South Asian Popular Culture

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Bringing up TV: Popular culture and the developmental modern in India Abhijit Roy a a Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta-32, India

Online Publication Date: 01 April 2008 To cite this Article: Roy, Abhijit (2008) 'Bringing up TV: Popular culture and the developmental modern in India', South Asian Popular Culture, 6:1, 29 - 43 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/14746680701878539 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14746680701878539

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South Asian Popular Culture Vol. 6, No. 1, April 2008, 29–43

Bringing up TV: Popular culture and the developmental modern in India Abhijit Roy* Department of Film Studies, Jadavpur University, Calcutta-32, 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.

The first five-year plan of India designated the role of communication in development in the following way: ‘An understanding of the priorities which govern the Plan will enable each person to relate his or her role to the larger purposes of the nation as a whole…. All available methods of communication have to be developed and the people approached through the written and the spoken word no less than through radio, film, song and drama’.1 Clearly, it was not simply the ‘priorities’ of the government that mattered and had to be implemented, but also an understanding of the priorities that equally concerned the post-colonial state. Development, as such, is not simply the seemingly benign activity aimed at bijli, sadak and pani (electricity, roads and water) but is also a process of evolving ‘methods of communication’, devising a mode-of-address or a language that can generate consent of the people to whom the institutional enterprise of development is directed. Perhaps the most crucial phrase in the cited passage is ‘larger purposes of the nation as a whole’ to which, the plan wishes ‘each person’ to relate. Television in India was started in 1959 and it had to perform the role no other than that of All India Radio: homogenize a varied set of addressees as part of the nationalist drive of conjuring a standardized citizenship. The idea of ‘Indianness’ that shaped the mass media policy in independent India was derived from the cultural projects of the ‘nationalist elite’ of colonial India.2 However, one should cautiously mention here that the policies of the state can never be fully ‘reflected’ in the mass media representations or for that matter in any site of cultural production. Discourses on development communication in India have *Email: [email protected] ISSN 1474-6689 print/ISSN 1474-6697 online ß 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/14746680701878539 http://www.informaworld.com

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generally tended to highlight a somewhat unproblematic manifestation of the hegemonic projects of the state in broadcasting. This paper, invoking the contradictions within the standardizing projects of the state, wants to suggest that the apparatus in question, television in our case, needs to be amply theorized for grasping the complexity of the communication process. Before we take up the question of the peculiarity of the televisual medium and of how that necessitates a certain order of refraction of the statist policies, we intend to draw attention to the possible dilemmas within nationalism. If nationalism in the colonial period, based on an invented tradition and major exclusions, was extended to the post-colonial drives of nation building, the contradictions within and resistances from without in this colonial ideologeme should also be part of the legacy. This is, of course, not to suggest that one cannot figure any order of rupture between the post and precolonial versions of nationalist thought in India. One can remember Partha Chatterjee: The project was cultural ‘‘normalization’’ like, as Anderson suggests, bourgeois hegemonic projects everywhere but with the all important difference that it had to choose its site of autonomy from a position of subordination to a colonial regime that had on its side the most universalist justificatory resources produced by postenlightenment social thought. (11)

With independence, the position of subordination did not of course wither. The ‘most universalist justificatory resources’ would still be with the West, keeping alive the constructed antagonism in the cultural but the tussle would intensify on other levels: the economic and the technological, the terrains of the Western nation’s progress. This is what the post-colonial nation can envy and try to follow but perhaps cannot accomplish only through the nationalist elitist mode of hierarchical representations masked by a rhetoric of equality, i.e. through the dominant mode of construction of a standardized Indianness. While this cultural value would still quite effectively operate in post-colonial modern drives of citizenising (‘development’ particularly acting as the grand leveler), the new regime of economic and technological development within the context of electoral politics would call for, one can loosely say, populism of sorts that would show up in actual developmental activity, in expanding the media network or in efforts of catering to the varied needs of entertainment of the ‘public’. All this, I suggest, complicate and forces a renewed negotiation with the exclusionist politics of nationalism to the extent that any idea of unproblematic transference of the ideologies of the nationalist elite in colonial India to those of policy-makers in Independent India is rendered impossible. Therefore, while trying to figure out the relationship between the State and the spheres of Mass Media, we should be able to foreground the very contradictions that characterize Modernity itself, and trace both continuity and break in our reading of the postcolonial cultural sites of statist intervention. Within this theoretical premise, my primary effort would be to read the history of development communication in India both as a site of hegemonic projects and of the contradictions that characterize them. In accordance with the newly formed states’ policy, public television, established in India in 1959 and named Doordarshan in 1976, tried to propagate ‘national integration’ like All India Radio. ‘Development’ and ‘education’ were the main objectives attributed to mass media. It was thought that a daily dose of pedagogy on farming methods, health and hygiene, family planning and news mostly showcasing

