JAWAHARLAL NEHRU UNIVERSITY

CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE

LG 507 Governance of Culture Industries

MA Optional Course: Winter Semester 2025 | Credits: 4

Course Instructor: Ghazala Jamil ([email protected])

‘To value and preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture’ is a fundamental duty enjoined by
the Constitution of India upon its citizens. The freedom to express, practice and preserve culture is
especially protected for the religious and linguistic minorities in India. While this provision is often
discussed narrowly in relation to family laws in India, it is hard to ignore that the Indian state took
upon itself the task to govern various arena of culture. Preservation of languages, monuments and
archaeological sites, public records etc is currently the legal mandate of the Union Ministry of Culture.
Various other ministries such as the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, and the Ministry of
Tourism also have an influence over the governance of ‘culture’.

Cinematic works in India were always referred as to come from ‘Film Industry’, but many other
sectors of cultural production—such as literary publishing resisted being labelled ‘industry’ due the
perceived dichotomy of art and commerce. Nevertheless, the nomenclatures ‘creative industries’ and
‘knowledge economies’ have been steadily gaining currency in the backdrop of now ‘liberalised’
Indian economy.

The course has been designed keeping in mind that occupational practices of culture are no longer
dominated by artists and critics. As ‘culture’ became a consumable commodity, the need to address
‘consumer’ (audience, reader etc) demands have brought in elements of business acumen.
Technological developments have not only transformed the media of cultural expression but also
modes of consumption of cultural artefacts. The ever-increasing segmentation of mass markets have
also enforced innovation regimes. These factors combined have mandated new and still emerging
legal and governance structures over which, the erstwhile players have little control.

This course is an attempt towards comprehending and critiquing a new economy of cultural
production. It scrutinises the well-established sectors of mass media such as newspapers/ books
publishing, and cinema and television etc as culture industries. In addition, it also includes ‘tourism’
within this understanding of culture industry because mobilities to consume culture are increasingly
desired and coveted, even as travel had (until fairly recently) evaded being scrutinised as a practice
of popular/mass culture. The course attempts to chart the history of development of increasingly
complex structure of each of these culture industries. It takes into consideration the corporatisation
of small firms and individual artistic endeavours in the backdrop of changing economic order,
governance architecture, and policy regarding knowledge and intellectual property.

As such, the convergence of culture and economy requires social scientists to take notice of what this
does to not only entertainment, leisure and creative pursuits, but also to weigh the methodological
potential of a cultural political economic approach to social change.

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Course Structure

I. Culture Industry: Theoretical Foundations

- Mass/Popular culture, High vs Low Culture
- Imagined geographies and communities as cultural artefacts
- Consuming publics and gender/subaltern counterpublics
- Knowledge Economies and creative industries

II. Governance Architecture

- ‘Culture’ and Law: Rights and Provisions
- Governing technology, innovation, intellectual property
- Autonomy and (Self-)Regulation: Content, Ownership, Patronage

III. Print Cultures and Publishing industry

- Literary bodies and popularisation of languages
- Print cultures and print capitalism
- Newspapers and Periodicals

IV. Entertainment Industries

- Regulatory and Funding bodies
- Film Industry: niche markets, genre formation, artistes as workers
- Television: Public Broadcasting to Private Viewing (Doordarshan to Netflix)

V. Heritage and Tourism industries

- Regulation, preservation and restoration of memory (Archives and Monuments)
- Everyday cultures and consumption: Gourmet and food cultures
- Tourism: pilgrimage, ecology, museums

Readings

Adorno, T. W. (2005). The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Routledge: London.

Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism.
Verso: London.

Appadurai, A. (1990). Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Public Culture,
2(2), 1–24.

Appadurai, A., & Breckenridge, C. (1995). Public modernity in India. In C. Breckenridge (Ed.),
Consuming modernity: Public culture in a South Asian world (pp. 1–20). University of Minnesota
Press: Minneapolis.

Cowen, T., & Tabarrok, A. (2000). An economic theory of avant-garde and popular art, or high and
low culture. Southern Economic Journal, 67(2), 232-253.

