Abstract
Video in the form of “little media” arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of “little media” were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of “little media” and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.
Keywords
In this article I am concerned with the discursive categorization of video as “little media” in the field of development communication. In particular, I explore how video’s arrival in India in the mid-1970s introduced a re-interpretation and adaptation of social and cultural epistemes and attributed contextually specific meanings to portable video. As little media, video intersects with a gamut of non-broadcast video-based practices including community video, participatory video, activist video, documentary video, advocacy video, and development video. Underlying these forms is the shared view of video as “useful” technology; a functional media that contains the possibility of producing “subjects in the service of public and private aims” (Acland & Wasson, 2011, p. 2). In this essay I am tracking the period 1972–1990, and the discourse in India and internationally of how video as “little media” technology could be dep-loyed to articulate people’s voices (Dagron & Tufte, 2006, p. 66). Many of the participatory adaptations of video as little media were several steps removed from the instructional context in which Wilbur Schramm first proposed the concept in 1973. Schramm was responding to dominant media systems and their focus upon the relation between instructional effectiveness and cost efficiency. Instruction in Big Media involved television, films, and computer-assisted technologies and required highly skilled personnel and specialized facilities. Little media referred to the less costly, less complex technologies of radio, tape recorders, filmstrips, slides, and visuals of all kinds. Crucially, this question of technological “size” is not ontological but contingent upon the choice of scale, modes, and objectives of media production and deployment. In recent scholarship, small or little media have come to be seen to extend beyond instructional uses, functioning as instruments of democratic participation in societies with restricted access to formal media systems (Larkin, 2004; Sreberny & Mohammadi, 1994).
The early history of video during the 1970s and 1980s is split into two institutional domains each with distinct practices and infrastructures. As a commodity, the logic of choice dominated the take up of video, the freedom to choose when to watch, how to watch, and what to watch in the form of home video, pirated or legal commercial cinema, or an array of television programs (Dovey, 1995; Hilderbrand, 2009; Newman, 2014). In India, the commercial availability of video in the 1980s inaugurated its use as a medium for the circulation of popular cinema through legal and illegal means. Its arrival generated panics about video piracy of cinema and anxiety about the heightened circulation of pornographic images through the unregulated circuits of video parlors (Roy, 2013).
In terms of non-commodity use, particularly in the United States, there were “few distinctions” in terms of political values, between video artists and video activists as art became politically and socially engaged (Boyle, 1992, p. 67). Both groups viewed “access” to media production as the foundation for “the democratization of technology,” producing a radical video practice governed by the principles of experimentation, free expression, and democratic participation (Hilderbrand; Newman; Blumberg cited in La Rosa, 2012; Boyle, 1992). A variety of practices and styles took shape around the technical functions of video, creatively exploring features such as video’s real time feedback. For instance, Daniel Graham’s (1975) Performance/Audience/Mirror combines real time feedback and performance to explore the relation between performer, technology, and the audience. In India, the state played a significant role: in continuity with earlier post-independence governmental deployment of film and radio for nation building, video extended mass forms of social communication. In 1984, barely two years after Doordarshan’s first color broadcast, the Indian government initiated the Country Wide Classroom, a daily nation-wide distance learning broadcast. While the accompanying infrastructure included the establishment of audio-visual labs in public universities, the educational objectives drew upon the existing expertise of the academic community for instructional media content (Rani, 2006).
My aim in this paper is to map the assemblage of discursive and historical factors that positioned video in India as a “little media” form that made a political intervention in the context of the dominant media systems of this time. Brian Larkin (2008) argues that technologies are “unstable things” whose technical functions and public uses are not intrinsic but socially and culturally constructed over a period of time (p. 3). The condition of instability is produced as much by the object’s physical potential as the political and industrial orders within which technologies are produced and deployed. The discourses and practices of non-broadcast video that I am exploring were developed at the CENDIT, recognized as India’s oldest video production unit and at the forefront of emerging non-broadcast video practices in the mid-1970s (Booker, 2003, p. 326). CENDIT’s objectives were to develop instructional technology, media applications to impart instruction and training. However, video practice and discourse at CENDIT was at once political and pedagogical. The institution’s key personnel saw the informational functions of non-broadcast video as mobilizing populations to constitute a democratic public domain. This approach contrasted sharply with the prevalent aesthetic and leisure practices involving pirate video, home video, and domestic television viewed privately and in commercial video parlors.
There has been some theoretical engagement on the subject of video for social change in India from the perspective of documentary studies (Battaglia, 2013; Wolf, 2013). This work has looked at specific histories, artists, techniques, and texts. In my argument, video for social change opens up a different set of questions relating to technology, theory, institutions, information, economies, and social structures. Studying the early occurrence of technologies, continues Larkin, enables us to uncover a history of debates around the possibilities of technologies before semiotic and formal economies stabilize. Hence tracking this early period allows us to witness the structuring effects of the discourse of “little media” upon the mobilization of specific functions, features, and practices of video technology. Of equal analytical interest in this paper are the ways in which technologies as objects of use shape social and cultural formations and modes of subjectification.
