Necessity, not Invention: Popular Culture and the construction of State Identity in China and India.

In studying national and state identity, scholars have primarily focused on official or political discourses as evidence of identity construction. More recently, Ted Hopf has underlined the importance of popular culture in examining societal discourses of Soviet and Russian state identity. By looking at portrayals of minorities in Chinese and Indian movies and visual arts we extend Hopf's framework in two ways. First, both China and India have significant heterogeneous, illiterate and poor parts of their population, rendering textual sources less useful as the primary means to study identity. Second, we want to see what types of culture are generated by the state as opposed to internal and external others. By looking at popular culture in a democracy and a non-democracy, we can assess to what extent popular culture is manufactured by the state or is representative of societal discourses. Through an analysis of significant films and art in the post-cold war period, we show how popular culture both reflects and is used as a means to carve out state identity with relation to 'internal' others, such as Muslims and the rural poor. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]