Satellite Television and Technological Modernity in India: on the Emergence of Asianet in Kerala

End Term Narrative Report

Title of the Project: Satellite Television and Technological Modernity in India: On the emergence of Asianet in Kerala.

Grantee: Jenson Joseph Arts Research and Documentation 2014. Grant Period: Over one year

July 2016

Contents

Title of the section Page number

Research paper: 3 Satellite Television and Technological Modernity in Kerala: On Asianet’s early years.

Interview with Sashi Kumar, founder of 28 Asianet.

Interview with BRP Bhaskar, senior journalist and 39 former editorial advisor to Asianet News.

Interview with Mangad Ratnakaran, 46

Interview with Dilip V, Vice President of Assianet Communications Ltd. 48

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Satellite Television and Technological Modernity in Kerala: On Asianet’s early years

Jenson Joseph

The popular Malayalam film Passenger (Ranjith Sankar; 2009) offers us a useful entry point into the problem that I want to take up for discussion here: how do we understand satellite television as an active agent shaping new forms of people relating to the idea of active citizenship in contemporary India? The film revolves around the events that unfold on an extraordinary day in the life of an inconspicuous, ordinary middle class man Sathyanathan, played by Sreenivasan1. Sathyanathan is keenly social, but his public engagements are politically inconsequential and unexciting, often inviting ridicule from his friends and family: he mobilizes railway passengers to campaign for better provisions and more trains, and he invests a lot emotionally in reviving the temple festival in his village. One day, his pedestrian routine gets disrupted when he gets entangled accidentally in bizarre circumstances, forcing him to become instrumental in first breaking a political scandal through a private television news channel, then in saving the lives of a doughty TV journalist and her lawyer husband who are on a mission of exposing the nexus between a local corrupt politician and a greedy multinational corporate, and eventually in preventing the eviction of an entire fishing community from its land – all in a matter of few hours! The climax of the film is striking: After coming home in the evening on his heroic day, Sathyanathan sits back on the sofa to check the TV news. Tears of joy well up in his eyes, as he watches the news program paying homage to the anonymous hero of the day. At this moment, his ageing mother, totally unaware of the sublime gratifying moment being played out between the viewer and the TV, grabs the TV remote and changes to the channel that runs her favourite prime time devotional drama. On any other day, this is the occasion for our protagonist to unleash his rhetorical attack on the overly sentimental staple content of TV in a desperate attempt to wean his mother or wife away from their favourite reality show, mega-serial or the mythical devotional drama. However, on this day, he does not react at all, but rather wipes his tears secretly, and leaves the TV to the women of the house, quiet and content.

1 A highly successful scriptwriter, actor and director, Srinivasan is considered a progressive figure in Malayalam cinema and one of the chief proponents of the highly valorized aesthetic formula of middle-brow cinema. Most of the lead characters that he has played in his career, especially those written by himself, do undergo major self-transformations through the narrative, from being objects of ridicule and mockery to evolving as mature characters – a factor that has contributed majorly to his reputation as an exceptional satirist, and as the master of genuine social-political introspection.

The film is a rare instance of cinema paying tribute to another medium – in this case, the modern media forms2 represented here by satellite television and the attendant technological apparatuses. A critical analysis of the film’s take on how satellite television has come to mediate politics in ways suggested here as democratising and as “empowering” could take us to the conclusion that the film romanticizes contemporary television’s propensities to provide emotional catharsis to disillusioned individual citizens. One could argue that the film confuses “politisization” with the contemporary media’s ability to transform the sphere of the political into consumable media spectacle. Arguing so would resonate well with Jurgen Habermas’ concluding remarks in his famous book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962/1989), about the Twentieth Century media cultures and the deterioration of “critical publicity”. However, I feel it obscures more than it reveals when we simply conclude by lamenting the “refeudalization” of public sphere and the triumph of powerful corporations in transforming citizens into private consumers of staged media spectacle. Without dismissing the critical charge of a reading along these lines, I suggest we need to take seriously cinema’s compulsion, here in this instance, to acknowledge modern media technologies – satellite television in particular – as a new set of tools that come with the ability to re-embed people, seemingly estranged from the domain of politics for a number of reasons, into moulds of “active citizenship”. In this paper, I attempt to explore the following two themes: How do the material and symbolic forms of ‘global technological modernity’ that globalization’s circuits have brought to post-colonial provinces like India become accessible and experiential primarily through new media technologies? How does access to and partaking in this ‘technological modernity’ offer people in these regions newer modes of engaging in politics over resources and rights, configuring a new paradigm of political engagement and citizenship? The history of satellite television in India, I argue, is central to understanding the specific modes in which such transformations were effected.

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Television Studies in India, over the last one decade, has shown ambitions of constituting itself as a specialized field, generating a considerable volume of academic as well as quasi- academic writings on television’s history in India, its regimes of affect, space and temporalities, and the medium’s centrality in the contemporary political-cultural life in the

2 A review of the film indeed mentions: “This may be the first Malayalam film where new age technology tools like 3G cell phones, laptops and webcams are shown in a positive light (maybe because the creator Ranjith Sankar is a former IT professional).” (‘Passenger is worth a watch’, May 8, 2009; http://movies.rediff.com/review/2009/may/08/review-passenger.htm; accessed on 13 May 2016; 12 noon).

4 region. While much of this body of work engages with a range of problematics having universal implications for television studies, I would like to foreground two key theoretical concerns emerging from the field so as to place my work conceptually within the field, conversing with its anxieties. Firstly, television studies in India feels compelled to ask, can there be a theory of Indian television (like we have now a theory of Indian cinema that compels film theory at large to reconsider its premises)? If yes, what aspects of television in India define it as Indian? The second concern is more universal though it resonates in each regional context as well: what would be the object of television studies (in India, or anywhere)?

In his ‘Afterword’ to Channeling Cultures: Television Studies from India, a recent anthology of essays from known scholars in the field, Aravind Rajagopal asks:

If television is, in fact, indispensable to any account of India today, how does it shape that account? What is the story of television in India, beyond recounting its spread and dwelling on its content? (Rajagopal, 2014: p296). We haven’t found satisfactory answers mainly for two reasons, I feel. Firstly, except for the brief period of the state monopolizing the airwaves and through it the right to practice the medium, television’s history and present in India are too closely intermeshed with the cultural-political shifts brought on by the neo-liberal economic order and the expansion of global capital adapting itself to multicultural regional consumer/market conditions. The resultant hybrid media cultures, which television is centrally instrumental in enabling, have made the invocation of the category of ‘Indian television’ rather difficult to sustain. At best, we have Indian versions of the same shows that we get to see on TV anywhere in the world.

Moreover, much of television’s content is already familiar through other media (despite the newer formats they assume in television), and at times the content is another medium itself (adopting McLuhan’s vocabulary); this makes it difficult to define the field’s object with any degree of essential exclusivity. I will try to illustrate this by quoting from Nalin Mehta’s 2008 book India on Television: How Satellite News Channels Have Changed the Way We Think and Act – one of the best available accounts on television in contemporary India. In the book, Mehta invites our attention to the spectacular spread of satellite television in order to propose, later, what he considers as its political implications. Early in the book, he says:

In less than a decade, between 1998 and 2006, India has experienced the rise of more than fifty 24-hour satellite news channels, broadcasting news in 11 different languages. They are a prominent part of a vibrant satellite television industry,

comprising more than 300 channels, that has targeted Indian homes since the early 1990s. In one form or the other, at least 106 of these broadcast daily news in 14 regional languages, and their emergence marks a sharp break with the past (p. 1). Mehta, then, proceeds to offer us his analysis of the political implications of this ‘satellite news channel revolution’, by borrowing Robin Jeffrey’s formulations on the expansion of newspaper industry in India and the deepening of democratic politics in the region:

Much like India’s ‘newspaper revolution’ that started in the 1970s, and the ‘cassette culture’ 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” [quoting Jeffrey 2000, p. 1] (Mehta 2008; p. 1). Ultimately, the story of satellite television’s impact turns out to be a mere extension of what the newspaper expansion had started achieving in India since the 1970s. This formulation poses another set of serious problems for history writing too. Firstly, the assumption that media expansion leads naturally to wider participation in democratic politics tends to make the writer a champion of the medium more than its historian. In fact, often it becomes imperative for the media historian to prove the positive ‘political impacts’ of his/her medium of choice, which then serves as the justification for the exercise of history writing. The ambitions of identifying and attending to the specificities of the medium fade into the background, while ‘the effect’ of mass media – as a generic category and a common frame of reference – gains overwhelming emphasis, with ‘effects’ measured directly in terms of the medium’s success or failure in broadening the domains of people’s rights-based political being.3

My attempt was not to prove an argument wrong, but to invite attention to certain porous premises of Indian television studies arising out of a set of self-imposed limits which the scholar feels compelled to work within, as those parameters promise certain tangible political legitimacy to the academic exercise undertaken. Perhaps, abandoning these readily available

3 In fact, the anxiety to identify and define TV’s specificities vis-à-vis other media forms, often producing convoluted arguments rather than clarity, is evident in the domain of state policies too. For example, An Indian Personality for Television: Report of the Working Group on Software for Doordarshan – the 1985 report of the working group set up by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1982 with PC Joshi as chairman – attempts rather unsatisfactorily to define what is unique about television in the following manner: Unlike a pornographic book or journal read in privacy by an individual, or a lewd or sadistic film viewed by a person in the anonymity of the crowd in a darkened cinema hall, a film screened on television is often watched by three generations of a family. To watch these lewd scenes in a family group is highly embarrassing (p. 159).

6 frames of doing media history and theory might yield interesting results. Along with the available and emerging scholarship that engage intensely with television’s content and its ideological operations on the one hand, and with television’s form, on the other, we could attempt to broaden the field and its limits by imagining newer objects for analyses at the risk of not knowing whether they would yield any immediate political dividends or not.

Making an attempt in this direction, here I embark on an exercise of foregrounding a set of key practices in the initial satellite television programming in India, by offering a detailed account of the early days of Asianet – the first Malayalam satellite channel launched in Kerala in the early 1990s, and one of the first satellite television channels in India (bracketing off the state-owned Doordarshan’s satellite telecasts). The specific practices that I would discuss in some detail include the elaborate procedures of assembling the new technological medium called ‘satellite TV’ as well as its viewers, looking to configure new relations between the medium and the audience, between civil society and the state, and between the region and global technological modernity. Conceived at the time of significant economic- political-cultural churnings in India and across the world, these practices, I argue, helped satellite television position itself at the centre of renewed negotiations between post-colonial regions and emerging terrains of global modernity – with media emerging as the primary site of these negotiations. The essence and aesthetics of much of these practices were to define what satellite television means as a modern medium today. In short, if the access to and partaking in the political-cultural economies of technological modernity has come to shape contemporary cultural life and ‘technological citizenship’ in most of the world post the 1990s, I would argue that the early practices in satellite television programming played a key role in effecting new relations between Media audience and Media forms, facilitating the grounds for global technological/media modernity to emerge as the most defining aspect of today’s cultural sphere. Of particular significance are the ways in which these practices arguably initiated a process of transforming media audiences into subjects of media – media here standing for all media formats, and not just the television.

