Millennial Turbulence: The Networking of Tamil Media Politics

Abstract

With the arrival of the satellite television news channel Puthiya Thalaimurai (New Generation) in 2011 and the contemporaneous proliferation of smartphone-enabled social media, a democratic politics long dominated by the world of popular cinema has found it difficult to reproduce itself in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Focusing on digitally targeted caste violence and mass protests in the name of the Tamil nation, this article argues that the networked publicity of satellite television and new media have layered themselves over existing infrastructures of mass-mediated populism. Many of the political challenges to existing structures fueled by newer media forms appear as shorter-term events, consisting of tighter, sometimes explosive temporal loops intersecting with longer-term formations. New media have thus taken advantage of the affective and narrative potentials within cinematic populism, all the while reflexively marking themselves as “new” in relation to the forms they have become parasitic upon.

“Millennial India”: Global Digital Politics in Context

“…Francis Cody (2019, 392) notices a similar modality of spontaneous assembly and publicity in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. In this region, long standing forms of “cinematic populism” characterized by cinematic stardom as the primary means of political dominance are overlaid by new mediations of political community under current conditions of digitalization.…”

“…Spectacular as they may be, these movements are however challenged by the temporality of shorter-term effects. Comparing online mobilizations with older forms of political movement, Cody (2019) suggests that "Many of the political challenges to existing structures fueled by newer media forms appear as shorter term events . .…”

“…Journalistic accounts and recent studies show that incidents of mob vigilantism aimed at Dalits and Muslims had used digital tools of visual morphing and targeted messaging (Siddiqui 2018). Cody (2019) notes that these new forms of organized communal hatred have all relied heavily on the infrastructural capabilities afforded by WhatsApp. Furthermore, caste-based policing of relationships has energized dominant caste-based political groups that are growing more assertive and independent of established Tamil parties.…”

“…Documenting new protests around linguistic nationalism in Tamil Nadu, Cody (2019, 392) notes “the rise of digitally enabled millennials as a political generation” that asserts its independent voice. For instance, in the Marina Beach occupation, a major agitation that drew nationwide attention, educated youth organized public demonstrations largely through social media to demand the right to continue the annual bull wrestling sport event famously associated with the region.…”

Policing the “Sensible” in the Era of YouTube: Urban Villages and Racialized Subjects in Delhi

“…These infrastructurally enabled imaginaries facilitate the emergence of right-wing political subjectivities congealed in online performances of affective publicness (Udupa 2019). They are also generative of a regional politics that purports itself as new, even though it is undergirded by existing mass mediated populisms from a previous era (see Cody, 2019). In what follows, I veer away from discussions that focus on the ways in which (new) media infrastructures shape national and regional political subjects, temporalities, and events.…”