Media under scrutiny

CHURNING out a media column demands dependence on the TV, VCR, telephone and computer. When the Northern grid went bust last week, the only one out of these that held out was the telephone. Alas ,media columns cannot be written by telephone alone. When the invertor and the UPS breathed their last one turned in desperation to the only media which does not require electricity for access, at least during the day: the printed word. Unable to watch a neat stack of tapes with the faithfully recorded gyrations of Govinda, the warbling of Asha Bhonsle and the shimmering festivities on Asianet that ushered in the New Year, one dipped into the growing pile of books being published on the media in this part of the world.

India's TV, satellite, cable and Internet revolution combined have become the delight of researchers abroad. Non-resident Indians and foreigners alike see boundless research possibilities in our media- rich poor country. No less than four books have landed on my desk in the past three months, three from Sage Publications and one from Oxford University Press. The last of these arrived in a cover from New Mexico as soon as the postal strike ended. It is the most enterprising and colourful, even as it is the least painstaking of the studies.

Arvind Singhal and Everett M. Rogers are indefatigable students of what they like to call India's information revolution, which phrase is also the title of their first book published at the end of the 1980s. They are also pioneers of the magazine journalism school of book writing. Little boxes here, tables there, itemised descriptions of developments elsewhere. An assiduous professing of available documentation, and a volume made eminently possible by the existence of the Internet. Some day someone will chronicle the contribution of Internet search engines to the burgeoning of secondary research.

The authors' first book dwelt largely on TV and print, with little boxed profiles of Aroon Purie of India Today and Shoba Doctor who produced "Hum Log" in the early 1980s. This volume is called India's Communication Revolution: From Bullock Carts to Cyber Marts. Which other country would make such appellations possible? No wonder researchers love us. By widening the scope of the study to take in the Internet and the IT revolution in addition to satellite, terrestrial and cable TV, they have enough fodder to churn out an easy-reading quickie. Boxes on Azim Premji, N.R. Narayana Murthy and Sam Pitroda. A glossary of concepts at the back of the volume which in addition to explaining coinage like "informatisation", throws in for the semi- literate the meanings of words like consumerism and development.

Light years removed from the Internet-enabled labour of Messrs. Singhal and Rogers is that of Purnima Mankekar in Screening Culture and Viewing Politics: Television, Womanhood and Nation in Modern India. Also an American university academic like the two above, her offering is billed as a "cutting edge ethnography of television viewing in India." In plain English (of which there is very little in the book), the author is a cultural anthropologist whose labour of close to a decade have yielded what could be called, in more prosaic terms, a reception study, the first major work of its kind from this region. It probes how TV programmes are received by viewers and how much their own circumstances colour what they see on TV.

The blurb at the back of the book has a British academic from the university of Birmingham telling you that this is a rare jewel, and a book that will become a classic. In other words, if you find this one a tough read, bristling with academic concepts and ideologically heavily judgmental, it is your fault. You are simply not equal to this scholarly endeavour.

Mankekar probes even as Singhal and Rogers skim. She picks families living in housing colonies in Delhi and describes their homes, clothes and lives on the way to describing what they watch and how they react to it. All of this takes up more than 400 pages. There is plenty of herself as well in the book. The programmes are those of Doordarshan: "Udaan", "Hum Log", "Rajani" and "Mahabharat". Welcome to a Stanford-based take on where Indian women figure in Doordarshan's construction of nationalism and how they receive its serials.

Last month the release of yet another volume, Satellites Over South Asia saw India's media and academic communities converge at a seminar in Delhi. David Page and William Crawley, two former BBC World Service journalists based at the University of Sussex have produced a chronicling of the satellite TV revolution. They also sponsored an accompanying film "Michael Jackson comes to Manikganj" by Nupur Basu. The book and film together are a generously funded exploration of what Zee, Star, MTV and others have come to mean to the countries of South Asia, with the exception of Bhutan and the Maldives.

The approach is journalistic and readable and it tells you what Indians seldom worry about: what it means to be a Pakistani, Nepali, or Bangladeshi and be fed a daily 24-hour diet of India- centric TV. One of the most memorable quotes from the film comes from a broadcasting official in Nepal who narrates how children in Nepal would describe Rajiv Gandhi as their Prime Minister.

The fourth book has a wider canvas: it tells you what television is doing to India, Sri Lanka and a wide sweep of countries to the east, taking in China and Japan. Strictly for eggheads with an interest in communications.

Meanwhile last week, the publishers of India Today launched two major initiatives: an online daily at www.thenewstoday.com, and a Hindi news channel, Aaj Tak.

More boxes coming up in Singhal and Rogers' next book.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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