Book Review: Sunetra Sen Narayan,Globalization and Television—A Study of the Indian Experience 1990–2010

Sunetra Sen Narayan’s account of the import of globalization and localization on television as communication technology in India, post the fact of liberalization, is an accessible and lucid text which covers a range of fields: it draws inferences from and seeks to examine theories emanating from the areas of mass communications, sociology, anthropology, economics and international relations. This approach—broad-sweeping as it is—results in a work which seeks to incorporate several dimensions, economic, cultural, social and political, and sets them in dialogue with each other.

The book opens with a general overview of the complex phenomena we recognize in shorthand as ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’, contrasting the former with other ‘like’ terms such as ‘transnational’, a term Sen Narayan holds is gaining traction in contemporary cultural theory over its forebear, ‘international’. The nicety of these distinctions made, she proceeds to examine various approaches delineating the impact of globalization on the nation-state, and outlining the mode’s various economic and cultural aspects. The text then sets out a number of different lenses through which the nexus or relationships between the media, state and society might best be teased out. These include an overview of the technological determinist tradition which focuses on the links between communication technologies and social processes; the realist paradigm which places the nation-state fairly front and centre (while the media and communications come next, and in some senses play ‘second-fiddle’ [p. 15] to it) of this discourse; the ‘piper’ approach which holds that those who possess power control the media, here referring specifically to the state-as-actor; and the valuation of ‘soft power’ (an inclusion of intangibles such as cultural, educational, ideological and other categories) and the ramifications this might have on the transfer of various power loci from capital to information-rich sites and players.

The first part of the book, which reads like an exhaustive and focused literature review more than it does as the opening chapters of a treatise, explores the agglomeration of meanings which have become attendant to these terms which appear commonplace to us today: ‘What is globalization? Is globalization viewed positively or negatively? Is it inevitable? What is the relationship of global with national and with local?’ (p. 23). The way that these questions bear out in the arena of global media, dominated as it is by ‘three or four dozen large transnational corporations’ (p. 25), highlights the centralization of power and the attendant decline in the relative importance of ‘public broadcasting’, which points, as some critics maintain, to the possibility of cultural homogenization. Contrasting this with the paradigm of ‘localization’, Narayan asserts that while ‘culture’ is a central thematic of any discussion in this area, this category remains a contentious one, which defies facile definition, and that ‘as de-territorialized forms of social relationships arise, categories such as “national” or “local” may have to be reconceptualised’ (p. 27). This is also the reason why defining the category ‘local media’ poses conceptual challenges: while some forms of local media may emphasize local cultures, in other instances, they could also serve as sites of resistance against what might be perceived as the hegemonizing force, that is, global media platforms. These are the central explorations around which the text is constructed and it revisits these themes in the light of its mandate: outlining the role of television as a medium; and what it means to—and is doing in—the Indian context.

Narayan locates the impact of globalization on television in the ‘shift’ it has witnessed from being ‘the core of a nationally authorized culture’, when it operated within the jurisdiction of governments and states (more or less from the 1950s to 1990), to the ‘advertising based, commercial paradigm’ it espouses today, with the attendant changes in content and programme genres (p. 35). The inroads this technology has made in the developed (and pertinently for this study, the developing) world means that it cannot be matched for audience size, even as factors such as privatization, liberalization and deregulation have all combined to contribute to the almost complete commercialization of television as a medium. Following the work of media scholars such as Dahlgren and Barker, Narayan holds that there is, today, a need to study television in a manner which would ‘delve into the connections between economic, political, social, and cultural dimensions’ (p. 36)—in other words, a manner which would allow for multidimensionality and focus on both national and local systems as well as the mores of transnational television. India, the writer holds, seems to be teetering between these positions since it has not fully embraced either the American model of commercial imperative or the public service model (best embodied in the present context by the British Broadcast Corporation or BBC). In this, it mirrors the position of several other developing countries in South Asia—Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nepal are such examples—which are also currently in the process of introducing different reform measures into their radio and television services, which have traditionally been predominantly under state control.

This begs further investigation into approaches pertaining to the role of the state in the dissemination of television in the first place, given that the very notion of nation or national sovereignty requires constant scrutiny in a period when, as Narayan points out, the ‘spread of neo-liberalism in economics has implied that the ideology of the market has gained vis-à-vis the state’ (p. 43). Analysis such as this would make it fair to say that the writer concedes that the category ‘nation’ is neither a fixed nor absolute one, begging questioning and inspiring controversy. She proceeds to cover several theoretical approaches to the role of the state, from those who believe it to be a withering vestige of the world that was to those who consider it a resilient structure which, because it is dynamic, can adapt to new conditions.

Narayan then surveys the Indian economy, before scoping out communications in India, covering the Indian press, which despite traditionally enjoying a certain amount of relative freedom, has also had to contend with the fact that the Indian state has had a monopoly on radio and television rights from their inception, with the television wing, Doordarshan, reigning unchallenged for several decades. This meant its broadcaster could get away with dealing in, what Narayan calls, content which was ‘soporific fare’ (p. 64), and following Nehru’s ‘statist’ vision, programming which some have identified as ‘state propaganda, which flagrantly served the needs of the political leadership’ (p. 87). From tracing the beginnings of broadcasting in India (amateur broadcasting began here in 1923) to the ‘birth of television in India’ in 1959 (p. 66), Narayan’s account of the growth and dissemination of this technology and medium is a very detailed—sometimes glaringly so—one. She outlines how the raison d’être of the industry at inception was to be a partner in creating ‘national consciousness’ and disseminating developmental programming which would actively support ‘government plans and programmes for bringing about social and economic change, and to protect national security, as well as advance the cause of national integration’ (p. 87). The 1980s saw a leaching away of some of these founding ideas, with factors such as ‘caste and communalism’ coming to the fore by the 1990s, which dealt a mortal blow to the secularism at the heart of the Nehruvian project (p. 87).

From the scenario outlined here when telecommunications and television broadcasting were state-owned monopolies, liberalization ushered in drastic changes in both areas, with competition from international satellite television providers and private domestic broadcasters having fairly changed the name of the game—from one channel, namely, Doordarshan, till 1990, by 2001, urban India could suddenly tune into 70 channels: ‘The invasion of the Indian skies by Satellite Television Asian Region (STAR) and other international and domestic players has now filled the homes of millions with diverse programmes’ (p. 69)—with another important fallout of this factor being the state’s granting of ‘autonomy’ to the national broadcasting organization and the All India Radio, which have, since 1997, operated under the entity that is ‘Prasar Bharati’. From the 1990s onwards, India was, for the first time, awash with programming in English, Hindi, several regional and some foreign languages (p. 89), and realizing the import of culture to marketing, and the role of ‘Bollywood’ and the Indian film industry on content generation across mediums. From charting and decoding the rural/urban divide in terms of penetration and potential as markets, to thorough content and discourse analyses of programming on Doordarshan as well as the ranks of private television operators, this study has important things to say for future policy and the charting of trends—projections—for where television as a medium, and as an industry, is headed in times to come.

Narayan’s work takes cognizance of the links between the broader processes of globalization, liberalization and privatization and the rapid growth of the broad domain of electronic communications in the past two decades. This is an important nexus, and one which the book attempts to highlight in myriad ways by examining the onus of ownership of technology, audience shares/revenues, content and its generation and the regulatory/policy frameworks which govern the medium. The text posits questions such as whether control over the medium is devolving to global or local players, post-1990, and determines what the state’s response to these challenges has been.