This book presents a new perspective on broadcasting by bringing together two neglected areas of research in studies of media in India—(a) the intertwined genealogies of sovereignty, public, religion, and nation in radio and television and (b) the spatiotemporal dynamics of broadcasting—into a single analytic inquiry. I argue that the spatiotemporalities of broadcasting and the interrelationships among the public, religion, and nation can be traced to an organizing concept that shaped India's late colonial and postcolonial histories: sovereignty. In what follows, I describe how sovereignty in its various incarnations functioned as an organizing concept for the associated ideas of public, religion, and nation; discuss the spatiotemporal underpinnings of broadcasting; elaborate the book's theoretical approach distinguishing it from other approaches; and sketch the chapter outlines.

In 1995, the Supreme Court of India, ruling in the case involving the Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, versus the Cricket Association of Bengal, declared that ‘the Air waves are public property’; the state-run television does not hold exclusive monopoly over broadcasting, and ‘the broadcasting media should be under the control of the public as distinct from the government’. The Court's strictures precipitated a series of policy measures instituted by the Indian government through parliamentary and bureaucratic committees to create an autonomous corporation for the management of the state-run television network. The ruling also triggered spirited discussions among journalists, policy makers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the scholarly community that centred around the category of ‘the public’: what was this public that the Court was putting in place, and how should one situate it in relation to the rapid transformations wrought by media privatization and economic liberalization?

While the arguments varied across ideological lines, all agreed that the Court's ruling marked a decisive moment for Indian broadcasting. Yet none broached the juridical reasoning that informed the judgment, that is, the particular ways in which law and legal codes were deployed, the citations as well as transfer of ideas and knowledge from earlier court decisions, broadcast laws from the US and Europe, mobilization of the rights discourse, and so on.