Indian Religions - Renaissance and Renewal - Anna S. King
Kumbha Melâ and the Media
Indian Religions - Renaissance and Renewal - Anna S. King
Anna S. King [+]
University of Winchester
Anna S. King is Convenor of the Spalding Symposium and Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Winchester. She trained as a social anthropologist at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology in Oxford and studied Hindi at the Oriental Faculty, Cambridge University. After initial research on Mircea Eliade, she carried out her first period of fieldwork on the pilgrimage priests of Hardwar, North India. She has since published research on the Dalits of India and on ISKCON’s Caitanya Vaisnava tradition. She is editor with John Brockington (2005) of The Intimate Other: Love Divine in Indic Religions (Orient Longman).
Description
This chapter argues that contemporary media are diverse, overlapping but fragmented and that any kind of essentialist understanding is based on ideological rather than empirical considerations. It reveals the heterogeneity of media representations of Kumbha and suggests that the culture of the newsroom and of public discourse influences media reports as much as inherited colonial stereotypes.