ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the discursive construction of the mass audience as a consuming public in Bengali, a language that currently ranks sixth on the list of the world's most spoken languages and that is used primarily in the state of West Bengal in eastern India and in the country of Bangladesh (both of which were part of the province of Bengal in British India), as well as across the worldwide Bengali diaspora. The Bengali cultural imaginary, shaped as it was by an ongoing interaction between local cultural formations and the new ideas and changes unleashed by the colonial encounter, provides an interesting vantage point for thinking about the relationship between “audiences” and “publics” within a comparative, non-Eurocentric framework. As Sonia Livingstone reminds us, audiences have often been defined in opposition to the public in both popular parlance and critical discourse (at least in the Anglophone world), with audiences being “denigrated as trivial, passive, individualized” and publics being “valued as active, critically engaged, and politically significant” (Livingstone 2005: 18). This has not, however, been the case in Bengal or more broadly speaking, in India. Mass audiences are routinely referred to as “publics” in Bengali, as well as in English and vernacular Indian languages such as Hindi, and the public is often imagined in a much more ambivalent fashion in Indian discourses about mass media and public culture. While a comprehensive survey of these discourses or of the semantic space of the “public” (https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203380017/86cc87b4-d58d-4b5e-afa9-48648f75c605/content/fig7-1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>) in Bengali is beyond the scope of this exploratory chapter, it investigates what certain categories commonly used by Bengali speakers and writers to characterize movie audiences — the trope of the consuming public and the terms darshak-sadharan (https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203380017/86cc87b4-d58d-4b5e-afa9-48648f75c605/content/fig7-2_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>, the general audience) and sadharan darshak (https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203380017/86cc87b4-d58d-4b5e-afa9-48648f75c605/content/fig7-3_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>, the average or common viewer) — can tell us about what “public” means in the Bengali cultural lexicon, and how the rise of cinema might have reshaped elite perceptions of the public. My goal is not to retrieve the lived experience of actual historical publics but to sift through some of the conceptual, historical, and political implications of keywords and recurring tropes used to refer to mediated publics in Bengali.