Given the sociological and political nature of this inquiry and its shift in focus to video as little media, I find Thomas Elsaesser’s (2009) approach to the study of the “utility film” useful. Elsaesser moves away from textual interpretation toward a consideration of film or video as one piece of evidence within wider historical and technological contexts. The historio-pragmatic methodology comprises a three-part framework: wer war de Auftragebber (who commissioned the film), was wan der Anlass (what was the occasion for which it was made), and was war die Anwendung oder der Adressat (to what use was it put or to whom was it addressed) (p. 24). Guided by this framework I will begin by situating the historical and discursive structures for video as “little media” in the 1970s and 1980s in the field of development communication. Importantly, the practice and discourse of “little media” was taking shape against volatile political and social currents, particularly as new political actors were emerging in the public domain. I will examine the ideological and structural positioning of video as little media in India and subsequently its semiotic and social effects. The democratically formulated objectives prioritized particular technical affordances and video practices, generating social and political modes of video making that attempted to reorder the hitherto fixed positions of audience and producer.
Video as Little Media: Discursive and Technological Contexts
The launch of the portable Sony half-inch reel-to-reel portapak in the United States and Britain in 1968 inaugurated the possibility of dispersing media production sites and media messages. Positioning themselves against “corrupt” and “manipulative” broadcast television, artists, and activists shared a counter-cultural interest in media “made for as well as by the people” (Boyle, 1992; Marshall, 1985). The National Film Board of Canada’s ‘Challenge for Change’ participatory media program launched in 1967 critiqued the transmission model of mass media, to provide activists with an alternative understanding of how video could organize community. 1 Video was re-imagined beyond its institutional existence in broadcast television and mass education, as a technology whose technical functions permitted multiple forms of social mobilization. The move toward participatory forms of media making at the Challenge for Change also coincided with a growing acceptance of the failures of the dominant developmental paradigm. 2 Particularly in the fields of health, literacy and agricultural production in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, this had translated into didactic communication forms promoting Western liberal models of economic and social organization (Moemeka, 1994; Mowlana & Wilson, 1988). In 1974, the World Bank stated, “These efforts at using mass media in development did not appreciably effect, in positive ways, the lives of the people in the developing countries” (cited in Moemeka, 1994, p. 5). Many reasons have been given for these failures and among them the most significant is the neglect of socio-cultural contexts in media production process and media content (Mefalopulos, 2008; Melkote, 2009; Moemeka, 1994; Steeves, 2000). An alternative formulation emerged in 1976 with the publication of Everett Rogers’ Communication and Development: Critical Perspectives that contained case studies of new development programs and paradigms. The role of communication technologies was considered central to the project of remapping the terrain by fragmenting the authority of the state as the sole producer of developmental messages. At a conceptual level, the remapping involved large shifts in emphasis from measurable indicators of growth toward qualitative criteria such as the “exchange of ideas,” “social conscience,” and “social change” with a new focus on the achievement of a “higher quality of life and social justice” (Moemeka, 1994, p. 13).
In development communication, the positioning of media including video was framed in terms of the direction and purpose of communication flows. The diffusion (monologic communication) and participation (dialogic communication) approaches generated specific arrangements of video methods, language, and mobilizations in contrast to uses such as public relations, journalism, or adult education (Mefalopulos, 2008, p. 58). Each of the two approaches authorized particular technical and social uses of video, governed by its underlying social objectives. The planned, one-way communication flow of the monologic mode was aimed at increasing awareness and persuading viewers (Mefalopulos, 2008, p. 57). In this model, production and circulation practices were likely to call upon specific technical features of video, making qualities of flexibility and portability relatively less important to those of high-quality recording and playback, stability, durability, and duplicability.
It is the dialogic mode that brought the little media discourse of video to the forefront. In this two-way communication model, the scope of communication was open ended and people’s participation was promoted and captured for purposes of project feedback (Mefalopulos, 2008, p. 23). The key components of participation and micro-level information flows suggest a fertile ground to think of video as little media. At CENDIT “little media” was produced through practice and discourse. The teaching guidebook for the 20-week video training program for community activists, written by Canadian media activist Maria Protz in 1989, focused on all-round practice. Eschewing technical specialization, the guidebook contains instructions to train individuals as a one-person video production unit, versed in all aspects of video camera operation, sound recording and video editing in non-studio environments. The CENDIT newsletter Nigah provides further evidence of the discursive positioning of video as little media. The yellow pages section featured a series of advertisements for relatively mobile video systems including the Sony 2400 ACE, highlighting its portability, light weight, in-built microphone, and battery operations. The description of Philips/Norelco 1481/44 video cassette recorder similarly emphasized portability. In an article which captures the ethos of the moment, Richard Leacock’s “Camera God, Camera Real” (Nigah, 1974) outlines his vision for a “filmmaking system” suited to the independent mode of filmmaking, that is, both “sophisticated and cheap” (Leacock, 1974, p. 19). Leacock’s hybrid film-video system uses cheaper video tape for the distribution of films shot on Super 8. “The possibility for change” he continues, is based upon “existent mass produced items, modified to do things they are not intended to do” (Leacock, 1974, p. 21). By framing video as little media, CENDIT attempted to loosen the political and industrial linkage between video, television, and the state. I will elaborate on the ways in which this vision framed media production and circulation but I will begin by considering the ideological and organizational dimensions of the institution where this discourse was taking shape.
