ABSTRACT
Cultural nationalism opposes the global monoculture with vernacular cultures in complete innocence of the origins of vernacular cultures. Arguing that the vernacular literary cultures of the past were conscious decisions made by producers of those cultures, Sheldon Pollock emphasizes the "produced" and provisional nature of vernacular cultures. Pollock's critique of the binary of the "philologies of community" and "philologies of contact" underlying the cosmopolitan/vernacular opposition is relevant to Indian cultural nationalism's espousal of an indigenous vernacular. The nexus formed between different components of the culture industry to dish out traditional fare to Indian viewers with a global dressing highlights the role capital plays in the production, distribution and framing of the new media. Michel de Certeau's notion of tactic is particularly helpful in understanding how popular practices can resist the dominant culture. Digital culture overturns the distinction between the sophisticate and the local through the techno-nostalgic privileging and globalization of the non-technologized and the rustic.
