Afterword: A public sphere turned inside out: A brief global history of Indian media

Contra Marx and Engels, the growth of capitalism has not necessarily exposed the real conditions of life for the bourgeois and the proletariat. The expansion of communication has led to the projection of imagined communities more compelling than those of class interest. The bourgeois public sphere was a case in point, of course, but what happened when this framework for communicating capitalism was transplanted outside the West? Effectively, in its transplantation to the non-west, the public sphere was turned inside out, I suggest. Secular tolerance, which was previously supposed to be upheld by the state, was rendered a private affair, while discrimination against minorities, and the celebration of religious identity became more common in public.