CENDIT: Organizational and Social Context
In 1972, a cross-disciplinary group of students, cinephiles, engineers, and media producers came together in New Delhi to form CENDIT. The private media collective was initiated by two history graduates Rajive Jain and Avik Ghosh who had been instrumental in the exhibition of art house cinema in Delhi during the 1960s at Celluloid, the Delhi University Film Society. They were joined by Akhila Iyer, Anil Srivastava, Robert Tyabji, Joya Roy, Narendra Rana, and Himadri Dhanda. 3 Akhila Iyer worked as an educational film producer in the area of gender awareness, Robert Tyabji had trained in electronic engineering, Narendra Rana in Social Anthropology and Joya Roy worked as a broadcaster and film editor. Anil Srivastava had assisted noted future arthouse film director Shyam Benegal in the production of commercial advertising and later supervised the production of information films at the National Education and Information Films Limited. Over approximately four decades, CENDIT sustained itself by networking with NGOs, community groups, trade unions, corporate agencies, and government departments. This spectrum of institutions offered it commissions, in-kind grants and voluntary donations for the production of print, video, and electronic media, conducting media training workshops and media research projects. In a continuous state of flux in terms of organization size, finances, and production agendas, the organization’s heyday occurred in 1981–1982 when with a maximum staff strength of nearly 50 it operated New Delhi’s first multi-channel color cable television service at the luxury Maurya Sheraton Hotel. A turnover of nearly half a million US dollars enabled CENDIT to purchase VHS recording and editing facilities and later Umatic equipment with the support of Sony Corporation. Taking advantage of the global interest in communication technologies and the autonomy of a private media organization, CENDIT contributed to the formation of local media networks and further afield with Videazimut, a global coalition of organizations advocating for media democracy. 4 Many of CENDIT’s activities such as product engineering exceeded the remit of development communication and offer fascinating insights into Indian communication history but fall beyond the scope of the present inquiry. 5 Here I focus on CENDIT’s work with video, as part of a political re-imagination of little media that rested to a great degree on the knowledge derived from government experiments in decentralized video production and circulation. It also developed a momentum of a quite different sort, in coalitions with politically conscious filmmakers.
The field of development communication in general and institutions such as CENDIT in particular were greatly influenced by Paolo Freire’s (1972) theory of Conscientizacao—a critical shift from top down knowledge flows to the consideration of “an individual’s contextual reality” in the construction of knowledge (Bessette, 2004; Dagron & Tufte, 2006; Melkote, 2009; Szalvai, 2009). The results of a survey conducted by CENDIT in Sultanpur, Western Uttar Pradesh in 1973 made the group aware of the imperative of introducing Freire’s approach in the Indian context of centrally controlled mass communication. Commissioned by the Family Planning Foundation, the survey focused on the rural audience reception of 64 documentary films on the subject of reproductive planning, meant to be screened in the Hindi-speaking rural and urban areas. With the majority of audiences perceiving them to reflect urban social values, living conditions and domestic relations, the findings reported a “lack of rural identification” with the films (Ghosh, 1974, p. 18). The study provided the field experience to justify alternative approaches while affirming the importance of social context to the communication process.
The historical context in which video practice was conceived at CENDIT was imprinted by major shifts in politics, with the proclamation of the Constitutional Emergency in 1975 and the rise of the Indian women’s movement in the 1980s. 6 While CENDIT did not participate directly in oppositional political movements, it extended support to dissenting voices, framing media not only in pedagogical or developmental terms but as a sphere for democratic expression. There were parallel developments in documentary film culture and activism in the 1970s and 1980s. While the state-run Films Division was charged with constructing the visual narrative of the Emergency as a period of strong leadership [Naya Daur/New Era; (Sastry, 1975); We Have Promises to Keep (Sastry, 1975); To Keep a Secret (Parmesh, 1975)], the institution of governmental dictatorship in 1975 triggered the birth of the independent documentary movement in India. 7 Anand Patwardhan’s historic Waves of Revolution (1975) documented the student movements leading up to the Emergency and was subsequently banned in India. Observable here is the emergence of a network in which CENDIT located itself alongside filmmakers affiliated to a left-leaning politics. CENDIT co-founder Rajive Jain traveled to Patna in Bihar, the epicenter of the anti-government student movement to assist Patwardhan with shooting on Super 8 cameras and later helped arrange underground screenings of the film. In subsequent years, filmmakers at the forefront of the political documentary movement who were raising fundamental issues of women’s rights, labor rights, and constitutional freedoms, including Anand Patwardhan, the Mediastorm Collective, K.P. Sasi, and Deepa Dhanraj, contributed to CENDIT as media trainers, guest lecturers, and mentors. With CENDIT as producer, K. P. Sasi was to go on to direct In the Name of Medicine (1987), an indictment of the commercial pharmaceutical industry in India. In all this we can discern a symbiotic relationship between CENDIT and the independent documentary movement, as its institutional networks, training programs, videotape library of Indian and international documentary programs and loan of equipment, contributed to the movement’s consolidation and expansion.
CENDIT’s socially committed media agenda owed much to the knowledge being generated by the Indian women’s movement during the 1980s. Co-founder Akhila Iyer had worked in the area of gender education and together with feminist activists Kamla Bhasin and Sushma Kapur harnessed CENDIT’s resources for feminist action. In India, the collaboration between activists and media practitioners occurred within a broader feminist critique of the gendered and economic inequities of development, as represented by the 1986 report on “Responding to the Challenge of Rural Poverty in South Asia: Role of Non-government Organizations.” Kamla Bhasin and Nighat S. Khan (1986) eviscerated a consumption-oriented economic development, which was neither “independent” nor “appropriate” as it was “not based on the needs of the people nor the specificities of the local institutions” (p. 4).
