ONE of our finest poets and cultural icons, A.K. Ramanujan, had a quotidian sense of India. ‘One way of defining diversity for India,’ he said, ‘is to say what the Irishman is said to have said about trousers. When asked whether trousers were singular or plural, he (the Irishman) said, "Singular at the top and plural at the bottom".’ It is interesting to explore whether, or to what extent, this lived plurality at the local level is reflected in the numerous regional television channels that have proliferated in India over the last decade.

Discounting half-baked theories and subliminal deductions, and construed at a flatly empirical what-you-see-is-what-you-get level, there is little to show that the regional language television has begun to engage with even a strand of the vast and fascinating weave of the composite Indian experience.

It all set out to be quite different. When Direct Broadcast Satellite technology came to India in the early 1990s, close on the heels of its advent in the West, it was the south of the country that first liberated itself from the thralldom of state-run television. Doordarshan (India’s state-owned television) was obsessively Hindi-and-north-centric with a mindset that saw the south, comprising four distinct states across the Vindhya ranges, as an amorphous mass situated somewhere in the back of beyond. Asianet and Sun TV, which emerged on the scene in quick succession, were pioneering moves to give Kerala and Tamil Nadu, and the sizeable diaspora of Malayalees and Tamilians, a televisual identity of their own. Entrepreneurs in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka followed suit with their own independent channels and the cable and satellite revolution panned out to the other regions of the country from the crucible of the south.

The promise held out in the first flush of this regionalisation of the electronic media soured quickly as content and style of programming began to subscribe to the meta model of Americanised television fare. The languages were different, but the genres were the same. There was not a hint of the vast Indian hinterland as the regional urban sensibility aspired to that of the global metropolis and of the inner city. It was ‘glocalism’ perversely cast – a leapfrog from the local to the global without a moment for the terrain in between.

 

Paradoxically, even as the television of the region was turning its back on the region, a process of miscegenation in politics was moving regional political parties to the national centre-stage, heralding a new era of coalition governments. But much of this has been lost on regional television as it chorused with the dominant English channels in caricaturing the not so Anglophile regional satraps staking their claims in Delhi. A Lalu Prasad Yadav or a Mayawati are, more often than not, the butt of jokes even when they make a political point in deadly earnest.

Rival channels in a language or a state are either directly owned by political parties, or openly hitched to one or the other party, and this strongly colours their portrayal of what is happening in their region. The viewer is often left trying to figure out, not just differing versions of a news story, but with one story that glaringly contradicts another. Nowhere is this contradiction as head-on or stark as in Tamil Nadu, where the DMK’s Sun TV and rival AIADMK’s Jaya TV are so obsessed with one another that both seem to have lost sight of the viewer in between.

Situations of crises have tended to be exacerbated, rather than responsibly reported, by regional television. The build-up to hysteria of the BJP’s ‘Ramjanmabhoomi’ movement (and the ‘rath yatra’ that led to the destruction of the mosque at Ayodhya), the anti-Muslim riots in the wake of the Godhra train incident in Gujarat in 2002, and recent remarks about premarital safe sex by film star Khushboo being torn out of context and pilloried in Tamil Nadu, are some instances of the populist agitprop role of local television.

What local entertainment television does to its mother tongue is another sordid chapter. In the south, channel after channel after channel gives you the same breathless talk, game or song show host inflecting good old Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam or Kannada into a hybrid American pop dialect that is as unsettling as it can be insulting to any native language sensibility. This deracination is compounded by a new and rapidly growing trend to push Hollywood dubbed into the regional language on prime cinema time. Cinema is what we thought we had plenty of ourselves. But our celluloid fare, with its local, and often rural, milieu is not seen as attractive to the burger-and-cola fed appetites of urbanizing TV viewers.

 

Add to this the fact that every language with a television face becomes dominant at the expense of numerous other languages which, without the critical numbers or influence, are languishing at the margins – and we have a sense of the slow poisoning afflicting local language and local culture, courtesy local TV. There are an estimated 850 languages in daily use in India (Ethnalogue Report of India) and already many of them are faced with extinction. Some, in a desperate bid to survive, are merging with the stronger variants.

The stratified growth of local language television has made for a more segregated and blinkered viewership. In the days when Doordarshan sought, even in its dowdy manner, to fulfil its public interest broadcast mandate, it became, at least occasionally, a common platform where one part of India could see, hear and understand another. The films in regional languages telecast with subtitles on Doordarshan, for instance, allowed us a syncretic glimpse of local specific cultures and concerns. With the regional language channels ploughing their exclusive furrows, and with Doordarshan in a state of limbo, there is no television equivalent of a social integer in India. The validity of an integer in a context where the concept of the nation state is itself passé is, of course, another discourse.

 

The regional language channels continue to draw and grow on an expanding advertisement pie composed of a handful of established big budget national and regional advertisers and numerous fresh spenders, at several local tiers, in the field. In many languages the number of players seems to have far exceeded the logic of the market, but the shakeout, long hinted at, has not happened. An indication of the uncovered gap of both their influence in the market and their potential for advertisement revenues lies in the statistic that with nearly forty per cent of the total viewership, they account yet for less than twenty per cent of the total ad-spend in the TV sector.