A brief history of Asianet’s inception My narrative revolves around the case of the Malayalam satellite channel Asianet that started telecast in August 1993. One of the first satellite television channels in India, Asianet was envisaged initially as the national channel of PTI TV, by Sashi Kumar who was one of the chief producers at PTI TV and the joint general manager of PTI then. Sashi Kumar was

7 inspired by Ted Turner of CNN, who combined direct broadcast satellite technology for uplinking programmes, with the idea of introducing a cable network across Atlanta for distributing the beamed down content to homes. In Sashi Kumar’s words, “there was a kind of effervescence in the air about TV, by late 1980s” (Interview; October 2015). The historical account offered below is constructed based on the interviews that I conducted with people associated with the channel during its early days, watching and analysing the samples of some of the early programmes in the channel, discussing popular culture references, and using written documents like, the vision statement, the scripts of some of the first programmes, etc. that I found from personal collections of the channel’s officials. I have also used material that I collected from specialized magazines on television published from Bombay during the 80s and 90s, accessed from the library archives at the National Film Archives of India, Pune, to get a grasp on public debates on television and its programming.

A brief review of the forms in which private entrepreneurship manifested in the field of television in India would be useful in situating the coming of satellite television, and Asianet in particular, within the emergent media-technological cultures during the 1980s and 1990s. The initial enthusiasm around TV surfaced in the form of video news magazines, as until then only the state had the rights to uplink content, and TV was still operating in the terrestrial telecast format. In the 1980s, after the Indian state recognized its potential as a more suitable medium (than cinema and radio) for its various ideological tasks, television started occupying centre-stage in the cultural sphere in India. After almost a decade of unchallenged dominance of the state television channel Doordarshan, by the late 1980s, private entrepreneurship took television into a completely different direction than what the state had imagined as the medium’s destiny. The following section charts the influx of private entrepreneurship mainly in the form of cable television networks, and video magazines in VHS tape format. This forms part of what Ashish Rajadhyaksha calls “India’s history of technological bypassing – or crafting new technologies so as to go around State hurdles (…)” (Rajadhyaksha 2011: 22; original emphasis).

In the early 1980s itself, cable television networks had started sprouting across urban centres of India like Bombay, Calcutta, Madras and Delhi. According to an article in the August 1988 issue of Play Back and Fast Forward, the cable network called ‘Nemula Video Network’ – an electronic communication services company – started commercial installation for residential viewing in Bombay in 1982 (Vol 3; Issue 3: p. 67). Soon, in 1983, Sidhartha

Srivastava – an Electronics Engineering graduate – started Cable Video Corporation; Adroit Advertising and Marketing launched its cable network called Channel 2 in the same year, but closed it down in a few years (Ibid). Soon, cable networks witnessed vast entrepreneurial interest, and the companies offering services multiplied by the end of the 1980s. Many video cassette library owners launched cable networks, offering entertainment using full length films and compiling similar fragments from a set of films, etc. Such cable networks depended mainly on cinema to generate staple content to be transmitted – a factor that led to squabbles between the network operators and video cassette companies.

Another field that witnessed private entrepreneurship is in generating content exclusively for television, taking into account the increasing presence of VCRs in urban houses. Video magazines arose as a result of this. Initially, print film magazines came up with the video versions of their print content, offering news from the world of cinema. Play Back and Fast Forward, a magazine dedicated for music, television and video sectors, cites ‘Lehren’ and ‘Movie Video’ as examples of print film magazines launching their video versions (Play Back and Fast Forward, April 1988, Vol 2, Issue 11). ‘Chalte Chalte’, ‘Bush Film Trax’, etc., are other examples of video magazines about the world of cinema. Soon, a number of publishing houses launched their video magazines: Living Media Pvt Ltd, the publishers of India Today, started the first news video magazine – ‘Newstrack’ – which gained considerable popularity during the 1990s4. PTI TV soon followed this with its own news magazine in video format (Ibid). In 1991, Hindustan Times, the Observer Group, and Independent Television launched their video magazines namely ‘Eyewitness’, ‘Observer News Channel’ and ‘Indiaview’, respectively (TV and Video World, June 1991, Vol 8, Issue 6).

In fact, Doordarshan was a crucial facilitator in stimulating private entrepreneurship in the production of content for TV – especially in the form of features on current affairs and stories on human rights violations. Outsourcing the slots for features helped Doordarshan officials to cater to the demand for feature and investigative stories as well as political analyses of current affairs at least to certain extent, while at the same time absolving themselves of the direct responsibility of the stances and perspectives reflected in such content; after all, it was

4 TV and Video World’s June issue says: “The initial foray into the video magazine market by Newstrack was meant to fill a vacant slot that existed mainly due to Doordarshan’s inability to provide credible and innovative programmes. For almost two years, Newstrack operated in isolation with little competition. With the Mandal issue in October 1990, Newstrack hit an all-time high, thereby making people more aware of video magazines and their value as a more credible alternative to Doordarshan” (TV and Video World, June 1991, Vol 8, Issue 6: p. 33).

9 virtually impossible to predict what content was going to displease the government and the politicians. NDTV, during the late 1980s, started producing programmes like ‘The World This Week’, and ‘The News Tonight’, for Doordarshan and became popular among the urban viewers. The formats of these programmes seem to have served as models for the video magazines.

Image 1: Cover of Newstrack – India Today’s Image 2: Cover of The Observer’s video magazine. video magazine on 1991 elections.

Specialized video magazines like ‘Business Plus’ launched by Bombay-based Paradigm Media in 1990 had a subscriber base of above 4,600, and sold 7,500 cassettes. Paradigm Media also launched ‘People Plus’, another video magazine focusing on human interest stories. Times TV (of Times of India) and Business India also launched their monthly business magazines in video soon. Dev Features launched its video magazine for sports- related news and clips, called Sports Channel. In the South, before the coming of Sun TV, Kalanidhi Maran started a video news magazine from Chennai in Tamil called Poomalai, for which the North Indian component was covered by PTI TV.

Image 3: Advertisement of Solidaire Satellite dish antenna. The first caption in the ad says: “Because you want the power to travel to different worlds, uninterrupted. Because you want to be there. Wherever. Whenever.” (TV and Video World, September 1992). The sight of big dish antennas looking up at the sky on the roof of rich and upper middle class houses in India during the 1990s was indeed a reminder of alternative worlds of lights, images and sounds, and of the possibilities of constructing one’s own worlds geared to newer tastes.

By the mid-1980s, direct broadcast satellite technology arrived, enabling private entrepreneurs to look beyond terrestrial broadcasting. In Sashi Kumar’s words: “Technology came to our rescue. In direct broadcast satellite technology, if you have a transponder up in

11 the sky and if you are able to uplink a signal to that transponder, the signal can be beamed down to the footprint of the transponder” (Interview with Sashi Kumar; October 2015). Asianet started transmission in 1993 from a hired studio in Philippines, using a Russian satellite, targeting Malayali audience in various parts of the world, launching itself as a current affairs and entertainment channel, with news broadcasts added to its staple a few years later. The channel’s programs were to reach homes through a special antenna (costing approximately Rs. 2000 then) for individual households that opted for their own receivers, or through cable networks distributing other satellite TV channels as well. A small group comprising renowned artists and intellectuals – all men, the most prominent among them being writer Paul Zachariah, poet and filmmaker P Bhaskaran, the Left ideologue K Ravindran, and senior journalist BRP Bhaskar – were roped in into key decision making positions.

Assembling an agentive audience In this section, I will put forth a set of arguments regarding how the channel’s interventions became instrumental in inaugurating a new relation between the media audiences and everyday media forms in general, in the region. I identify the satellite television’s address from the skies (as opposed to the terrestrial transmission, flowing from centres of local political units to its peripheries – the mode of address associated with state-run television until then) (see Image 3) as crucial in fashioning new modes of relating to the state and politics in the region during the 1990s, by instating the then-emergent global technological modernity as a mediating factor in local cultural politics. This refashioning, I will illustrate, was assisted by the aesthetics and address of Asianet satellite television’s early programming strategies that looked to assemble an active animated audience, invoking them as critical consumers of media, as participants in content selection and the assembling of technology, and at times even as partakers in producing the content, thus offering them symbolic avenues for connecting to global media modernity and for reconfiguring citizenship where access to (media) technology will be a crucial mediating element.5 I will begin by sketching out certain aesthetic manoeuvrings in early programming in Asianet, to illustrate how the channel’s initial address offered the viewers: a) symbolic access to content production and technology assembling; b) resources to redefine one’s position in relation to media as that of a critical

5 See also Nye (1996), Barber (2000), and Barry (2001) for elaborations on the links between media, technological modernity and democracy in the contemporary world.

12 consumer; c) new discursive tools with which to distance oneself from the domain of ‘local (electoral/mobilizational/mass) politics’.

After setting up Asianet in 1991 with an initial capital investment of Rs. 6 crores, along with his uncle Reji Menon – a doctor then practising in Russia – Sashi Kumar prepared a brief manual which was to serve as a guide for the channel’s “style of presentation”. It reads:

1. We MUST be different from Doordarshan. More casual, irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, innovative to the extent of brinkmanship (constantly pushing the margins of moral acceptability). This may mean a few comments or jokes at our own expense. The whole point is not to take ourselves too seriously – at least the effect should be one of effortless discourse which takes the viewer always into confidence. 2. We must plug ‘ASIANET’ as “the viewers’ channel”; there must be a sense of sharing all our effort, the process of creativity or programming with the viewer, even at the risk of exposing our shortcomings or faults. This will mean: we never talk down to the viewer, unless it is done deliberately in a provocative manner; we talk to them and with them, at times sharing a joke, at times conspiratorially, at other times placing our problems before them. 3. The comperes, presenters, anchors should become personalities with distinctive style. Their creative ego should never be submerged in any corporate or impersonal style. Their angularities and at times eccentricities could become assets, just as much as their professional skill. This would mean the texts have to be evolved like speaking parts in a dialogue between them and the viewers. This may also mean that we do not pre-set the text fully – leave it open-ended enough to allow for spontaneous innovations even in the last minute. (…) 4. The initial one hour slots with which we go on the air should communicate a sense of the PROCESS of our programming work. It should be open ended in style. It can incorporate vignettes of the process of programming – editing, shooting, discussion, planning, etc. at work… (From the short manual prepared by Sashi Kumar for Asianet anchors; obtained from the personal collection of Asianet Vice President Dilip V; emphases in the original).

The manual allows us to deduce the manoeuvrings that went into reorienting the audience in the region away from the established modes of relating to media forms, and introducing new codes that invited them to experience and access the promises of global technology-media cultures emerging in the 1990s, heralding a modern era in media practice and consumption. Though the mode of address associated with the state television Doordarshan is explicitly referred to here in the beginning as that specific model to be disassociated from, the distancing sought here is one that is extended to the familiar media practice prevailing in the region then at large, including the print media cultures of the time, as we will see soon. Many

13 of the parameters suggested in the manual – the semi-informal deportment, the emphasis on the metaphoric abandoning of the top-to-down message flow, a certain projected transparency regarding the production processes, and the emphasis on moulding the medium’s own personalities and thus leaving open the possibilities of little cults evolving around them – have come to define contemporary television’s form and mode of address. In fact, the spirit of this manual had immediate purchase with the rest of the team, as is reflected directly in the promos for Asianet, scripted by the writer Paul Zachariah, which were telecast during the initial days of its transmission w so as to introduce the viewers to the channel and its programmes. I am reproducing below a significant part of the script which I retrieved from Asianet’s Thiruvananthapuram studio, so as to bring to focus certain regimes of affect that Asianet tried to introduce, defining what satellite television was to mean later.

Introduction to Asianet promos, written by Paul Zachariah:

Tight close up of Lakshmi’s face, with joined hands and a smile – teeth should be visible.

Lakshmi: “I am Lakshmi; Greetings to all Malayalees from the Malayalam TV channel Asianet!”

Lakshmi, in casual working dress, is seen seated in the studio, but already getting up. As she moves forward, others are seen doing various things like, carrying loads of cassettes; crossing the floor reading a ticker tape; carrying a chair; arranging a chair; moving a floor light; listening with earphones to a recorder; applying make-up on the face before a mirror; lying casually in a chair and looking at the ceiling; glancing through the newspapers.

