On 07-Sep-06, at 9:43 PM, sastry wrote:
The big deal to me is that the statement has a bias. The statement
says that
India is Hindu dominated and as you have guessed - it leaves it to the
listener to figure out what that might mean.
Why would the announcer want to say "Hindu dominated India" rather
than
"India"? Surely there must be some meaning in there? Do you suppose
the
people who wrote the script of the news item "Pakistan and India
have been to
war three times over the status of Kashmir, which is the only
Muslim majority
state in Hindu dominated India" were wrestling with questions like
"What is
Hindu" and "What does domination mean"?
I doubt it. I am sure the scriptwriters had one meaning in mind -
and that was
the meaning they thought they were conveying. The India that fights
with
Pakistan is not just India, but it is Hindu dominated India. They
were not
splitting hairs about whether a Jain feels Hindu or not. They have
no such
confusion. To them the answer to the question "How would you
characterize
India?" is simply "A Hindu dominated nation"
I agree with the rest of your post but for this bit. Surely the
script writers also had some thought for what viewers they were
writing for?
If one assumes a Western Christian viewer who may be inclined to
assume Muslim vs an assumed Christian majority, then it becomes
important to clarify that it is Hindu, not Christian.
Why Indian media does not see it necessary to describe the US as
"Christian dominated" is anyone's guess, but it has nothing to do
with how Western media represents India. The audiences are different.
Western media is indeed guilty of assuming it knows what is best for
the east, but this is hardly new. It's been going on for centuries.
There's a whole body of work in post-colonial and subaltern studies
examining just this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_%28book%29
--
Kiran Jonnalagadda
http://jace.seacrow.com/