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the government’s achievements, would not only help create modern citizens aware of the State’s benevolence, but would also make them imagine the nation entirely as a statist space. Sevanti Ninan marks this period of television in India as one of ‘indefinitely dull programming for health, education, agriculture and the public sector’ (Ninan 18). The audience was conceived as a homogeneous set of passive internalizer of messages. To homogenize the sphere of reception was also to standardize a certain notion of citizenship. Here ‘development’ became a grand leveler that could erase all the differences among the inhabitants of the country to suture the unifying thread of the modern nation. However, the project had a crucial contradiction produced possibly by the very form of mass media dissemination, the compulsive direct address to the people, and the onus of ‘representation’ through a ‘visual’ medium. The programmes were mainly compartmentalized fragments addressed towards different segments of people: agricultural programmes for farmers, news in English for the urban elite, quiz programmes for urban schoolgoing children, literacy and awareness programmes particularly for the rural illiterate, folk performances from various parts of India. Thus, television could not mask the hierarchies and multiplicities, both economic and cultural, in Indian society, as the programmes revealed serious differences in lives and cultures of the Indian people. The exclusivist effort to conjure the image of the ideal Indian citizen was always to an extent frustrated by a mode through which nationalism could also disseminate itself: that of trying to be, albeit ineffectively, exhaustive in ‘representing’ the various territories and cultures (the folk performances for instance) of India. Attributing the days of development communication in India with compulsions of heteronymous representation may sound a little banal now, as it has become customary to identify the consumerist popular of the 1990s with this trait. However, one should remember that the hegemonic project of nationalism is always replete with tension between the exclusionist and inclusionist modes of representation. While the former was dominant in the days of development communication, compulsion for the latter was not difficult to figure out. At this point, I would like to draw attention to the way the broadcast media exhibited a certain moralist stance inherent in the nationalist politics of development. The State, till the end of SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) in 1976, more-or-less consistently identified a particular popular form as ‘entertainment’, as something that had the power of morally corrupting the citizen. ‘Entertainment’, representative of which could be anything from popular film to advertisement, was thought to be opposed to the values of developmentalist education. I suggest that the very idea of development here was not very far from that of ‘growth’, given the State’s conceiving the audience as, in a sense, ‘children’. In fact, it can be literally traced in the very first years of television in India when the programmes were primarily meant for medium and high school students, beamed at publicly funded schools in and around Delhi. Children, it is believed, can be easily influenced culturally, and are least exposed to the differences that mark the complex world of adults. As they are expected to conform to the codes of the family, not talk back to elders, restrain their sexual desires, the audience of early television in India were also conceived as best suited to programmes that were unidirectional in ideological traffic,3 least interactive and containing educational messages. As the child is not supposed to move much out of a certain territorial confinement, the

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Indian public television’s imagined citizens were spoon-fed with programmes that strained to take the viewer beyond his/her familiar spaces. The operation of Public television in India can be related to what Alexander Kluge, New German filmmaker and theorist of Public Sphere, has to say about the establishment of German public television. Kluge, in his effort to ascribe to public television limited capability of constituting a meaningful sphere of public opinion, suggests that the German public television was established ‘… in relative isolation from large areas of the public sphere, in both its classical-bourgeois and industrial-commercial forms, and was guided instead by a bureaucratic ‘will to program’’ (Hansen 180). A formal correspondence to this can perhaps be traced in the report of Joshi Working group in 1983 where a section of the report was devoted to reactions to Doordarshan programs gathered in the course of Group’s meetings with people from different walks of life. I quote one villager from the report bringing to the fore the territorial/ epistemological confines of childhood that the State television wanted to underline through its programs: ‘Why should a program for the village show only the village to us? Take us beyond the village. We also want to know about the world, about other parts of the world, about other countries or even about people in other parts of our big country’. (qtd in Chatterjee, P.C. 177) The metaphors of childhood and growth are helpful as they help us grasp the State’s imagination of citizens as somewhat desexualized beings. A rhetoric based on ‘development’ contributed to a sense of perennial ‘growth’ for the addressee. The most crucial site of worry for the state was popular film. However, the moralist drive of the State vis-a`-vis film was also not free of contradiction. Almost right from the beginning, television started incorporating films in its transmission not only because films provided cheap programming in an era of dearth of funds for a novel medium like television, but also because of the State’s obligation to be ‘popular’. In 1952, B.V. Keskar, the then minister for cultural affairs banned film songs from radio on the charge of vulgarity but had to lift the ban because, according to a press release ‘... it cost the broadcasting organization too much in popularity’ (Chatterjee, P.C. 36; Lelyveld 111–127).4 Another instance of the State’s acknowledgement of film as a popular medium was when during the Emergency Raj Kapoor’s Bobby (1973) was telecast right at the time of a rally addressed by the opposition leader, Jai Prakash Narayan, reportedly to lower the attendance at the rally (Ninan 26). The point of worry for popular film (‘vulgar’) was largely the explicit rendering of female sexuality, though that also provided a space for the heterosexist male gaze. One can in fact go to the extent of suggesting that the kind of ‘public’ the State-controlled Media tried to create till the 1980s, though largely in vain, was in many ways opposite to the ‘public’ of popular cinema in India. While the popular cinematic public was conceived as one belonging primarily to streets and lumpen public spaces, the territory of the broadcast public was essentially the home and the family, the sanctity of which, it was thought, could better sustain a citizenship premised upon the patriarchal order of the nation-family bondage.5 This of course does not mean that the Nehruvian State’s brand of ‘development’ and ‘education’ did not conjure its constituency in some brands of popular films. One can trace especially in some of the films of the 1950s and the early 1960s (Mehboob, Raj Kapoor) a certain ideological location of the country and the city that could very well go with the modernizing/Socialist impulse of the State. Still, the preferred mode-of-address for

