Television and participatory culture in India

Indian television has achieved a certain height of interactivity,

participation and mobilization through the genres of Reality TV and
news.
Abhijit Roy’s essay focuses on the many legacies of the current phase of
participatory culture around Reality TV launched with Kaun Banega
Crorepati (KBC) in 2000. He zeroes in ‘participatory culture’ and broad
forms of publicness and collectivity around mass media, radio, and
television to be precise, from the 1950s to the 1990s.
Abhijit Roy reflects and thinks of a ‘pre-history’ of the current form of
participatory culture around Indian television, noting the continuities and
ruptures that enable us to historicize forms of publicness in the 21st
century.
His first project is probing the under-researched forms of participation in
the era of exclusive dominance of state-controlled radio and TV. Print
media deliberated on civic issues through ‘letters to the editor’ (and
occasionally participation in ‘contests’), and the radio used to primarily
invite participation through song-request programmes. James W. Carey
once called ‘transmission view of communication’, being an apparatus
that either discouraged or tried to control participation.
Microcosms of the public manifest in small physical assemblies have
always been created around portable media like the transistor and the
newspaper. The home-centric sets like the electric radio, the ‘record
player’ and, later, the television, also, had the capability of bringing the
neighbourhood and acquaintances together, especially when access to
such media was not widespread. This surely was not a ‘participatory’
public but one that was, at least partly, mobilized by a particular
medium, in the form of small listening/viewing/reading and discussing
communities.
Abhijit Roy understands a type of public by beginning to historicize
participatory culture from a vantage point ----
Abhijit Roy explores the correspondence the contingent little
communities who formed little popular assemblies with radio or
television at their centre, had to structures of already existing
communities. While the newspaper’s usual constituency was the public
space where strangers could (and continue to) easily come in close
contact with each other, radio tended to draw a community of
acquaintance around, with lesser chance of encountering a stranger, be
the gathering at home or outside. The ‘passerby’ however was always a
possibility. Television-at home was distinct from newspaper and radio in
largely preventing the possibility of accommodating strangers or
passerby.
Radio and television were unique in relegating the erstwhile primacy of
communitarian reception of popular entertainment to privatized
consumption. They remain primarily responsible for expanding the
semantics of community/public leisure in which, the element of ‘going
out for the speciality of a spectacle’ constantly negotiates the new
lexicon of ‘entertainment’, the ever-presence of a domestic flow of
sound and images. The larger community of the nationwide watching
public, however, always intrudes as a rule through the apparatus itself,
generating a peculiar space of ‘privatized public’. Television particularly
has given rise to a new home, a site that is torn between a sense of threat
to its property and peace, and a sense of security, an intensification of
the boundary of home underlined by the ‘distance’ of reception. The
impression that is created in any act of watching TV is not exactly of
‘being at home’ but possibly of ‘being in one of the homes’. The home
and the familial space here harbour a certain order of porosity and
ephemerality. The order of communitarian engagement, hence, is not
completely lost from television. In a way the gatherings around media,
in its early form and present incarnations (for instance, collective
watching of a high-power football or cricket match in spaces from malls,
multiplexes and restaurants to local clubs) bear with them a concoction
of the traditional communitarian assemblies and the nation-wide
‘coming together’ of people across a live network. The rise of
participatory culture and the power of the network have not weakened
the corporeal experience of the territorial community but may have
subjected the local physical assemblies to enter into an inter-constitutive
relationship with the emerging virtualities shaping the public.
It was through the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)
that the state in 1975–76 tried to involve residents of nearly 2,500
villages in North India, giving each village a television set around which
the villagers were expected to assemble. But it was not ‘participation’
per se since the villagers were conceived merely as viewers with no
active role to play in this grand design of the state. SITE couldn’t excite
much the villagers who were groomed for ages with communitarian
engagement around local ‘entertaining’ performances, an audiovisual
configuration of a different order.
Abhijit Roy suggested that the demise of the form of ‘discrete
programming’ (the modern realist mode of documentary-style
representation) and the simultaneous rise of the flow form on Indian
television, a process gaining impetus between 1982 and 1991, did
create a space for mass identification with television and therefore
participatory culture around it. The argument suggests that the
form of ‘flow’ (originally proposed by Raymond Williams) that was
discontinuous, rupturous and open-ended, also inseparably
connected to consumerism, could generate tropes of identification in
the relatively non-modern subject because of the form’s
correspondence with the popular performative traditions in India.
The first major instance of a ‘network’ of participation emerged around
Binaca Geetmala, a radio programme and ‘Vividh Bharati’, the radio
station. Binaca Geetmala started airing on Radio Ceylon in 1952, shifted
to Vividh Bharati in 1989 and continued till 1994, having taken various
names in its career, Cibaca Sangeetmala, Cibaca Geetmala and Colgate
Cibaca Sangeetmala. The participatory culture around radio, with
American entrepreneur (Dan Molina), cross-cultural broadcast signal
(Beamed from Ceylon), commercial multinational sponsors (Swiss
companies from CIBA to Ovaltine), competition and ‘hit parade’
formats – all of Radio Ceylon seem to be resonating with the
consumerist televisual culture in post-Liberalization India. A certain
form of simple comprehensible Hindi on television that has helped
create a pan-Indian audience post-1982 may also have been popularized
for the first time by Hindi film songs in the 1950s. there is a role of
Hindi film songs in popularizing ‘Hindustani’ that was ‘open,
colloquial’ and also ‘not sanskritized, nor does it have too many difficult
Persian or Arabic words’.