Everyone stops doing what they were doing, and move towards the centre. The person in the chair is prodded by another into action. Some carry what they were holding. They form a group at the centre stage. They stand casually and relaxed, but polite, friendly and smiling.

Ashraf steps forward, smiling: “I am Ashraf. I have good news for all of you: our channel is all set to start transmission in Kerala. Not just in Kerala; you can watch the channel’s programmes from across India, Asian countries and the Gulf! This small Asianet family is gathered here in the studio to introduce you to the programmes of Asianet.”

As Ashraf steps backward, Sujata steps forward.

Sujatha turns to camera: “When we start our full-fledged transmission, we will have programmes lasting eight hours every day. We are indeed preparing very interesting programmes for you.”

(Joining her hands in Namaste): “I am Sujatha. Our greetings to all Malayalees across the world!”

Those whose hands are free do the Namaste; others merely bend their heads, smiling. The group disperses in different directions to their places. Lakshmi is followed to where she switches on some lights, giving the studio a new appearance. She looks at the lights with satisfaction; picks up a chair and walks to Merli who is hidden behind the cassettes on her table.

Lakshmi puts the chair down, peeps in on Merli, laughs and says (to Merli): “Merli, you look as if are you hiding behind the cassettes. Are you scared of the viewers?”

Merli moves some cassettes to make her face visible, and says laughing to the camera

Merli: “Not at all. After all, I am from Kozhikode; I am not afraid of anyone! I have only love for everyone.”

Lakshmi sits on the chair and starts pulling out tapes and writing on them:

Merli: “I am Merli. A warm welcome to all to Asianaet.

Asianet is an initiative from Kerala. We transmit our programmes to your homes through the Russian satellite called Ekran. From the satellite to the dish antennas; from the dish antennas to your TV sets through cables. We use technologically advanced cables. This means, you will get vivid visuals on your TV… We are trying our best to make the programmes top class. Our humble attempt is not to bore anyone.”

Merli: “Our studio is situated in Thiruvananthapuram. Our satellite station is in a place near Moscow called Dubna. The satellite may be Russian, but it speaks Malayalam!”

Mahesh’s voice: “Really?”

Mahesh is seen pushing a suitcase with Asianet logo on it. Mahesh says very seriously in his Thiruvananthapuram accent: “But what if it switches to Russian every now and then? Our folks won’t understand!”

Mahesh sits on the suitcase and addresses the camera... “I am Mahesh. Greetings.”

Mahesh takes out a paper and starts reading it. He suddenly asks Sujata: “Our programmes will be in Malayalam, I hope?”

Sujata: “Of course. Why did you ask, Mahesh?”

Mahesh: “I can see titles of a few foreign programmes on our programme list here.”

Rajesh is intently doing something to a recorder. He speaks without looking up…

Rajesh: “Our channel has foreign programmes too. It should have everything; that makes it entertaining.”

Merli peeps out from her place and asks…: “Mahesh, what are you reading?”

Mahesh: “I am learning by heart the names of the programmes. I have to announce them.”

Rajesh is putting on his earphones, pressing some switches, etc.

Rajesh: “You don’t have to struggle so hard to do that in our channel, Mahesh. You just have to say it in your own style, directly. Let there be no formalities between us and the viewers.”

He looks at the camera and says…: “I am Rajesh.”

Merli comes carrying a load of cassettes and places them in front of Ashraf, and says: “Here are the programs. Let’s tell the viewers now…”

Ashraf picks up one cassette and looks at it, and asks: “Merli, what is written in Russian on it?”

Merli (wistfully): “If only I knew Russian...!”

Lakshmi: “What if you knew Russian?”

Merli: “I would have read Das Capital in Russian!”

Rajesh with his earphones off, and listening to this…: “Come on, Merli. Das Capital was written in German!”

Merli (irritated): “Oh damn..!”

Ashraf: “Is this some quiz competition going on here? We need to start!”

Mahesh is putting the last cassette into the box and trying to close it. He asks: “Why am I not able to close this box?”

Sujata helps him close the box.

Rajesh (lifting the box): “Which flight are we sending this on to Moscow?”

Lakshmi: “Tomorrow’s morning flight”

Mahesh: “I wish I could go along with this box to Moscow too. I badly want a break from Thiruvananthapuram!”

Ashraf places his hands on Mahesh’s shoulders, and says: “Let’s start our program before Mahesh flies off to Russia.”

Ashraf steps forward and a spotlight falls on him. He says: “We begin with a small introduction about our cinema-related programs.”

Lakshmi, visible in the shadows, calls out in a whisper, loud enough to be audible: “Ashraf..!”

Ashraf turns in surprise. He doesn’t understand. Lakshmi mouths the words, but loud enough to hear: “The logo… Let the Asianet logo come on in now…”

Ashraf is puzzled for a moment but suddenly realizes the mistake. He puts his hands on his head and says: “Sorry, we forgot to show the logo.”

Freeze…. The logo comes on… The theme song follows...

At the end of the song, Ashraf and Lakshmi are on the stage under spotlights and light effects. Lakshmi is in formal Kerala dress. Ashraf too is in a jubba and veshti. They are smiling, but formal [underline in the original].

Ashraf: “Welcome to this introduction to Asianet’s programmes.”

Lakshmi: “We do not want to make big claims. We sincerely hope Asianet’s Malayalam channel will reflect the life in Kerala sincerely, beautifully, and enjoyably.”

Lakshmi smiles and claps her hand. The clap is cut to the clap board of the film song trailer.

***

(Introduction to Asianet’s promo written by Paul Zachariah; obtained from the personal collection of Asianet Vice President Dilip V).

It doesn’t require close scrutiny to identify a set of well thought-out interventions being effected here, looking to produce ‘a new media sensibility’6, moulding new affective regimes between mass media and the public. One could delineate attempts to generate an intimacy- evoking informality without doing away completely with the required formalities for a reformative medium; an enthusiasm to situate the channel’s arrival within the economic- cultural horizons of global technological modernity but by taking adequate care to mitigate any anxieties about it being ‘too foreign’ to the local; the strategies of foregrounding the apparatus’s techno-modernity while at the same time demystifying it, by rendering the machinery simultaneously intimate and spectral, etc. These ingenious manoeuvrings are keys to understanding the forms in which the medium’s technological modernity manifested itself in the channel’s early programming, soliciting newer forms of the public relating to mass media. The cumulative effect was that of the unbundling of the machineries of a technological media apparatus which the state had kept to itself until then, but which was now being made accessible to the people – a process facilitated by global technological revolution, and mediated by a group of local (male) cultural interlocutors positioning themselves alongside cosmopolitan tastes.

Shaping new notions of citizenship This moment in the history of mass media in the region, I argue, should be considered an important part in the narrative about the rupture that scholars have pointed out in notions of citizenship in India after the eclipsing of the Nehruvian vision beginning in the late 1980s. This rupture is described in political and cultural theory as one that moves away from the nationalist-productivist paradigm (i.e., ‘citizen as producer-patriot’), to the idea of the ‘citizen as cosmopolitan consumer’ in the wake of globalization and the neo-liberal economic policies that the state in India has adopted over the last few decades.7 The media’s role in these transformations is accounted in such narratives mostly as that of plugging in the Indian viewers/readers to the consumer cultures of the West, mainly through consumer goods advertisements8, but also through programs that packaged and reproduced cultural diversity and ‘differences’ as consumable entities. Television is indeed considered one of the key agents in all these, though much of the theoretical attention has hovered around its content, and understandably so. However, it would be worthwhile to bring to focus the significance of

6 Sashi Kumar, in his interviews, has pointed out that he wanted Asianet’s interventions to bring about a “cultural renaissance” and a new media sensibility in Kerala. 7 Mazarella 2003; Deshpande 2003; Lukose 8 See also Mazarella (2003) for a detailed account on the advertisement business in India (Bombay), with a focus on the production of commodity images in globalizing India.

17 satellite television’s address in assembling the traditional mass media audience in a region like India as agentive and empowered, thus complementing the processes that offered the access to consumer goods and the ‘freedom to choose’ as fundamental political rights that should be protected through state intervention – the foundations of ‘consumer citizenship’.

The specific modes in which media audiences were configured as empowered and agentive were more symbolic than material. In contrast to the state-owned television’s terrestrial address from the capital centres of the national or regional political units (Delhi or Thiruvananthapuram), the satellite television’s hailing from a transcendental epicentre somewhere beyond the bounds of the local, of which the sky-facing antennas were constant reminders of, operates as very significant in the symbolic realm. This symbolic realignment in media history was to enable imagining a new, universally binding, moral-cultural epicentre, manifesting itself as associated with the global technological modernity and as hierarchically positioned above the local domains of political power – a raw power gained through mass mobilizations and electoral victories. This symbolic transcendental plane promised newer modes of political engagements – with the world at large and with one’s immediate surroundings – especially to a large section among the middle class who were already disillusioned with the available political paradigms in the region, for various ideological reasons.

One could identify a set of outcomes – abstract as well as immediate – that this realignment brought about in the region’s dominant media discourse, ranging from a redefining of the principle of ‘objectivity’ in journalism as an emphasis on the refusal to take sides in politics, to the instituting of ‘human rights’ as the locus of progressive media discourse. One of the most significant among these is the figurative elevation of mass media’s audience from the position of its object – to be reformed, to be informed, to be instructed – to that of the subject of media, by introducing the idea that media’s primary function is to serve the welfare of its audience and protect its rights, especially against the encroaching on these by the state. This was in contrast to the two then-existing dominant ideas about the political functions of media in post-Independence India: media as one of the state’s modernizing machineries; and media as the forum for negotiations with the democratic state. There are reasons why the middle class responded positively to the departures from these available frames brought on by the new media technologies like satellite television. And most of Asianet’s early programmes catered to the middle class’s desire to disassociate itself from the political class, and to be addressed as the subjects of a new world order emerging in the wake of globalization, making

18 novel promises – material and symbolic. In the following section, I discuss briefly the channel’s two early programs, namely Pathravishesham – a weekly show analysing daily newspapers, and the comedy-satire programme Comi-Cola, in order to illustrate some of the strategies deployed in them.

Audience as subjects of journalism One of the channel’s signature shows in its initial days used to be Pathravishesham (or “News from the Papers”), alternatively anchored by senior journalist and now an important human rights activist BRP Bhaskar, and the renowned writer Paul Zachariah – both of whom were closely associated with Asianet in its early days. The programme was launched when Sashi Kumar struck the idea after watching the show called What the Papers Say in BBC which would offer sarcastic takes on headlines in leading newspapers and tabloids. (Interestingly, in 1969, when BBC ran the show for a brief period with a different title – namely, The Papers – the cultural theorist Stuart Hall was its first presenter). Pathravishesham’s episodes turned out to be scathing critiques of the practices in print journalism of the time in the region, provoking the region’s leading newspapers like Malayala Manorama to even launch fierce campaigns against television in its pages. Its first episode9 begins by the host BRP Bhaskar explaining to the viewers the rationale behind starting the programme as offering a platform to keep checking: “How well do the newspapers protect your interests?” (Pathravishesham, Episode 1; accessed from Asianet archives, Thiruvananthapuram, on Feb 21, 2016). The episodes of Pathravishesham were elaborate lessons in traditional content analysis of newspapers, as the anchors would often discuss and compare the coverages that the newspapers afforded to a few chosen events during the week, measuring them column-wise and length-wise, as well as by subjecting the reports to rigorous examination. Often, the anchors identified problems in representation and accuracy, and pointed to human rights violations that such sloppiness could lead to.

