AMONG technologies which shape society, television cannot but be the foremost. Before we let it permeate our lives, there was the United States where television shaped time more than half a century ago. An evening thing, then an afternoon thing, then a morning thing that you did your exercises in front of. In India we have adapted that. It is the great leveller: babysitter, grandparent sitter, the housewife’s fix, the maid’s fix. Switch it off and there will be a surge of panic. A crisis, not just of filling time, but of finding meaning in a humdrum life. When God, Ekta Kapoor and Rajat Sharma converge on the tube, all classes find meaning in their existence. Piety, entertainment, political curiosity: all needs are met by the Box in a television society.

The other pixellated universe, the computer, has ridden on telephone and broadband lines to fly into a limit-less universe of communication where distance disappears, books and pictures become portable, paper publishing passé. Television programmes become portable too – somebody invented YouTube and TV programmes began to transcend continents.

Pixels have transformed reality for millions. Conversely, reality – albeit constructed – has been captured as entertainment for millions. The soul of Indian television resides in what we call small town India, determined less by size than conservatism. From here people make phone calls to appear on reality shows. From here they provide the viewing numbers to soap operas on domestic politics. From here come the participants who will walk on to reality shows which quiz them about whether they have ever craved a partner other than their husbands. From far-flung corners of very small town and village India come the boys and girls aspiring to become performers of some kind. Their small screen successes and failures reflect aspirations that TV audiences in non-metropolitan India identify with.

Television is the great unifier. Reality TV is the stepping stone out of obscurity. With a little help from Amitabh Bachchan, Akshay Kumar and Salman Khan. When Kaun Banega Crorepati 4 invited contestants from all over, five million applied to become part of a television quiz show.

If we were ever a diffident people it must have been before satellite television amplified Doordarshan’s reach. As we grew into a television society we warmed to the idea of the passing stab at fame that a fleeting appearance on TV offers. There is very little we will now not do on television. Dance, sing, cook, woo, confess. And through all of this, compete.

 

Somewhere in the process of going from one channel to two hundred plus, God and his interlocutors began to reside on television. And, the box in the corner went from being evening time pass to a morning ritual. In 1987, when Lord Ram and his kin moved from stage and celluloid into their homes, all classes of Indians made space. They bathed and prayed before the telecast, and anointed the TV set with garlands and sandal paste.

Then it became a twenty four hour thing, spirituality supported by consumer advertising. Plenty to choose from: Sanskar, Aastha, Sadhna, Jeevan and God. As well as Maharishi Veda Vision, MiracleNet, Eternal World Television Network (EWTN) and Ahimsaa and Amritha. Gulshan Kumar of T series was killed and yet did not die. He lives on television where mortality is of a different kind. Something dies only when the ratings drop and it is pulled off the air.

Now plenty of young people are turning to television for a spirituality fix. The channels say that where its audience range once began with thirty five year olds plus, it has dropped to twenty five plus. When the audience age drops, the favourite guru on TV changes from the grey and pious to cool young gurus who attract the young spenders that advertisers want. And the sadhanas and discourses alternate with programming on cool things like Feng Shui, Art of Living, Yoga and Vaastu.

Television makes the Kumbh Mela come alive. Internet websites offer a virtual snaan. The Gurbani goes live from the Golden Temple, thundering White evangelists reach invisible audiences scattered over Kerala and Tamilnad. Television is both Satan’s medium as well as God’s. Religious programming is a hit, but crime shows still get the highest ratings. In television’s expanded moral universe, pixellate the victim of rape or violence and the private can become public. Crime can be given a fuzzy face, not that of the perpetrator, but of those most vulnerable.

 

If religion is the opiate of the masses, TV and video and a computer screen relaying YouTube are now part of an Indian child’s intellectual and emotional inheritance, the medium she recognizes and responds to before she can talk or walk. Depending on parental attitudes to the medium, it is permitted to become the filter through which a child views reality. Internet in the more affluent child’s life only takes the omnipresence of pixels in a young person’s universe further.

In January 1994, fourteen year old Sekhar and eight year old Amlu were telling a researcher how big Rajnikant loomed in their lives. Sekhar admired him deeply. ‘He dresses well, dances well, and is a good man reforming thieves and bad men.’ He and his sister emulated Rajnikant’s fights. Children of a hotel steward earning a thousand rupees a month, the box that extended their universe was a black and white portable television bought on installments. Since money was tight, the mother said that she cut back on food to find the money to pay the installments. The children did not mind trading coconut chutney for large doses of fantasy.

