Echoes of the teashop in a Tamil newspaper

This essay is about how the act reading the newspaper aloud in groups among working class men has become the object of textual representation in the newspaper itself. The popular gossip column called “Teashop Bench,” found in the Daily Blossom newspaper, rests on a different regime of circulation than that found in actual teashops. In purporting to represent one type of public, the Daily Blossom’s “Teashop Bench” column is involved in the performative conjuring of a different type, a new Tamil public that is premised on an emergent sense of private domesticity, where the newspaper is increasingly something to be read silently.