The television story

Published : Dec 19, 2008 00:00 IST

Nalin Mehta has produced a book that is a mine of information on how television emerged and grew in India.

NOTHING in the history of modern India has grown as fast as television; from the 1970s, when the first stations began broadcasting to major city audiences, to the 1990s, a mere 20 years, it burgeoned into a giant network, changed from black-and-white to colour, started using satellites, and went from analogue to digital in much of its recording, and later, in its mode of transmission. From the 1990s to the present, again a little over 20 years, its growth has been expone ntial the single broadcaster, Doordarshan, having to contend with as many as 300 channels available to viewers across the country.

The story is fascinating, complicated, more of a rough-and-tumble affair than anything else. It is the story of enterprise, cunning, huge amounts of money, a bewildered and often incredibly short-sighted government, and of an enormous audience hungry for more of what they get from their television sets. It is the story of the emergence, almost suddenly, of a giant industry employing thousands across the country.

For anyone to try to document this amazing story and do it in one book would be an act of considerable bravery or of naive superficiality. It is to Nalin Mehtas credit that he is able, almost breathlessly, to marshal an incredibly huge amount of facts and statistics and present them in a coherent form.

To determine the structure of the book must have been a daunting task in itself. Nevertheless, Nalin Mehta has done it, and produced a book that is a mine of information on how television emerged and grew in India.

He has brought order and focus on a terribly disorderly and constantly changing subject, and done so with a creditable degree of lucidity. He writes easily, not with the ponderous consequence of an academic who drives a reader to the nearest television soap opera, and unravels developments while sticking scrupulously to facts, all of which he has meticulously documented and attributed, should one want to go into any one aspect in further detail.

This has great advantages, which are obvious, but also has an inbuilt disadvantage in that it can, and does, result in over-simplification of a situation for the sake of coherence. Just to take an instance at random, his very readable account of the situation with cable operators (Chapter 3 of the book) and MSOs (multi-system operators) is lucid and spot on, but it tends to over-simplify the very often infuriatingly complex system that prevails in different parts of the country. Cable operators are generally close to local political leaders, or, as in Tamil Nadu, they are totally political. The Orcs of Mordor, as I often thought they were.

Incidentally, that is a part of the danger of covering so vast a subject: regional television tends to be referred to only in passing, whereas it is a formidable aspect of television in India, particularly in the south. The amazing growth of Eenadu television is mentioned, but its implications for television in the country and the foresight of its founder Ramoji Rao would, perhaps, warrant another book.

It is very likely that regional television will overtake the existing Hindi-oriented television. There is always the myopia of the north, which sees the country as cast in its own image. As Nalin Mehta himself points out, advertisers and marketing men are always looking for the right audiences and, as the south inexorably becomes relatively wealthier and the cow-belt becomes more and more impoverished, the right audiences will be ones that speak Telugu, Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam. And there is the curious case of West Bengal, a State that is not as well off as the southern States but which, with neighbouring Bangladesh, may well be in the list of right audiences for advertisers.

The book concentrates on news channels and says so at the beginning, but even so, the murky but exciting world of entertainment television is big enough to warrant a little more space in a book called India on Television. One expected to read of the way entertainment television emerged, the twists and turns, the phenomenon of Ekta Kapoor, and the sweatshops where episodes are churned out almost by the hour, leading, as it has right now, to a confrontation between producers and the people they employ, who are perhaps little better than slave labour.

I have another small comment on the tag line to the title of the book, How Satellite News Channels Have Changed The Way We Think And Act. Nalin Mehta gives instances of what happened the coverage of the rescue of the little boy, Prince, who fell into a borewell, and the graphic account of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modis use of television.

But how has it changed the way we think and act? Has it done so at all? Or, if it has, how? We needed some analysis here, apart from the detailed and fine reportage.

Media analysts such as Akhila Sivadas have done a considerable amount of work on the effect of television on children and on adults; some of the results of these analyses make frightening reading. Sevanti Ninan has also done some work on this, and the indefatigable Bhaskara Rao of the Centre for Media Studies has a good deal of data that would be very relevant to any analysis that needs to be made. There are instances cited by Akhila Sivadas and others, of youngsters trying to imitate the character Shaktiman and jumping off roofs. Recently leading newspapers reported at least two fatal accidents involving motorbikes where the drivers were trying to imitate stunts shown in television advertisements for various kinds of bikes. These raise a set of arguments and dealing with them would have enriched the book.

If television has changed our lives, then it is only logical to expect the book to indicate how it has changed and why, and, hopefully, point out what, if any, can be done to contain the effects or focus it in some way; I am merely taking the tag to the title of the book to its logical conclusion. But these are, in the end, minor points and do not, in any way, take away from the fine job that Nalin Mehta has done in documenting the emergence of television, news channels in particular, and that he has done it so comprehensively speaks eloquently of the enormous effort he has put in to get his facts and figures. He had the advantage of being right there in the middle of it all though that can turnout to be more of a hindrance, as one may miss the woods for the trees.

Nalin Mehta has not fallen into that trap and has distanced himself, and yet used his personal knowledge to provide a dimension that another scholar would not have been able to. But one can picture him spending night after night with reams of data, wearily trying to make some sense of them, of putting them in some kind of order. He has done that admirably and produced a book that will be a definitive record and guide to the thousands who are curious to know how Indian television, especially news television, the animal we have now to live with, came to be what it is.

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