Mystifying Signals

THE images that flicker across our television screens day in and day out know no boundaries. As we approach the threshold of a new millennium, they have acquired the power to significantly alter the way we perceive the world around us, indeed the very way we order our lives. Given that undeniable fact, very few coherent attempts have been made to assess the awesome impact that television infotainment—transmitted non-stop from "borderless skies" into millions of homes across the nation by a wide variety of domestic and international channels—has had on post-Independence India. Switching Channels is surely one of those rare essays.

A book as slim as Nilanjana Gupta's is perhaps not the ideal vehicle to trace the role that television has played in our nation's encounters with modernity, but her study, both in the modest range of its stated ambition and the precision of its execution, presents just about the perfect introduction to a subject that is as vast as it is complex.

But it can be no more than an introduction. On her part, Gupta, a reader in Jadavpur University's English faculty, does admit that it is difficult "to capture something that is evolving so rapidly". Not surprisingly, there are crucial strands of the television story that she is compelled to leave largely unexplored. Worse still, she occasionally raises questions that are central to her analysis of the ways TV impinges on societal norms and a nation's cultural ethos, but, thwarted by the constraits of space, she has to gloss over the answers. Yet, Switching Channels is a remarkably illuminating overview of the inevitable linkages that exist between state power and the dissemination of information, between commercial interests and programming parameters, between globalisation and the need for government regulation.

Gupta deals with issues as varied as the consolidation of the satellite TV market represented by tie-ups among competing entities, the evolution of the Prasar Bharati Act and the continuing debate on the formulation of the Broadcast Bill. Has DD become the agent of unification that it was envisaged to be? The author feels it hasn't. "Doordarshan has always tended to privilege only narrow and limited group interests, so that instead of becoming a medium by which a true national consensus can be created and disseminated, Doordarshan has itself become a symbol of the exclusionary nature of the national narrative," Gupta writes.

Does the spread of satellite TV provide an escape route? Gupta is reluctant to hail the new era. "The technologically advanced media," she argues, "are owned, produced  and transmitted by only a handful of huge conglomerates which operate on a global scale, and these conglomerates are vertically integrated in relationships that very few media products can be seen as really 'independent'." Subservient to the demands of economics, the parameters of these products are determined by the marketplace. One form of dependence—on political or national affiliation—are replaced by another kind of subjugation.

As the book traces the history of TV in India, from its tentative beginnings in the late '50s to the satellite revolution of the '90s, from Doordarshan's early Krishi Darshan-centric days to its radically altered face in a new, multi-channel scenario, the book hints at a probable ideological spectrum within which the consumption of electronic media products could be better understood, within which the problem of the steady constriction of choice for the viewer could be addressed. It does so without appearing to be unduly opinionated.