Imagining South Asian Television Publics

Television has a prime role to play in the formation of discursive domains in the everyday life of South Asian publics. This book explores various television media practices, social processes, mediated political experiences and everyday cultural compositions from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. With the help of country-specific case studies, it captures a broad range of themes which foreground the publics and their real-life experiences of television in the region. The chapters in this book discuss gendered television spaces, women seeking solace from television in pandemic, the taboo in digital TV dramas, television viewership and localizing publics, changing viewership from television to OTT, news and public perception of death, redefining 'the national', theatrical television and post-truth television news, among other key issues. Rich in ethnographic case studies, this volume will be a useful resource for scholars and researchers of media and communication studies, journalism, digital media, South Asian studies, cultural studies, sociology and social anthropology.

Anthropological Quarterly, 2001

‘‘South Asian Media Cultures’ provides great insight into the complex South Asian mediascape. It represents a critical, reflecting approach illustrating the recent trend of transnational and cross-disciplinary discussion.’ —Alexandra K. Schott, ‘Internationales Asien Forum’ 'An astute, engaging, and sophisticated volume for anyone interested in popular culture, globalization, and shifting social and political landscapes in South Asia.' —Sunaina Maira, Associate Professor of Asian American Studies, University of California, Davis 'Through detailed qualitative analysis, this book provides fascinating - and occasionally disturbing insights into the intersecting cultural identities and ideologies that are at stake in this rapidly changing region.' David Buckingham, Professor at the Institute of Education, University of London 'South Asian Media Cultures' is a collection of essays that pulls together field-based audience and textual research in areas such as the politics of new media, contemporary television and film in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and their audiences. Through a careful analysis of the various media cultures and practices from across South Asia, this collection addresses pertinent issues such as how discourses on gender, nationalism, ethnicity and class are being expressed by mainstream media texts across South Asia, and how different groups within the public discern meanings from such discourses. With this collection, Banaji aims to reduce the reliance on commercial Hindi cinema ('Bollywood') for reference on the politics and history of South Asian Media. Instead, key current research and theoretical debate are presented in an accessible manner. They are organised around three clear themes: 'Audiences, meanings and social contexts', which focuses on the responses of particular social groups to specific media formats, ideas or genres; 'Media Discourse, Identity and Politics', which discusses the complex links between media representations and socio-political identities; and 'Alternative Producers: New Media, Politics and Civic Participation', which describes and assesses the various civic practices and possibilities opened up in South Asia by digital and mobile communications.

The little black-ink rubber-stamp I discovered sometime in the early 1990s had two Bengali words for designation: 'Betar Srota' (Radio Listener). Proudly displayed by the rightful user, a paan-shop owner in the southern fringe of Calcutta, this text used to appear below his signature in every letter he wrote to All India Radio's Calcutta station, particularly to Vividh Bharati. Apart from being an indicator of popularity of radio in the heydays of public television in India, this is also a testimony of how the Subject interacting with media constitutes its identity. Such personalisation may be rare but it hints towards the myriad histories of participatory culture in India and their various relations with the personal, the private and the public. In this essay I seek to understand some of them with a view to roughly propose a critical agenda for studies in lndian participatory cultures. I try to demonstrate how earlier forms of audience engagement with radio and TV help us understand 'participatory culture' -- interactivity, participation, mobilization -- around particularly Reality TV.

REVIEW Television Studies in India , 2014

Biswarup Sen and Abhijit Roy (eds.), Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2014. Hardcover, Pages 322. Television Studies is a new area in the academic disciplines in India. While Film Studies as a discipline flourished in the last two decades, there has been also progress in the fields of Media Studies, Cultural Studies and very recently in New Media Studies. But television which emerged in the last three decades as the largest and most popular media in India has not been properly addressed in the critical disciplines. Empirical researches on television programmes are often conducted from the vantage point of "mass communication" but they usually address pragmatic and functional aspects of Indian TV. There exists very little amount of academic publications in India which is able to address television theoretically by exploring the political economy of television culture. This anthology, edited by Biswarup Sen and Abhijit Roy, aspires to fill up the void in the sphere of our existing knowledge related to television studies in India. Television nowadays in India has become one of the most important spheres of popular culture which claims a considerable span of time in our everyday mores. After the liberalization of Indian sky through global satellite broadcasting in the early 1990s, television in India exclusively redefined the older paradigms of communication and reception. The book edited by Sen and Roy includes most recent theoretical developments in television studies and aims at understanding the political economy of the shifting codes of televisual culture in India. The book contains twelve chapters preceded by an introduction. The chapters are focused on televisual forms, cultural experiences of television and the political histories of television in India. The first chapter, "TV after Television Studies: Recasting Questions of Audiovisual Form" by Abhijit Roy revisits the theoretical frameworks of Television Studies as a critical discipline. His essay maps the historical development of television studies starting from British screen theory to the most contemporary of media