The absence of colour in the television set did little to diminish the dreams the eight year old derived from it. Her head was full of outlandish fashions imbibed from the heroines in the movies she watched. She came home from school and watched the afternoon Hindi movie every day. Its unreal, melodramatic universe was a part of her life.

A decade and a half later children became channel hopping viewers, and marketers coined cute terms for them like pester power.

 

First, there was the expansion of one’s personal universe with the box in the corner, even as there was no recurring cost. Once bought, you did not have to pay for anything – not even electricity. But it opened up the world beyond. In 1991, Sunder Lal, Chandigarh factory worker who lived in a slum, bought a small black and white TV set at his wife’s insistence, and tapped electricity for it from the nearest pole. He discovered subsequently that there was an earthquake in Maharashtra and terrorism in Kashmir. His wife learned to recognize the prime minister and president and the chief minister of Punjab.

And all across the country people discovered that they did not need to know English to watch The World this Week on television. It was their window to the world beyond their country. The children of Harihadha Majhi, a hospital attendant in a Bhubaneshwar slum watched it, as did the grown up sons of Naseema Khatun, a Calcutta social worker. In 1991, 92 per cent of the population in three North Bengal slums watched election telecasts by political parties on television.

For researcher Arvind Rajagopal, politics after television meant that Ramayan on TV created a receptive public sphere for the majoritarian messages of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and the Bharatiya Janata Party, paving the way for the latter’s capture of power at the Centre in the late 1990s. Cashing in on a television-stoked political agenda, the lead actors in Ramayan contested parliamentary elections. Sita and Ravan made it. Ram did not.

Nail your politician was the new entertainment on television. It predated privately produced news. If the inquisitor was smart he knew where to draw the line; if the politician was smart he knew how to dodge. Rajat Sharma ran a people’s court with mock charges in a mock courtroom. The politician got a new forum which beamed him into homes across the country, for the cost only of participating. Sackfuls of letters arrived from small towns in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, asking to be part of the studio audience.

 

From 1998 the news channels came stomping in, one by one, scattering Doordarshan’s timid agenda. When outdoor broadcasting vans were acquired by the satellite news channels, TV in real time changed the concept of news. The Gujarat earthquake of 2002 went live; people all over the country were moved to volunteer and contribute. So did the tsunami two years later. Television changed the geography of citizen response.

It has also changed the concept of immediacy in politics. In June 2005, Star Ananda instituted daily live public debates between candidates contesting the Kolkata municipal elections. They were conducted in the city’s public spaces and drew crowds of many thousands on the ground in addition to the audience when it was telecast live. Now you had, effectively, political rallies mediated by a TV anchor. Rallies that ended with mini-riots breaking out as passions ran high among rival parties’ supporters and the TV anchors being roughed up (Nalin Mehta, 2008). Even if you were nowhere near the maidan where it was all happening, you were there, and emotionally involved.

 

Then it dawned on the increasing numbers watching political discussions on television that every human being in the land had the right to an opinion and a political opinion at that. They watch the opinions unfold on late evening discussions everywhere: in English, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Kannad, Gujarati. Argumentative television (Nalin Mehta) was born. First one just listened. And then as mobile married television to produce an interactive public sphere, people participated. It filled your evenings no matter how educated or well-heeled or poor you were, whether you lived in a tenement or condominium. Television multiplied the public sphere and took it to a realm that was inconceivable before. Between words and pictures, video and SMS text, what constituted political activity became transformed.

The other pixellated universe offers an outlet when television fails. Whether you live in Kashmir or Manipur, when the mainstream political discourse shuts you out, when hyperventilating anchors on the idiot box define excluding agendas, you turn to the computer and internet to create an alternate news agenda, an alternate discourse. And reach out to a diaspora that shares your goal. The medium makes that possible.

 

* This essay draws on India on Television by Nalin Mehta, and Through the Magic Window by Sevanti Ninan. It refers to Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics After Television.

** Sevanti Ninan is the author of Headlines From the Heartland: Reinventing the Hindi Public Sphere (Sage, 2007), and Through the Magic Window: Television and Change in India (Penguin India, 1995), among others.