Spirited publics? Post-secularism, enchantment and enterprise on Indian television

Abstract

Channel surfing on morning television in India-a truly bewildering experience given there are now 800 plus channels-involves navigating a mix of news and sports channels, cookery shows, soaps, and the odd magazine-style breakfast show. In some ways the schedule appears not that different from morning television in say the UK or Australia apart from one significant difference: one of the more prominent genres is religious programming. In this essay, I examine the role of spiritual television, a widely popular genre in India, in constituting contemporary forms of televisual publicity and citizenship. I argue that spiritual programming in India is increasingly positioned in the broader TV market as a form of lifestyle advice television offering blueprints for (late) modern living, with saffron-robed yoga gurus and new age babas increasingly jostling for screen time with celebrity chefs and Bollywood stars. If figures like the hugely popular yoga guru Baba Ramdev and the family-friendly astrologer Astro Uncle are now important guides to life, fate, and fortune in today’s India, what might this mean for questions of selfhood and citizenship in a country significantly shaped by regional, religious, and linguistic differences? What sort of post-secular civility and publicity is enacted through televised spectacles such as Baba Ramdev’s famous mass yoga camps, which are attended by thousands of Indians? How does television’s role in India as a kind of privatized electronic shrine enable both a collectivism of sorts and a form of individually tailored neo-spiritualism?