Examine the impact of mass media on Indian society. Whether western consumerism and materialistic culture, creeping in through mass media, are adversely affecting the traditional. Indian culture? (2002)
The question restates the cultural imperialism thesis: that transnational media carry a consumerist value system which displaces indigenous culture. Examined against Indian evidence, the thesis identifies a real process but misdescribes it. What mass media has done is not westernise Indian culture but commodify it — and Indian audiences have used the same media to reassert tradition.
The claim at its strongest
- Herbert Schiller (Mass Communications and American Empire, 1969) argued that the media systems of poorer countries are reshaped to serve metropolitan corporate interests, so that advertising becomes the vehicle of an imported way of life.
- Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s culture industry (Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1944) holds that commercial media standardises culture into a commodity that manufactures conformity while advertising individuality.
- Jean Baudrillard (The Consumer Society, 1970) goes further: consumption is a system of signs, so needs are produced by the medium rather than met by it.
- The Indian evidence is real. Satellite television arrived in 1991 alongside liberalisation; private satellite channels rose from 130 in 2004-05 to 908 in 2024-25; advertising reached about ₹1.5 trillion in 2025, some 0.41 per cent of GDP. Festivals have become retail seasons, and Dipankar Gupta (Mistaken Modernity, 2000) notes that westernised consumption has spread far faster than modern attitudes to hierarchy and merit.
Testing the claim
- Roland Robertson’s glocalization and Arjun Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (1996) predict indigenisation rather than replacement: mediascapes are reworked by the local imagination. India’s market bears this out — viewing and listening are overwhelmingly in Indian languages, and imported formats survive only when recast around family, marriage and locality.
- The same media reassert tradition. Arvind Rajagopal (Politics After Television, 2001) showed that Doordarshan’s Ramayan (1987-88) built a nationwide Hindu public through the most modern medium available; its 2020 re-telecast drew 7.7 crore viewers on a single day. M. N. Srinivas’s Sanskritisation now travels by satellite as readily as by imitation of the local dominant caste.
- The audience is not passive. Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model (1973) allows negotiated and oppositional readings, and Purnima Mankekar’s ethnography of television viewing in Delhi (Screening Culture, Viewing Politics, 1999) found women reading state programming through their own class, gender and community positions rather than absorbing it.
- Measured effects run the other way too: Robert Jensen and Emily Oster (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2009) found cable television’s arrival in rural India associated with reduced acceptance of wife-beating, weaker son preference and higher female school enrolment.
What is genuinely adverse
The damage is not westernisation but commodification — media manufactures aspiration faster than the economy supplies mobility, and inflates dowry, wedding expenditure and body-image anxiety. Ownership is concentrated, and India ranked 157 of 180 on the World Press Freedom Index in 2026. Access is stratified: rural internet penetration was 48.31 per 100 against urban 126.80 in early 2026.
Conclusion
Traditional Indian culture is not being passively eroded by an alien one. It is being selectively marketed, energetically reasserted and unevenly transformed through the same channels. The sociologically defensible verdict is that mass media has changed the form of Indian culture profoundly while leaving its core structures — caste endogamy, familial authority, religious identity — resilient and, in places, strengthened.