Abstract
The media world has changed profoundly in the past two decades, reflecting the cumulative impact of liberalization, privatization and deregulation of the media and communication sector, together with the digitization of content, enabling global and instantaneous circulation of cultural products from across the continents. Nevertheless, the imbalance in the flow of media products – from the media-rich North (and within it a US–UK core) to the South – continues to define global communication. Yet in an era of multi-vocal, multi-layered and multi-directional flows, the traditional domination of western, or specifically American, media is diminishing, and, more importantly and arguably, being challenged.
India and globalization of media
With robust annual economic growth over the past decade, India is increasingly viewed internationally as an emerging economic and political power. On the basis of purchasing-power parity, it was the fourth largest economy in 2011 behind Japan, China and the US. With this economic growth has come a stream of foreign direct investment in various sectors of the Indian economy, including media and communication, which have demonstrated impressive growth in recent decades.
India has become an important source of media products, both nationally produced as well as a production base for transnational – largely US-based – media conglomerates, including for Disney and News Corporation. Such corporate synergies have been made possible partly because of a closer economic and strategic relationship between the US and India. In the media and cultural sphere, this has led to greater visibility globally of Indian cultural products, from Bollywood cinema to Bhangra music. India’s $3.5 billion Hindi film industry has provided a popular definition of India and helped to make it an attractive, not to say, exotic and colourful, tourist and investment destination. Bollywood is the world’s largest film factory in terms of production and viewership – every year a billion more people buy tickets for Indian movies than for Hollywood films – and it aspires to reach beyond its traditional overseas constituency – the South Asian diaspora.
Today, exports account for nearly a third of industry earnings, as Indian films are increasingly being watched by international audiences, shown in more than 70 countries – from Egypt to Nigeria and from Russia to Thailand. Domestically, its most striking presence is in the broadcast sector, which has expanded exponentially in recent decades. Until 1991, India had a highly regulated state broadcasting monopoly, with one channel Doordarshan. By 2012, nearly 600 TV channels were in operation – of which 50 broadcast in English, making India one of the world’s largest English-language television markets – in a country with 500 million TV viewers.
In parallel with the transformation of the broadcasting sector, a massive expansion in newspaper circulation has also taken place, in sharp contrast to the US and the UK. According to the World Association of Newspapers, India is the world’s largest newspaper market, with 110 million copies sold every day, and more than 2300 ‘paid-for’ daily newspapers – the highest number in the world. FM radio, too, is growing rapidly, as are digital mobile media. Thus, unlike much of the western world, journalism as a business is thriving, not least as a result of rising literacy (in the past two decades, it has grown from 52 to 74 percent) and the purchasing power of the 300-million strong middle class, major beneficiaries of India’s enthusiastic embrace of neoliberalism.
India, ‘Chindia’ and BRICs
Away from the media spotlight, new configurations are forming, representing South–South media and cultural flows. Indian entertainment is becoming an important part of the ‘global popular’, including in China, as it opens up to non-western media content. One example of this is the release of the 2005 Bollywood-inspired Chinese film, Perhaps Love – the first musical in that country since the 1950s, choreographed by Bollywood’s leading director Farah Khan. A Beijing-based film group is to produce China’s first Bollywood film, entitled Gold Struck. These are indicative of the potential of a ‘Chindian’ cultural collaboration between the two countries in the world with the largest populations and fastest growing economies, with old histories and new ambitions.
Beyond Chindia, the BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) cultural exchange is also noteworthy. A prominent example is the successful Brazilian soap opera India – A Love Story, screened in prime-time on TV Globo. This winner of the 2009 International Emmy Award for Best Telenovela was set in both India and Brazil and dealt with Indian themes, including caste, gender and class, with Brazilian actors playing the Indian characters. The series used various cultural tropes from Bollywood, including the musical score. These hybridized media forms and new horizontal media flows have to be understood within this ‘other’ globalization of communication between major emerging markets and mostly outside the remit of the western-dominated discourse about media globalization. As these markets expand, one can foresee a greater degree of awareness and engagement with media content among the BRICS countries. Such possibilities offer challenging opportunities for theoretical innovation and empirical cross-cultural comparative research.
Leveraging the legacy
India can perform an important role in articulating and promoting this other globalization, given its democratic polity, creative and cultural industries, and its tradition of intellectual autonomy and critical discourse. It remains an interesting paradox that India – a very poor and deeply unequal and undemocratic society, with its pronounced caste and class distinctions – has emerged as the world’s largest and arguably most ‘argumentative’ multi-party democracy. This multi-lingual and often noisy argumentation has been supported and sustained by one of the world’s freest media systems. A federal democratic structure and a constitution which ensures freedom of expression and linguistic, religious and cultural pluralism, has been crucial for the growth of media in India’s national languages. The constitution of India recognizes 18 languages as official, while 400 other languages are widely used in the country where multilingualism is a norm. Though English remains the link language – of higher courts, bureaucracy and higher education – Hindi, with its regional variations, is the most widely spoken language. Not surprisingly, Hindi-language media dominate, but in recent years, as regional parties have gained ground at the national level, audience figures for media use in India’s regional languages have also soared. The impressive growth of India’s cultural and creative industries is also a testimony to the strength of India’s IT sector and the convergence between these industries and IT-enabled services: according to industry estimates, despite the economic slump, IT exports from India will reach $148 billion by end of 2012.