Along with the familiar charges of sensationalising, factual inaccuracy, political partiality and sloppy writing, a major reason for newspapers to invite the programme’s criticism was that print journalism was perceived as too wrapped up in local politics. In Sashi Kumar’s words:

Print was at its arrogant heights those days. It was the most dominant medium. Bulk of the print would talk only about politics and changing governments. Reporting about

9 I watched the early programmes that I discuss in the paper from the well-preserved archives at Asianet’s office at Puliyarakkonam, Thiruvananthapuram. However, since these are preserved in DV tapes, I have not been able to make copies of the episodes or take still grabs from the videos.

other spheres like culture was in clichéd formats in the print. The newspapers failed to reflect the lived lives of people in the region’s urban-rural continuum (Interview with Sashi Kumar, October 2015; emphasis mine).

The format of the program caught on well with the viewers to the extent that they started sending in letters to the hosts pointing out mistakes and issues that they would find out in newspapers on their own. BRP Bhaskar told me in an interview (July 2015) that the writing style in many of these letters would in fact mimic the very format of the show. One could say, the show tried moulding the viewers/readers as critical consumers of the media (in general), and in turn, as subjects of media discourse/journalism.

It is striking then to note that even the channel’s first comedy programme Comi-Cola10 reflected some of these anxieties quite vividly. A typical Comi-Cola episode would contain a funny skit offering cheeky satirical commentary on contemporary issues, with politicians becoming the butt of the jokes on a regular basis. In fact, this was also the beginning of a trend among popular mimicry troupes in Kerala11, who until then would entertain people by imitating and presenting funny caricatures of mostly popular film stars, turning their attention to politicians as a new breed of people to tap for ‘inspiration’; after all, television had started making politicians’ mannerisms, voices and body gestures familiar with the audiences too. The programme’s first episode shows a skit performed by the mimicry troupe from Kalabhavan12, led by the famous parodist and mimicry artist Nadirsha, The theme chosen for the skit is significant, and offered adequate scope for satire: an imaginary coaching centre offering training for aspiring politicians on ‘how to get ahead in politics and become a minister’. The lessons start with the master, played by Nadirsha, checking whether all his students possessed ‘the minimum qualification required to become a minister: lack of education’. The skit then proceeds to the aspirant ministers getting certain basic lessons on how to wear ‘an inauguration smile’, how to please everyone, how to win in horse-trading,

10 Asianet had adopted the policy of not accepting advertisements from multinational cola companies, like Coca Cola and Pepsi. Given this, it is interesting to note that the title of the programme, given by Paul Zachariah, is a pun on the brand name ‘Coca Cola’ which is often used as shorthand to refer to the global reach of the consumer culture, starting in the West from the mid twentieth century. Despite the channel’s general political positioning against the multinational brand’s exploitative relations with third world regions like India as its market and as the cheap sources for raw material, the decision to borrow the chicness associated with the brand for a programme title indicates the desire to position the channel in domains of global cultural tastes and the familiarities they evoke. 11 Mimicry troupes were mostly all-men performance groups who became popular in Kerala from the late 1980s. 12 Started as the Christian Arts Club at Ernakulam in 1969 by a Christian priest named Fr Abel, Kalabhavan emerged as a key centre of popular cultural production in Kerala by training young musicians, dramatists, mimicry artists, etc., in the 1970s, 80s and 90s.

20 how to empty out the treasury and fill one’s own pocket, obstruct traffic, and wash one’s hands off responsibilities easily, etc. In a region where electoral politics, ever since the 1960s, revolved almost entirely around garnering the support of caste and religious communities and forming expedient political alliances by mediating their interests, the educated middle class started feeling alienated from the electoral politics for power; the vanguard position that this class was afforded in the new nation of Malayalis had started diminishing… All these made the distaste for the political class positively appealing for the middle class viewers. Thus, a disapproving distance has emerged as the mainstay of daily reporting of matters related to electoral politics on television, and ‘political satire’ programmes have emerged as one of the chart-topping content in contemporary television in Kerala.

Deployment of cinema When it was launched, Asianet identified cinema as a readily available source of content it could draw from, taking cues from how cable television networks in Indian cities had become popular by offering cinema. The channel’s uses of cinema in its early days are pointers towards how television’s deployment of cinema has potentially propelled new modes of popular engagements with media in the region. Asianet recruited veteran film producer Shobhana Parameswaran Nair to acquire the rights of as many films as possible, especially the old films which the producers gave away happily as they had completed their theatrical runs. The idea was to use films to fill air time, and appropriate cinema’s popularity to draw audiences towards television. Besides, the channel would also break down the acquired films into segments of comedy scenes, songs, romance scenes, etc., to make separate TV shows out of them, leading to inventing and showcasing easy and inexpensive ways of generating media content while orienting the audiences towards novel ways of playing with media technologies and media content. The loose format of Indian popular cinema lent itself to such uses of cinema too. These forms in which cinema was deployed in television offered a new lease of life to many films much after their theatrical runs, as they were to be viewed and re-viewed in the middle class homes on television. The media cultures that emerged in the region out of all these inaugurated new relations between popular cinema and the Malayali middle class, cultivating certain new forms of cinephilia among the middle class around popular cinema in Malayalam; popular films were ‘rediscovered’ and appreciated anew, and minor cults are still being built around sometimes hitherto unnoticed artists and elements in them.13

13 The region’s middle class always possessed an ambiguous relation to the popular cinema in Malayalam, very often holding the latter as an object of abomination but nevertheless obsessed by its charms and looking to appropriate the medium for various cultural projects. Cinephilia has manifested in the region mainly in the form

In fact, the origins of many of the now-familiar uses of cinema-related content that we witness in New Media forums today like YouTube and social networking websites can be traced back to television’s deployment of cinema-fragments in varied contexts and forms. The practices of juxtaposing familiar content and producing mostly amateurish montages using cinema and cinema-fragments in television gradually tutored viewers in imagining novel uses of modern media technologies and in playing with content, meanings and contexts; in that sense, the deployment of cinema-related content on television showcased before the viewers the technological and aesthetic possibilities of producing of media content using available media forms as per one’s own creative interests. In other words, these practices started moulding the audiences as the subjects of media, as the agents of production of media content.

Here, a look at the format of a comedy programme called Cinemala, another example from Asianet’s initial programmes, will be useful. The episodes of Cinemala – literally meaning ‘garland made of cinema’ – were generated by mixing skit with comic scenes from films that would have some bearing on the skit’s theme, producing sarcastic and ironic commentaries on social system, powerful people and political controversies. The montages created out of inserting comedy scene clips from popular cinema with skit on contemporary events oriented the audience to make moral judgement on issues and events, endorsing a sceptical view of the prevalent political system; possessing the faculties of wit – complemented here with the savviness with media technologies and the familiarity with the best of the region’s popular culture – was proposed as an important asset to feel agentive, ‘in control’, and empowered in certain ways. Popular culture in this way was symbolically elevated and placed above the mundane, nevertheless powerful and inaccessible, realm of politics; it was endowed with the moral faculties to critique political power.

The triumph of affect over reformist realism As far as the channel’s envisaged cultural mission was concerned, the challenge was to reconcile two conflicting elements emerging out of the practices within: the realism-oriented reformist interventionist agendas on the one hand, and the intimate and affective relations

of the lower class’s fascinations with the popular cinema’s stars, and the middle class has taken care to distinguish its relation to cinema as different from such forms of cinephilia. The middle class’s obsession with the medium took the form of patronizing art cinemas of the world through film societies, mainly during the 1970s and 1980s. It is only during the last two decades that popular cinema in Malayalam made between 1970s and 1990s found new favour with the middle class in the region – a factor facilitated by television and the circulation of cinema in newer and cheaper formats including CDs and DVDs.

22 between the medium and its audience that the early programming practices at Asianet had begun to nurture, on the other. The channel took it upon itself to revive the aesthetic project of cultural self-representation, attempting to achieve deeper realism in representing the region’s ‘authentic local content’ – a project towards which cinema and the print media were critiqued as having contributed very little. In fact, by the mid-1980s, when the Indian state started turning away from cinema in favour of television as its preferred medium to reach out to the masses, the state’s projects of promoting realism as the chosen aesthetic was carried on to television, as is evident from the patronage that Doordarshan offered to tele-serials like Bharat Ek Khoj (Shyam Benegal), Hum Log (P Kumar Vasudev), and Buniyaad (Ramesh Sippy & Jyoti Sarup) during the decade. One of the ambitions of the founders of Asianet was to go beyond this state-sponsored formal realism14 and to device new ways of capturing “the region’s cultural life authentically and in its entirety”, or “the lived lives in the region’s urban-rural continuum” (borrowing Sashi Kumar’s phrases; interview with Sashi Kumar, October 2015). A more radical use of realism – resorting to the resources of ‘documentary realism’ already in practice in television, with an emphasis on candid camera and an interest in the ‘truly local’ – to reflect the region’s hitherto unrepresented cultural-scape emerged as one of the key tasks that the channel could embark on, expecting the middle class intelligentsia’s patronage for the project. One programme that wore this ambition on its sleeve is Ente Keralam (My Kerala; 1994 – 1999), a television travelogue anchored by the Marxist cultural critic and filmmaker K Ravindran. I will conclude by contrasting the aesthetic impulses in Ente Keralam with those in Sthree (The Woman) – a hugely popular tele-serial that ran for two years (1998-2000) on Asianet, setting the trend among television channels in the region to compete among themselves to produce more and more tele-serials targeting women audiences.

Ente Keralam took the viewers through the region’s breadth, each episode highlighting the life forms often in a remote semi-urban region, describing obscure cults and dying traditions, exploring the remnants of the past, and documenting the architectures, culinary practices, landscapes, etc.15 The choice of the destination for the programme’s first journey makes its

14 The state television Doordarshan’s representations of the regions have often courted controversies. BRP Bhaskar, in an interview, recounted an instance from the late 1980s when viewers from Kerala objected to how a Hindi tele serial on Doordarshan represented a Malayali woman in Delhi in one of the episodes, forcing the channel to issue an apology later. 15 Sashi Kumar remembers about conceiving the programme: “It was clear from the very beginning that it would be a modern Pilgrim’s Progress–like account of [Ravindran’s] personal rediscovery of Kerala. He would travel and tell. And we would get a different, truer feel of Kerala. Beyond the grand narratives of historians. Beyond

23 subversive intentions clear: the first episode takes us into the interiors of the district of Kasaragod at the northern tip of Kerala bordering the state of Karnataka – one of the most under-represented geographical regions within Kerala.16 In the episode, we see Ravindran being hosted by a local Muslim resident at his humble middle class home where he was served dinner and liquor; we get to see a lengthy segment of the dinner table conversations over liquor and smoke involving Ravindran, the host and a few of his male friends, as the topics ranged from the availability of good meat in the region to the history of the place as well as the changes taking place in and around. In his comments on the programme’s aesthetics, Sashi Kumar wrote in 2008: Ente Keralam is distinctively a writerly text, not only in terms of the voice-over of the sound track, but also in its visual language. Ravi seeks to use his camera as naturally and unselfconsciously as a pen, much like the camera stylus aspiration of the French New Wave cinema. He creates an engaging tension between his lucid camera language and his commentary track in the measured, magisterial Malayalam that only he can write. The result is a sense of Brechtian alienation which prevents the material at hand lapsing into sloppy nostalgia. The quotidian and the commonplace seem to flower under his benign gaze and demand and deserve our attention with his authorship (‘Ente Keralam; Ravi’s Keralam’; in Ravindran (Ed.) Ente Keralam: Keralathiloode Ravindrante Oru Vazhivitta Yathra [My Keralam: Ravindran’s Vagabond Journeys Through Kerala], Mathrubhoomi Books, Kozhikode: 2008/2012; p. xiv).