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the post-colonial State would ideally be realistic, not melodramatic,6 though the State would not directly patronize the realist mode in film before 1969, the moment of New Indian cinema. A somewhat corresponding authorial intervention can be traced in early Satyajit Ray, though it will not be right to decipher Ray merely in such terms.7 However, the presence of the male child in Pather Panchali can be read in interesting ways if one tries to hark back to the issue of the gaze of the child and its relation to realism. Can we say that the child helps render the pro-filmic world somewhat objective as the audience predominantly takes the ‘innocent’ point-of-view of the child protagonist? Incidentally, Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), the film that Ray himself acknowledged as a key source of inspiration, also had a nonintervening child, keenly observing the world around. The characters played by Raj Kapoor, whose legendary popularity in contemporary Soviet Union was not accidental, also exhibited infantile qualities.8 Therefore, one possibly needs to complicate the unproblematic relegation of the citizen subject of the developmentalist state to sheer masculinity. At some level the subject has to be understood as one that still faced the dilemma of the child, that was expected to derive ‘pleasures’ in displaced forms, to never make the oedipal discovery of the desire/ploy of the Father/ State to shape a particular Mother/Nation-hood. As I should be cautious of the danger of stretching a possible psychoanalytic interpretation of this kind too far,9 I would simply suggest that at another level, imagining the subject of development communication as masculine is indeed productive precisely because of the way the citizen subjectivity relates to feminine sexuality (the anxiety discussed earlier). If we incorporate the overlapping nuances of both of these levels, what transpires is that the citizen was possibly being imagined as a male child that would never grow, or a grown-up infant not to be enticed into the pleasures of the world. The broadcast Public, directly under the aegis of post-colonial State pedagogy, could never be the libidinal ‘vulgar’ public of popular cinema, the constituency of capitalism’s enchantment with the erotic, the vestige of colonial expansion worldwide of ‘entertainment’. The tension between the child and the grown-up, between the desexualized and the heterosexist masculine in the very imagination of citizen has left trace in almost every way the State tried to engage in development communication. A comparative study of Radio and Television can throw considerable light upon this: while the State, until 1976, could sustain a great degree of control over television, All India Radio exhibited the limits of the didactic drive, generating splinters of ‘entertainment’. The privately sponsored Vividh-Bharati was conceived as early as in 1966; the mixed baggage of song, radio-play, advertisement and sports-commentary found a larger space in Radio. One reason for this could be the very medium of Radio which, being non-visual, would be less of a bearer of realism, a mode that primarily coheres to reception in the form of ‘seeing’ (and reading) and not listening. While the apparatus of Radio can definitely accommodate realistic mode of address, the postcolonial context, it seems, can never be as responsive to literary realism as the West has been. In India, Radio became a major site of vibrant musical cultures and not merely of talk/literary mode.10 Radio, though directly under governmental control, was always a constituency of both ‘entertainment’ and education. In fact, looking at the significance of sound cultures in India one can open up interesting thoughts on the ‘everyday’ of the post-colonial. This everyday, oriented predominantly around

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the aural, would perhaps be inimical to the ocular-centric modernity on which the televisual and cinematic rhetoric of development were primarily premised. This is not only to suggest that the representational sphere of the post-colonial popular heavily invests in the aural, but also to draw attention to the ways this auditory order purports to contradict the liaison between development communication and realism. My own experience in the ‘Protected Place’11 that was Chittaranjan, the biggest railway township in India located on the western fringe of the province of West Bengal is a testimony to this. The place, a reasonably small town developed in Nehruvian times around a Locomotive Works, was and still is, like any other industrial township, replete all over with what I would call a certain iconography of the developmental modern. A certain structure of uniformity in town-planning showed everywhere: rows of identical and numbered residential quarters, parallel streets with equidistant light-posts, street numbers written on the street-boards, the perpendicular turns at the road-junctions, rectangular fields, marketplaces in designated places that were miniature versions of the chess-board structure of the township, all were designed to institute a certain ‘order’ in life. Schools, dispensaries, community halls, cultural institutes, offices, ration-shops and employees’ cooperative shops were typically generic in architectural pattern along with a certain system of plantation alongside the roads. Moving through the town one frequently came across familiar water carrying vehicles and ambulances of the railways, written government notices and various symbols and plaques of government in and outside offices, the offices that had national flags flying atop. The pantheon of nationalist or socialist imageries lent names to the important buildings and roads of the town including the name of the town itself after the nationalist leader Chittaranjan Das: Kasturba Gandhi Hospital, Basanti (after the wife of Chittaranjan Das) Institute, Ashok Avenue, chain of ‘Deshbandhu’ (as Chittaranjan Das was popularly known) primary and high schools, Vivekananda High School and Bulganin gate. The obligatory presence of the students of all schools at the local Oval stadium on the Independence Days and the Republic Days, when the GM (the General Manager of Chittaranjan Locomotive Works), smiling on a slow-moving sarkari jeep, used to receive ‘salute’ from the school children, made spectacular addition to this iconography of the developmental modern. The stereotype of this visuality coupled with a certain synchronic temporality of everyday life, based on uniformity of working hours (the daily factory/office work, in quotidian reference, is still called ‘duty’ as in ‘did you go for duty today’?) makes this a perfect site for studying the addressee of development communication. The point of giving such visual details of a citizenizing space is to contextualize a certain aural atmosphere that somewhat contradicted this visuality. This was the time when television was still to come to the town. A certain aural milieu, bustling with sounds of Radio and particularly loudspeakers and sound boxes, lent a different ambience to the otherwise routine order of the everyday. Bengali and Hindi film songs and Bengali modern songs would constitute the favorite pastime for most. The songs and kitsch oral comics would be regularly played in puja pandals and other ceremonies organized by local clubs as well as on domestic occasions. The two cinema halls of the township, ‘Srimati’, the theater that showed Bengali films and ‘Ranjan’, one that showed Hindi films, both names (interestingly gendered vis-a`-vis the kind of films each showed) being misfit in the set of nomenclature of nationalist association, created an