Digitization and the growing availability of satellite and cable television as well as on-line delivery mechanisms, have ensured that Indian media content – films, sports, entertainment and news – are consumed not only at home but among the 25 million strong Indian diaspora, scattered around the globe. Indian television has been active in selling the global Indian to Indian audiences, and the glitz and glamour of Bollywood to the famed NRIs (non-resident Indians). As well as enriching the cultural, economic and intellectual experience of countries like Britain and the US, the Indian diaspora has also made a significant contribution to India’s emergence as an economic and cultural power.
The most explosive growth is in mobile communication, as India is already one of the planet’s biggest mobile phone markets. However, internet penetration remains very low: as of the end of 2011, 121 million Indians had internet access, a penetration rate of just over 10 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population. There is no doubt that with the growth of mobile internet, making 3G phones affordable and accessible, this will accelerate. As elsewhere, young people in India are the biggest consumers, as well as producers of mobile digital content and of social media (such social media sites as Facebook are extremely popular among young Indians). What makes the Indian case particularly noteworthy is the scale and scope of the potential change: India, though an ancient civilization, is a very young nation, with more than 70 percent of Indians being below the age of 35.
As more members of this demographic join the on-line world, it is interesting to speculate what kind of content will be circulating on the electronic superhighways when not 10 but 90 percent of Indians are able to use the internet. As their connectivity grows, a sizeable segment of young Indians are increasingly going on-line, producing, distributing and consuming media. Given their proficiency in English, the dominant language of global commerce and communication, coupled with the growth of English-language media in India and the globalization of Indian media industries, they are likely to become more visible in the international media sphere.
India and international media studies
This growth in media and communication in India has implications for the research agendas of media and communication studies worldwide. As with other subjects within social sciences and humanities, the discipline of media studies is embedded in a Euro-Atlantic intellectual tradition and, like most other social sciences suffers from what might be called ‘epistemological essentialism’, notwithstanding calls for de-westernizing and internationalizing the field. The fact that media and communication as an academic field itself emerged in the United States has made a deep imprint on its theorization, teaching and research. The dominance of English as the language of global media and communication has also contributed to the primacy of English-language scholarship in this field, represented in the number of journals and textbooks produced in the US and Britain. The influence of the US academy was particularly prominent in political communication with its various variants, including versions of modernization theory, during the Cold War era, when the authoritarian vs. the liberal media theory remained the dominant paradigm. Such theorization largely failed to take into account complex countries like India, which did not fit neatly within the bipolar construction of the world. The essence of modernization theory was adopted for communication courses in various universities in India, but not without an Indian critique of it and with appropriate modifications to suit the Indian situation.
Such an attitude towards western theories was a manifestation of India’s quest for intellectual autonomy: as one of the founder members of the Non-Aligned Movement, India pursued a self-reliant and autonomous foreign policy. India made a major contribution to the debates within UNESCO about the creation of a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) during the 1970s and 1980s. It was a founder member of the Non-Aligned News Agencies Pool, an attempt to encourage South–South news exchange to counter western information hegemony. In the age of BRICs, coinciding with cracks within the neoliberal model of US-led capitalism, there is now talk of Non-Alignment 2.0.
The ‘rise’ of India poses challenges for the western-dominated epistemological and pedagogic frameworks for the study of media and communication. It is noteworthy that some key recent studies on comparative media systems and comparative journalism research have excluded India, despite the extraordinary growth of media in that country and the multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multicultural nature of the media system there. Arguably, the complex media scene in India is not easy to analyse within traditional media theory – whether liberal or critical – though both have useful insights to offer.
One area where Indian media could make a meaningful difference is in the field of development communication. India remains home to the world’s largest population of poor people: on every major index of social progress, it shows abysmally low ranking, despite demonstrating robust economic growth and lifting millions out of poverty in the past two decades. India and Indian media therefore have a moral and material imperative to be at the forefront of shaping discourse about how to deploy media and communication tools for poverty alleviation programmes internationally. They can draw on a rich legacy and a long-standing tradition of Mahatma Gandhi’s egalitarian journalism (the iconic leader of India’s independence movement edited for most of his political life the weekly newspaper Young India, later renamed Harijan). More broadly, Indian journalism evolved within the context of a fight for democracy in the tradition of anti-colonialism, represented by leaders like Gandhi. After independence, a ‘Third Worldist’, anti-imperialist ideology – sometimes more as a rhetoric than reality – continued to define mainstream media under Nehruvian socialism. The attitude of the Indian elite towards new communication technologies was also indicative of such a political stance. India was the first country to use television for education through its 1970s Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) programme.