In contrast to the non-affective documentary realism of Ente Keralam, the tele-serial Sthree (dir. Shyamaprasad) chose to embrace the possibilities of the elaboration of affective relations between the medium and its viewers. In my interview (October 2015), Sashi Kumar has acknowledged that initially the programmes in Asianet were conceived keeping primarily the male member of the household in mind – imagined as the addressee of ‘the serious content’ in conventional wisdom, and also as the gendered audience of realism. Sthree, however, was an attempt to appeal to the women audience segment whom the cultural- reformist ambitions of the channel chose to sidestep. The serial begins with a tribute to ‘the Indian woman and her sacrifices’; it narrates the story of Indu (played by Vinayaprasad), a young attractive sales woman from a poor family in Fort Kochi, working in a textile shop in Ernakulam. The first episode has an interesting sequence. Indu has no time to get married and

the ornate descriptions of poets. Beyond its romantic ensnarement in film song. Beyond the Pavlovian picture postcard response of green paddy fields, blue backwaters and multihued sunsets. Beyond the kitsch Kathakali masks crucified on walls across Malayalee middle class homes in and outside the state (Sashi Kumar 2008/2012; p. xiii). 16 In fact, one could argue that this is a symbolic reversal of the hierarchies among the regions within the linguistic geographic unit called Kerala, as the Southern-most district of Thiruvananthapuram – the state capital – often enjoys a privileged place when it comes to representational politics.

24 start a family life, as she has to look after her younger sisters and her father. Moreover, the family is too poor to arrange the dowry money. Indu, however, is hopeful that she would find a soulmate who would understand her perfectly. Once in her dream, Indu fantasizes her ‘first night’ with the perfect man whom she would find when the time comes. In this long sequence, Indu romances the camera sitting on her decorated cot, while the camera goes around her at intimate distances. This rendering of the medium as affective and intimate struck a chord with the audiences. The success of Sthree took Asianet and television in a totally new direction – a familiar story to the students of media in India.

Conclusion My attempt in this paper was to understand the arrival of satellite television in India as an important moment in the region’s history of media and its relation to modernity, by discussing the early years of Asianet – a private Malayalam satellite channel and one of the first in India that started its transmission in the early 1990s. Taking up the programming practices in Asianet during its initial years for analysis in some detail, I have argued that these practices reconfigured the relation between media forms and the audience, by offering the audience symbolic avenues of accessing the technological apparatus of the medium, of partaking in the production processes, of becoming the subject of media. Discussing these processes alongside the significance of satellite television’s address from the skies in realigning the region’s relation to global modernity, the paper argues that satellite television’s manoeuvrings have complemented the reconfiguring of the notion of citizenship in India in the wake of globalization.

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Interviews

Interview with Sashi Kumar

Jenson Joseph: The emergence and spread of satellite TV in India is often understood as part of the story of Western media’ global expansion, as the result of an America-propelled media imperialism’s attempts to reach to the Third World market, etc. However, the history of a channel like Asianet does not fit easily into this framework. This was one of the first satellite television channels in India, and it was envisaged from within the local context. In that sense, that envisioning is something we need to revisit.

The late 1980s… You were already in the field of Television when you came up with the proposal for Asianet. You were with PTI TV then. This was also the time that witnessed several formal experiments in the field of television in Indian metropolitan cities. From home to home cable television networks in cities, to video magazines, different formats of television were being tried out. PTI TV also had plans to launch its own video magazine. How did journalists’ fraternity look at television as a medium at that time?

Sashi Kumar: I was chief producer at PTI TV at that time. TV was not a new medium for me because my main medium has been television. I started to work as a news presenter in Doordarshan. I broke into print journalism for a brief period but I came back, as certain things were happening. The state of affairs in the state-owned Doordarshan was jokingly referred to as ‘Glasnost and Perestroika’. Even though it was a government channel, the brief was that ‘you can be open; you can be critical’, etc. Many critical programming on government and the state started appearing on state television. A lot of these programming were not done by the Doordarshan staffers, but by the outsiders, as slots were contracted out to others.

Parallely, as you indicated, there were video magazines. India Today had a video magazine called ‘Newstrack’. This is how Prannoy Roy, for instance, started ‘The World This Week’ in Doordarshan. I was called back by PTI in 1986, and we set up a television centre in PTI. We became a big banner for production of current affairs documentaries on domestic and particularly international issues, on Doordarshan. We did a number of important documentaries; we did many-parts documentaries on what was happening after the break-up of the Soviet Union, withdrawal of the Russians from Afghanistan, the Sri Lankan IPKF

28 engagement, what was happening in Iran-Iraq, the Kuwait attack… We also did a multinational documentary on the theme of disarmament and development. For a while from 1986 to three or four years after, the biggest banner on Doordarshan in terms of critical programming was in fact PTI TV. We also did another programme called Money Matters – an economy program on Doordarshan on Saturday morning slot, which looked critically at economic policies. Many prominent economists even of Left persuasion got a lot of visibility on state television through this program. We did a cultural program called Thana Bana, looking at the plural culture of India. We did another program called Jan Manch, putting a minister in the dock. In fact, variations of these program formats became independent channels later. For example, Money Matters is probably the first sustained programming that pointed towards the business channel as a logic. In that sense, PTI TV was not just doing programs for Doordarsan, but also innovating on programming, emphasising on how to be responsibly critical.

Because of certain restriction on free expression of ideas in Doordarshan, video magazines like Newstrack emerged. In the South, before the coming of Sun TV, Kalanidhi Maran started a video news magazine from Chennai in Tamil called Poomalai, for which the North Indian component was done by PTI TV.

So there was a kind of effervescence in the air [about TV]. That set me thinking. Time was becoming ripe for an independent-minded television network in the country. The initial expression was in the form of these video news magazines, as only the state had the rights to uplink content, and TV was still operating in terrestrial telecast format. Incidentally, the technology also came to our rescue, as direct broadcast satellite technology came into being in the mid-1980s, enabling us to look beyond terrestrial broadcasting. Direct broadcast satellite technology liberates you because if you have a transponder up in the sky and if you are able to uplink a signal to that transponder, that signal can be beamed down to the footprint of the transponder. That was the principle.

The big player who had already used direct broadcast satellite technology by then and started an independent channel was Ted Turner of CNN. This is when BBC was still operating on terrestrial transmission, though BBC World was using satellite transmission to a greater extent. Thus, my real inspiration was Ted Turner and what he did. He not only started satellite transmission, he also cabled up Atlanta. It is from him that I got the idea that we can

29 use the utility poles for cabling up: the poles are already there and all you need is get a licence from the state to use them to for your cable networking.

Asianet was not meant to be a Malayalam channel. It was meant to be the national channel of PTI TV. As the chief producer of PTI TV and the joint general manager of PTI, I had proposed to the board of PTI that PTI is well positioned to start a national news channel, and that the channel should be called Asianet. Otherwise why would you call a Malayalam channel Asianet!

A number of people on the board were very enthusiastic about the proposal; some of them were not very enthusiastic because they had their own private ambitions to start channels. They saw PTI as a probable big player, which created conflicts of interest in that situation. I wasted almost one year waiting for the nod, but nothing was happening. And I decided to start it on my own. I spoke to my uncle Mr Reji Menon, who was a trader in Russia.

Soviet Union was breaking up, and a lot of transponders were being liberated. Because of certain confusion there, state-owned transponders were being made available, but for a huge cost because that was still the age of analogue technology. Indicatively, the cost of a transponder was something around 18 crores a year (whereas today you get a transponder to uplink for 1.5 crores).

As the law of the land said you can’t uplink from here, we started with a Russian transponder called Ekran. To receive the signal, one had to use the helical antennas. We started selling those helical antennas in Kerala when Asianet started.

I knew that it would be difficult to launch this at the national level, and hence started looking at a region. Though I lived all along in Chennai, I thought let me look at Kerala. Luckily for me, when I went and talked about it to the then chief minister K Karunakaran, he was very enthusiastic about it. I presented both the ideas to him: we will have a satellite channel, and also a state-wide cable networking which was unprecedented in India. We entered into a contract with Kerala State Electricity Board to use their poles, for a monthly payment per pole for a period of 10 years.

The initial impetus was that the technology was available. And we wanted to do something different from Doordarshan. When I moved to Kerala, it looked far easy to decide what is to be done there in the state – as a cultural, political, social intervention. K Karunakaran inaugurated it in Guruvayur, and later in Thiruvananthapuram, by receiving the signal.

We continued with the Ekran transmission for almost a year. Many companies started making the special antenna for households. It was a simple technology and was as cheap as Rs. 2000. We didn’t ask for any royalty from the manufacturers of these antennas. It was potentially a big thing. But what didn’t know what this transponder we contracted was one the life of which was over. It was already drifting out of its orbit. That the Russians didn’t tell us!

After we started all this, suddenly the signals started becoming weaker. Initially, they wouldn’t tell us the reason. Once the cat was out of the bag, we were in deep trouble. We frantically started looking for alternatives. I went to Hong Kong and started negotiating with IntelSat. Thus, we moved on from Ekran transponder to the more modern, American, C band transponder. This is where you have a big dish and an offset sort of a receiver, and you have to distribute the signal via cable.

This was a big let-down. On the one hand we got a good reception in Kerala; on the other hand, technologically we were suddenly shifting track in a very early phase which can kill a project. We had to survive that.

JJ: How were the programs uplinked?

SK: Initially, the content were uplinked from Russia. We would send tapes through Aeroflot or Air India pilots or airhostesses we knew. We used the connections of my uncle who was in Russia. The uplinking station was 3-4 hours away from Moscow. Later, the uplink for the C band transponder was from Philippines. And then we shifted to Singapore.

JJ: How did the newspapers respond to the emergence of private television?

SK: Newspapers did not believe in the future of TV. They thought this is too expensive and people wouldn’t come to it… and after all, the state-owned Doordarshan is there. In fact, we decided to start on our own, we thought of finding big partners. The first big partner I

31 approached was Vivek Goenka of Indian Express. I met him at Express Towers in Bombay. I knew him; he was from my school in Chennai. He was very receptive to the idea. But he had just taken over the newspaper after Ramnath Goenka passed away, as was still under the tutelage, in some sense, of the textile man Nasli Wadia. He took me to Wadia’s office; we had a long chat. Nasli Wadia told Vivek: “This is a great idea. I understand why Shashi Kumar wants to do this. But you should decide whether you would want to be a newspaper baron or a cable operator.”

It was seen like that. Because our first direct satellite broadcasting experience was during the Gulf war, CNN’s war coverage was shown across homes by cable operators who just strung cables on the multi-storeyed buildings in particularly Bombay, and also in Kolkata, Delhi, etc.

Then I approached Manorama. In fact, Philip Mathew from the Manorama family was already in the PTI Board, and he was one of those who was enthusiastic about the project. Philip Mathew told me to talk to his father K M Mathew. I went and met K M Mathew in Manorama office in Kottayam. He listened to everything and said, he finds this too risky. Then I approached The Hindu, as N Ram was my friend. The Hindu group too was too conservative to venture into TV at that point of time. Much later, when Asianet became popular, K M Mathew called me and said “I should have listened to you; I made a mistake.” Out of sheer compulsion, I was forced to do it on my own.