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exceptional site in the town, enticing students to sneak out of the high school. One remembers the uneasiness of the elders with contemporary Hindi film songs and the word larelappa that was used to describe the ‘vulgarity’ of these songs. The quiet poise of a standardized form of life marked by the serene cycle bells of workers returning from work, the morose 11 o’clock siren from the factory and the infrequent sounds of feeble rickshaw horns in the midst of geometrical precision of the cityscape could only be dissipated when the cacophony of a number of microphones or the filmy frenzy from a radio or a record-player spread zigzag. The aural-visual dissonance seems to be an unavoidable feature in any process of realist-developmentalist communication in the non-west, in the territory of not-fullybourgeoised state-form. ‘Development communication’, given its nationalist-realist preoccupations with a heavy investment towards the constitution of a ‘modern’ public based primarily on visual and literary modes of address, always strains to constitute an influential space in the third world where the aural, and more importantly the musical, are primary constituents of social life of the dispossessed, the addressee of development communication. While it is not right to take television as only a ‘visual’ medium given a host of theoretical positions that suggest a primacy of sound in it, one can at least suggest that the televisual rhetoric of development until the 1980s never invested in the kind of aurality/musicality that the addressee would prefer. It was rather an effort to illustrate visually the pedagogic orality of Radio. Only after the 1982 Asian Games, Doordarshan started emphasizing the aural popular with an increase in commercials, fiction, films, film songs and other film-based programs. Television, for the inhabitants of the small industrial town of Chittaranjan, then became a site of negotiation between the iconography of the developmental modern and the erstwhile aural ambience. In an interesting take on the power and role of a certain convention of recorded music in ‘instantly reordering the aural economy’ in Nehruvian times, Sudipta Kaviraj hints towards the possible reasons of Hindi film songs being unacceptable in the post-colonial developmental-modern ideoscape. He suggests that ‘Listening to songs from Hindi films was disapproved of even more strongly because the disapproval against the romantic behavior was compounded by the Bengali disdain about the general lowliness of north Indian culture. They came under three degrees of prohibition – they were romantic, they were from films, and they were Hindi’ (Kaviraj 64). The uneasiness with north Indian culture and Hindi is not only true with the Bengali middle and upper class who somewhat bear the legacy of the colonial modern but definitely claims a wider constituency in India. The developmental modern shouldn’t apparently have been discomforted by the modern order of these songs since ‘Against the iron-laws of arranged marriages, these songs advocated, however vaguely, the individualistic principle of romantic choices of partners ...’ (Kaviraj 63–64). However, the fact that the songs ‘described this as a state of divine emotional fulfilment’ had more to do with the lineage of the deep eroticism of Radha-Krishna stories (Kaviraj 64). One can possibly suggest, extending Kaviraj’s analysis of the modern popular recorded music, that this traditional eroticism finds a major ally in the popular idea of the ‘Western’ value of free sex that was detested in the developmental state’s call for the modern. However, even for a devout vaishnavaite in Kaviraj’s religious town of Nabadwip, birthplace of fifteenth century Bhakti saint Chaitanya, the attitude towards the Hindi film song

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would not be different from that of the State. The reason perhaps is that, for them, these songs inescapably bear the sense of the ‘commercial’ western popular aspiring to trivialize, in the language of the urban kitsch, a religious tradition located primarily in an agrarian imaginary. Developmental modernity in India had to choose eclectically from a wide range of options to devise an ideological framework that cannot simply be understood in terms of the tradition/modernity binary. The call for an industrial modernity with the compulsion of ‘rural development’ could not unproblematically adopt values of bourgeois individualism, as was predominantly the case in the West. It was rather an effort to consolidate a negotiated version of the western industrial modern in which modernity could be accommodated very much within the confines of traditional institutions of feudal patriarchy. Madhav Prasad’s theorization of Hindi popular cinema in terms of the Marxian category of ‘ideology of formal subsumption’ demands special attention here. According to Prasad, State is the most crucial institution that constitutes the ‘ideologeme’ of the popular Hindi films in that the former makes possible taming of the modern signifiers like privacy of the heterosexual couple within the traditional hierarchist institutions (Prasad 1–23). The question here is that if the popular Hindi films are by-and-large ideologically consonant with the developmental State, why was the broadcast public imagined to be incompatible with filmic entertainment? The answer perhaps lies primarily in the specific forms of the Indian popular film and its reception. Prasad’s identification of the Hindi popular film as a constituency of the Statist ideology is premised primarily upon the ‘narrative’, the trajectory of the characters and the resolution of ideological and moral questions in the text. If we look, not from the perspective of narrative, but from that of ‘spectacle’, we would see that the textual moments of realization of the modern ideals do somewhat prevail and cannot be tamed by the overarching structure of narrative resolution. In other words, popular films critique/appropriate certain things only after showing and elaborating on them, thereby lending a relative autonomy to the appeal of what should have been completely subsumed. In Indian popular film form, songs, and for that matter, the larger audiovisual scope of playing with the modern, work on this logic of autonomy and can ‘… also be enjoyed as independent artifacts, de-linked from the connectedness of the film structure’ (Kaviraj 65). It was this spectacular nature of the ‘performance of the modern’, the precise capability of corruptive enticements to protrude out of the larger acceptable ideoscape of the ‘feudal family romance’ (Prasad 30–31) that led the State to conceive the cinematic public in terms antagonistic to the televisual public. Only after the boom in commercial sponsorship post-1982 and particularly after the coming of the private satellite channels post1991, television in India started to transmit popular films and film-based programs in large numbers. Krishi Darshan,12 produced by the Delhi centre, embodied the developmental state’s vision of the broadcast public as predominantly ‘rural’, as representing a pristine Nation. My example of the small railway township of Chittaranjan would not be much different from the State’s idea of the village, a space that was thought to be uncorrupted by the heteronymous urban popular. The ‘industrial town’, from the developmentlist State’s perspective, is not ‘city’ per se; it is rather proximate, one can say, to the ideal of a planned village as in ‘Asian Games Village’. The ‘rural’ and the

