Introduction: Critical Explorations of Media Modernity in India

Bioscope, 2017

Video in the form of " little media " arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of " little media " were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of " little media " and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.

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.

Emerging Trends in Development Research, 2004

Societies throughout the world are now passing through the process of profound and rapid change. This change is closely related with the process of globalization. In last one decade, this process is taking place in most of the countries of the world. Globalization refers to 'the increasing interdependence of the people across the world, it refers to the increasing impact of living and working in a single, global market place, but more fundamentally, it refers to a basic shift in the institutions of our lives' (Giddens 1999). It has given rise to a debate among the social scientists, on the one hand and the policy makers, on the other, to assess the impact of the processes associated with this wider phenomenon on the social and cultural institutions of the societies not only in the developed societies but also in academic and political forums of the developing societies particularly those who have adopted policy to privatize and liberalize their economy in the recent past.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2019

Television is one of the influential medium due to its omnipresence in our living room and our daily engagement with it. Any discourse on development, therefore, must evaluate the role of televisual representation. It indicates the politics of representation involved in televisual texts related to developmental projects undertaken by the government. The pertinent question is how media sustains its representation on development? The answer lies in the fact that it is through the careful interplay of a cultural identity merged with the notion of development, which makes it possible for the idea of uneven development to sail through on television. Development is visualised as the emerging new and progressive identity that demarcates the boundary between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’. Those who are in support of the developmental projects are included in the former while those opposing are included in the latter. Images are manufactured, stories get constructed, and news gets manipulated in the process of media production. There is a crisis in news reporting about development, which does not take into account the devastated livelihoods. It puts under scrutiny the alleged neutrality of television news, the relationship between media and democracy, and most importantly, the right to have a dignified life of the citizens.

Center for Security Studies, 2022

2010

"This study of popular Indian cinema in an age of globalisation, new media, and metropolitan Hindu fundamentalism focuses on the period from 1991 to 2004. Popular Hindi cinema took a certain spectacular turn from the early nineties as a signature 'Bollywood style' evolved in the wake of liberalization and the inauguration of a global media ecology in India. Films increasingly featured transformed bodies, fashions, life-styles, commodities, gadgets, and spaces, often in non-linear, 'window-shopping' ways, without any primary obligation to the narrative. Flows of desires, affects, and aspirations frequently crossed the bounds of stories and determined milieus. One example is the film Haqeeqat that featured poor working class protagonists, but romantic musical sequences transported them abruptly to Switzerland, with the actors now dressed in designer suits. Basu theorises this overall cinematic-cultural ecology here as an informational geo-televisual aesthetic. This book connects this filmic geo-televisual style to an ongoing story of the uneven globalizing process in India. Basu argues that 'Bollywood' is not so much indicative of a uniquely Indian modernity coming into its own; rather it is symptomatic of a pure techno-financial modernization that comes without a political modernity. Bollywood in the Age of New Media therefore explains how the irreverent energies of the new can actually be tied to conservative Brahminical imaginations of class, caste, or gender hierarchies. Using a wide-ranging methodological approach that converses with theoretical domains of post-structuralism, post-colonialism, and film and media studies, this book presents a complex account of an India of the present caught between brave new silicon valleys and farmer suicides. "

Media Asia, 2016

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.

Sharing an excerpt from my essay, ‘New Media Overtures Before New Media Practice in India’ -- first published in Marg, in 2009 and republished in Domus in Jan. 2015. My formulation of a genealogy or ‘pre-history’ for India’s new media practices of the 1990s is based on a well-developed theoretical position that I have manifested over the last decade through my lectures and essays published in anthologies. I chart this ‘pre-history’ through the collaborative endeavours, experimental films and photographic experiments of Akbar Padamsee, Nalini Malani, Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain and Krishen Khanna during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Dashrath Patel’s transdisciplinary practice from the 1960s to the 1980s. This is part of my commitment to retrieving the lost histories of art, and to writing art history against the grain of received narratives. During the 1960s and 1970s, when these experiments were being conducted, the art world in India was fixated on painting as the premier form, so these were seen as aberrations if they were noticed at all. Art criticism was still obsessed with the questions of modernism, indigenism and authenticity, and had not expanded to be able to embrace such experiments. There was no critical framework or cultural context for them. That is why I have analysed the history of Indian new media art as a passage from ‘no-context media’ from the late sixties to ‘new-context media’ of the nineties. *