After we started, once or twice, when we ran out of money to pay the transponder; the uplink stations in Philippines pulled the plug a couple of times. We managed to cover it up with sending out video cassettes to be played from cable network stations. Only those outside Kerala came to know that the channel was off the air for a brief period. Later, we managed to get some money from the bank and paid them. In short, it was like a tight rope walking in the beginning. I don’t think I have slept properly for almost a year. I knew without money one can’t run the channel, and the advertisements were going to take time to come.

Later, we signed a contract with Kerala State Electricity Board for using their poles. This contract was something I could leverage. Many foreign as well as Indian companies including BPL and Reliance were interested in the cable network – which was named Asianet Sat Com – and we had discussions with them. But they couldn’t see the full potential of it.

The first big money comes for the channel when I divested 50 percent of the stakes of the cable network to the Raheja Group in Bombay for roughly 40 crores, which was big money those days. I put this money into the channel.

JJ: In many narratives about the arrival of private channels in India, we see mentions about the desire of the middle class – a group familiar with what cable TV offers in places like America and fed up with Doordarshan’s limited fare – for better program content is attributed as one of the reasons. What do you think?

SK: I don’t think people knew what to expect. Maybe some wanted news programs that are critical of the government. Other than that, I don’t think they had any idea about the possibilities of the range of programming, the cultural space that satellite television could create, etc. I don’t think there was any felt demand from people, which created this. I even feel everyone was happy with whatever was going on.

JJ: Then, how did you decide what to offer on the channel?

SK: Initially, the programs on Asianet were a judicious mix of entertainment and what I would call informatively stimulating programming. The logic of entertainment program has gone through three broad phases: the first big spurt of programming was film-related. We went and bought the rights of as many Malayalam films as we could – mainly the old ones. We had recruited Shobhana Parameshwaran who was in charge of film acquisition. The producers also thought of this as additional revenue from films that had completed their theatrical runs. These films would run as films; then we would extract parts from them and make programs based on comedy scenes, romance scenes, etc.

In the initial budget allocation, I said: for entertainment programming, we will just use films and spin it off into other programs. And let us invest more money on other kinds of programs like Ente Keralam by Chintha Ravi, K P Kumaran’s attempt to do serials based on literary works, etc. We had recruited big people to do all these tasks.

The first big break happened when we commissioned out a serial to Shyamaprasad: Sthree. Suddenly the whole logic of the channel underwent huge transformation. This was a learning experience for me. You are running a channel, and you think you are in control of everything

33 that goes on there, editorially. Sthree became such a big hit, and took the channel in a particular direction beyond that control. I even think it was the beginning of all soap operas in regional channels. Shyamaprasad was a bright chap and had a hunch that housewives would watch this.

JJ: Was Sthree modelled on anything?

SK: It was not modelled on anything. It was not there on any other television anywhere. Maybe in Brazil, there were these tele novellas. Their sentiments are similar to ours. But the hit serials in American television during those times were those like ‘Dallas’, ‘Dynasty’, etc. which were celebrations of American lifestyle. Incidentally, that was the time when Soviet Union was disintegrating, and these programs in fact were a way of telling what these places were missing out on.

Here, Sthree was one of our emotional, trivial dramas. When it became a huge hit, you can’t resist that in your own organization. Your marketing section demands prime time for Sthree. In other words, the sheer success of the program becomes the defeat of your vision. It is very paradoxical in that sense. My vision that I will have a thinkers’ channel with book reviews, intellectual programs, etc. When Sthree became a hit, I knew that was the beginning of the end of what I wanted to do.

JJ: Did Sthree’s success change your idea about who is or who can be television’s audience? Especially in terms of the gender composition?

SK: Yeah it certainly did. Before that, we were marketing for a family audience, but we were marketing for the male more than the female audience. Because conventional wisdom was that it is the man of the house who would looks at news and related programming. But suddenly it became the woman, for the wrong reason though. Till then I was telling the advertising and marketing guys what to do; after Sthree, they started telling me what to do!

JJ: You have also mentioned in interviews that the attempt was to introduce a media sensibility different from the one that the print had enabled. What was to be the new sensibility of media and how was it envisaged as different from that which was determined by the print medium?

SK: Surely. Print has its limitations. The experiences that the print enables are limited. You can’t have interactions in print, outside the ‘letters to the editor’. That is why social media has taken over. Television was the intermediate phase, where we had progammes like Nammal Thammil [Between Us], or Ente Keralam [My Kerala], which was a micro level ethnographic look at the region, its life, etc.

Print was at its arrogant heights those days. It was the most dominant medium. Bulk of the print was talking only about politics and changing governments. Reporting about other spheres like culture was in clichéd formats in the print. The lived life of people in an urban- rural continuum was missing from newspapers.

And print also had the habit of not critiquing itself or other media. One of the early programming in Asianet was Pathravishesham [News from Newspapers], which was unique and critical of the print. On BBC, I had seen programmes where they would review newspapers and be critical of them. I said why don’t we have a program like that.

JJ: So media literacy was one of the key agendas?

SK: More than media literacy, our aim was to make people critically aware of the media. In fact, when we started Pathravishesham, the chief editor of Malayala Manorama K M Mathew wrote to me asking whether it was a healthy thing to do. He said he heard about the program from his people that this program talks about the shortcoming in the coverages of Manorama or Mathrubhoomi, etc. I took his words seriously and wrote back requesting him to watch the program and decide himself whether this is unhealthy subterfuge of the media. He later wrote back to me saying he watched a few episodes and that it is good that there is a constant invigilation of what the media is doing. He said, ‘you will be happy to know your Pathravishesham is routinely discussed in our editorial meetings’. These are some of the new things, though not new in strict sense, that we wanted to do in the Indian context.

JJ: Let’s come to news programing. I have looked at magazines published from Bombay in late 1980s and early 1990s which were dedicated to discussing Television programmes, like TV and Video World. And I have seen in them articles that discussed women newsreaders on Doordarshan, treating them as stars, whereas interestingly a similar interest in male newsreaders is absent. When I interviewed BRP Bhaskar, he also suggested that women definitely started getting more visibility in news as well as journalism after the coming of TV. How did this happen? Was this only about pretty faces as one explanation goes? What was Asianet’s approach towards how to use women – as presenters and journalists – in news when it started Asianet News?

SK: Women newsreaders represented certain aspiration. The glamourization of these newsreaders was in fact counter-productive. Because they were discussed for the wrong reasons – not because they read well or they were intelligent, but because they wore a certain ornament or dressed well, etc. It wasn’t a compliment to the gender really speaking. It was a token exercise.

Doordarshan had more women on screen, and it was followed in our case too. But in our case, some of the women would also go on to do interviews. We had women producers like Diana Sylvester. There were others working in the newsroom. Our newsreaders came across as more intelligent than the Doordarshan newsreaders, whether it is Maya or Rani, etc. Even our male newsreaders would ask questions. Like, Nikesh Kumar, Pradeep, etc. The quality that we looked for in them was they should have some journalistic background.

JJ: After talking to some of the journalists who have worked with Asianet for a long time, I have started getting this hunch that human rights stories have emerged as a key component of journalism after the coming of television. Do you agree?

SK: That is true. A program like Kannadi started out by just talking about the plight of the people, etc. It soon turned into an activist program, exploring way of intervening and helping people. Getting an impact from your program emerged as important. Issues of human rights lapses or violations became an important part of programming.

Moreover, some of the stories that Asianet did during its initial days in fact set a new standard in investigative journalism. For example, the ISRO spy case. It was Asianet which

36 said this is all cooked up. The print media was sure that this is a genuine case, and they went on with it. Neelan used to be the editor, and I have called him up asking: “are you sure, because we are the only ones saying it’s all cooked up. We would look very foolish at the end.” To which he would reply: “No problem; we have all the inputs.”I had to take anticipatory bail from Cochin Court, as Kerala Police filed a case against me saying I am defaming them. Paul Zachariah was my guarantor. Shekhar Gupta was the other man who wrote that this is all cooked, and he was summoned. He didn’t appear before the court, and an arrest warrant went for him. He somehow got out of it.

The other example was Chekannur Maulavi case. We did an investigation and said he was actually kidnapped and murdered. The government and the police view was that he had just disappeared, and it was a suicide.

JJ: So what exactly was the print doing at that point of time, in your opinion?

SK: Print was sitting comfortable because they were making money. Print thought this television thing is a foolish exercise. Once they found the advertising started shifting to television, they started getting anxious. Malayala Manorama started a full-fledged campaign, carrying a series of full and half page ads mocking television viewing, mocking people who think television is going to take away from print. They even started putting up big hoardings! In short, these big media were so convinced that nothing can shake them. They were powerful, and making profit; they didn’t think a new medium was going to make a dent into their share. That is the reason they were not going out of the way to do anything different or difficult. Whereas for us, the only way to garner viewership was to do the difficult. That had to be our trademark. Unless we took those risks, we could not score a point over them, because they had many correspondents; they had contacts in governments; they could get an interview with a minister at any time. Often, the opposition was willing to come to us, but the government would not; so we had a problem in balancing, etc.

JJ: How did the Malayali viewership outside Kerala figure in the discussions on marketing and distribution? Was the diasporic Malayali a serious consideration?

SK: Yes. Especially the Gulf Malayalis. The footprint of our satellite was anyway covering the Gulf regions. So we knew we had to have programs that appeal to Gulf Malayalis. I went

37 to the Gulf. I organized the distribution in Gulf; spoke to local agencies that had rights to distribute channels there. At that time, we had only started talking about America and all. That came much later. We also thought of having a spread in Singapore and Malaysia too. There were some programs that looked at the issues of the NRIs. But they were all interested in what was happening here [in Kerala] rather than what was going on there. We set up a marketing department in the Gulf right in the beginning as we knew a lot of them were watching it there. In fact, a lot of people here would tell those in the Gulf ‘bring us this product, that product,’ etc. Such products were interested in advertising on the channel. So there was sort of a relationship through advertisements. We realized that right in the beginning.

Interview with BRP Bhaskar

Jenson Joseph: The public that existed in a region like Kerala, until the coming of television channels like Asianet, was a public mediated primarily through the print. The public that TV channels sought to enable seems to be different from, and even oppositional to, this ‘print public’. Nevertheless, we have not accounted for the exact difference between ‘the print public’ and the public mediated primarily by television.

BRP Bhaskar: We had television before the coming of channels like Asianet. We had Doordarshan. It has been there for a while when Asianet came. It didn’t have much influence though. Initially, Doordarshan aired only Hindi programs. Moreover, as an institution within the government’s control, it didn’t have much influence. Just like the government-controlled radio didn’t affect or alter the print media and its public in any significant manner, Doordarshan did not have much significance on the public. Nevertheless, people had started watching Doordarshan, and responding to it too.

Doordarshan started telecasting serials quite late. In one of its first long serials, it used to introduce new characters in its weekly episodes. In one such episode, it introduced a Malayali character – a Malayali woman looking for a job in Delhi, being introduced to two scheming [male] politicians. It turns out that her father was an independence struggle veteran, and the family is now in penury; the two scheming politicians plot to manipulate her vulnerability. After the episode was telecast, many viewers from Kerala responded angrily and wrote letters alleging that the episode portrayed Malayali women in bad light. The following episode opened with an apology, stating that it regrets the fact that a character portrayal in its earlier episode insulted the sentiments of the viewers in Kerala.

This was an indication of television’s potential to influence people. However, Doordarshan would hardly telecast much content related to Kerala. It is after the coming of Asianet that television became an institution with tremendous influence on everyday life in the region, making TV-viewing a habit. One fundamental reason could be this: a crucial element in habit-formation is the frequency of exposure [to media]. For example, a weekly would have more influence on readers than a magazine, because the weekly comes out more frequently, maintaining a stable continuity especially through serialized stories and novels, etc. Magazines cannot maintain such continuity due to the inevitable lapse in publication. Similarly, a daily might have more influence than a weekly. Television takes this a step

39 forward, and tries to maintain this continuity uninterrupted. Live telecasts and breaking news accentuates this further. Thus, its capacity to hold people is more. That is one element.