2007

This book is essentially an ethnography of television production in a situation of acute change. In late February 2002, when the fieldwork for this thesis commenced, an Express train carrying many Hindu-nationalist activists caught fire outside a small-town station in the West-Indian state of Gujarat. The incident set off the most brutal and most clearly state-sponsored violence against the Muslim minority (more than 2000 dead, 200 000 displaced) in India's post-Independence history. It was the first communal violence that was 24x7 reported nation-wide by commercial television, and it was the first pogrom on a global scale that was covered live and uncensored by competing networks from the same country (rather than international media "uncovering" such a form of organised violence and persecution). Researched under this impression of mediated real violence, this thesis provides, firstly, an analysis of the interplay of transnational media corporations, particularly Rupert Murdoch's Star TV, in their pursuit of creating profitable national consumer markets, preferably in a democracy like India, with the anti-minority politics, modes of popular/populist mobilisation and discursive strategies of Hindu nationalism. It looks at the economic, technological, medial, political, social, visual/iconographic and legal aspects of this interplay and delineates their concrete manifestations in news as well as in entertainment programming of everyday television (particularly in very popular shows and channels at the time). These aspects are set into the larger framework of globalisation, privatisation, commercialisation and neo-liberal policies, the related thrusts of social upward mobility (especially in the new middle classes), ‘good governance’ (instead of socio-economic justice) and shifting class-, caste-, majority-minority and national-regional relations in the context of a re-formulation of nation and state that defines and legitimises new logics of inclusion and exclusion. Secondly, this work is a study of "Indianisation" and lingual/representational politics in the context of the growing precariousness of the liberal-secular discourse and of democratic, independent mass media in India. Especially English-language journalists, whose largely critical coverage of the anti-Muslim violence experienced an hitherto unknown rejection on the part of TV audiences (and consequently produced a slump in advertising revenues), turned with the Gujarat crisis out to epitomise the ambivalence of challenging the definitional power of a privileged postcolonial class: its rightful critique carries the danger of vindicating and naturalising anti-minority cultural nationalism. The study follows and examines, before the background of a normative construction of a Hindi-speaking, ‘authentic’ media consumer, the changing position of both English and Hindi-producing journalists and producers, their respective perceptions of alienation, speechlessness and empowerment, their unwanted role as activists in the context of shifting meanings of 'neutrality' and 'objectivity', their difficulties or agility in assessing their options and maintaining, changing or even developing their convictions, and the strategies they find or reject for adapting to the circumstances. In this context, thirdly, this book engages in a critical debate of anthropological assessments of globalisation and media change and theories of postcolonialism on the one hand and conventional modes of ethnography on the other hand. It attempts to show the 'blind spot' of the mutual linkage between Hindu nationalism and economic liberalisation in the approaches specifically of Arjun Appadurai and the Subaltern Studies Group and argues for a stronger reflection and consideration in anthropological research on the cooperation between ‘the global’ and ‘the local’ in terms of disabling and anti-emancipatory mechanisms rather than focussing mainly on aspects of empowerment and negotiation of identity. At the same time it proposes, by introducing an ‘ethnographic moment’ instead of the ‘ethnographic present’, a flexibility in ethnography that is aware of its increasingly ephemeral character and that takes account of the pace of change in the media as well as of the grown likelihood, in a global era of post-traditional wars and genocidal politics, of the field researcher to be confronted with incalculable situations of conflict and violence.

