Imagining an India: The Media Ecology of the Indian Diaspora in the Greater Chicago Are

Indians have migrated to America in recognizable numbers since at least the turn of the 19th century and have established large and thriving communities in many major cities, especially after the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965. Members of these communities have regularly engaged with news from and about India in order to stay connected with some notion of "home." While early generations relied on a relatively sparse media ecology shaped particularly by legacy ethnic media (print, radio, video) and interpersonal networks, the contemporary Indian diaspora also have at their disposal digital media platforms that have made it easier and faster than ever before to stay engaged with news from and about India.;Guided by Arjun Appadurai's concepts of hard and soft cultural forms and his framework of global cultural flows, particularly the mediascape and ethnoscape, my dissertation focuses on members of the Indian community in Chicago, one of the nation's largest, to explore how, why and with what consequences they engage with news for and about India. Through an analysis of in-depth interviews with members of the diverse Indian community in the Greater Chicago area, I describe and interpret the news consumption habits of three interconnected groups that constitute the Indian diaspora: 1) those who were born in India and relocated to Chicago, 2) Second-generation Indian Americans who were born in the United States, and 3) those who were born outside of India or the U.S. but whose heritage can be traced to India.;My research suggests that the while news- and media-consuming members of the Indian diaspora in Chicago often understand India as a combination of a place and an idea, the home-host structure prevalent in traditional diaspora studies is not especially salient for this group today. Instead, news and non-news media products appear to serve both cultural anchors and buoys that guide ethnic identity formation and maintenance in ways that elide or even elude the "home" versus "host" comparison.