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Fernandes, L. (2000). Nationalizing 'the global': Media images, cultural politics and the middle class
in India. Media, Culture & Society, 22(5), 611-628.

Fraser, N. (1990). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing
democracy. Social Text, (25/26), 56-80.

Gans, H. (2008). Popular culture and high culture: An analysis and evaluation of taste. Basic Books:
New York.

Gladstone, D. L. (2005). From pilgrimage to package tour: Travel and tourism in the Third World.
Routledge: New York.

Gupta, A., & Chakravorty, S. (Eds.). (2004). Print areas: Book history in India. Permanent Black:
Delhi.

Jameson, F. (2006). Postmodernism, or, The cultural logic of late capitalism. Duke University Press:
Durham.

Jayasankar, K. P., & Monteiro, A. (2015). A fly in the curry: Independent documentary film in India.
SAGE Publications: New Delhi.

Jeffrey, R. (2000). India's newspaper revolution. Hurst and Company: London.

Joshi, P. C. (1989). Culture, communication and social change. Vikas: New Delhi.

Khullar, S. (2015). Worldly affiliations: Artistic practice, national identity, and modernism in India,
1930-1990. University of California Press: Berkeley.

Liang, L., Suresh, M., & Malhotra, N. (Eds.). (2006). Back to the future: The Indian Cinematographic
Committee evidence and report, 1927-1928. In The public is watching: Sex, laws and videotape (pp.
36-52). PSBT: New Delhi.

Mathur, S., & Singh, K. (Eds.). (2015). No touching, no spitting, no praying: The museum in South Asia.
Routledge: New Delhi.

Mattelart, A. (1994). Mapping world communication: War, progress, culture. University of Minnesota
Press: Minneapolis.

Mazzarella, W. (2004). Culture, globalization, mediation. Annual Review of Anthropology, 33, 345-
367.

Mazzarella, W. (2010). Beautiful balloon: The digital divide and the charisma of new media in India.
American Ethnologist, 37(4), 783-804.

Mehta, N. (Ed.). (2008). Television in India: Satellites, politics and cultural change. Routledge:
London.

Mubaraki, M. A. (2016). Filming horror: Hindi cinema, ghosts and ideologies. SAGE Publications: New
Delhi.

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Nora, P. (2002). Reasons for the current upsurge in memory. Transit, 22(1), 4-8.

Parera, S. (2016). Warzone tourism in Sri Lanka: Tales from darker places in paradise. SAGE
Publications: New Delhi.

Parthasarathi, V. (2014). On the constituted contexts of public communication: Early policy debates
on the press in India. Media International Australia, 152, 12-25.

Pendakur, M. (1989). Indian television comes of age: Liberalization and the rise of consumer
culture. Communication, 11(1), 177-197.

Prasad, M. M. (2000). Ideology of the Hindi film: A historical construction. Oxford University Press:
New York.

Pryke, M., & Du Gay, P. (Eds.). (2002). Cultural economy. Sage Publications: London.

Ranganathan, U., & Rodrigues, M. (Eds.). (2010). Indian media in a globalised world. Sage
Publications: New Delhi.

Rudolph, S. H., & Rudolph, L. I. (2006). Postmodern Gandhi and other essays: Gandhi in the world and
at home. Oxford University Press: New Delhi.

Said, E. W. (2012). Culture and imperialism. Vintage: New York.

Thomas, P. (2014). The ambivalent state and the media in India: Between elite domination and the
public interest. International Journal of Communication, 8, 466–482.

Travers, A. (2003). Parallel subaltern feminist counterpublics in cyberspace. Sociological

Perspectives, 46(2), 223-237.

UNCTAD/UNDP. (2008). Concept and context of the creative economy. Creative Economy Report
2008. United Nations.

Urry, J. (1990). The tourist gaze: Leisure and travel in contemporary societies. SAGE Publications:
London.

Venkaṭachalapathy, A. R. (2006). In those days there was no coffee: Writings in cultural history. Yoda
Press: New Delhi.