International Journal for Digital Television, 2016

This article maps the intricate ways televisual spaces build a sense of community and access to transnational networks of solidarity. Taking the programme Pravasalokam or ‘The World of Expatriates’ as a specific instance, this article tracks the imagination of ‘Gulf’ and the affective community who responds to such transnational television programmes. The show has been described as a ‘part-reality’ show on account of the fact that it hybridizes the formula for reality television by adding a component of investigative journalism. India has a substantial expatriate population in the Gulf countries, most from the state of Kerala. The show tracks down missing expatriate workers in the Gulf at the request of family members who have lost contact with them. Pravasalokam therefore acts surgically, as if to restore life to the previously geographically stable family. In effect, Pravasalokam, I argue, is a symptom of a larger condition of the transnational family, wherein the risk of disconnection always looms large despite the myriad possibilities of communication in the digital age.

In my attempt at exploring possible connections between nation and the television ‘form’, I have in this essay tried to track a major trajectory in television studies, that of the theoretical investments in the formal aspects of the televisual experience. The essay heavily draws upon the recent debates around the notion of ‘flow’ in the work of Raymond Williams and relates them to another movement which is also, not surprisingly, called ‘flow’ i.e. the flow of programs and programming from one country to the other, the most familiar route being from the North America to the rest of the world. The object is to investigate whether television inclines towards offering a specific kind of experience, whether, to put it more precisely, television comes closer to being an ‘ideological apparatus’. We try to locate the Indian context—with its particular histories of performance—vis-à-vis this apparatus and show that, to a large extent, the so called ‘pre-capitalist’ traits in the Indian popular performative traditions are homologous with what western theorists try to specify (though in contradicting terms) as a somewhat ‘central’ televisual experience. One of the main aims is to account for this correspondence of televisual form to the heteronomous popular of the territories that consistently refuse to harbour fully bourgeoised state-form and that continue to be highly heterogeneous in production relations. The paper tries to investigate into the specific imports of this relation in the post-liberalization cultural lives of television in India with special reference to a somewhat novel way television has started imagining the nation. I shall draw upon various instances from the history of television in India to demonstrate the currency of this dialogue between the pre-television modes of addresses and the televisual flow in the constitution of televisual subjects in India. The significance of the Indian popular film form in lending a major legacy to televisual reception would be a key area of concern. The series of works in Indian Film Studies over the last twenty years, in their insistent emphasis on the political economy of popular audio-visual cultures, gives the paper a major point of entry into the study of location of the televisual apparatus in a post-colonial context.

The essay suggests that the ideologies of the privatized satellite television in India remain largely inconceivable unless one takes into account the complex relationship between the Indian state and realms of ‘popular’ down from the 1960s. It takes a close look at the way India’s state-controlled television tried to frame a certain aesthetics of ‘development communication’ involving issues of pedagogy, nationhood, citizenship, sexuality, morality, autonomy and publicness. One of the key arguments is that the State’s moralizing effort to conceive a modern televisual public as antagonistic to what it thought to be a ‘vulgar’ cinematic public, along with a concurrent obligation to make television popular and profitable, created a host of contradictions within the hegemonic projects of the state. This, however, also led to possibilities of negotiation between the statist forms and the emergent consumerist forms of citizenship post-1982. In this sense, we are looking at the conditions of possibility of the way post-Liberalization satellite television most aptly demonstrates the inter-constitutive relationship between the State and the Market, the historical liaison between democracy and capitalism.

This thinkpiece draws attention to a recent trajectory in Television Studies that wishes to reframe the axiomatic of the discipline for the purpose of locating television as a key player in larger historical processes. Arguing that such a shift couldn’t be imagined without a crisis of the discipline’s excessive reliance on Anglo-American experiential spheres, the article examines how scholars of non-western—particularly South Asian—television can critically engage with this moment to theoretically intervene into the discipline. Surveying disciplinary debates across Literature, History, Media Studies and Culture Studies, the article problematizes the comparativist approach as well as the tenors of multiculturalism and postmodernism in the recent efforts to revisit television’s location in History. The imperative of negotiating two orders of the ‘modern’ (the European modern and the 20th century ‘communicative modernity’ of the global north), a creative challenge posed broadly to the non-western media scholar, has never been significantly addressed by the discipline of Television Studies. The article proposes that any attempt to locate television in History and envisage a broader inter-disciplinary dialogue must address such an imperative and not be content merely with presenting differences. Keywords: Television Studies, Disciplinary debates, History, Modernity, South Asia.