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‘industrial’, both alike, were imagined to be sites of the Socialist modern. Inability to look at the ideological correspondence between the state-conceived cultural geographies of these two sites impairs our understanding of the politics of the developmental modernity in India to the extent of obscuring the distinction between an urban modern and an industrial modern. With the failure of SITE (‘failure’ in the sense of its inability to sustain the exploitative trope of an authoritarian State during Emergency), the Statist imagination of the public as predominantly rural faced the first major onslaught in independent India. Between 1972 and 1975, television spread over a number of metropolitan centers including Bombay and Calcutta; the first non-Congress government made television separate from AIR to institute the name ‘Doordarshan’ in 1976, the year that also saw the arrival of commercial advertising on television. Fictional narrative curiously was started back in 1967, though ‘fiction’ represented by serial drama, commercials and films would not substantially figure before the 1980s. This time onwards the urban clientele of television started widening with a corresponding increase in fictions set in urban locales. While one cannot simply connect the shift in focus from the rural to the urban, to a shift in mode of address from the documentary to the fictional, the correspondence is not banal either. ‘Fiction’, at some level, is in close proximity to ‘entertainment’. The popular/ capitalist belief is that a daily dose of entertainment, after a hard day’s toil, is required more by the urban manager/worker, than by the villager whose priority should be to ‘develop’. The urban worker, supposedly closer to the modern consciousness, the primary signifier of which is the very decision to move to the city, can look for something else that would make him relaxed and fit for the next day’s work. With the citizen subject being imagined by the Indian State increasingly as urban from the late seventies, the idea of ‘entertainment’ as a necessary supplement to the ‘basic’ needs of the citizen found a major currency in programming. This testifies to a somewhat secondarized but necessary role of ‘entertainment’ in urban capitalist contexts of citizenization.13 The competence of the urban public in grasping the realist fiction, the context of new technological innovations post-1975 including the half-inch videotape brought to the market by Sony and the concomitant mushrooming of cheap electronic goods including television across urban India may also had contributed to the emergence of the urban televisual public in India from the late seventies. Government’s refusal to implement the recommendations for autonomy of the broadcasting organizations in 1978 and the stalling of the autonomy bill by subsequent governments have been explained as the effort of political parties in power to ensure their influence over the audience. Along with this, we should remember that the gradual emergence of a mass of crucial opinion-makers in the form of urban televisual public from mid-seventies made the governments particularly averse to the idea of losing control over radio and television. The process of identification of the urban middle class with television-content gained a major impetus in 1982, the year of telecast of the Asian Games. For the first time, live transmission created the condition for what could be called ‘televisual nationalism’, a significant form of nationalism in the era of global television. Asian Games was telecast, after many debates, in color, with the cushion of revenues from commercial advertising. Following this, ‘sponsored programs’ and the first major drive to expand the sphere of reception of Doordarshan through High and Low

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Power Transmitters started in 1983. After the sway of events in 1982–1983, Doordarshan never, with any seriousness, looked back at the project of ‘development television’. It rather tried to negotiate the emergent commercial popular by seriously reviewing its program content. One of the major sites of a negotiation between the developmental State’s pedagogic project and the emergent commercial popular was the ‘progressive melodrama’, Humlog (1984–1985) and Buniyaad (1985–1986) being two major instances. The idea of making a me´lange of melodrama and progressivist messages of the state was imported from another third world context, Mexico, where the model was quite successful. The underlying message of Humlog, the first ‘mega-serial’ on television in India, was that of family planning. Ashish Rajadhyaksha rightly recalls the connection between the progressivist series like Humlog and Buniyaad with the State-funded New Indian Cinema of the 1970s. (Rajadhyaksha 41–42). It was indeed not a coincidence that many of the New Indian filmmakers including Shyam Benegal and Govind Nihalani went on to make television series for Doordarshan in the late eighties. Not only Humlog, but a host of television serials till the early nineties tried to incorporate what the State thought to be ‘progressive’ within the ambit of popular melodrama. The interesting point to note here is that the idea of ‘progress’ still did not sever its connection from a certain concern for the lower and lower-middle class or for the small town and the village, as exhibited in some of the popular tele-serials like Nukkad, Malgudi Days, Rajni, Basanti, Udaan, including a Hindi-dubbed Japanese series called Osheen. Many of these serials telecast on the much-demonized Public Television seem to have been sensitive at least in their figuration of certain realms of life about which the soaps in the era of satellite television are terribly amnesiac. Brief spots containing family planning messages were transmitted on radio and television since the 1960s. Only when they started appearing in the ‘prime time’ television, an increase in awareness was noted. (For more on this see Ninan 23, 118– 123). The reason possibly was that the husband and the wife could watch these spots together and jointly take a decision on planning the family only in the evening, something that was difficult earlier when these would appear in the afternoon and they would be watched only by the housewife. The fictional rendering of developmental messages in the form of progressive melodrama quickened the process of awareness-generation among especially the urban middle-class. Humlog and Buniyaad, however, should not be seen merely as having the legacy of a realiststatist cinema or of the erstwhile project of development. The new constituency of development communication was premised in a certain televisual form that emerged in the West in the mid-seventies, the form of the ‘flow’ that Raymond Williams theorized meticulously. (Williams 86–96).14 One of the commercials that became a major signifier of the emergent flow-form featured ‘Maggie Two-minute Noodles’, the sponsor of Humlog. Interestingly, the image of the urban nuclear family that so strongly emerged on TV through such commercials found a major resonance in the ‘small family’ that the serial itself was propagating as part of the old statist drive of population control. This in fact is one of the many instances of a certain negotiation between the State and the Market in the context of an emergent commercial popular in the 1980s. In order for ‘family’ to continue to be the microcosm of nation, rendering a certain kind of melodrama15 possible on consumerist television, the emergent model of ‘nuclear family’ had to