The latest National Readership Survey, which shows that the Indian language press is growing at a far faster pace than the English press, seems to emphasise that the local lure is real not only for television but for the older print media as well, and that newer regional markets are opening up. Radio and telecommunications in the private sector also seem set to go local and develop a neighbourhood identity. The two rounds of FM radio licensing, in which over three hundred private players have won their bids to run stations in over ninety zones across India, is creating a new buzz that seems to proceed from the margins to the centre, rather than the other way round.

But the real breakthrough would be in the technological dispersal that digitization implies. With the expansion of broadband capacities, the liberalization of last mile connectivity, the unbundling of the local loop, and fibre-to-the-home set to become a reality in middle class India, often cutting across the urban-rural divide, there is bound to be a churning process that unleashes energies that are latent in different locations of the country. The emergent structure need not be one whose centre of gravity is the metropolis or the big city. It could, rather, be a multi-nodal, evolving and open-ended model that integrates in some significant measure the semi- urban and rural hinterland. This vision of a technologically converged, yet devolved, telecommunication regime can of course quickly evaporate into thin air if the handful of big corporations who are already eyeing this virgin opportunity are allowed to set the terms of a mock cartel competition and walk away with chunks of the cake.

 

What is being missed in the current saga of privatization of the information-communication-entertainment (ICE) sector is that the wherewithal of reach is in the public domain and must, in a democratic reckoning, belong to the people. The airwaves or radio spectrum over India must be construed as much a natural resource as her rivers or mineral deposits. The pathways of overhead or underground cabling that crisscross vast tracts of land must be seen as based on the principle of a right of way over public, and therefore commonly owned, property. The recent move by the AIADMK government in Tamil Nadu to take over the private cable TV network and operations in the state, whatever its partisan motives, is illustrative of a normative and legitimate role of the state in regulating infrastructure in this realm. It was widely welcomed – including, quietly, by political allies of the DMK, the party against whom it was targeted – as addressing the haphazard and monopolistic growth of cable television in Tamil Nadu.

 

With all round penetration of cable television hovering around sixty per cent of the state, the dominant control by the family of one political group and another large business house effectively meant that they determined the channels that will be distributed and, further, decided which of them will be on prime band and which on the lesser band. The fate of a new channel, even if in Tamil, depended on the whim and fancy of a couple of such multi-system operators, or MSOs, who had the bulk of the state wired up. Often new channels seeking distribution were required to pay high carriage costs. Fees down the cable chain, including what must be paid by the last mile cable operator and by the subscriber were stipulated by the MSO.

This monopolistic position was, in the first instance, appropriated by a mix of political, money and muscle power and not acquired through fair or competitive trade practice. Central to this appropriation is the ‘right of way’ for cabling through public pavements and across public roads, which is based on local body clearances and varies from place to place in the state. Indeed, in the cities and towns, these cables are strung across high-rise buildings or intervening props, be it a tree, a lamp post, or a pole erected for the purpose along the sidewalk.

Cable and Satellite (C&S) networks cannot only purvey the numerous TV and audio channels, but also potentially offer value added features like internet, voice mail, electronic home shopping, home security alarm systems and a host of other services to the home, and should, ideally be seen as part of an infrastructure building exercise. Governments at the state level should ideally play a role in ensuring that such a vital infrastructure is not hijacked for partisan political ends and ensure that it remains in the public sphere.

 

Alongside these manifest developments in, and concerns about, the ICE sector, a quieter local-specific presence being felt is that of the community radio. Restricted yet largely to academic campuses, its grassroot potential as an instrument of empowerment has been driven home dramatically in the wake of the recent tsunami disaster. To inhabitants along a stretch of the Tamil Nadu coast, a community radio-like set-up served as an early warning against the killer waves, and it has now become a model widely espoused by NGOs to target far-flung communities in different areas.

At a time when the private corporate FM radio is set to make local waves, opening up the community radio to public spirited initiatives and players would be a welcome countervailing influence. For this to happen, the skewed and narrow bureaucratic mindset that the radio, given its bottoming-out reach, is more politically and socially sensitive – and therefore more vulnerable – than the other electronic media, must yield to an appreciation of its transformative quality in a community environment by providing actionable information.

For too long now babudom in India has been dabbling in pulp psychology about the way radio can make or mar the lives of what are seen as the lower denominations of impressionable, naïve listeners. Therefore, goes the argument, the need for vigil over the medium. Indeed the same illogic has been applied to keep news and current affairs outside the purview of licensing for FM radio, so much so that FM sans news is today a laughable anomaly in a context where titbits of news assail us every step of our daily lives – from the ubiquitous mobile phone, internet, the host of local, national and international TV channels, to other radio offerings like World Space, BBC, broadcasts from neighbouring countries and so on.

The record of the Indian regional language satellite and cable TV may indeed be sullied in communally, or multi-culturally, sensitive situations. But the response surely does not lie in a Canute-like attempt to halt the technology waves. Nor does it lie in the idea, peddled by some bureaucrats, of a regulation of content tantamount to pre-censorship, as the experience of cinema – the only media sector thus far subject to pre-censorship – teaches us. The perversity and deviousness with which the average Indian cinema has, all these years, dodged the censors and managed to pack the screen with sex and violence far worse than the censorship code was meant to prevent, is clinching proof of the futility of such pre-emptive laws.

The creative spirit, even where it plays foul, cannot really be put down by the letter of the law. What is required is an enlightened and enabling framework, with a truly representative body of professionals setting, and subscribing to, a code of self-regulatory guidelines, and where peer pressure and accountability become natural deterrents against deviant behaviour.