When I began my research on the power of the Hindi media in India, there were only a few studies available on the growth of the Hindi media and its potential impact on Indian politics. The work of Robin Jeffrey (2000) and Sevanti Ninan (2007) provided broad overviews of the Hindi media while Per Stahlberg's (2002) study provided a rich ethnographic account of the relationship between the Hindi media and politics. Anup Kumar (2011) analysed the role of the Hindi media in mobilising the public that led to the creation of a new state, the State of Uttarakhand. These studies further fuelled my interest in the role and effects of the Hindi media in the political process. At the same time, my ambition as a student of political communication led me to look at the larger theoretical question of whether media plays a role in the mobilisation of citizens and influences political outcomes.

I have been interested in the growth of the Hindi media since my days as a PhD student at the National University of Singapore (NUS). In 2010, I joined Kyoto University as a Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) postdoctoral fellow. This fellowship gave me time to develop an analysis of the role of the Hindi media in India's democracy, which was published in Economic and Political Weekly in 2011. Another book chapter titled ‘News Media and Political Participation: Re-evaluating Democratic Deepening in India;’analysing the relationship between the media and politics in India, was published in a volume I co-edited, Democratic Transformation and the Vernacular Public Arena in India, Routledge (2014). Parts of these two publications are the basis for parts of the discussion and data presented in two chapters (1 and 3) of the book. Back in India in 2013, after I joined the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance (CCMG) at Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI), a central university in Delhi, I had the opportunity to immerse myself in India's media and politics. At CCMG, I developed two specialised courses on digital media and political communication with a focus on published research largely from western contexts to discuss developments in India.

In late 2013, I collaborated with Anup Kumar and Holli Semetko on a Delhi Assembly election study that became a pilot for our spring 2014 India Election Study that focused on the impact of campaigning in urban contexts.