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bear the legacy of the ‘small family’, of, in other words, the benevolence of the welfare state. I suggest that one needs to launch an arduous investigation into traces of possible continuity of ideologies of the Welfare State, albeit displaced and appropriated, into the representational framework of consumerism. Humlog tried to underline the efficacy of the slogan ‘small family, happy family’ by depicting the drudgery of life in a large family, without almost being aware that the happiness of that ‘small’ family had every possibility of being imagined as the one portrayed in the nuclear family of the ‘Maggi’ commercials. The state’s effort to intensify the family planning campaign as part of the international drive by bureaucrats and social planners (Das 147)16 to devise educational soap operas was based on the wrong assumption that the audience would be drawn only towards the ‘published sequence of programs’ (Williams 90). The fact that Development Communication, this point onwards, came to be almost perpetually located in a certain televisual form that inclines towards assuming a consumer-subject is usually undermined, leading to a truncated understanding of Mass Media’s role in Development in relation to the ideologies of only the State. Post 1982 the Market that was making possible the new regime of development-communication through sponsorship, was also being produced by that regime. Discourses on Development Communication should increasingly stress the point of such inter-constitutive relationship between the State and the Market in order to explain less strenuously a certain order of ineffectiveness of statist developmental messages in the era of commercial television.17 It became clear, with particularly the telecast of Humlog, that a new lexicon of Development Communication was being devised because the erstwhile mode-of-address could not be sustained any more. The 1980s, from this perspective, is particularly interesting in the career of television in India. The very emphasis on the word Humlog by Ashok Kumar who with his familiar avuncular demeanor18 appeared at the end of each episode, invoked a sense of bondage with television itself, particularly in the urban middle-class, the emergent constituency of the televisual apparatus and consumerism, both at a formative stage in India. Projecting a pro-development image, it should be remembered, can be no less a concern for the Market. This is to be located not merely in the ‘don’t drive drunk’ message from Maruti or Shabana Azmi’s call for saving two buckets of water in the Surf Excel commercial, but in a certain texture of the consumerist popular that enacts the mapping of the Nation in terms, albeit displaced, of the image of the welfare State. What happens subtly from the 1980s is that the very connotation of ‘development’ widens to incorporate the agency of the corporate sector, with television, in India like elsewhere in the World, exhibiting this semantic expansion much more than any other medium. Television or Media in general, itself, aspires to become the grand agent of benevolence and epistemological superiority embodying a perfect tie-up between the state and the market, enacting the original historical liaison between democracy and capitalism. This of course became more transparent in the 1990s in India, obscuring the somewhat intensified power of the State in the era of Late Capital. In the 1980s, I would suggest, the State was still nurturing a self-image that was antagonistic to the codes of Market, something that was shrugged off gradually in the post-Liberalization era. However, the crucial history of the mutual constitution of these two ideological frames manifesting in a certain super-image of the Media, did start in the 1980s and has since been demonstrated most efficiently by television. That the juridical redefinition

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of ‘public’ in India in the historic Supreme Court judgment in 1995 involves television, from this perspective, does not seem to be a coincidence. The new idea of the public, it seems, can no more be represented by the State or by the Market despite claims to ‘representation’ from both of them, but by a certain abstraction of Media embodied primarily in Television, or rather the Televisual (if one takes it as a certain ‘mode of address’ that pervades popular spheres of other media). The new language of ‘development’ has to be understood in relation to this power of the ‘televisual’ in India. To account for the intricacies of development communication in the era of commercial television as evident in instances from Mera Bharat Mahan (‘My India is Great’) spots in the regime of Rajiv Gandhi to the recent ‘Pulse Polio’ campaigns featuring Amitabh Bachchan,19 one possibly needs to complicate further these propositions in a separate treatise. We have simply tried here to note some possible theoretical approaches that can help historicize issues in developmentcommunication in India. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

