WESTERN MEDIA KEEPS GETTING INDIAN COVERAGE WRONG SAYS NEW REPUBLIC ARTICLE
January 7th 2008 09:12
New York-based freelancer Samanth Subramanian hits out at cliche’d media reporting about India and asks “Isn't there anyone who can write about India with some complexity?” in an article entitled ‘The Land of a Thousand Newspaper Articles’ in The New Republic.
He said the elephant and the tiger are the most stereotyped symbols of India, flogged by writers for centuries, and gave a serve to Alex Kuczynski's September 2007 piece in the New York Times titled “Mumbai Moment.’
He wrote, “She emerges from Mumbai with stale news of ‘ferocious poverty,’ of the smell of the great unwashed, of the press of people on the streets, of the rich living cheek-by-jowl with the poor. But Mumbai is more layered and interesting than that.”
To illustrate his point about accuracy, he points out that Bollywood isn't the world's biggest film industry; the Indian film industry is, as a whole, is. As for nuance, he says Indian cinema is not just the razzle-dazzle of Bollywood, but also the socially conscious films of Kerala, the grand lineage of Bengali films, the experimental films of New Delhi and Tamil Nadu, and even the rustic art of Bhojpuri films.
He said there is far, far more too Indian cultural life – art, dance, music, literature, and theatre in both rural and urban India – than the pretty movies and festivals that monopolise the attention of journalists.
He even takes cricket coverage to task criticising the Times of India for producing an “atrocious piece” on cricket, and points out that cricket-crazy India is also a cliché, with domestic games now often played in stadiums so empty “that the sound of bat on ball echoes loudly from the stands.”
- From MediaBlab
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