The continuities and ruptures therefore are to be sought in a larger
history of the audience that has moved from one register to another at
various levels: space (from territorial gatherings to networks), identity
(from tactile acquaintances to anonymity), geography (from local to the
national and the global), medium (from radio to television and the
internet), behaviour (from consumption to participation), technology
(from terrestrial transmission and single medium to satellite
communication and convergence), genre (from music to Reality TV and
news) and of course the larger social registers (from state controlled to
privately owned media, for instance) difficult to exhaustively list here.
Participation on doordarshan
Doordarshan never tried to invite much audience participation through
the 1960s and the 1970s. All it tried to create at most was a ‘national
audience’ through either development programming or its idea of
‘entertainment’ later through programmes like Chitrahaar.
Doordarshan drastically re-fashioned itself to fit into the post-1991
environment of competition and entertainment-programming marked by
the presence of several privately owned satellite channels.
The greatest instance of Doordarshan’s commercial reach-out drive was
DD-Metro (introduced in 1984 as DD 2 and changed to DD Metro in
1993), focusing on greater number of Hindi Films, advertisement and
entertainment. It was on DD Metro that Superhit Muqabla, a countdown
show of popular Hindi film numbers based on audience poll like Binaca
Geetmala, generated a significant amount of audience participation.
Hindi film once again came to play the role of a crucial unifying force
behind participatory culture. Superhit Muqabla presented top 10 songs
of the week based on audience response that came in huge numbers in
the form of postcards. Many such countdown shows, though none
becoming as popular as Superhit Muqabla, appeared on television
subsequently.
The flagship ‘interactive’ show of Doordarshan, recording the highest
audience participation on Indian television for quite some time was
Surabhi (1993–2001). The show reportedly received over 1.4 million
postcards in a single week for the programme’s weekly quiz open for
participation. A special category called ‘Competition Postcard’ was
devised by the Indian postal department for writing to the programme.
The many gazes of the different classes, cultures and identities, from
which the abstraction of ‘Indian culture’ could be looked at and
negotiated, were now consolidated into a grand representable level of
‘Indian public’. The pile of postcards and other empirical
representations amounted to a sort of statisticization of publicness,
capable of producing a convincing sense of ‘Indian public’ and
‘Indian culture’ through the responses from a sample section of the
public. It is interesting to note that such samples, in their many
incarnations, were largely occupied by the emergent middle class of
the country. Varied territorialized gazes were now appropriated by
the gaze of an emergent new middle class, which enjoyed certain
privilege of being not only the voice of the nation but also possibly
the only class that could imagine itself as a community of
consumers. The Indian state possibly acknowledged the exclusivity
of this community by making the price of the ‘competition postcard’
INR 2, as opposed to 15 paisa, the price of the usual postcard.
Surabhi presented little communities and cultures, through its very
own rhetoric of tourism, ethnography, adventure, art appreciation,
leisure and lifestyle. The idea of ‘media’ as staging people’s interest
and participation still needed public enterprises like Doordarshan
and the Indian postal department, but notably couldn’t surface at
all without the agents of emerging commercialization (private
producer, corporate sponsors).
A key constituency of the urban middle class ideas of civility,
aesthetics and patriotism that Surabhi propagated was formal
education, which till then could not be aligned to consumerist
reception through Doordarshan slots like the ‘Countrywide
Classroom’. Attaching the values of education to consumer culture
in fact started a bit earlier, in the phase of Doordarshan’s new-
found commercialism after the 1982 Asian Games, through
particularly quiz programmes like Quiz Time. Starting in 1985, this
English-language programme was pioneer in giving a new lease of
life to quizzing as a culture in India from the mid-1980s with quiz
competitions becoming popular in schools, colleges and almost every
street corner functions. More than the quiz programmes per se,
‘quiz’ as an easy way to involve people by offering reward for
answering questions became the most common way for getting the
audience to interact, write letters, come to studio and grow as
consumers with the growing business of Bournvita ‘growth’ drink
or Cadbury chocolates. This was true for many other kinds of
programmes, from what was to soon emerge as Reality TV like
Kaun Banega Crorepati (produced notably by the same Siddharth
Basu, the host and maker of Quiz time) to numerous game shows,
talk shows and even soaps. It was common practice in the serials of
the 1990s to ask questions at the end of episodes and offer prizes for
the right answer. Questions asked in the conventional quizzing mode
of ‘which’ ‘when’ and ‘who’ fitted well into the emerging structure
of segmentation on television. Increase in segmentation had a toll
both on the length of argumentation and hence argumentation itself,
and the attention span of the television viewer itself got considerably
short simultaneously. In general, television content started to get
informatized from this point of time, with ‘knowledge’ becoming
synonymous with ‘information’, street-smartness and the promise of
inclusion into the world of new consumption.
