Television in India

Satellites, Politics and Cultural Change

Nalin Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134062126
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

This book examines the development of television in India since the early 1990s, and its implications for Indian society more widely. Until 1991, India possessed only a single state-owned television channel, but since then there has been a rapid expansion in independent satellite channels which came as a complete break from the statist control of the past. This book explores this transformation, explaining how television, a medium that developed in the industrial West, was adapted to suit Indian conditions, and in turn has altered Indian social practices, making possible new ways of imagining identities, conducting politics and engaging with the state. In particular, satellite television initially came to India as the representative of global capitalism but it was appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs and producers who Indianized it. Considering the full gamut of Indian television - from "national" networks in English and Hindi to the state of regional language networks – this book elucidates the transformative impact of television on a range of important social practices, including politics and democracy, sport and identity formation, cinema and popular culture. Overall, it shows how the story of television in India is also the story of India's encounter with the forces of globalisation.

1
Introduction

Satellite television, identity and globalisation in contemporary India

Nalin Mehta

‘Idol’ television: nationalism, identity formation and satellite television

When the makers of American Idol sold the India rights of their programme to Sony Entertainment Television they could never have imagined that the Indian variant—Indian Idol—would one day act as a catalyst for cultural and political forces that would draw the north-eastern states of India closer to the mainland as never before. In the third year of Indian Idol, two young men from the north-east, a region that has continually suffered for its physical and cultural distance from the mainland, made it as finalists on the programme. The first was a Gorkha from Darjeeling, Prashant Tamang. Employed as a constable in the Kolkata Police, he came from a region that through the 1980s had undergone a traumatic insurgency for a separate Gorkhaland led by the Gorkha National Liberation Front. By 1989, the conflict itself had been resolved with the creation of a Gorkha autonomous hill district but the scars of those years still remained. The second was Amit Paul, a Bengali from Meghalaya, a state with deep divides between the tribal and non-tribal populations on the one hand and with mostly Bengali ‘Dkhars’—outsiders—on the other. These two young men qualified as finalists in the middle of 2007. What followed next bears detailed description to illustrate the nature of satellite television in India and its social meaning in a country where the state monopolised television for the first five decades of independence. As one media report pointed out:

Perfectly sober people, including senior bureaucrats and ministers, are doing bizarre things to get either Amit Paul from Shillong or Prashant Tamang from Darjeeling voted as India’s next singing sensation. Announcements are being made during football matches, marriage ceremonies and birthday parties to see either of the two singers through. Some ministers are exhorting voters to send SMSs in favour of their favourite crooner; others have booked PCOS [public call offices] for the job. Even former militants are allegedly browbeating residents to vote for the local star.

(Soondas, 2007a)

It was a stunning demonstration of satellite television’s potential for identity formation and political mobilisation in a land divided across various registers: caste, ethnicity, religion, language and sharp income divides. The rise of private satellite television, after decades of state monopoly over the medium, has engendered a transformation in India’s political and public culture, the nature of the state and expressions of Indian nationhood. Much like India’s ‘newspaper revolution’ (Jeffrey, 2003:xi) that started in the 1970s, and the ‘cassette culture’ (Manuel, 1993) of the 1980s, the availability of privately produced satellite television has meant that ‘people discovered new ways to think about themselves and to participate in politics that would have been unthinkable a generation before’ (Jeffrey, 2003:1). Operating at the junction of public culture, capitalism and globalisation, satellite networks are a new factor in the social and cultural matrix of India, with profound implications for the state, politics, culture and identity formation. These are the linkages this book sets out to explore and delineate in detail.

Television is a cultural arena where ideas circulate, often with unintended consequences.¹ The case of Indian Idol that began as a singing talent hunt is instructive. Let us first examine the case of Amit Paul. Writing on his impact on the politics of Meghalaya, Jaideep Mazumdar (2007) went so far as to observe:

When the history of Meghalaya is written, it could well be divided into two distinct phases—one before the third Indian Idol contest and another after it. A deep tribal-non tribal divide, punctuated by killings, riots, and attempts at ethnic cleansing, would mark the first phase. A return to harmony and to the cosmopolitan ethos of the past would signify the second. The agent of change: Amit Paul, the finalist of the musical talent hunt on a TV channel

As Mazumdar pointed out, the Bengali Paul became ‘the perfect medium’ to connect the predominant Khasi tribes of the state with the non-tribals, after two decades of ethnic conflict that had begun in 1979 after the alleged desecration of an idol of the Goddess Durga, revered by the non-tribal Hindus in the state. Amit Paul became a vital link for this process of reconciliation because his success in a national television competition, by bringing the north-eastern state, often relegated to the periphery in the mainstream consciousness, into the limelight, enabled a new mobilisation based on the boundaries of the political map of the state, rather than one based on ethnicity. The Times of India (Soondas, 2007b) described this mobilization as Amit Paul fever’—nomenclature that resonated with memories of ‘Ramayana fever’ (Lutgendorf, 1995:224), which had engulfed northern India in the 1980s during the telecast of the televised version of the great epic Ramayana. As Arvind Rajagopal, among others, has pointed out, that series played a pivotal role in the refashioning of the politics of religion and ethnicity in north India, facilitating the creation of a new Hindu public that was mobilised for the Ramajanmabhoomi agitation that resulted in the demolition of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.

