Mediating modernity: Theorizing reception in a non‐western society

This article theorizes non‐Western media reception, based on a reception study of a Hindu epic, “The Ramayan,”; screened on the state‐owned Indian television system, Doordarshan, in 78 episodes beginning in January 1987. Based on interviews with viewers from a variety of social backgrounds and on analysis of press response to the epic, it argues that the epic represented, for many viewers, a narrative of community opposed to bourgeois modernity, and superior to it. For Doordarshan, as a broadcaster in a non‐western/incompletely modern society, the epic represented a way of mediating between a secular bourgeois public, and a “communitarian public sphere”; which, it is argued, characterizes Indian popular culture.