Divided Media: Politics and Mediated Movements in India by Suruchi Mazumdar (published by Routledge in 2025) is a compact, intellectually rich reflection on how the media ecosystem, political movements, and democratic possibilities intersect in contemporary India. The author talks specifically about West Bengal’s and especially Kolkata’s media landscape and examines how mainstream news organisations, regional political cultures, and emerging digital spaces shape a larger understanding of movements, focusing on the Singur and Nandigram agitations of 2006 and 2007. ‘Through the complexities of mainstream news media and emerging digital culture in the eastern city of Kolkata, this book foregrounds regional and linguistic variations in the studies of media, movements, and politics in India.’ This regional emphasis allows the book to capture the cadence of West Bengal’s political tone and tenor, too.

The author examines the shifting media landscape, exploring hybridity, diversity, and digital nationalism through critical thematic analyses of newspaper coverage, qualitative digital studies of techno-commercial features such as hashtags and viral videos, and extensive interviews. The author very early on makes it clear to the reader, ‘This research does not aim to compare contemporary movements; rather, it tries to capture the changes in political communication in the context of core issues such as corporate industrialisation, oppositional protests, and religious nationalism within India’s emergent, evolving media landscape.’

Appealing to the reader is the book’s premise of a refusal to treat ‘the media’ as a single entity, a monolith. Instead, Mazumdar paints a picture of a hybrid, commercially driven, politically entangled media sphere in which visibility is never neutral and democratic participation is always mediated through competing interests. Mazumdar focuses on the metamorphosing media landscape, and remarkably captures the greys amidst mainstream media’s political and commercial logic, on-ground movements and digital activism, questioning dominant development and religious nationalist agendas and the possibilities of political diversity and democratic participation.

Another striking feature of the book is how it takes the media debate away from a Delhi-centric angle or national-media account of Indian journalism. By foregrounding Kolkata and the Bengali public sphere, Mazumdar underlines how Indian media politics cannot be fully understood only through national television debates, English-language newspapers, or pan-Indian digital trends. Regional language media, age-old political alliances and local ownership structures, amongst other factors, matter greatly in the larger scheme of things. The theoretical spine of the book is the argument that Indian media cannot be understood through a neat division between independent journalism and political propaganda, between old and new media, or between digital and print media. In this strain, fascinating to note, how different factors- political alliances, market pressures, professional norms, activist practices, and digital circulation overlap in complex ways. To the reader, then, the media doesn’t come across as either an apostle of righteousness or an ombudsman of morality, but she views it as an active participant in mediated democracy.

The paradox comes to the fore of how a fragmented media landscape does not necessarily produce ideological diversity. This reveals how surface-level differences in media perspectives can coexist with shared silences on deeper structural questions. Mazumdar situates digital media practices within a broader media ecology, where these interact with print journalism, television narratives, party networks, and commercial platforms.

In layered, scholarly, yet careful prose, Mazumdar writes within the framework of media studies, political economy and communication. For students of media, those interested in the interplay between media and the political ecosystem, it both stymies and strengthens, and for those engaged in journalistic practice, the book is a seminal study of the interwoven warp and weft of journalism in all its practicalities. The writing style is academic, method-driven and analytical, giving the work gravitas, as it moves between historical context, textual analysis, interviews and digital-cultural observation.

Concepts such as ‘hybridity’, ‘partisanship’, ‘commercial logic’ and ‘movement visibility’ are used with precision, but they require sustained attention from the reader. The book subtly offers a sobering reminder to the reader that democratic visibility is always contested, never guaranteed, and rarely innocent. The book wins in the way it presents media in a non-binary debate of old and new media, digital and print, and commercial and personal; rather, it inhabits those parts where it asks how media become sites of negotiation, compromise and contestation. Prescient thoughts on the current media debate are the aftertaste that the reader is left with, as the author rightly mentions.  ‘The tension between shifting political alliances, commercial, and media/professional logic remains pertinent to this multi-hybrid digital space.’ The book is as much an academic study as it is a sociological contract.

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Swati Rai is a Delhi-based English language and communication skills trainer.