campaigns and other events organized and staged for the purpose of mobilizing supporters for the Hindutva agenda. The president of the Studios is Dr Jinendra Kumar Jain, a medical doctor, ambitious and visionary businessman, and active supporter of Hindu cultural nationalism (Hindutva) in the 1980s and early 1990s. In political and ideological circles of India's capital Delhi, for the duration of those years, J K Jain and his studios were mostly known for their alliance with the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (Party of the Indian People; hereafter referred to as BJP) and other organizations related to the ideological body of Hindutva, all of which are subsumed under the umbrella of the Sangh Parivar. The ‘Sangh’, or association/brotherhood, is a pan-national network of affiliated organizations that functions on a variety of levels, such as parliamentary as well as non-parliamentary, educational, social and cultural activities. This complex infrastructure caters to a wide range of groups, interests and needs.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s in particular, the BJP—as the official political branch of the Sangh Parivar—had come to function as the major speaker and catalyst for a social movement taking place particularly in north and west India.

Walter Benjamin's quotation addresses the role played by new audiovisual media in the construction of national identity, and the way in which the perception of individuals and groups in a society is influenced by modern technologies. Benjamin's comment is part of a large body of reflections accumulated in his Arcades Project, a montage on the rise and the ‘signatures’ of modern societies and public life in Europe in the context of popular culture, politics and capitalism at the turn of the nineteenth century. Naturally, his concern with production and distribution of various visual media demands to be read within the historical context from which it arose. Yet, despite today's very different technological, social and economic conditions, which impact on, and are shaped by, postmodern and postcolonial societies, Benjamin's concern with the relationships between actuality and virtuality, fantasy and rationality, and the complex invisible and visible strategies of ideological power that enhance ways of seeing and displaying, is still relevant.

The voice-over for a Jain Studios video entitled The Making of a Chief Minister addresses potential political clients interested in marketing themselves with confident lines such as: ‘If your target is victory, then your medium is VOW!’ Equally, in my conversations with J K Jain and other employees of Jain Studios, the BJP's victories in Parliamentary and Assembly Elections were frequently attributed to the power of the Studios’ facilities, in terms of both production and distribution.

These brief examples indicate the hopes and desires shared among several BJP representatives that political transformation could be successfully enhanced with the help of new media technologies, and that the videos produced by Jain Studios could have a strong impact on the audiences. As discussed in the previous chapter, it was in this way that the party sought to exploit new media technologies that had thus far been restricted through state monopolization. In the prologue to his work, The Rise of Network Society, Manuel Castells speaks of a similar interaction of technology, politics and society in the context of identity constitution and focuses on the question of the actual impact of media on social change.

The introductory scene of the video God Manifests Himself (hereafter, also referred to as GMH), produced in early 1990 by Jain Studios, opens with a speech by J K Jain, who appears on screen against the backdrop of a white temple and blue skies. The temple is a model of the proposed Ram temple due to be ‘rebuilt’ at the disputed site of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in order, according to spokespeople of the Hindu Right, to honour Lord Ram's birth and reinstall national integrity and justice to the Hindu majority. The site is particularly well known to us because of the mosque's demolition by supporters of the Hindutva movement on December 6, 1992, and because of the riots between Hindus and Muslims that swept across the subcontinent in the subsequent months. In the video, J K Jain addresses the viewers like this:

There then follows a montage of different calendar prints of Lord Ram, one of the main gods of the Hindu pantheon, referred to as the beholder of supreme authority.

This chapter explores Hindutva spokespeople's attempts to exploit the video media in the context of nation building with respect to the notion of history. The key argument is that Jain Studios’ videos were used to create consensus in the viewers that India's history had to be rewritten by re-making it. The new media technology was one tool through which Hindutva spokespeople strove to persuade audiences to get personally involved in what was referred to as an unavoidable ‘turning point in history’, and another step to Hindu people's self-empowerment. The idea behind this was that those who hold the past control the future.

This statement by one of the BJP's media experts is representative of the ‘New BJP’, ‘the party with a difference’, as the political wing of Hindutva promoted itself from the late 1990s onwards. To some extent, in projecting a new national confidence, Kulkarni's comment is reflective of the international recognition that India has gained in recent years on the basis of her software expertise, thereby changing the dominant image of India as an economically backward country into that of an equal player “in the new world order”. Information technology thus became the flagship, or synonym, for the scientific and rational spirit of the ‘new BJP's’ claim to nationality; like video, it ties the power of political representation to economic and technological development.

Made in 1990, From the Sea to the Saryu (Sagar se saryu tak, Hindi; hereafter From the Sea …) presents the ‘patriotic pilgrimage’ (deshbhakti ki teerth yatra) of BJP president L K Advani from Somnath, a town by the Indian Ocean in Gujarat, to Ayodhya in the state of Uttar Pradesh.