(In)Visible Publics: Television and Participatory Culture in India
Abhijit Roy
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
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.
Key takeaways
- Television and participatory culture in India
- Extending this argument, I have suggested on another occasion (Roy 2014) that the ABHIJIT ROY (IN)VISIBLE PUBLICS demise of the form of 'discrete programming' (the modern realist mode I have referred above) and the simultaneous rise of the flow form on Indian television, a process gaining impetus between 1982 and 1991, did create a space for mass identification with television and therefore participatory culture around it.
- But, more importantly, it showed the growing anxiety of the Indian state over the appropriation of a nationwide participatory culture by agencies other than the Indian state.
- Hindi film once again came to play the role of a crucial unifying force behind participatory culture.
- Indian society is becoming a television society in more than one sense.
Related papers
The Televised Community. Culture, Politics, and the Market of Visual Representation in India
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.
The apparatus and its constituencies: On India’s encounters with television
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.
Reality TV and Participatory Culture in India
Popular Communication, 2010
This article focuses on events surrounding the third season of Indian Idol in order to assess the changing relationship between television, everyday life, and public political discourse in contemporary India. In the summer of 2007, media coverage of Indian Idol focused on how people in Northeast India cast aside decades-old separatist identities to mobilize support for Amit Paul and Prashant
Television Publics in South Asia: Mediated Politics and Culture
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.
Bringing up TV: Popular culture and the developmental modern in India
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.
CHANNELING CULTURES: TELEVISION STUDIES FROM INDIA
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
Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood and Nation in Postcolonial India (review)
Anthropological Quarterly, 2001
Public Interest Television and Social Responsibility: The Search for the Missing Person in Indian Television
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.
Imagining South Asian Television Publics
Television Publics in South Asia: Mediated Politics and Culture , 2023
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 broad range of themes which foreground the publics and their real-life experiences of television in the region. The essays 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; re-defining ‘the national’; theatrical television; and post truth television news, among other key issues.
Watching Barkha Dutt: Turning on the news in television studies
This essay examines Barkha Dutt, host of the popular NDTV news talk show ‘We the People’, as a symbolic portal into the rise of television news celebrity culture in India's altering mediascape. The essay first situates Dutt's work as a reporter and a talk show host within the context of Indian television journalism's role in the democratic public sphere and then explores the implications of Dutt's class and gender identities for the hierarchies of celebrity status in commercial television news. In the end, this case study of Barkha Dutt argues that greater attention to India's exploding journalism industry – its star personalities, political economy, critiques of news programmes' and talk shows' representations and audience responses – will revitalize and enrich the evolving trajectories of television studies.
The Time of Television: Broadcasting, Daily Life, and the New Indian Middle Class
This article develops a temporal framework for analyzing television's role in shaping the formation of a new and powerful urban middle class in 1980s India. Focusing on the first sitcom produced in India, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi [Such Is Life], we argue that the unique temporal affordances of broadcast television facilitated a broader shift in the national imaginary. Not only did broadcast television, via the vehicle of such neglected genres as sitcoms, synchronize the rhythms of daily life to its schedules, but sitcoms also recast the daily lives and experiences of the middle classes as ordinary, relatable, and achievable. Casting the 1980s as the time of television illuminates a critical period and medium of communication in Indian cultural history.
Television News and Democratic Change in India
This article examines the impact of India’s ‘television news revolution’, or the rapid growth of privately owned television news channels, on substantive democracy, or the ability of ordinary citizens to access social, political, and economic power. Existing scholarship has largely relied upon content analysis (or textual interpretation) and reception studies to address this question. In contrast this article examines media practice, drawing upon ethnographic field research on the social and political worlds of television news production in contemporary India. Through a specific focus on the experiences of freelance stringers in the news industry, one main argument is advanced: television news expansion has had a ‘provincializing effect’ of enabling the social, political, and economic empowerment of small-town, non-metropolitan, or provincial actors. This finding nuances and unsettles the common conflation of television news media with the interests of the urban middle-class elite in India. At the same time however, a detailed exploration of the political dynamics and consequences of ‘provincialization’ cautions against its reading as empowerment, subversion, or resistance to extant patterns of power and privilege: practices and structures of exclusion and inequality persist within these newly mobile social worlds.
