ABSTRACT
This chapter presents cultural politics and a category that refers to the struggle for control of the means of cultural production and conflict over meaning. Two types of contest are involved. The first, the Lasswellian question about the distribution of wealth, power and status, can be framed by the positivist language of political science. The second, the question about identity and worth, is more suitably discussed in the language of post-modernism. Cultural politics is grounded in the control of the means of public culture. From the perspective of cultural politics as against that of the "information society," India's illiterates should be counted as participant. Control of the means of public culture became an issue in the elections of 1989 in a number of ways. The struggle for control over the means of cultural production is carried on at the legal and institutional level by the contest over media autonomy.