Recommending concrete action to expand women’s technical capacities, the same report nominated CENDIT to organize regional training programs in the use of communication technologies for women. With feminist activists as mentors and trainers, in a series of “Women and Media in Development” workshops during the 1980s, CENDIT provided video production training to women and community activists. Filmmaker Anjali Monteiro (2015), whose filmography includes nearly 40 co-directed documentary films including films on issues of gender and sexuality such as Our Family (Jayasankar & Monteiro, 2007), She Write (Jayasankar & Monteiro, 2005) in Odhni, received her “first introduction to video” in such a workshop (Jayasankar & Monteiro, 2015, p. 31). The horizontal teaching-learning structure of the workshop, recalls Monteiro, allowed activists from across South Asia to cooperatively build video production skills. At the same time video producers at CENDIT collaborated with grassroots organizations including women’s groups (Action India, Mahila Mandal) labor unions (Delhi Dehat Mazdoor Union, Kerala Matsya Thozilali Federation, Chhattisgarh Mines Shramik Sangathan) and social welfare groups (Social Work and Research Centre, Ubeshwar Vikas Group, Literacy House) to support ongoing rights-based projects through the integration of video technology into their activities. The wide ranging video programs resulting from these collaborative projects eschew individual production credits and cover issues of women’s rights and media representation [Women in Indian Cinema, 1984, Aurat Manoranjan ka Saadhan/Woman: Source of Entertainment (Cendit, 1983), Dohra Bojh/Double Burden (Cendit & Delhi Dehat Mazdoor Union, 1982)] and labor rights (Zanjeeron se Mukti/Freedom from Chains, 1980).
Between 1975 and 1976, the Indian government undertook large-scale experiments to develop technology and infrastructure in order to systematically harness video for mass education. These included the exploration of satellite technology for rural educational television broadcast through the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE). 8 For CENDIT, SITE was one of the “shining examples” of global cooperation that would through communication flows make possible the Gandhian dream of village level democracy (Srivastava, 2012). As part of SITE, the Kheda Experiment in Gujarat trialed a hybrid decentralized model of video production and broadcast (Bhalla, 1984). Broadcasting one hour of programming per day with 50 percent of the content produced in the local Gujarati language at the Ahmedabad and Bombay studios, the UNDP-funded Kheda Experiment was held in high esteem by CENDIT. While close to mass media instruction of the sort CENDIT had been critical of, nevertheless the decentralized production and circulation methods of these models were seen in positive terms by the organization. Srivastava (1980) reports that public script-writing competitions were organized by the media researchers to source lived realities of the local inhabitants for video rendering (p. 161). Have Na Saheva Paap, a series of seven programs in which all the actors were “Harijans” from two villages in the Kheda district, is especially singled out by Srivastava (1983). 9 Its narrative themes of caste exploitation, sexual exploitation, and bonded labor were determined by the producers and the actors working together. The co-production methods at Kheda offered an opportunity for socially marginalized Dalit residents to participate in self-representation. Srivastava notes that in Have Na Saheva Paap the Dalit men were given the bare outlines of a plot, and allowed to choose their roles and improvise dialogues and situations, resulting in programs that had a “tremendous impact” on the village audience (n. p.).
Subjects, Ethos, and Representation: Little Media Video Production Practices
Indeed, that is one of the greatest advantages of the portapak. It can be forgotten. Its unobtrusive appearance and size helps the communicator to remain a part of the crowd, without drawing too much attention to himself. It is also an amazingly hardy machine. When one thinks of all the technological sophistication that is packed into the little body. (Srivastava, 1983, p. 50)
A coastal livelihoods project in Tanzania became one of the first in the region to use video in a participatory way. The project convened a week long workshop amongst the fishermen in the area and facilitated the video recording of the meetings in an unobtrusive way … thanks to the flexibility of the technology the fishermen were also able to edit the video. (Mefalopulos, 2008, p. 64)
In the spatially and temporally separated observations above, we witness both a coincident and conflicting set of meanings becoming attached to video as little media. The shared emphasis upon unobtrusiveness designates a form of usage where the apparatus attempts to conceal its role in altering the temporal, spatial, and affective dimensions of the moments it records. Mobilized in the public arena of the street, meeting hall or village square where people converge and participate in public acts of discussion, leisure, and consumption, the camera at once seeks to participate in this domain but refuses to announce its presence and participatory role. The above observations foreground key technical features: small dimensions, flexibility, simplicity, resilience, and portability. The excerpts also signal two modes of little media usage of video: a controlled documentary style managed by an author or “communicator,” and a participatory mode managed by groups who collectively contribute to the production of media content. Politically, the coexistence of the modes captures an unsettling of the status of professional expertise, individualism, and formal considerations in video process and content, calling into question the status and function of a video producer. In this section I will examine the ways in which a form of mediated relation between subjects and society came into being through video praxis once producers largely relinquished control of video operations. Furthermore, ideologies overtook esthetic considerations in terms of how the technical functions of video technology, the ethos of media practice and formal aesthetics were ordered.
