India’s Newspaper Revolution

This book shines a light into a black hole: the revolution in India's newspapers, and the reading habits of its people, since the late 1970s. Although scholars have written exhaustively about the centrality of print for the making of the modern west, the transformation of Indian-language newspapers has passed almost unnoticed. Spotlighting vast yet neglected changes, India's Newspaper Revolution engages not only social scientists and historians, but advertising, marketing and media practitioners. While newspapers elsewhere struggle to hold readers, Indian daily circulation have increased by close to 500 per cent in twenty years. The book pinpoints the role of advertising in propelling a print boom in ten major Indian languages; analyses the role of capitalism and technology in shaping identity–national or otherwise; and examines patterns of ownership, the recruitment of journalists and the forces striving to control the Indian language press. By charting these immense changes in the production and consumption of print, the book contributes to a more precise understanding of events in India in the 1980s and 1990s.