The Mahatma didn’t like the movies and why it matters

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.

Media Watch, 2015

India witnessed a revolution in the television communication landscape following the shift in the economic policies in 1991. This analytical study looks into the changes and additions in the functions performed by mass communication using television medium before and after the implementation of liberalization policies in India. Tables are included to provide overviews of the historical developments at different periods and to distinguish the functions performed by television communication. In addition to information, education, entertainment, correlation and mobilization functions, empowerment and need satisfaction are also accounted as functions added in the due course of mass communication progression in the transnational and digitized era.

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.

South Asian History and Culture, 2012

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 2016

SOUTH ASIA RESEARCH, vol. 10, No. 1, May 1990

Journal of Communication, 2001

Anthropological Quarterly, 2001

Rethinking Indian Political Institutions

As elsewhere, economic reforms in India went hand in hand with important changes in the media sector. Besides forcing a review of India media law, the introduction of new media technologies like cable and satellite television has rede ned existing communicative, economic and political networks, both at the macro and local levels. Starting as an urban cottage industry, within less than a decade the new media networks in India show strong signs of consolidation. As a starting point, this article brie y examines how current changes in Indian media law have substantially recast debates on media autonomy. It then analyses recent shifts in the distribution sector with respect to Mumbai, examining how the entry of transnational/ 'indigenous' media rms has signi cantly affected both the pace of developments within the industry, as well as the ground-level equations between big enterprise, political bosses, local networks and the underworld. With revenues directly tied to the reach of the cable networks, increasingly the right to control 'distribution territories' has emerged as a key issue. The extensive volatility within the industry is thus an outcome of an ideological climate where media deregulation in India has sought to reinforce belief in the ef cacy of the market and the elimination of competition. The distribution of cable and satellite services in India has been undergoing rapid transformation over the last decade. Considering that the 1991 Gulf War marked the beginning of foreign satellite broadcasting in India, the fact that cable television now reaches more than 20 million Indian homes 2 is an index of the fast pace of growth within the new television distribution industry. Although today cable and satellite services are closely linked, it is worth remembering that cable operations pre-date satellite TV in India. 3 Among the rst cable operators were those who ran closed-circuit lm programmes in luxury hotels. Especially in cities like Mumbai, closely-built apartment blocks with a high concentration of resident populations presented an ideal breeding ground initially for lm-based cable TV services. With the video boom and the falling cost of