Abstract
Sunetra Sen Narayan presents a much-needed summary of the changes to India’s television broadcasting landscape that led the country’s broadcasting options to blossom from a single source, the government-operated Doordarshan, into the multiple cable and satellite channels available today.
Narayan’s book claims to be a critique of globalization using the Indian television industry as a case study. Narayan wants to draw the reader’s attention to the relationship between the media and the state. Three of her major points are that the unregulated freedom of the satellite industry was less about democracy and more about ‘encouraging consumerism’ (p. 251), that changes in the media landscape of India coincided with and at times reflected change in the political landscape and that the glocalization process in India ‘may outline the shape of things to come in other South Asian countries’ (p. 263).
Narayan’s key theorist is the political scientist James Rosenau, but she does not describe how ‘the role of new communications technologies in informing individuals’ is evident within India’s media structure (p. 34). Rosenau’s value to her work is most clear when she notes that ‘[s]ince this hitherto closed industry has been blasted open to transnational forces, there has also been a germination of private domestic broadcasting’ (p. 258). Narayan’s contribution might be best thought of as an analysis of the glocalization of Indian broadcasting.
Problems with the organization of the chapters distract from their content, though this might be excused by the process of transforming a dissertation into a monograph with a 10-year lag in between. The problems with the method and sourcing, however, are less forgivable and more important when considering how the book fits into the larger literatures of globalization and media studies. Rather than putting primary materials like corporate or government documents at the centre of this important work, she relies more on newspaper coverage about industry developments. She begins the book with a broad discussion of global media theory and transnational commercial culture that could have been incorporated into her main case study of India.
Navigating government archives to find source material is daunting and she should have afforded herself the chance for a more thorough engagement with what she found. Her brief treatment of the Chanda, Verghese and Joshi Committees and her description of the programming changes made by the major networks show her ability to find relevant material, but offer little more than a description of how each committee attempted to shape national broadcasting policy in the midst of important political changes. Her assertion that ‘the role of the state-controlled broadcast was a matter for public debate’ (p. 201) is not clear from her evidence.
There is great promise and purpose to combining the abstract ideas associated with globalization with a focused examination of a segment of a nation’s media system. Narayan does not blend the two to demonstrate where theory meets practice. She does not make a convincing argument that the market-driven homogenization of culture is either at work in India or contributed to the liberalization of the country’s economy in the early 1990s. In fact, much of what she argues in her chapter on the rise of private television points to the replacement of Doordarshan’s monopoly by competition through domestic and foreign broadcasting corporations.
She opens her chapter on trends in television with a short digression into the history of newspaper publishing. She smartly contrasts the press’s watchdog function with the statecrafting mission of All India Radio (AIR) in the period following India’s independence in 1947. ‘The traumatic birth of the nation … implied that AIR was entrusted with the unenviable task of developing a ‘national consciousness’ at a time when wounds were fresh’ (p. 86). Setting the press and the broadcasters in opposition to one another is a useful approach, but Narayan abandons any mention of the press after this initial point.
Her penultimate chapter discusses the important regulatory developments of broadcast and cable in India. She finds it ‘interesting to note that until the mid-1990s, laws that were not specific to the industry governed broadcasting’ (p. 194). While it may be interesting, Narayan does not explain why. For Narayan, regulations represent the state’s reaction to the rapid maturation of the industry between 1990 and 2000. She does point out that the liberalization of the broadcasting market accompanied regulatory controls but does not sufficiently address this apparent paradox.
She introduces the reader to several relevant regulatory and policy milestones in India’s history, proceeding chronologically from the Chanda Committee Report in 1964 through the Broadcast Regulation Bill of 2007 (officially known as the Broadcasting Services Regulation Bill). Her discussion of the News Broadcasters Code of Ethics fails to mention that, as Narayan describes it, the Code is not about ethics of practice but rather about the freedom to broadcast channels’ desired content. Here again, she raises but does not interrogate a major point about the Indian media environment, that ‘the satellite channels are not subject to government regulation’ (p. 220). Fellow scholars should appreciate her for bringing these documents to the discussion, and the lack of critique provides room for future projects that might explain the connections between the effects of polices on the public and the broadcasters.
In sum, Narayan introduces two massive concepts – globalization and Indian media history – and promises to weave the two together. Unfortunately, she rarely makes connections between theory and practice, making abstractions out of both. The strength of the book is its collection of straightforward, though sometimes repetitive, presentations of milestones and statistics that describe the expansion of the Indian broadcasting market. She begins to discuss India’s place within South Asia towards the end of the book, noting that ‘India’s case is particularly complex because of is greater size, cultural and linguistic diversity, and strong secular and democratic traditions’ (p. 221). Future scholarship in this area should appreciate the work Narayan did, but India’s complexity requires further work to be more focused – more ‘glocal’.