In post-liberalised India, the vast population is regarded as an enormous resource to be exploited as labourers, consumers or for their knowledge. A feature of the new media economy is that newspapers, mobile phones and TV shows are not exclusively produced for the better-off among an urban middle class and, furthermore, that the mass media are increasingly making use of ‘common people’ and their lives in a multitude of places as media content. The subject of this article is whether or not this obsession with the population should be urging us to rethink the Indian media landscape in analytical terms. ‘A public’, Michael Warner argues, is a reflexive relation among strangers, constituted by attention. If the Indian population is now addressed in various new ways, is it time to reconsider the old ‘truth’ that India is an unfit case for discussions about publics?
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