Evolution of Indian Electronic Media
Television came to India by accident in 1959 when the multinational Phillips gifted some television equipment to India. But there was no place for this medium in the ‘Nehruvian State’ that emphasized on running the commanding heights of economy wherein it was considered irrelevant to the government’s development agenda. Thus attempts to develop it as mass medium remained absent till Indira Gandhi came to power. This is when television was transformed into not only a, what Mehta calls, “Trojan horse” into the citizens’ living rooms but also a gigantic propaganda tool for the ruling party, a vast patronage network with little space for creativity and initiative. Later on Rajiv Gandhi did attempt to bring about glasnost but failed.
However, the idea became a reality years later with the arrival of satellite television. But, before that a quiet struggle to break DD’s stranglehold on news retail had started. Newstrack, world’s first private video news magazine, created a niche by working outside the established system while Prannoy and Radhika Roy’s NDTV preferred to work from within the system initially, using DD’s infrastructure for telecasting such path breaking shows as The World This Week and News Tonight. In fact their endeavors epitomize the beginning of the end of state monopoly on TV news broadcasting (private radio news broadcasts are still banned in our country). Today there are more than 300 TV channels in India, out of which at least 106 broadcast daily news in 14 languages. Between 1998 and 2006 the number of 24 hour satellite news channels rose to more than 50, broadcasting news in 11 languages.
In the 1980s TV was consciously turned into a mass medium as a political/developmental strategy. An agent of the socialist state, it simultaneously accommodated the steady growth of Indian capitalism, gradually turning commercial from the late 1970s onwards with the introduction of advertising. The development of a national television network in the 1980s, accompanied with television advertising, augmented the creation of a ‘new consumer class’ and this formed the basis for a new notion of collectivity expressed as ‘the middle class’. But this makeover of DD and its co-option by the forces of capitalism happened in strictly controlled conditions. News programming remained a zealously guarded sanctum sanctorum, even though a great deal of like entertainment was farmed out to sponsors and private producers. All programming, however, was subject to strict bureaucratic and political control.
However, it took the political establishment some time and effort to accept the arrival of new technology with some confidence. For example, in Dec 1993 KP Singh Deo – the then Union I&B Minister – had declared the private satellite channels as ‘diabolical invasion from the sky’. Although, eventually, the concerns regarding CNN-isation/MTVisation of Indian television were proved to be baseless, bogey of neo-colonization was raised and jingoism reached scream levels when the minister dubbed those who did not watch DD as anti-national.
While the new satellite TV technology fuelled debates on the cultural impact of television, it also heralded the lessening, and eventual disappearance, of the vice-like grip of the State.
Talking of cultural impact, this book – though mainly focused on news channels – observes that the serial Ramayan on DD heralded the revival of Hindutva. This may not be far off the mark but if there had been more in-depth study I am sure the credit would have gone to Chanakya that unabashedly promoted nationalist fervor – mixed with Hindutva undercurrents. The frequent references to “Ma Bharati” by the protagonist and his depiction as a tireless nation-builder via temple pathshalas certainly were ultra-right in theme and content. However, coming back to the news channels, the book is right in averring that BJP successfully ‘mediated’ the anti-BJP coverage of 2002 Gujarat riots to reach out to its constituency. However, the contention that Babri Masjid would not have been demolished if private news channels had existed in 1992 is open to debate, because here too the coverage could have been mediated to BJP’s advantage with Narsimha Rao unwilling to face up to the gathering Hindutva storm.
This thoroughly researched tome seeks to correlate the vast changes in Indian television and India over the past decade. It tries to find answers to critical questions about the relationship of television, globalization and capitalism; the role of television in creating political identities; and what this means for India’s liberal democracy. The book also seeks to know why television is growing, who pays for it, who profits from it, who produces it, who controls it and what changes it brings. It argues that though news channels were driven by capitalist motives of profit generation, their efforts led to the creation of new visual publics – national, regional and local – that altered politics and forms of identity formation in significant ways. Live television news used new forms of technology to plug into existing social nodes of communication, introduced a new kind of publicness and initiated a social transformation.
