Now before we start looking into the logistics of how and why ruptures in language, consciousness and social reality occur, the question arises, is there any way in which we can understand their interrelationship in theoretical terms? In this regard, it would be worthwhile to mention that the materialist view of ‘consciousness’ put forward by Karl Marx and his followers definitely does help us see how these three constituents often interconnect. According to this viewpoint, ‘consciousness’ is nothing but the "sum total of mental processes that participate in man’s understanding of the objective world and of his personal being." This view postulates that it is man’s attitude to the world, reflected in his understanding and knowledge of the objects that constitutes his consciousness.

Moreover, this model offers a real possibility of connecting language and consciousness, as apart from being historically constituted, both are perceived as instruments of collective social and psychological transformation. The materialist model doesn’t just posit language as an extension or an attribute of consciousness but as a separate sub-system that has the potential to transform consciousness as much as it could effectively be transformed by consciousness in turn. If seen in these terms, language, consciousness and social reality truly become relational categories, intersecting, interpenetrating, defining, delimiting and demarcating the boundaries of each other. Moreover, language in this schematic conceptualisation becomes an intermediate category, mediating between consciousness and social reality. It needs to be stated here that more than its ideological underpinnings, it’s the functionalism of this viewpoint that is serviceable, even efficacious for our present analysis.

It’s no coincidence that in the post-liberalised economy, newspapers in India went through a paradigm shift not so much in terms of redefining their role or function but in acquiring a brand-like quality. If we look at the way in which some of the newspapers in India have undergone a radical face-lift, it would be apparent how large-scale concessions are being made to the overruling, overarching logic of the market forces. There has been a sharp decline in the news content, political stories or comments and a proportionate increase in personality-centred journalism. For some queer reason, it is believed that this is the only way the newspapers could possibly survive in our consumerist culture with its ever-shifting gaze and fragmentary, spliced up reality reducible into a million splintered micro images. This basic Darwinian impulse for survival in the market has certainly brought newspapers in line with other disposable consumer products such as toothpastes, hamburgers and cokes.

Among other things, this has also put a big question mark over the credibility of the newspapers and the news being purveyed by them. What makes the matters worse is that under such circumstances, the newspapers are almost compelled to give a sense of legitimacy to the uncritical, conformist, standardised language for purveying or communicating whatever information they do. Gone are the days when the newspapers had a distinct character, a unique editorial policy or a well-defined ideology. Now, it’s simply wholesale standardisation of theme, content and ideology, which sometimes becomes a form of mimicry as well. Try and pick up a newspaper or a magazine, browse through an article on fundamentalism, terrorism or communal riots, you would hardly ever come across an article or an analysis in which attempt is made either to go into the history of fundamentalism, terrorism or communal riots or to define the terms of reference. More often than not, the conceptual framework of ideas is left undefined in the hope that such terms are so deeply embedded in popular consciousness that they need no further investigation or critique. I don’t recall having read even a single article in the recent times or even earlier where a systematic attempt was made to differentiate between such terms as Hinduism and Hindutava, an all-important distinction that ought to be made in our present context, especially since each constitutes a diametrically opposite discourse.

It’d not be totally outrageous to suggest that our English newspapers don’t in the least suffer from the burden of "anxiety of influence" and often tend to view Indian reality in exactly the same way in which either The Guardian or The New York Times would. Not many self-conscious attempts are made to see how the burden of the language could also, in certain cases, become the burden of the ideology and, therefore, of representation. No wonder, often enough, our newspapers perceive our domestic situations and events through the eyes of the foreign correspondents. Once I remember having read a front-page, four-column news item in The Herald Tribune about how, on the demise of Mother Teresa, Sister Nirmala had been appointed as the head of the Sisters of Charity Mission. What indeed shocked me about this report was the way in which it had tried, very painstakingly, to privilege and foreground the fact that Sister Nirmala was essentially a Hindu, who had later converted to Christianity and was now being installed as a head of a Christian mission. I wonder how many of us would actually be bothered about the religious identity of Sister Nirmala!

It is not being suggested that this kind of ‘divisive consciousness’ about religious identity is the creation of the mass media. All I’m saying is that the Orientalist project of (mis) representation that started during the colonial period has still not ended in the West academy and institutions. And further that they continue to create stereotypical structures of knowledge and consciousness about us, that too, in a language, whose dominance over our own languages is unquestionable. What is worse, oblivious of its ideological implications, our newsmen, especially in the English media, through their refusal to critique such representations, often end up showing complicity with this project. This is how the Euro-centric view of India as a primitive, undeveloped society, still struggling with its archival combination of violence, bigotry and religious identity gains both popularity and legitimacy, eclipsing and obscuring in the process its multifarious economic successes and development activities.

