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This article is concerned with understanding the role of satire as a crucial narrative and communicative form for thinking and caring about politics in contemporary India. In an era marked by the relentless corporate makeover of news media and a concomitant decline in public trust in journalism, satirical videos that took on Narendra Modi, Arvind Kejriwal, Rahul Gandhi, and other political figures during the 2014 election campaign season offered a strikingly different and immensely popular mode of engagement with the political. Moving past well-worn paradigms for understanding the relation between entertainment and politics, this article situates online satire within a vibrant field of everyday digital media production that marks contemporary Indian public culture. I show how satirical videos became part of an intricate, networked, yet comprehensible intertextual field that linked the 2014 elections to long-standing political issues and debates around caste, class, gender and sexuality, and religious nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A busy industrial centre in a prosperous agricultural state, the town of Ludhiana in Punjab has been a porous site for both overseas migration and an influx of workers from other parts of the country. In the early 2000s, in the wake of economic reforms in India, the city was celebrating a new sense of cultural identity, not only at the regional (Punjabi) level, but also-unexpectedly-at the level of the city itself. How did this recent selfreflexive public culture link up with the simultaneous consolidation of cable TV networks in the city? This article examines the imagined communities and self-images that foster and are fostered by this form of globalised media capitalism, through the commodification of cultural identity. At the same time, however, it argues that the establishment of a televisual regime is also accompanied by performed communities, whose political valence has remained largely unarticulated and unacknowledged. The interactions between these virtual and performative communities have unfolded in different registers, thriving on the largely informal arrangements that corporate television networks and advertisers have had to rely on to operate at the local level. Attending to interactions such as these may be a useful supplement to the emphasis on semiotic practices of 'reading' and meaning-making in ethnographies of the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do representations of 'India' shape the lives of members of a diasporic community, the identities they forge, and the politics they negotiate? This paper examines how grocery stores in the San Francisco Bay Area enable the construction of India and Indian culture, and argues that (1) Indian grocery storesin the diaspora form a crucial node in the transnational circulation of texts, images, and commodities between India and the diaspora; (2) the objects sold in these stores create varying regimes of value in different contexts; (3) gender (as it intersects with class and race) offers an important lens to examine the kinds of social practices facilitated by these stores. Throughout, the author wishes to foreground the on-going and contested construction of a transnational set of images, discourses, and institutions that engender what different people mean by 'India.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]