Culture

India's linguistic settlement, built around the three-language formula and periodic reassertions of Hindi's official status, has never fully resolved the tension between administrative efficiency and regional linguistic identity. Revisiting the 1965 anti-Hindi agitation in Tamil Nadu alongside more recent controversies over language in education and official communication shows a pattern still unresolved. The essay argues the settlement's durability lies precisely in its ambiguity, however uncomfortable.

India's public cultural institutions, including the Sahitya Akademi, the ICHR, the National School of Drama and the film certification board, were built with formal autonomy from direct government control, yet this autonomy has been repeatedly tested by successive governments seeking to shape appointments and content. This essay traces specific episodes of contestation across decades and argues that institutional independence, however imperfectly realised, remains worth defending on non-partisan grounds. It closes by acknowledging the genuine difficulty of drawing that line in practice.

Long before formal media studies took the claim seriously, Indian screen culture was already functioning as an informal political curriculum, shaping how audiences understand authority, community and the state. The 1987 telecast of Ramayan on Doordarshan and subsequent decades of political cinema and streaming drama offer concrete evidence of this influence. The essay argues that recognising this informal curriculum matters more, not less, as streaming platforms fragment the shared audience that once made such influence traceable.