Politics After Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India. By Arvind Rajagopal. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. viii + 393. $69.95 (hard), $24.95 (soft)
Journal of Communication, 2001
Spirited Publics? Post-secularism, Enchantment and Enterprise on Indian Television, In David Marshall, Sharyn McDonald, Glenn D’Cruz, and Katja Lee (eds.), Contemporary Publics (Palgrave MacMillan, London: in press).
In this chapter I use religious and spiritual television, a genre that many households in India engage with on a daily basis, as a way of thinking through some broader concerns around the role of everyday modes of televisual public-ity, civility and citizenship. The aim here is to broaden conventional communicative conceptions of publics to not only to embrace the affective, embodied and non-symbolic dimensions of media modernities but also to accommodate a non-secular or more correctly a post-secular conception of contemporary publics, one which embraces the spirit world, soothsayers and other enchanted systems of knowledge, belief and practices. This essay seeks to think about media publics taking into account a more pluralized and non secular model of modernity; it ventures into the world of enchanted and magical publics via a somewhat unlikely route: the figure of the religious guru on what I am terming lifestyle-oriented spiritual television. As I argue, popular televisual figures like the yoga guru Baba Ramdev and the family-friendly astrologer Astro Uncle, who provides astrologically-based parental advice, are now important guides to life, fate and fortune in today’s India. In foregrounding the role of such figures in shaping forms of what might be seen as public culture, my concern here is not so much with emphasising the idiosyncracies of Indian television or suggesting some kind of radical incommensurability between Euro-modern and Indian media publics. Rather I want to mobilise the figure of the spiritual-lifestyle guru as of way of exploring the confluence of secular and non-secular belief systems and late modern media cultures while unsettling some of our core assumptions around media modernities, televisual publics and the social.
Indian Media and Caste: Of Politics, Portrayals and Beyond
2021
Media industry in India has witnessed hegemony of dominant castes since its very inception. Such hegemony has had a huge impact on our everyday lives and how we come to experience the world. This paper attempts to analyze how caste operates in the media sector, from its composition to content and argues that Indian media has played a catalytic role in inflicting epistemic violence over the oppressed castes as it helps dominant discourses to prevail and shapes popular perceptions and culture. After going over journalism, the paper examines cinema and television as both- a tool of maintaining the status quo and also as a medium of resistance and assertion. An analysis of the feminist discourse in media reveals a linear and somewhat exclusionary approach that bars the agency of Dalit women from media representation. At the end, it explores the power of the Internet with respect to the emerging Ambedkarite voices that are strengthening a liberatory framework while reclaiming their world...
Inequalities in the public sphere: emergence of community television in India
Asian Ethnicity, 2012
Economic restructuring in the 1980s opened the doors to the previously statedominated television sector in developing countries. In India, unexpectedly, the resulting competitive setting produced multiple channels targeting various local ethnicities from below along with national-level expansion involving transnational corporations from above in a process now known as localization. While the plurality of channels translates into growth of the public sphere, this paper examines the reasons behind the uneven growth of community media, which cannot be explained by the community's size or economic resources. Some community channels extend their reach into the national arena while others lag in media development implying unequal political participation in the communicative system. What are the institutional reasons behind such variations in a multiethnic setting? The paper also examines whether the development of ethnic media reflects the redistribution of power taking place in the political arena or is it an independent development with implications of its own.
The Unbearable Liveness of News Television in India
TV And New Media (Sage)
The last two decades in India have seen an enormous growth of satellite television. News has established itself in the meanwhile not merely as a source of information but also of entertainment. Available in all regional languages through several competing channels, and presented elaborately, television news has come to establish a mode of address, which defines one’s sense of time and space, and configures one’s sense of the dramatic situated in others’ stories. This article engages with the implications of “liveness”—as material and as affect—toward convergence of news narratives. Discussing two of the most widely covered recent stories—Aarushi Talwar’s murder and Baby Falak—the article foregrounds the class antagonism and scandalous anxieties of Indian televisual publics, and argues that news television invites us to trade liveness for news. Thus, news media not only liberates itself of the rigor of news production but also entertains us by reaffirming our deepest anxieties and competing with other modes of intertextual entertainment available on rival channels.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.