If our English language media has failed to liberate itself from the hegemonic influence of the ideology of the language in which it operates, our media of the regional languages has largely been hegemonised by our English language media. One of the marketing strategies that a Hindi daily, which claims to have a readership of 15 million, adopted during its launch in this region was to emphasise that it offers everything that a good English newspaper can, plus it’s in Hindi. It was as if apologetic of being a regional newspaper, this newspaper suffered from some anxiety of donning a national identity, not by competing with the best of Hindi dailies, but rather with the best of English dailies available in the market. Is it not, once again, the case of internalizing the ideological burden and thus indulging in self-inferiorisation, rather than self-promotion?

One might turn around and say that it’s not for the mass media to interrogate and critique the inferiorisation of both language and representation. Rather, its function is to give legitimacy and sanction to it. After all, why should it be left to the mass media to make an all-important distinction in terms of a great literary work by Shakespeare or Kalidasa and a popular brand of cigarette? As far as it goes, both are to be understood as two manifestations of a "classic." This kind of anachronism, I dare say, is built into the very nature of mass media and all other organs of mass culture as well. Not only does it trivialise the serious but also vulgarises it, while at the same time, sanctifying something that only deserves little or perhaps no notice or attention. This is how the mass culture ends up giving a covert sense of legitimacy to, what Shestakov, a Russian literary critic has, very appropriately, described as the ‘aesthetics of the trivial.’

Another anachronism that the mass culture first brings into play and then legitimizes has to do with the overturning of the classic dualism of ‘quality’ versus ‘quantity.’ The strongest impulse of the mass culture is to make more and more goods and products available for the consumption of more and more people. As mass culture is a quantity-oriented system, quantifying goods, products and people with the same kind of eagerness and urgency, often it becomes a pre-text for the ‘commodification’ of people and ‘humanisation’ of lifeless objects such as computers, television sets and other appurtenances of consumerist haute coutre. It’s the result of this kind of quantification that human beings are often denied a sense of reality and subjectivity, and thus fall easy preys to the multiple processes of objectification.

In such a situation, gender often doesn’t matter as both men and women are as readily subjected to the processes of objectification as goods and objects intrinsically are. And when attempts at objectification become overbearing or overwhelming, the threatened subjectivity often re-orders its strategies of survival by escaping into the self-structured worlds of fantasy, mythology, narcotic pleasure or narcissistic contemplation of the self. The American writer Christopher Lasch in his book The Culture of Narcissism has very convincingly analysed this aspect of the mass culture. Analysing all the aspects of contemporary culture – politics, art, literature, sports, advertising and education – he comes to the conclusion that each of them is characterised by the phenomenon of narcissism. All of this, in his view, is linked with the appearance of a new type of an individual for whom the world is nothing but a mirror in which he is reflected.

"Narcissism remains at its most precise a metaphor, and nothing more, that describes a state of mind in which the world appears as a mirror of the self." Needless to add, that this kind of ‘narcissistic self,’ living as it does in a perpetual state of flight from the reality, is certainly exposed to a greater danger than anyone else to the multiple processes of self-mutilation, self-destruction and gradual dissolution of being. Although Christopher Lasch has essentially made the American mass culture of 1960s the target of his attack, his analysis assumes an alarming significance for our understanding of contemporary Indian society.

We, in India of the first decade of the 21^st century, are definitely in a vice-like grip of the psychological, cultural crisis that had assailed America or its people in 1960s. If we do go along with this proposition, then in our consumerist culture, mass media has only one consideration and one function viz., its growing concern to stay in the market, its losing battle of survival, its narcissistic pre-occupation with its own fantasies and mythologies. As its propensity to perceive the world in terms of its own struggles and survival has increased manifold, mass media’s potential to become a mirror to the society has proportionately diminished and decreased. Only a media free from the clutches of the market forces can possibly serve the cause of democracy; not a media whose ideology is already underwritten by the multiple grids of various forces, economic, social and political. Media that is obsessed with its own angularities and distortions can hardly ever afford to take upon itself the onerous task of refracting, mediating or analyzing the angularities or distortions of the society it operates within.

Most of the small, marginal, even big newspapers in India owe their existence either to the corporate houses, the business barons or the political parties. For business barons, motive of profit maximization or power brokering clearly supersedes all altruistic considerations of objectivity and neutrality. And, of course, such a laudable aim doesn’t even appear on the agenda of the ideologically inclined newspapers that often serve as the organs of various political parties. Both the English medium and vernacular newspapers now appear more interested in promoting personalities, creating iconic figures, thereby increasing their saleability. But not many seem interested in representing rural India or the development stories, thus deflecting from their basic goal of mirroring, representing, and analysing social reality. In short, newspapers have increasingly become the purveyors of mass culture and ceased to be its trenchant critics. No wonder, linguistic distortions and grotesque portrayals of reality have almost become the order of the day. It’s the total failure of the mass media to first recognise and then unmask the contradictions of the mass culture that has dangerous ideological implications for both language and consciousness.