Field Experiments and New Subjects
Amsterdam-based media producer Jack Moore, on a UNESCO sponsored visit to India, donated his Sony half-inch video portapak to CENDIT. Shortly after, during 1974–1975, CENDIT conducted a series of video experiments. In these initial stages prior to the commencement of SITE and Kheda, the experiments rested upon a relay between technical possibility and ideological orientation. In 1974, now in possession of one of the first mobile video systems in the country, CENDIT’s field practice was not dissimilar to the street tape makers of New York who took advantage of the portapak’s mobility to document life on the metropolitan streets. Les Levine’s Bum shot in the Bowery district of New York in 1965 is recognized as the first time-based video artwork (Sutton, 2005). Using the mobility of video to move unhindered and its capacity to alter perception through real time changes in focal distance, Levine had recorded testimonies of the homeless in at a moment when video acquired “countercultural” meanings (Tripp, 2012, p. 5). For CENDIT portable video formed the beginning of an experiment in participatory video production; its radical ambition was to skill its subjects in video production, going a step further than street tape making.
CENDIT co-founder Anil Srivastava (1980) noted his feeling of disquiet about top down flows of knowledge embedded in educational media forms directed toward village audiences. Questioning normative terminologies such as “education,” “development,” and “modernization,” he wrote, “we, who were literate, borrowed our scenario for life from the West and were trying to cast them into that mold which we call modernisation” (p. 159). The cultural and cognitive issues raised in these observations reflect the conceptual grounds for CENDIT’s initial experiments with video and the training and advocacy programs produced over the next two decades.
In early experiments with video, CENDIT moved toward the “demystification” of media production, consistent with the technologically driven social imaginary of development communication where professional television and film production modes were considered “alienating” for socially disadvantaged groups (Varghese, 2003, p. 351). In Rajive Jain’s ancestral village of Saharanpur, a series of three experiments were conducted. From Jain’s production notes in Nigah (1975) that I have organized and analyzed below, several individual and group social practices emerge and shifts in subject positions become observable.
The Novelty of Video Playback
The video tape recorder, camera, and monitor were set to record mode with a fixed frame and placed under a large tree. The people who gathered around were taped and the recording played back immediately. In contrast to the disinterest in state documentaries, Jain notes that the people “were quite happy watching themselves endlessly” with often hundreds of people “crowded” around a six-inch monitor (1975, p. 48). In this experiment, the fixed frame was not dissimilar to the feedback loop of a closed circuit video setup. Nevertheless, while it did not utilize the mobile possibilities of the portapak, the immediate loop served to overcome the mystery of the recording process. A reordering of social life is observable in the way village residents were collectively drawn to the publicly positioned video apparatus to view real time playback. Capitalizing on this initial appeal, two further experiments were conducted.
The Possibilities of Participation
In the second experiment, the CENDIT team handed over the video tape recorder and camera to a group of village residents without instructions about handling the equipment or producing specific content. Initially the residents filmed scenes of village activities such as harvesting and wrestling. Later, in a recording which took place shortly after the imposition of the Emergency, Jain noted that a spontaneous public discussion about reproductive practices was generated on camera. Those gathered expressed concern about coercive sterilization programs, and wanted the recording to be brought to the attention of local government officials. In this second experiment, we witness a shift in the position of the local participant of media production. The participant realizes that control over technology gives him agency to construct his own messages and relay these to those in authority. The assemblage of technology, group dynamics, and the liberating withdrawal of professional media personnel and protocols, mobilized participation to produce a mediated forum of dialogue amongst citizens and between citizens and the state.
Video for Personal Expression
In a third experiment, individuals borrowed the camera and filmed scenes of their choosing. In one such incident, an elderly landless Muslim farmer walked around the village with hand-held camera, interviewing well-off farmers about their views on landless laborers and agricultural poverty. This media practice documented the autobiographical and the social; we see the construction of a personally meaningful artifact by the user who deploys the video camera to articulate his own social condition in conversation with superior groups. Taken together these experiments draw our attention to the politics of subjectification and the construction of new subjects whose bodies and minds, knowledge, leisure, and community life would be shaped through their encounters with the new technology. We can speculate that the experience of operating video technology would be likely to produce specific attitudes toward electronically operated equipment, instantaneity, the distinction between technical and intellectual labor, and the ephemeral but powerful presence of the electronic image in the modern public domain.
An Ethos of Little Media Video and Representational Politics
In video for social change, the agenda is an ethics-based approach to video production that privileges collective decision making and action (Lunch & Lunch, 2006, p. 18). We see this ethos, first, in the production credits in several CENDIT videos where no individual lays claim to aesthetic and technical control or narrative authorship. Nevertheless, it is amply clear that the videos are produced with expert editorial and technical inputs. Here a key question emerges regarding the scale and nature of expert intervention in these collaborative, rather than participatory relationships. Specifically, my inquiry focuses upon the ethics of these editorial moves and the principles that governed the aesthetic and rhetorical decision making even as the video producers seemingly withdrew from the production. With the emphasis upon process, aesthetic concerns appeared to retreat into the background. However, for socially conscious video makers working in collaborative relationships with the socially marginalized, the assemblage of portable video and an ethic of unobtrusiveness authorized a specific mode of visual inquiry. In the visual approach to “the interview,” we witness an implicit critique of the programmatic conventions of popular non-fiction media such as news reportage and instructional media. In documentary studies, the interview is understood as a form of “hierarchical discourse arising from unequal power relations” (Nichols, 1991, p. 47). In contrast, the ideals of the ethnographic interview seek to equip researchers to “describe another culture” and “understand another way of life” (Spradley, 1979, p. 3). The necessary supplement to such an agenda is field work, which may include learning a new language, or taking field notes. The interview in several of CENDIT’s videos not only communicated information, it also relayed the linguistic culture of the locality, and a sense of individual experience and world view.
