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 1 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 ---------------------- 2 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. 3 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. *** 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, 5 comprising more than 300 channels, that has targeted Indian homes since the early 1990s. In one form or the

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