The First Five Year Plan was drafted in 1951. See India, Planning Commission, particularly the section titled ‘Democratic Planning’ in Chapter 8. See particularly Partha Chatterjee (35–75) for elaboration on the category of nationalist elite in colonial India. James W. Carey (14–23) talks about the ‘transmission view of communication’ that looks at communication as a way of controlling space and people without paying attention to the feedback from the addressees. This view defines communication by words like ‘sending’, ‘imparting’ and ‘transmitting’ as opposed to a ‘ritual’ view of communication in which, terms like ‘sharing’, ‘exchange’ and ‘interaction’ become important. It would perhaps be apt to look at the development-communication mode of Nehruvian socialism as one explainable in terms of the ‘transmission view of communication’. Lelyveld (111–127) reads this is an effort of the ‘subdominant’ groups of colonial India, of the Brahmins in this case, to restore their ideological authority over the postIndependence Indian society at large by trying to popularize Sanskrit-oriented Indian classical music on state-controlled radio. According to him, ‘The damage done to Indian music, Keskar believed, was not only the result of British imperial neglect and the wandering attention of maharajahs. More fundamentally Keskar placed the blame upon the shoulders of North Indian Muslims, both the rulers of earlier centuries and the Muslim musicians who, in Keskar’s view, had appropriated and distorted the ancient art, turning it into the secret craft of exclusive lineages, the gharanas, and, ignorant of Sanskrit, divorced it from the religious context of Hindu civilization.’ (117). He further suggests, ‘… cinema offered an opposing style of music that challenged the aims of the national cultural policy. The lyrics, aside from being in Urdu, were generally ‘erotic’, and since the late 1940s there were noticeable infusions in orchestration and to some extent rhythm and melody from Western popular music, which Keskar identified with a lower stage of human evolution’ (120). Lawrence Liang (366–385) identifies certain forms of public-ness around the cinematic space with an idea of illegal citizenship. In this connection, the slum-dwellers, the fans of Rajnikanth and the tapori of the Mumbai streets as represented in Hindi popular film come in conjunction to constitute sub-terrains of illegality that the State can never give recognition to but cannot entirely ignore either. The broadcast public, according to me, was envisaged as relatively legal, at least until the widespread mushrooming of illegal cable operators from the early 1990s. Realism and Melodrama, however, can be perfectly compatible on certain occasions. Peter Brooks (1976) discovers in ‘social melodramatists’, a ‘dual engagement’ with both the ordinary and the ‘moral drama’ implicated in and by man’s social existence (22). Can

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8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

13.

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we locate in Raj Kapoor of Bootpolish (1954) and Mera Naam Joker (1970) tendencies of a social melodramatist? On another occasion, while discussing Balzac, Brooks suggests ‘Excess is necessary to approach the essential and the true, that which is hidden by what men ordinarily call ‘reality’ as by a curtain’ (4). From the Indian State’s exclusionist broadcast media perspective, what seemed to be particularly in dissonance with the structure of melodrama was the latter’s ‘desire to express all’, the fact that in it ‘nothing is left unsaid’ (4). See Geeta Kapur (17–49) for an investigation of the context in which Ray’s form could be sustained. The form of Apu trilogy can perhaps be the only major instance in this regard. However, one should be cautious to note also in Ray the disharmony with the Statist project. The most haunting instance possibly is the sympathetic narratorial attachment with Sarbajaya while she waits at home for Apu in Aparajita (1956). Ray’s patronization of the values of realism, continuity and closure contrasts with his obsession with pictorial ‘spectacle’ and literary stereotypes in Bengali popular representations. For more on this see Ravi Vasudevan (52–76). One remembers the numerous Chaplinesque (i.e. infantile, as Eisenstein described Charlie’s activities in his essay ‘Charlie the Kid’) associations of Raj Kapoor’s screen persona and the popular references to his ‘schoolboyish’ approach to sex. See the entry on ‘Raj Kapoor’ in Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (120). Sibaji Bandyopadhyay in his Oedipus and his Father: Towards an Understanding of Masculinism, (forthcoming) critiques the Freudian scheme of the Oedipus Complex by particularly questioning the efficacy of constructing an all-pervasive Oedipal trope from a single instance in Greek Drama. I am using the word Oedipal here in the loosest sense of the term to refer metaphorically to an order of the Statist imagination of the citizen as child. One can get back to a basic problem here posed by the fact that with the coming of sound in film, the Indian popular film became a major bearer of ‘songs’ (which in a certain sense was extra-cinematic) as opposed to the Western context that predominantly invested in ‘talkie’ subsumed in the narrative. This is surely an instance of the rupturous history of the colonial and the post-colonial that synchronically can posit various layers of representational cultures unlike a history in the west that can somewhat be read, with lesser strain, as a diachronic continuity, making room for values of realism, continuity and closure in representations. However, major drives contrary to this historiographic distinction can be traced on both sides, thereby proving the futility of any such stubborn distinction; the divide is nonetheless productive in explaining the varied inclination of audio-visual popular cultures in the East and in the West. The township is literally walled, and guarded by Railway Protection Force at the gates of entry. In our childhood days we used to hear, with awe, elders saying that ours was a ‘protected place’ and was different from other ‘cities’. The name of the program can be loosely translated as ‘A look at the Agricultural Scenario’. Started in 1966, it continues to be a daily program (5 days in a week) in collaboration with the Min. of Agriculture, Govt of India, under the scheme ‘Mass Media Support to Agriculture Extension’. This is telecast at six in the evening on all the regional Doordarshan channels with respective regional focus. This field-based program covers various aspects of agriculture, horticulture, animal husbandry and dairy and in general rural life of farmers. See Richard Dyer (1–4) for an elaboration on the idea of ‘entertainment’. Dyer suggests that the notion of entertainment ‘...mis born out of a society that both considers leisure and pleasure to be secondary and even inferior to the business of producing, reproducing, work and family, and yet invests much energy, desire and money into promoting them. Equally … counter-capitalist views, embodied in Marxism, themselves secondarize leisure and pleasure to labour and production….’. The overarching reference here is to capitalism and the examples used by Dyer elsewhere are mostly from television, cinema and other industrial apparatuses, making ‘entertainment’ a predominantly Modern and urban category. My sense of the ‘urban’ here inclines more towards the ‘city’ than towards the ‘township’. The supposedly planned cultural life of the later has

