Babus, lokkhis and the others: representations of the body in the daily press of Bengali India

Abstract

This article presents a quantitative and qualitative analysis of “journalistic” photographs in the daily press of Kolkata, West Bengal, India. It seeks to examine the representations of the bodies of adult subjects in the mass media in order to identify the strategies used in the construction of models of social order and of identity. These are correspondingly in the constitution/reproduction of dominant Bengali culture. Taking as the starting point the examination of the photographic images published in the daily press, we proceed to triangulate them with images produced by other representational mediators that were collected during fieldwork in the region.