Today, despite massive expansion of television, educational aspects of television have been mostly ignored. Yet, there is other kind of political information being broadcast on a 24/7 basis. India has the distinction of having the largest number of dedicated news channels – 122 by the end of 2011 and counting – making it home to the world’s most competitive and crowded news arena. The proliferation of news networks and the multiplicity of other media outlets free of government control has arguably democratized public communication. In such a news environment, citizens have access to a wider range of information and journalists can help to give voice to the disadvantaged and seek accountability from politicians and bureaucrats. Elite news networks such as the English-language NDTV 24×7 have taken up causes in the public interest – such as rural development, environmental protection, freedom of information, gender equality. Their efforts have at times influenced government policy. There is also a strong and growing tradition of investigative journalism to expose social and political misdemeanours, corruption and criminality. However, such public-interest journalism is confined to a few notable exceptions. Most of the media are entrenched in a ‘Bollywoodized’ media culture, thriving on entertainment and infotainment-driven programming rooted in a crassly commercial media system. By overwhelming public discourse with Bollywoodized content, egalitarian aspects are marginalized in the media, at a time when more than 300 million people in India remain illiterate and the gap between the rich and the poor is growing rapidly, making India one of the world’s most unequal societies, despite a democratic political system and impressive economic growth.
The issues that confront the Indian situation – about governance, sustainable development and democracy – have striking resonances in many other countries in the global South and studying these could make an important contribution to a broader communication discourse. Apart from the globalization of Indian media, the growing Indian presence within the international non-governmental sector, multilateral bureaucracies and academia could be harnessed to this end.
Despite India’s gradual integration with the US-led neoliberal economic system as a producer and a consumer of commodity capitalism, there is a strong and deeply entrenched tradition of argumentation and critical conversation in the Indian body politic and in its intellectual life, reflected in academic and journalistic discourses. As Indian media and academia globalize, will this critical mass contribute to a critical global media studies? Indian scholars and scholars of the Indian diaspora have an impressive record for pushing the boundaries of research in social sciences; particularly notable has been their contribution to such areas as postcolonial theory and subaltern historiography.
However, in the media and communication field there is some way to travel. Following the British elitist higher education model, media and communication studies in India were traditionally not considered proper academic subjects. With the exponential growth in the media sector, the study of media and communication has expanded rapidly, as evidenced by the mushrooming of mostly vocational media institutes. A majority of these commercial outfits are geared to train students for careers in growing media industries. Media research in India and the globalizing tendencies of Indian media are still in their early stages in terms of theoretical innovation and empirical rigour, though some universities have started to take it more seriously. The Indian contribution to the internationalization of media studies remains crucial, given its history within the international communication debates – from Gandhian notions of community media and sustainable development to Nehru’s idea of intellectual autonomy for the global South, to NWICO and WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society). As digital media and communication become more commercialized, India’s could be an important voice in articulating southern viewpoints and perspectives in global forums like UNESCO, ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organization) on such diverse and contested issues as multiculturalism, intellectual property rights in the digital environment, safeguarding of media plurality and indigenous media.
Another key area where an Indian contribution to media and communication research could be meaningful is the engagement with religion – something that media and communication scholars have largely ignored. Particularly relevant in the post-9/11 world is the representation of Islam, which has acquired deep political connotations. The Indian experience might offer a more nuanced reading of intercultural communication, since it represents a civilization – the Hindu-Buddhist tradition – whose roots are not in the Abrahamic religions and therefore not affected by discourses of ‘clash of civilizations’ and ‘crusades’. Had British imperialism not partitioned India at independence in 1947, it would have been the world’s largest Muslim country in terms of population. Today, at 177 million, India has the world’s third largest Islamic population, contributing to the millennia old Indo-Islamic culture, noticeable in its classical music, poetry and cuisine. At a more popular level, Bollywood’s representation of Muslims, such as the film My Name is Khan, starring superstar Shah-Rukh Khan, demonstrate a different sensitivity and sensibility to Hollywood-dominated global entertainment. This award-winning and hugely successful film about an Indian-American suffering from Asperger’s syndrome and how his life was affected by 9/11, was released in 2010 by 20th Century Fox in 64 countries, and was listed by the prestigious Foreign Policy journal as one of the top ten 9/11-related films. The film is an example of a new stage in media globalization – a Bollywood film set in the US and distributed globally by a major transnational conglomerate.
Given its demographic and democratic advantages – argumentation, pluralism, liberalism and a history of being able to deal with diversity and discord, India has the potential to develop academic discourses which are not derivatives of western formulations and theorization. The Indian government and the private sector is investing heavily in higher education, while top-rated international universities are queuing up to enter the massive and largely untapped Indian domestic higher education market. This, combined with economic and cultural impact of India, aided by its global diaspora, might create a globalization with an Indian flavour and possibly a critical media studies with an Indian accent.