Satire, Elections, and Democratic Politics in Digital India

This article is concerned with understanding the role of satire as a crucial narrative and communicative form for thinking and caring about politics in contemporary India. In an era marked by the relentless corporate makeover of news media and a concomitant decline in public trust in journalism, sat...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Television & new media 2015-05, Vol.16 (4), p.394-400
Main Author: Punathambekar, Aswin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Digital technology
Everyday life
India
News
Political communication
Political leaders
Sexuality
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Summary:This article is concerned with understanding the role of satire as a crucial narrative and communicative form for thinking and caring about politics in contemporary India. In an era marked by the relentless corporate makeover of news media and a concomitant decline in public trust in journalism, satirical videos that took on Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi, and other political figures during the 2014 election campaign season offered a strikingly different and immensely popular mode of engagement with the political. Moving past well-worn paradigms for understanding the relation between entertainment and politics, this article situates online satire within a vibrant field of everyday digital media production that marks contemporary Indian public culture. I show how satirical videos became part of an intricate, networked, yet comprehensible intertextual field that linked the 2014 elections to long-standing political issues and debates around caste, class, gender and sexuality, and religious nationalism.
ISSN:1527-4764
1552-8316
DOI:10.1177/1527476415573953