Contesting Interpretational Authority: Democracy and Fascism in the Indian ‘Empowered Public’

Abstract

Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in India's television landscape, this article works with two terms – ‘interpretational authority’ and ‘star-anchor’ – so as to elucidate the ambivalence of empowerment in what Arvind Rajagopal has called her postcolonial ‘split public’. I understand interpretational authority, in the ambiguous context of the ‘democratic nation-state’, as professional journalism's filtering function of both direct democracy and popular majoritarianism. Along four genealogical variants of empowerment, I relate democratisation and anti-elitism in and through evolving Indian news television to Walter Benjamin's deliberations on the aesthetics of fascist communication, and argue that, in a swiftly ‘entertainmentised’ TV journalism, interpretational authority was rendered somewhat dysfunctional before it could actually establish itself both in vernacular and English-language channels. The ‘star-anchor’, in order to still reach a public, becomes the embodiment of ultimately compromised interpretational authority and a reified, socio-economic hierarchisation in a TV journalism that competes with the immediacy of popular power.