In Gramodaya (Cendit & Capart, 1986), Gandhigram (Cendit & Capart, 1986), and Because of Our Rights (De, Sen & Ghosh, 1991) the interlocutors are rural citizens who argue for the place of traditional rights and skills in a changing national economy. Sponsored by the Council for Advancement of People’s Action & Rural Technology (CAPART) and dubbed in English, while Gramodaya appears to address multiple audiences, its thematic focus upon ceramic tile making process also indicates that it would be used for training. Filmed in the Bhadravati region of Maharashtra, it features interviews with four different potters who are training in new tile making techniques. The video displays ethnographic detailing when it has each potter introduce himself not only by name and profession but as resident of a particular region and village with distinct personal aspirations and goals. The interview of Brijbhushan from Chandtola village in Bihar offers us the clearest evidence of the intersection between ethnography and information. Brijbhushan details his living conditions, his daily routine, domestic facilities (fan, toilet), financial status (wage of ₹200/day), and most importantly, the dream of owning a small ceramic workshop in Chandtola to serve local house-builders. Each individual is interviewed on location in a dimly lit, noisy production workshop, which serves as textual evidence of professional identity and ethnographic and textural detail. The video is far removed from the standardized expertise of professional filmmaking, and evokes private perspectives and an intimate subjectivity that exceeds straightforward information transfer. Although my analysis is based on a handful of available videos, it is possible to situate such efforts as of the interactive, witness-oriented form of ethnographic interview in documentary film (Nichols, 1991, p. 48).
Many of these video practices parallel independent artists’ experimentation with the technical capacities of video to challenge symbolic conventions. However, a crucial distinction between artist practice and little media video lies in the different approaches toward post-production. In order to manipulate and amplify the meanings of their raw footage, artists “relied heavily upon postproduction” (Dovey, 2004, p. 562). This was partly determined by the accessibility of technology, as sophisticated video- editing equipment gradually became available outside TV production institutions, particularly in Western educational institutions, and art departments in the 1980s. In contrast, the combination of ideology and limited material resources produced a particularly functional relation to post-production in little media video. At CENDIT, the bulk of video editing equipment consisted of consumer VHS video tape recorders with a single playback source manually synced using a stop-watch and a video recorder. Later, a few more advanced Umatic editing setups with remote editing controllers were employed for commissioned video productions. Moreover, with a shift away from specialization, professional technical expertise was not always available and hence pictorial and sonic elements often show only minor modification. In Gramodaya basic cut-to-cut editing is favored with cutaways employed to bridge temporal jumps in place of electronically switched transitions such as dissolves. The original footage recorded on automatic exposure setting is uncorrected and light level variations are visible throughout camera movements. The sonic register demonstrates a similar ethos of non-intervention to the extent that noisy background sounds are left in and non-diegetic audio effects are not favored.
Dispersal, Distraction, and Display: Audiences and Viewing Practices
One of the most ambivalent aspects of little media video is the way in which it defines, addresses, and positions the relations between media participants and media audiences. In the absence of an external source of media messages, the conventional notion of a media audience is complicated by the overlaps between those who participate and those who view. Dohra Bojh (Cendit & Delhi Dehat Mazdoor Union, 1982), a film about the domestic physical and emotional burdens placed on women, was produced by CENDIT in partnership with Action India and Delhi Dehat Mazdoor Union in Mandi village near Delhi. The same groups arranged screenings among farming communities on the outskirts of Delhi and in Saharanpur in Uttar Pradesh. Provoking discussions, facilitating reflection, and eliciting “responses for further discussions” the film was acknowledged as a success story of participatory communication (Ghosh, 1984, p. 67). This case highlights practices of circulation and exhibition in the technologically enabled forms of community dialogue that CENDIT aimed for. There are parallels here with Tripp’s (2012) genealogical study of participatory video screenings in New York, where video makers “would invite people whom they taped” to watch the videos and discuss them (p. 9). Direct address and personal knowledge rendered these screening forums distinct in terms of the forms of exchange between the screen and the spectator, governed not simply by the logic of consumption or leisure but of existential familiarity. In the following section, I will examine the ways in which infrastructure was mobilized and the diverse political meanings inscribed in the symbolic and material architecture of little media circulation and exhibition.
A further issue that I will consider pertains to the second audience in sponsored developmental work, the sponsoring institutions who, while embracing “community participation” as “watchword,” inevitably monitor the levels of its achievement (Waisbord, 2005, p. 78). This associated audience of institutions who are engaged in producing the discourse of development and the implementation of its practices as donors, research institutes, community organizations, and policy makers have attracted little attention. There was a distinct challenge here to the ethics of the ethnographic video form: to fulfill the mandate of social transformation, not only must video processes generate community outcomes, but also the final output must be translatable, evaluable, and expressive in a variety of institutional contexts. Further in this section, I will examine how this tension in terms of the relay between the structuring effects of institutions and little media’s stated community aims was managed through video aesthetics.
