CHANNELING CULTURES: TELEVISION STUDIES FROM INDIA

With the advent of digitization, television studies is expanding its contours to areas where the object would not be television apparatus per se, but it is still important to reframe the established Western-centric debates on such historical processes by positing television as an essential element in them. The paper attempts to map the limited yet critical scholarship of non-Western television studies that aim to bring a shift in the approach of television studies that produce grand theories out of entirely American or West European experiential domains. Outlining the key debates in non-Western television studies, particularly focusing on India, this paper underlines that it is crucial to identify the increasing powers of television culture across the world. The wide-ranging influence of the 'other' regions and the indication of a reasonable degree of difference in televisual culture can be crucial in challenging the Western basis of television studies, pointing to a restructuring of the discipline itself. The paper seeks to emphasize that it is vital not only to recognize how the Anglo-American experiential realm of television has turned out to be the natural referent, rather it is equally essential to conduct an examination of such naturalizations. Introduction This paper attempts to outline how scholars, particularly those studying Indian television cultures, can decisively engage with studying television to theoretically contribute into the discipline. With the advent of digitization, television studies is expanding its contours to areas where the object would not be television apparatus per se, but it is still important to reframe the established Western-centric debates on such historical processes by positing television as an essential element in them. The paper attempts to map the limited yet critical scholarship of non-Western television studies that aim to bring a shift in the approach of television studies that produce grand theories out of entirely American or West European experiential domains. This paper seeks to outline in what way the expansion of the traditional televisual form to the new digital platform relates to the emerging digital culture in a developing country? If broadcast television invoked the imaginary of the nation around a concurrent engagement with shared televisual experience, then what kind of communities or televisual subjects are constructed in response to the multiple screens, interfaces, and media platforms of our contemporary mediascape? In what ways smart TV, digital set-top boxes or ubiquitous mobile devices alter television's location within the

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.

South Asian History and Culture, 2012

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.

2009

Acknowledgments vi Introduction: the televisual sublime 1 Television theory: TV studies 1.0 and 2.0 22 Television institutions 50 Content 80 Audiences 110 How to do TV Studies 3.0 145 Conclusion 175

Anthropological Quarterly, 2001