This new 2007 ‘fever’ led to mobilization of a different kind, combining the imagery of television with the democratic process of voting. In a television show based on voting by viewers through mobile phone messages, Amit Paul’s entry into the finals led to a massive state-wide campaign for his victory, endorsed by no less than the chief minister himself. Appointing him as Meghalaya’s ‘brand ambassador for peace, communal harmony and excellence’, Chief Minister D.D.Lapang compared Paul to Kapil Dev, India’s cricket World Cup-winning captain of 1983. That victory kick-started the process that made cricket the centre of a new Indian nationalism centred on cricket.² By comparing Paul to Kapil Dev the chief minister had similar expectations for Paul. Moreover, in a region that is home to India’s oldest separatist insurgency—the Naga insurgency outdates even the Kashmir dispute—and where just one state, Manipur, has as many as 25 militant organizations,³ politicians cutting across party lines extorted people in all the seven north-eastern states to vote for a singer in a national television contest, broadcast from Mumbai. As Meghalaya’s Minister of Planning Mukul Sangma put it, ‘Amit personifies the aspirations of all residents of the state to achieve national fame’ (Mazumdar, 2007). Issuing an appeal to everyone in the north-east to vote for Paul, the former speaker of the Lok Sabha, Purno Sangma, emphasised the same point:

Amit has already created history. He is the pride of Meghalaya and the whole North-East. We are proud of him and I personally appeal to all citizens of Meghalaya and northeast to vote for Amit generously and make him the next Indian Idol

(Soondas, 2007a).

Ministers and state legislators competed with each other to donate public telephone booths to facilitate voting. If one legislator donated three booths, another donated three, a third as many as 20.⁴ According to one legislator, Amit Paul had become the symbol of reconciliation between the state’s divided ethnicities: Amit’s voice has broken all barriers. No one is a ‘dkhar’ [outsider] anymore. From now on we are all Meghalayans’.⁵

When Sony flew Paul home to perform in two concerts during a break in the programming schedule, the streets of Shillong were blocked in an unprecedented street party as large crowds, led by the chief minister, came out to welcome the previously unknown local who was paraded in an open jeep and welcomed with festive flags.⁶ A cavalcade of 1000 cars escorted Amit and as one reporter observed, ‘posters, T-shirts, coffee mugs and satchels bearing Amit’s smiling visage are the hottest items in town’ (Mazumdar, 2007). One reason for this mobilisation was the fact that for the first time a north-easterner had become a national figure in popular culture. As he progressed in the television show, he sang songs in Meghalaya’s Khasi, Nepali, Hindi and English on national television. In a country where north-easterners are often discriminated against in the mainland this was unprecedented. The 2007 Bollywood blockbuster Chak De India details this discrimination beautifully. When two young girls from the north-east turn up for a training camp in Delhi for the national women’s hockey team, they are disparagingly cat-called by local boys for their ethnicity, and the clerk registering the names of participants welcomes them by saying, ‘You are guests’. To which one of the girls replies, ‘How will you feel if you are called a guest in your own country’. The film captured the alienation of the north-east in the nationalist imagination of India and this is why Amit Paul’s success became such a cause for celebration. As another television singing contest winner from another north-eastern state, Assam, summed up, ‘Amit Paul and I are both from the north-east, a region hardly known to the outside world. We know the hurdles we have crossed to reach our desired destinations’ (Soondas, 2007a).

The case of the other contestant, and eventual winner, Prashant Tamang is equally revealing. A Gorkha by ethnicity, he is a police constable in the Kolkata Police. As he progressed through the competition through viewer voting, the hill districts of Darjeeling witnessed a similar mobilization. Just as Paul became the symbol of a nationalism centred on north-eastern identity, Tamang became the symbol of Gorkha nationalism. Crucially though, both nationalisms were not separatist in nature, but were constructed within the context of a pan-Indian nationalism that saw no conflict between regional and national identities that could be simultaneously assumed. The chief minister of neighbouring Sikkim, a state incorporated by India in 1975, was quoted as saying that he would ‘do much more than any government’ to advance Tamang’s cause (Soondas, 2007b). A businessman from Gangtok announced a Rs 10 million award to fund his campaign and in Kurseong, adjoining Tamang’s home town of Darjeeling, as many as 10,000 students held a street procession to generate support. Media reports noted how erstwhile cadres of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, which had fought a bitter battle for a separate state in the 1980s, were in the forefront of a campaign to elect a fellow Gorkha on a national television programme that was produced thousands of kilometres away in Mumbai and s...

Table of contents

• Routledge Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Mahatma didn’t like the movies and why it matters
• 3 India talking
• 4 Politics without television
• 5 Muslims on television
• 6 ‘Give me a vote, and I will give you a TV set’
• 7 Soaps, serials and the CPI(M), crickets beat them all
• 8 Bowling with the wind
• 9 Changing contexts, new texts
• Index