The Political Charge of Circulation
CENDIT’s screening practices speak of the social mobilization of video to construct modes of cognition and subjectification where audiences were positioned as members of a social grouping in particular geographies. Addressing the critique of mass media that conceptualized audiences as a homogenous group, little media mobilized publics around common interests and shared contexts. Interlinked through existential conditions but produced through technology and media circulation, the small, dispersed, and active publics realized a form of participatory democracy sought by little media video. Hum Bhi Insaan Hain (Cendit & Delhi Dehat Mazdoor Union, 1980), a documentation of the struggles of landless peasants in the Mandi village outside Delhi, depicts the goal of horizontal group formation across geographies, an ambition extended through video screening strategies. The video features conversations with several landless peasants and was circulated in a neighboring village in the same district at a fair organized by the laboring poor of the area. Another particularly telling example comes from Ferozabad in Uttar Pradesh. Akhila Ghosh (1984) notes that a video program was made about a group of Dalit women who organized themselves into a sewing cooperative in a village-level social action program. The video was transported 450 kilometers to Pather village and a screening was organized for a group of Muslim women who were struggling to initiate a cooperative group. Here little media was not only a form of technological hardware; as video practice and exhibition, it enabled flows of information between geographically separated but similar groups, making a bid to render change imaginable and to impart instruction.
For CENDIT, the geographically dispersed non-metropolitan circulation combined with lack of infrastructure produced a fragile and contingent screening system. Mobility was the key in this enterprise and the transportation of video playback infrastructure was integrated into circulation, conveying thus not only media messages but also introducing media technologies physically and symbolically to new populations and geographies. Screening requests from regional groups were passed on to CENDIT store manager and production assistant Kailash, which he was authorized to fulfill through available means. “I have transported screening equipment including a television set, truck batteries, and video playback decks by train, bus and bullock cart to the outskirts of Delhi and to places with no roads.” 10 The objective of community participation brought into being a space of exhibition governed by the principles of access instead of quality, profit, or customization. Thus, an improvised circuit of community halls, school halls, training centers, and village squares functioned as screening venues. In the “Instructions for Screening” included in the video catalog, The Other Picture (CENDIT, 1993) lack of technical knowledge is anticipated by providing instructions on how to arrange equipment. The section entitled “Notes on organizing a video screening session” begins with a basic introduction to the PAL video system and VHS systems. Detailed steps are provided to connect the equipment via audio and video cables and connectors, how to tune a television set and how to load tape into a VCR. A note on “Place of Screening” recommends, “Ensure adequate ventilation,” “the audience should not be made to sit facing the Sun,” and “in case of outdoor night screening keep it away from ditches, holes etc. because people might fall in them in the dark” (p. 216). The focused attention to the conditions of viewing depict the multidimensional and yet site-specific ambit of little media that drew upon localized knowledge of the social realm beyond the screen, to systematize its circulation agenda.
A Productive Distraction
The infrastructure of the television screen, ordinarily meant for controlled indoor viewing, was now used for public gatherings in improvised settings. There was some concern that such a setting would fragment viewer attention and engagement. Anil Srivastava (1980) describes one such screening:
Therefore filmmakers often talk about the “captive audience” the audience in the dark…well we found out that people in the village do not watch a film the same way we do. They walk in and walk out again…They often talk amongst themselves during the film show. They often talk amongst themselves during the film show. The argument gets lost for want of attention… (p. 160)
The distracted mode of viewing observed by Srivastava gives us cause to ponder the cognitive and critical relationships between audiences, media content, and the technological infrastructure. In these settings what kinds of meanings, forms of identification, and courses of action would be produced and would these proceed along the projected developmental path? One way of channeling attention was to restrict the duration of the videos to approximately 10–30 minutes so that screenings could fit in alongside daily routines and rhythms rather than be considered a disruption. Next, there were clear instructions on how to select accessible media and facilitate “small” group discussion so that the screening connected with the context and set up the possibilities of meaningful encounter and active publics. These guidelines were posed as a series of questions, such as: “Is it [video] accessible for the group” and “Does it [video] analyse/present an issue which concerns the group” (The Other Picture, p. 220). There was a vision here of setting up meaningful dialogues on the basis of screenings. It is possible to argue that an incipient evaluative viewing practice was coming into effect where media messages were subject to analysis and critique in relation to their contextual relevance and applicability. In the space of dialogue perhaps lay the possibility of a shift in power for as Dagron (2009) cautions, “It doesn’t matter if the poor get information on many issues; their struggle is for citizenship—Information alone cannot change a given social, economic, and political situation” (p. 456). The political meaning of dialogue, on the other hand, extends beyond the immediate function of information transfer. According to Mefalopulos (2008, p. 75), dialogue involves people in problem solving by drawing upon their collective knowledge and thus reduces the dominance of experts in decision-making processes. The focus on producing a space for dialogue is indicative of commitment to the cultivation of a range of habits and processes necessary to negotiate meaning in media messages from empirical and situated standpoints.
Institutions and Video Display
Importantly videos were called upon to perform more than the overt objective of horizontal, participatory communication. Information coded in the video programs was significant for several reasons. First, information formed the basis of program evaluation; its success or otherwise would determine the durability of the NGO-funder relationship. Furthermore, information and specific outputs, argues Ebrahim (2002), represent a mechanism through which “external influence” is exerted upon NGOs by funding organizations (p. 85). In participatory projects, the sourcing of objective information continues to be a matter of concern. Dagron pinpoints the fundamental lack of clarity surrounding the definition of information in participatory communication “what do we evaluate: programme activities or the resulting social change (if any)?” (p. 461). Hence, in his study of participatory media case studies, David Booker states that video-based projects tended to exclude performance measuring strategies and little data existed to “validate” this form of audio visual usage in community development (p. 339). It is my contention that these considerations focus our attention on the multiple functions video practices had to fulfill. Community-driven and participatory logics of video use of the sorts I have outlined highlight the operational components of video-based projects: how communities were drawn into understanding and using video, and how video circulation facilitated geographically extensive community formation and political representation to government. On the other hand, the NGO had also to be able to render videos as data forms that were legible to institutional audiences and shown to fulfill the funder’s objectives. These issues partially transferred the information function to the operational components of the video programs.