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14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

A. Roy interesting correspondences with the post-colonial state’s imagination of an ideal modern village. The ‘city’, however, was conceived by the state as the site of lumpen, of chanceencounters and maverick enticements. However, this is broadly a distinction between a space of state intervention and that of private commercial enterprise, they both function under the aegis of the modern capital. One should carefully note here that the rise of ‘entertainment’, as the defining mode of commercial television, itself creates a space in which the cultural ecology of the city starts gradually appropriating that of both the village and the township. However, this demands a separate treatise on whether commercial televisual cultures signpost an overarching urbanization of culture. One can remember the shock that Williams said he got watching television in a hotel in Miami in America. The intertwining of ‘published sequence’ of programs with the unpublished ones, with the ‘breaks’, directed towards consumers in the flow-form shocked the naturalized gaze of the citizen groomed in the sphere of British Public Service Broadcasting. Both England and India have witnessed a transition from ‘discrete’ programming directed predominantly towards the citizen to the form of the ‘flow’ that primarily assumes the viewer as a ‘consumer’. For more on the form of Flow and its particular workings in the Indian context, see Roy (1–31). One of the major features of the popular melodrama is that it aspires to bring the social into the familial. The melodramatic exposition engages in the strenuous act of mapping the Nation predominantly through ‘family drama’ that becomes the repository of a set of tensions characterizing the ‘nation’. See in this context Christine Gledhill (5–39). Das suggests the involvement of a whole range of bureaucrats and social planners in making Humlog a reality in India. She meticulously demonstrates how the educational soap opera, since the mid-1970s, was expanding its territory especially in the third world, from Peru through Mexico to India. Das (152), for instance, while trying to reason out the telecast of Humlog in the primetime slot, unlike the afternoon transmission of the traditional soap opera, talks about the ‘control exercised by the bureaucrats of the Information and Broadcasting Ministry and not the powerful commercial sponsors’. The problem of undermining the significance of the Market in defining the structure and location of Humlog becomes particularly evident when she terms ‘the market success enjoyed by Maggi Noodles’ as simply an ‘unexpected consequence’. One should possibly go beyond the level of government decision to underline the emergent imperatives of Statehood in India in the 1980s. Ashok Kumar, an actor whose career as a Hindi film actor spanned from 1936 to 1997, was towards the end of his career popularly known as Dadamoni, an affectionate term for elder brother. He, in a way, embodied the experience and knowledge of growing and ageing through a long period of significant transitions in twentieth century India. His advocating for the modern ideal of ‘small family’ would appear to be highly reassuring for particularly the traditional mindset in this regard. Mera Bharat Mahan, the slogan that caught the fancy of the Indian public in the late eighties, was particularly popularized by nationalist/propagandist images on Doordarshan. ‘Pulse Polio’ is an immunization campaign for children established by the government of India in 1994 to eradicate polio from India.

Note on contributor Abhijit Roy is a reader at the Department of Film Studies, Jadvapur University, Calcutta, India.

References Bandyopadhyay, Sibaji. Oedipus and his Father: Towards and Understanding of Masculinism. Calcutta: Seagull Books, forthcoming. Brooks, Peter. Melodramatic Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976.

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Carey, James W. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. New York: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Chatterjee, Partha. Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Chatterjee, P. C. Broadcasting in India. New Delhi: Sage, 1992. Das, Veena. ‘‘On Soap Opera: What Kind of Anthropological Object is it?’’ Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, vol. III. Ed. Toby Miller. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. 147–167. Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. London: Routledge, 2002. Gledhill, Christine. ‘‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation.’’ Home is Where the Heart is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI Publishing, 1987. 5–39. Hansen, Miriam. ‘‘Reinventing the Nickelodeon: Notes on Kluge and Early Cinema.’’ October 46 (1988): 178–198. India, Planning Commission, First Five Year Plan. Chapter 8. . Kapur, Geeta. ‘‘Cultural Creativity in the First Decade: the Example of Satyajit Ray.’’ Journal of Arts and Ideas 23–24 (1993): 17–49. Kaviraj, Sudipta. ‘‘Reading a Song of the City – Images of the City in Literature and Films.’’ City Flicks: Indian Cinema and the Urban Experience. Ed. Preben Kaarsholm. Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2004. 60–82. Lelyveld, David. ‘‘Upon the Subdominant: Administering Music on All-India Radio.’’ Social Text 39 (1994): 111–127. Liang, Lawrence. ‘‘Cinematic Citizenship and the Illegal City.’’ Inter Asia Cultural Studies 6.3 (2005): 366–385. Ninan, Sevanti. Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India. New Delhi: Penguin Books India, 1995. Prasad, M. Madhava. Ideology of theHindi Film. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998. Rajadhyaksha, Ashish. ‘‘Beaming Messages to the Nation.’’ Journal of Arts and Ideas 19 (1990): 33–52. ‘Raj Kapoor’. Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema 1999. Revised edition. 120. Roy, Abhijit. ‘‘The Apparatus and its Constituency: on India’s Encounters with Television.’’ Journal of the Moving Image 4 (2005): 1–31. Vasudevan, Ravi. ‘‘Nationhood, Authenticity and Realism in Indian Cinema: Double take of Modernity in the Work of Satyajit Ray.’’ Journal of the Moving Image 2 (2001): 52–76. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge, 1990.