The other element is related to the nature of the content. Certain content has the capacity to form strong viewing habits than other – a factor that television exploits in its favour too.

In fact, all media is habit [forming]. When we say one medium is more effective than the other, what we mean is, it is more habit-forming than the other. If one newspaper makes the reader crave for it intensely, it has a greater ability to influence you and form a habit in you. How? This is because it is easier to pick up a bad habit than a good habit. Equally, it is easier to give up a good habit than a bad habit.

JJ: Had you started watching Asianet even before you became associated with Asianet’s ‘news division’ as a member of its editorial advisory board? Or, even before Asianet launched its news-related telecasts?

BRP: Not much. Initially, the reach was poor. And I was in Bangalore those days. And it was not possible to pick up the signals from Bangalore. One needed a special antenna which the Russians supplied, to pick the signals from the Russian satellite [using which Asianet beamed its signals initially]. It was a U-shaped antenna that looked like a lightning arrester. One of my neighbours in Bangalore had a Russian wife. He was picking up Russian television by making an antenna.

JJ: During its initial years, was it perceived as an initiative which would inaugurate a new ‘media culture’?

BRP: Undoubtedly, it was perceived as a medium that was to make a change. For example, Asianet launched its news-related programs, there were hardly any women in the newspapers in Kerala. In fact, when I came back to Kerala in 1992-93, some magazine asked me for an article, and I said I will write about the absence of women in media in Kerala. Even if there were women in newspapers, they led an invisible career. This was the backdrop when Asianet was launched. And from the beginning, it was felt as if this is going to make a difference.

JJ: Even in terms of the representation of women?

BRP: Yes.

JJ: Why?

BRP: Because it was already happening in places like Delhi after the arrival of Television. In Delhi, there were indeed a few women in newspapers, but in miniscule number. When I worked in the Statesman in Delhi, there were no women. In UNI, when I used to work there, there was one girl in the desk. She used to be on a permanent evening shift from 3 to 9 pm. She wanted that shift. At 9 pm, she would go to All India Radio and read the 10.30 bulletin. When Doordarshan came, she became a news presenter there. So, the change in the presence of women with the coming of television could be seen in Delhi. Gradually, the status of women in newspapers also improved, as they were given better reporting tasks.

In Doordarshan, Pronnoy Roy’s programs started offering women important roles in them. But in fact, the man who brought girls into Indian television was M J Akbar when he did a program for Doordarsan. In this program, he used women journalists from his newspaper. He had already started employing a lot of women journalists in his newspaper – Telegraph. He had brought a lot of girls from all over the country. In fact, journalists used to say jokingly: ‘Akbar’s harem’!

When Akbar and NDTV used girls in their news programs for Doordarshan, these women did very well. That was a major change, and it was hoped that the same will happen here too. However, the initial efforts towards that didn’t succeed. There were very few women candidates during the recruitment.

JJ: So you were actually looking for women candidates?

BRP: Oh yes. In fact, in contrast to the conventional approach of “other things being equal, a girl is disqualified”, we adopted the approach: “other things being equal, a girl will be preferred to a boy”, during the recruitment.

In newsrooms, boys never used to like the presence of women because that affected their freedom. They wanted to be boisterous, use language without bothering about the presence of women, etc. Such resistances were there in Asianet too, initially. Of the first batch of three women who joined, only one survived – Leena Manmadhan; the other two discontinued, probably because of such problems. The atmosphere was not very conducive. The boys were not very receptive of girls being around. But later this notion was broken, and several women started joining in the following batches.

In fact, before the recruitment of journalists began, we recruited one of the women candidates for the travelogue that Ravindran did in the channel. We had interviewed the candidates and

41 the selection process had been completed, but we had not started giving out the appointment letters since we didn’t know when we would start the news transmission. Ravindran wanted a woman companion for his travelogue – a fellow traveller on his journey across Kerala. So we decided to use one of these candidates whom we had interviewed and selected. She was the first to be appointed. (Vinu Abraham’s wife)

JJ: Did Asianet want women as news presenters?

BRP: Among our first set of newsreaders was Maya, who came from Doordarshan. She was the first known face of Malayalam television. She was taken off Doordarshan after an issue regarding her appearance in some advertisement. In the beginning, she was the only person in the team who came with some experience in visual media.

We had male news readers as well in the beginning. We – especially Shashi – were particular that journalists should read the news; we didn’t want presenters reading the news mechanically. Maya herself was rather a newsperson than a mere news reader, who was shaped up in UNI and Asianet.

JJ: In an interview, Shashi Kumar has said the intention was to mould a media sensibility which is different from the one that the print was nurturing. What exactly was imagined as that difference?

BRP: There were two aspects to our approach to the news. On the one hand, we didn’t want to follow the bureaucratic approach of Doordarshan towards what is news, i.e. ‘if the prime minister wants to say something, or if the minister says something at a function, that is news’. On the other hand, we wanted to remain close to the newspaper – in the concept of news. The attitude of the people of Kerala towards news has been shaped by the print media. They have certain concepts in their minds about news, and those come from our newspapers. We wanted to remain close to them. This approach reflected in our recruitment as well: people from the newspapers were recruited at the higher levels, so that certain professional values can be established. And we didn’t take anyone from Doordarshan, because we didn’t consider Doordarshan experience as an asset from our point of view, though Doordarshan was the only visual media at that time.

Personally, I am of the view that Doordarshan and All India Radio are very professional bodies. Probably, they stand at a higher level professionally, compared to other media in the fields. But they have their limitations – which is that they are part of the government. They

42 think of themselves as a government bodies. There need be no imposition from the government on them. They have internalized that ethos.

Whether you are in private sector or in a government sector, the employer has an ability to control, which is an accepted factor. One can’t dispute the newspaper owner’s right to control or determine the newspaper’s policy. What is objectionable is interference in day-today working, and attempts to promote or run down somebody, etc. A newspaper can decide they are against reservation, or against this or that. But interfering in the day-today judgment of people is objectionable.

I know a lot of young people in Doordarshan have tried to explore the limits of their freedom, and they have found it possible to achieve certain things.

There was also the element of corruption which affected Doordarshan significantly.

JJ: Corruption at what level?

Answer: For example, in allotting slots for serials. There were instances of officials getting arrested after allotting slots for the next one and a half years by taking money just before the transfer from one station to the other. I myself have had a bitter experience. I had given a proposal to make a serial out of Thakazhi’s novel Kayar for Doordarshan, with M S Sathyu as the director. The approval was pending. Soon, middlemen approached us. It was a Malayali from a Madras-based advertising agency. They made an offer: “if we pay Rs 1 lakh, we will get the slot easily. The agency will pay the money and get the slot; in return, it should get the right to produce it.” When I had proposed the idea to Satyu, he wanted to produce it himself. So I told them their offer is not acceptable. They went straight to Thakazhi, booked a flight ticket for him and brought him to Bangalore where I was based. I scolded Thakazhi, and I told the agency: “This man is an eminent writer. Just because you can flaunt an air ticket, do you think you can drag him all the way here?” Later, Thakazhi told me he agreed to come to Bangalore just to see his grandson who was settled in the city!

Ultimately, Doordarshan rejected the proposal. Roughly five thousand serial proposals were waiting for approval. They could not have read all of them; so they started summarily rejecting many.

JJ: Shashi Kumar also talks about a ‘renaissance’ which the channel was trying to inaugurate. What was the mission?

Answer: Renaissance, everywhere, is a movement that reflected on all spheres of life. In Kerala, the first communist government of the 1957 was the result of the renaissance. It reflected in spheres of art, literature, cinema, industry, etc. It reflected in the print medium too, and most of our newspapers are products of it.

After the 1970s, with the coming of editions, newspapers strived to become the most widely read newspaper rather than the best newspaper. Increasing the circulation began to be the ultimate test. Using this analogy, one can say when Asianet started, we were a movement which stood close to the spirit of renaissance or what was left of it. Shashi Kumar maintained it throughout his period.

Asianet goes into the mode of competitive marketing and serial-oriented culture when Sun network introduced Surya channel in Malayalam. Initially, Surya operated within the format that Asianet had introduced; they had a counterpart for each and every program that Asianet had introduced, except one: Pathra Vishesham. Ironically, later Asianet started following Surya’s path. Asianet started serials because they were anticipating that Surya will come up with serials which they were already doing in Tamil.

Surya came ready to compete with Asianet with its terms, after conducting market studies which proved Asianet’s popularity. But when Asianet went into the path of commercial telecasting, the competition shifted on to Sun Network’s terms.

JJ: How crucial was the migration factor?

Answer: The satellite used for transmission determines your footprint. Initially, what Asianet does is to unite the Malayali community in the Indian subcontinent. I used to do Pathra Vishesham those days. People in Bangalore and Bombay started recognizing me. Asianet people – those who appeared on the channel those days – would be identified immediately anywhere; those who used to travel extensively would know that.

Later, the Gulf becomes a major factor. But that was the case with newspapers too. Malayalis in Gulf were desperately wanting Malayalam content. In fact, it was a Pakistani named Mallik who found out that there is a market for Malayalam print in the Gulf and started bringing newspapers and periodicals to the Gulf. I happened to meet this Mallik once when I was in the Gulf on a UNI assignment. He told me: “If you give me more Malayalam newspapers, I can sell all of them too.” Such was the craving there for Malayalam content in the Gulf. But our newspapers and periodicals reached the Gulf late.

JJ: So it is with the coming of the cable television that Malayalis in Kerala and outside started consuming news together again?

Answer: True. When large scale migration started, those who went to various parts of the world had already developed a habit of reading while they were in the region. However, the unavailability of publications in Malayalam in these areas meant that Malayalam started losing its readers. It took a while for Malayalam publications to start their editions in the Gulf and other diaspora. But Asianet had succeeded in reuniting the Malayalis with the diasporic Malayali.

JJ: Was Pathra Vishesham popular? What was the idea behind starting a program like that?

Answer: It was Shashi Kumar’s idea. Initially, there was the concern of sustaining this from episode to episode. Because, how do you sustain the interest in a program that discusses what was printed in newspapers in a visual medium? We started using clippings of the newspapers in the beginning. Later, we started using visuals related to the news we discussed in the program.

Malayalis were already a newspaper-savvy people, and a people under the heavy influence of media. They could easily relate to the program.

JJ: This was also a platform to nurture a critical relation to media among the public?

Answer: Yes indeed. And we started getting evidences that this was happening quite effectively. After the program was on for some time, viewers started writing their responses to us. Some of these responses were in the format of the program itself, analysing what a newspaper was doing, etc. They did it almost the way we would do in the program, often imitating our style and format closely. I still remember this young chap who was doing his medicine at Kottayam Medical College: one Sajan Raghavan. He is a doctor now. He used to write to us regularly. These letters reflected how the program influenced how the readers looked at newspapers.

But beyond than criticism of the newspapers, much more profound was the program’s effect in bringing the newspaper within the limits of where you can deal with it. Before that, newspapers would stand above you and talk down to you. The program started with the message: here is somebody who is able to talk to them.

Interview with Mangad Ratnakaran

JJ: Before you joined Asianet, how did you perceive the coming of the channel? Do you remember what were your feelings about how would it affect the media-scape in Kerala?