It argues that the emergence of television news networks is intimately connected with mechanisms of public discussion and interactive reasoning, and has enhanced and strengthened deliberative Indian democracy. It also identifies the social sources of news television and moves beyond the political economy equation to argue that the rise of Indian news television can only be understood in the context of a society with a strong argumentative tradition of public reasoning. Indian television thrives on programming genres that marry older argumentative traditions with new technology and notions of liberal democracy to create new hybrid forms that strengthen democratic culture. It then moves on to a genealogy of politics on satellite television that focuses on the specific ways in which the medium emerged as a new factor in the Indian political matrix in the mid-1990s and changed the daily practices of politics because of the 24-hour publicity it provided.
It further argues that far from being a simple techno-centric offshoot of the economic reform process that started in 1991 Indian satellite television grew because of a unique confluence of economic, political and technological factors. It sketches the complexity of responses that the medium drew from different organs of the state – some embraced it while others consistently opposed it. It also shows that satellite television came to India as an agent of global capitalism, that Indian entrepreneurs were initially in subordinate positions, but that they gradually reversed the power equation. Now we are witnessing the beginning of a gradual reordering of global media flows with India transforming from a mere receiver to a major supplier. In global terms, Indian networks have so far served large diasporas around the world but they have recently started branching out into foreign languages as well. Both Zee TV and NDTV, for instance, have been involved in setting up channels in Bahasa Indonesia. Zee is now looking to branch out in local languages in Russia, Malaysia and Afghanistan. The point is that India appropriated satellite television, Indianised it.
Chapter 3 specifically focuses on broadcast policy and its meanings. It argues that the control of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, that monopolized broadcasting since inception, has been reduced because immense changes in the political economy of India have overtaken it. Every minister of broadcasting since 1991 has tried to assert otherwise but none very successfully. When the old command model of television was shaken up, the hitherto all-powerful, seemingly unitary state failed to evolve a coherent regulatory regime catering to the new realities for more than a decade. After an initial period of denial by the state, a series of loose and parallel systems of control emerged, often at cross-purposes with each other, and none very effective. This was true at least till mid-2007 when new Broadcast Bill (2007) tried to fill in the vast grey areas in the legal structures of broadcasting. India’s encounter with private broadcasting offers an illuminating case study to understand the larger trajectory of changes that engulfed the Nehruvian state after it embarked on economic reform.
Complex forms of globalization are embedded within Indian television’s evolution. Chapter 5 specifically uses the example of cricket and sport programming to document the cultural implications of this Indianisation. Television has been Indianized because news channels put what might be termed global practices of television through an Indian lens, remarrying them reconstituted elements of what are seen as ‘Indian’ practices to create new hybrid genres of programming. Because private television came to India as a foreign entity, Indian producers in the early years largely followed Western formats, which served as a benchmark. As competition intensified, however, economic pressures turned news producers into mediators of what they understood to be an ‘Indian’ identity. They tapped into Indian oral traditions and traditional patterns of social communications that historians and sociologists have long documented and channeled them into television. The ‘mediated’ nature of the tele-visual medium means that these traditions are not transferred as is, but repackaged with the use of new interactive technologies in a form that resembles, but is still vastly different from, the original. It uses cricket to illustrate what this means for notions of identity and Indian-ness.
Satellite television is one of the most obvious manifestations of globalization. Its technological capabilities have been adapted in unforeseen ways but debates on globalization, media and cultural impact have struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation. The central problem in cultural debates on globalization has been the ‘tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. But many of these debates revolve around the traditional notions of a dominant center and dependent periphery and, though many scholars have argued in favor of more ‘hybridized’, complex and overlapping information flows, empirical work on how such processes work within the non-Western media has been thin.
This book is a seminal, but by no means comprehensive, work on the evolution of television in India. There is a need to have a look at the regional television too. Moreover, the book confines its study to news channels whereas the impact of non-news or entertainment television on India’s political, social and cultural aspects needs to be evaluated too.