Approached as an artifact within a spectrum of information requirements that NGOs have to present to sponsors, video as narrative form, and technology of circulation operated as a form of “process data” (Ebrahim, 2002, p. 88). Alongside product data which include calculable indicators and quantitative analysis such as financial and annual reports, process data are qualitative, interpretative, and indicative rather than conclusive. Because of Our Rights and Gramodaya provide examples of “process data” as it was composed for audiences beyond local communities. Both films employ an expository narration to organize the recorded materials, information that participant-audiences would not require. The English language expository voice-over is addressed to an audience external to the scene of community life and practices. This institutional audience could be that of the sponsor, for whom the video offers a sense of the process of film use and community practice, but it could also be for a more general audience for the documentary, one unfamiliar with the details of project, participants, and objectives. Certain emphases in the content also suggest a sponsor-addressee. In Grameen Dastkar/Rural Artisans (Cendit & Capart, 1986), the economic hardships faced by rural artisans are framed in ways that legitimize the existence of rural development programs associated with the funding NGOs.
While this evidence appears to contradict the community-framed aims of little media communication, Ebrahim asks us to consider the complexity of address and of the configurations of power. He argues that organizations resist the informational demands of funders “through a series of strategies” that may include the symbolic generation of information or the selective sharing of information (p. 85). In documentary style little media video, the unpredictability of reality often exceeded scripted narrative horizons. To turn again to Grameen Dastkar, the video reveals “unintentional” truths about caste-based livelihoods, poor working conditions, child labor, and steeply hierarchical rural societies, beyond the strict purview of institutional communication. Many of these issues come across in supplementary B-Roll footage capturing the village setting, artisan work areas and interviews of the artisans themselves. 11 Hence, in analytical terms it would be more productive to interpret the videos as textual traces of the multiple configurations of power and of ideological struggle underlying their contexts of production.
Conclusion
In his study of colonial film and political form in Nigeria, Brian Larkin urges us to consider the mutability of film (and media) not only across time, but also space (p. 79). Cinema, he states, is shaped by historical formations that are created by epistemic structures related to specific locations and contexts. In this article, I have opened my inquiry into the discursive production of video as a small scale communication technology that while coinciding with participatory discourses worldwide, in its Indian adaptation, becomes imbued with political meaning. In the historical formations of political upheaval and the emergence of new actors in the public domain between the mid-1970s and late 1980s, video both drew upon and makes available an alternative imagination of technologically mediated democracy. The political crisis during this period created the conditions for a media form that could perform as a more decentr-alized, locally oriented space for political mobilization and the building of social solidarities. In setting up an alternative network comprised of grassroots organizations, community groups, artists, social activists, socially engaged citizens and international solidarity groups, CENDIT contributed to the production and circulation of information in networks beyond the control of the market and the state. These networks were set up by CENDIT to circulate developmental messages but also came to be adapted and utilized for the production, circulation, and exhibition of more intellectually oriented and radical political media. In subsequent years, a number of organizations including Akhra (Ranchi), Magic Lantern Foundation (New Delhi) and Marupakkam (Madurai) were launched by those who had trained or worked at CENDIT. Alternative to mainstream media economies, these organizations were grounded in a political ethos seeking to cultivate media literacy and promote social advocacy and participatory media production and circulation in and outside metropolitan areas. 12 In this way, little media video inaugurated new channels and infrastructures that expanded and strengthened the democratic social sphere.
At a symbolic level, while the videos in themselves lacked aesthetic interest, they were part of a social habitus, which heralded political promise. The designated function of such video use was to relay instructional information and mobilize rural constituencies. But when recalibrated as little media it outlined an improvised, non-expert, portable assemblage of infrastructure, and inaugurated a new horizon of experience for a technologically mediated society. In its unintended consequences, the transportation of video and its participatory ideology and practice suggests wider ramifications, to cultivate active and dynamic publics, particularly an evaluative, critically oriented public constituted through media participation and dialogue.
We should also remember that despite the social transformation promised by the unrestricted flow of information, the techno-utopia of video as little media faced serious shortcomings. While the technologies in use were consumer grade, their availability was restricted for reasons of cost and government import regulations. Such constraints on community access, the centerpiece of this alternative approach, tended to limit the objectives of participatory communication. Nevertheless, we have observed that in the way video was mobilized to connect with local participants it offered the outlines of a critical public space resulting in new cooperative circuits and networks of individuals, communities, and organizations. In re-conceptualizing the existing discourses of video beyond those of leisure, entertainment and pedagogy, little media video offered the possibility of a genuinely new relation between technology and society.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my deep gratitude to Ravi Vasudevan for his guidance during the stage of fieldwork and subsequently for his expert comments on drafts that greatly improved this paper. I am thankful to Avik Ghosh and Akhila Ghosh who, in addition to their print archive, shared a tremendous store of oral information that contributed to the findings presented in this essay. The fieldwork was conducted as part of my PhD candidature at Monash University, Australia in association with Sarai, New Delhi.