Answer: When Asianet entered the media scene in Kerala, it was definitely being seen as a positive signal by many. It could maintain the image of a ‘Left media’ from the beginning. This was not because it flaunted affiliations to a particular ideology or a political party. Rather, the channel’s predominant outlook was determined by a Human Rights perspective. Programs like Kannadi and Ente Keralam reflected this, representing the channel’s image. Pathra Vishesham was known for exposing the hidden agendas of big newspapers; the media coverage of sensational issues like the infamous chaaracase (The ISRO Spy Case) was scrutinized in public, etc. The channel was definitely looked up to by the public as well as the journalists’ fraternity.

JJ: What did it promise which the dominant print media could not do?

Answer: The reports of early Asianet journalists like Jayachandran proved that visual media was going to be more effective than print in dealing with human rights issues like the Adivasi struggles of the 1990s, the victims of Endosulfan in Kasaragod, etc. The animated visuals of the Endosulfan victims alone would convey things much more effectively than even a well written newspaper report. The medium was more suited for telling human interest stories.

JJ: Was the viewership in Gulf as well as other regions with significant Malayalee expatriate population a significant factor in how the channel operated during its initial years?

Answer: Asianet played a significant role in unifying Malayali population across the world. We kept getting enough evidences about a major viewership base in places like London, the Gulf countries, Europe, etc. This was the reason why the channel started programs like Meghasandesham which were platforms for the migrant Malayalis to get in touch with their loved ones in the homeland.

I have always felt that even if I may not be recognized in Kerala as a media person, many would recognize my face in Gulf.

In fact, when the program Kannadi became popular, it started getting contributions from a lot of viewers for the victims whose stories the program covered. And most of these contributions came from the Gulf and other overseas Malayali emigrants.

JJ: What were the Kannadi stories that received most responses and monetary contributions?

Answer: Mostly victims of tragedies, calamities and human rights violations. Initially, the producers would give away all the money that it received in response to a story to the particular victim that it featured. But when some stories started evoking overwhelming responses in terms of contributions while others would not generate adequate contributions, it set up a fund and started channelizing some of the money to stories that do not get enough contributions.

JJ: Would it be wrong to argue that TV as a medium is more suited for human interest stories than the print?

Answer: That’s quite accurate to argue so. The animated visuals of TV are an advantage over print in conveying the effects of calamities, famines, etc. Moreover, the body language of people is something that gets lost in print reports, whereas in TV it is conveyed well and often evokes major interest – both from the point of view of human interest and news interest.

Interview with Dilip V, Vice President, Asianet Communications

JJ: It won’t be an exaggeration if I say, Asianet has now become a key cultural institution in Kerala. Yet, it doesn’t have a ‘history’, whereas we have book-length historical accounts of even recent cultural trends like New Generation Cinema. My attempt here is to understand Asianet’s interventions in Kerala’s media scape through narratives and memoirs of people who have worked with the channel from its early years.

To begin with, what was the nature of program content during the early days of Asianet? We know that when the channel started, the idea was to depend on cinema as a ready and primary source of content. We know that producer Shobhana Parameswaran Nair was given the task of acquiring as many films as possible. Do you think Asianet’s uses of cinema as content has shaped new ways of consuming cinema in Kerala?

DV: Asianet started transmission in August 1993. We joined the channel at its Chennai base, much before the transmission started. We moved to Thiruvananthapuram after the transmission started. P Bhaskaran’s son Ajith Bhaskaran was the director of programming, when the channel started. Zachariah was the consultant.

The channel started with a 3-hour telecast of programs every day. From 7 pm till 10 pm. Of this, 2-2½ hours would be a film. Thus, the program content for a day would be something like, one film and a half-an-hour programme (an episode of Kannadi, or Cinemala for example).

In the next stage of the expansion of transmission time, we included programs like Natakashala, which was basically videographed commercial plays in Malayalam, to be telecast in serialized form in 4 or 5 parts. Another popular program during the channel’s initial period was Poomarakkombu – in which many classical songs from cinema and plays were re-created, with many of the original singers like Anto. The songs were picturized in Merryland Studio at Nemam. In fact, we used to shoot a lot of our programs in Merryland. By the way, Asianet is the first to make use of Merrylands studio’s floors for non-cinema shooting. Later, they transformed into a television production company, by producing the extremely popular serial Swami Ayyappan for Asianet.

Most of the films that Asianet acquired were old films whose theatre run had exhausted. In fact, when the channel Surya was launched, Asianet was pushed to the second position in viewership, and cinema was the reason: Surya started buying all new films and telecasting them, whereas Asianet was still dependent on old and not so very old films.

JJ: Was there a policy as to what kinds of films would Asianet acquire?

DV: All kinds of films. Colour and Black and White… In fact, we focussed initially on buying those old films which had completed their runs in the market. We didn’t ignore relatively new films either. Mr Shobahana Parameswaran was a respected figure in the industry. Adoor Padmakumar, who was a production controller, was appointed to help Mr Nair with acquiring films. Remember, this is when nobody knew what Asianet was, or what it was going to be. We started acquiring films much before the channel started transmission. And Mr Parameswaran Nair’s contacts helped us get them. We bought almost all classics in Malayalam cinema. We somehow missed Chemmeen, which Surya bought later.

The first film we telecast was Vadakkunokki Yanthram. In fact, this was the film that Asianet aired on the day of its transmission. Before the film, we telecast an interview with Mohanlal. Sasikumar interviewed him for the channel. We also aired the first episode of Kannadi on the same day. These were the program content on the first day.

Later, we expanded our telecast hours to 6 hours, and then let to 9 hours.

JJ: Will you agree if I say, it is through television that Malayali middle class developed a new kind of cinephilic relation to popular cinema? I mean, until then, cinephilia would mean the following two things: the mass’s obsession with popular cinema and things associated with the publicness and glamour of cinema in general; and then the middle class intelligentia’s obsession with Art Cinema, facilitated through film society movements, etc.

DV: Absolutely true. Asianet and cable TV played a key role in extending the shelf life of past films. Nowadays, we have started communicating using film dialogues from popular films in our everyday conversations, especially in our conversations on New Media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. This is made possible with the repeated viewings of films on television.

Not very long back, Asianet Movies aired a set of KS Sethumadhavan movies. We got a call from K S Sethumadhavan himself from Chennai. He said he has noticed the special package;

49 he recommended one of his films which we had not aired, and requested for that film also to be included in the package. Thus, many ‘popular films’ of today became truly popular through our telecasts.

JJ: Isn’t it also true that Asianet, and later other satellite TV channels, played a central role in bringing news and discussions about the industry of mainstream cinema, its stars… in other words, everything ‘behind the screens’, started reaching middle class homes in Kerala with far better legitimacy than it had received through printed weeklies and magazines dedicated to cinema? The weeklies and magazines often doubled up as erotic, glossy glamorous objects, sold along with the pulp and erotica in bus stands and on pavements, and thus would be considered something which could not be “brought home”.

DV: Very possible. The very first interviews that we telecast in our channel included those with film personalities like Mohanlal and Seema [the glamourous star of what is widely considered a semi-porn film Avalude Ravukal]. In the Seema interview, we showed clippings of glamorous song sequences from films starring Seema, and then we would cut to the interview shots of Seema sitting at home on her sofa, almost like a house wife. That, to a great extent, deglamourized her, making her appealing to the home audience, etc. You could say so.

We also did a lot of promotional for new films, because such promotionals were popular program content for us. In fact, I think it wouldn’t be too far-fetched to say, we started the practice of making trailers for Malayalam films. Whenever a new film was set to release, the producers would give us a few clippings from it. We would go to the location, and interview a few stars, artists and technicians. In the end, we would edit these and make a promo or trailers, and telecast them. Such programs were popular.

JJ: You were in charge of advertising too. What were the initial sources for advertising revenue?

DV: Till the time when Asianet started its cable service, we didn’t run commercials. It was difficult to convince people about the channel’s reach before that, because only very few used to have the special helical antenna to receive the signals. Being Asianet’s employees, even we didn’t have Asianet connection at home. Initially, we didn’t have commercials; only our own promotions.

Once the channel started transmission through its cable network, we started getting advertisements, and we set up a sales unit in 1995, with bases in Chennai, Bombay, Delhi and Kochi. V-Guard Stabiliser was one of our first advertising clients. We used to wait for the cheque from V-Guard to arrive to get our salary! Lunars, Kitex, Malabar Cement, Bhima Jewellers, and Ujala whiteners were some of the early advertisers in our channel.

JJ: What was the reach of Asianet initially?

DV: It started with roughly 1000 households installing helical antennas to receive the channel’s signals. Houses in high range areas would get clearer signals. Gradually, we started getting letters from far-away places, and from outside India like the Gulf countries, etc., telling us that they are watching the channel. They would send us their feedback about the programs. People would buy antennas from Kerala (from Trivandrum, I think), take them with them to the Gulf countries and watch the channel from there.

Once we got a letter from one viewer in Antarctica: a Malayali wrote to us saying he watches Asianet from the base camp there!

We had a programme on Sundays in which we would read out the letters from viewers and discuss them. It is through such letters that we started figuring out the reach of the channel.

JJ: Comedy was a major ingredient from the beginning. Can you tell us about it?

DV: We started the program called Cinemala, by showing comedy clippings from films with an added commentary by a mimicry artist or a film comedy actor. Gradually, it acquired the format of the skit, with film clippings in between. The skits would be mostly satirical commentaries on some contemporary political development.

The then Chief Minister of Kerala, K Karunakaran was at the receiving end of most of the mockery in Cinemala. And Karunakaran used to sit down to watch each episode of Cinemala, and would even call up Asianet often with his feedback. He was fond of the program! In fact, the only modification that he suggested is, he wanted the program to use a female artist to impersonate his daughter Padmaja, (instead of the practice of a male artist dressing up as a woman and impersonating her).

The program in fact revived the political career of some of today’s politicians. V S Achuthanandan is an example. I don’t think Achuthanandan would be what he is now without

51 the political satires like Cinemala that people started watching on television. Achuthanandan becomes ‘Achu maman’ through comedy programs in television channels.

Comedy and music were the major ingredients, after cinema. Along with this, we regularly interviewed writers, artists, poets, painters, sculptors, etc.

JJ: Tell me about the beginning of the era of serials.

DV: The first daily fiction programme – or in other words, serials – on Asianet was a dubbed Tamil serial called Shakthi, which was being telecast in Sun TV (Tamil channel) during those days. When Sun TV’s own Surya was launched in Malayalam, Shakthi team backed out; we could not complete all the episodes; we had to stop the serial midway. That is when the idea of our own serial came up. Thus, Sthree emerged. Shyam Sunder, the man behind the serial, roped in film actor Siddique to play the lead male role in the serial; and Vinayaprasad for the female lead role in the serial that later became extremely popular among women audiences. Siddique was going through a dull period in his film career due to personal problems.

The first episode of Sthree was aired on December 21, 1998. It is with the success of the serial Sthree that women audience migrated from Doordarshan to Asianet. And with that, Asianet suddenly realized the possibilities of catering to women as an audience segment; until then, this segment was not taken into consideration majorly. Sthree was telecast at 7.30 pm, after the 7 pm news, every day.

JJ: What were some of the other popular programs?

DV: Anweshanam, an investigative programme by Neelan, was very popular. The programme generated and revived public interest in the death of Sr. Abhaya, and the missing case of Chekannur Moulavi. Anweshanam was instrumental even in pushing the investigations in these cases in new directions. Pathravishesham, a weekly newspaper analysis, was another popular programme which had a positive impact. Kannadi carried out investigations into human rights violations, like the victims of Endosulfan usage, the state oppression of Adivasi struggles, etc. As you can see, Kannadi became extremely popular in Kerala. Munshi, a 3-minutes social caricature program which started on 10 September 2000, is another such programme.