Professor Francis Cody received a SSHRC Insight Grant for his project Mediating the People: Newspapers and Mass Politics in South India. Read more about the project below.

This project examines the role of newspapers in shaping political life in Tamil Nadu, India.  Newspapers have long been understood as important media of public debate in western political theory.  Some scholars have even gone so far as to argue for their centrality to the birth of both liberal democracy and the nation-state form.  In India, where a postcolonial nation inherited state structures from the British Empire, where universal franchise predated mass literacy by many decades, and where newspapers have come to the forefront of political mobilization in the age of globalized digital technology, there is ample reason to believe that the relationship between newspapers and democratic practice will be quite different.  Unlike liberal democracies, Indian politics is defined primarily by communal identities associated with caste, religion, and region.  People nevertheless come to understand themselves as members of these large-scale social identities through the modern media, and not just through face-to-face interactions.  In Tamil Nadu, it is Tamil language newspapers that are the most important media in this process of political mobilization.  The aim of my research is therefore to develop a more general theory of mass media and democracy that is better suited to understanding communal and populist politics in the postcolonial world by focusing on the South Indian case.

In addition to normal academic publication in the form of articles and a scholarly book, as well as training graduate students in multi-disciplinary social scientific research, this project will make a public impact in the following ways: 1) I will work closely with students to develop a multi-media internet archive of the history of newspapers and politics in Tamil India.  This archive will be linked to the Centre for South Asian Studies at U of Toronto, Centre for South Asian Civilizations at U of T Mississauga, and to the Tamil Worlds Initiative at U of T Scarborough.  2) I will collaborate with colleagues at Jamia Millia Islamia University and the Delhi School of Economics to organize an international conference on Media and Politics in South Asia.  This will include corollary workshops where researchers can work with journalists in Delhi, Chennai, and at the U of Toronto through a SSHRC Connection Grant. 3) I will write a more widely accessible journalistic account, in English and in Tamil, of the rise of the major newspapers, the personalities that founded them, and their place in Indian democratic culture.