Participation on private channels
From the vantage points of statisticization, informatization,
consumption and participation, Abhijit Roy explores some major
trends of participatory culture on private television. The same
trends also continued on Doordarshan but it was the private
channels that primarily emitted the appeals of a new relationship
between participation and consumerism. Participatory culture
requiring the intervention of state agencies had to decline after a
point of time, as the values of the state, public good and welfare
were to a large extent appropriated by the emergent forms of
private media. A great example of such appropriation was the legal-
juridical acknowledgement of the dissolution of the state’s right to
be the exclusive custodian of public good and of ‘public property’
like the airwaves.
i) Carrying the legacy of Quiz Time in many ways, Cadbury
Bournvita Quiz Contest (CBQC), a quiz contest for school
students, started in 1994 on Zee TV. Originally held live in
cities across the country since 1972, CBQC became a radio
show and then shifted to television in 1994. The show shifted
from Zee to Sony Entertainment Television in 2001,
continued till 2005 and came back on the Colours channel in
2011. CBQC’s comeback in 2011, due to a huge campaign of
its fans on social media, has made it the most popular and
the longest running quiz show on Indian television. The
show reportedly reached over 11,25,000 students in 4,000
schools across 66 cities in the country by 2005 when it closed
(Hemrajani 2011). Reaching beyond India (the UAE,
Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, Nepal and Sri Lanka) and
in numerous quiz events at schools and companies, the show,
hosted by Derek O’Brien, has been synonymous with
popular quizzing in India in the post-Liberalization India.7
The career of this programme could be an important
testimony of how popular quizzing, brand promotion
around ‘education’ and knowledge, and a corresponding
participatory culture dominated by the young consumers
 have evolved from the early days of liberalization to the
present.
ii) The historical role of Hindi film songs in emitting a sense of
nationwide connectedness found a major place in private
channels as well. Singing competition programmes like
Close-Up Antakshari (CUA) were full of nostalgic numbers
evoking the memory of 1950–70s. Starting in 1993 on Zee
TV, CUA was somewhat symptomatic of the new-age
television’s compulsive drive worldwide towards subsuming
age-old traditions into structures of informatization and
consumption. Antakshari is a traditional game played at
homes and on social occasions in the Indian sub-continent in
which each contestant sings the first verse of a song that
begins with the letter on which the previous contestant’s
song ended. But more than rendering a whole song, the
competence demanded by this game is sharp memory of the
first few lines of a song. The song-as-information was a
perfect fit into a popular culture that celebrated
informatization, consumerism and of course film songs.
iii) The new entertainment was a peculiar mélange of work and
‘time pass’, a phrase that is often used by local train
hawkers selling peanuts to passengers. While ‘work’
involves cerebral investment required for answering
questions and earning ‘fabulous gifts’, time pass refers to
enjoyment of idleness, either as choice or under compulsion.
The title song of CUA had these lines Baithe, baithe, kya
karein? Karna hai kuch kaam/Shuru karo antakshri, leke
prabhu ka naam, meaning ‘What do we do sitting idle? We
need to do some work/Let’s start playing Antakshari, with
blessings of the Almighty’. The two categories also operate
in the very act of watching television. We are referring to an
era when time pass is no more voluntary or optional; it
rather is a compulsive drive, a work without which one
cannot keep updated and socialize, one cannot live, so to say.
We are looking into ‘informatization’ as a symptom of such
convergence of work and leisure, information and
entertainment. Notably, the 1990s was undergoing an
‘information revolution’ and was at the doorstep of an
imminent boom in information technology, a sector that
embodied the promise of a new India. CUA had participants
from all walks of life. A list provided by a fan goes like this:
Navy, Army, Air force, postmen, engineers, doctors,
firemen, singers, cricketers, film and TV actors and disabled
people. Shows were held in Dubai, Sharjah, London, New
York, Pakistan. As a whole CUA from 1993 signalled every
single feature of what was to be Reality TV proper in the
next decade: Huge audience participation from India and
the diasporic community, continuing currency of the film
song, appropriation of tradition into contemporary
frameworks of consumption and informatics, convergence of
leisure and work, and as a whole signalled the coming into
being of what Gupta calls ‘a television society’. Gupta, after
completing a massive sample survey of the television
audience in West Bengal in 1998, commented:
From the results of the survey, one of the general observations
that may be offered is that the entire phenomenon of watching
television is ultimately linked to the social aspirations and
changes that modernity is bringing into Indian society. While
there is a sense of guilt associated with the act of watching
television, the viewers seem to be using television programmes
 to redefine their lifestyles in various ways. Indian society is
becoming a television society in more than one sense.
iv) Informatization, as a process of creating a set of simple
challenges for getting the audience to participate, proliferated
out of quiz programmes to suffuse into almost every televisual
genre. A good example where consumerism and informatization
were almost graphically realized to attract considerable
audience participation was a programme called Tol Mol Ke Bol
(‘Tell Us The Right Price’, Zee TV). Tol Mol Ke Bol had a
studio audience tightly packed into rows of seats waiting for the
host to enter. The host enters, runs up to the stage and calls for
some names, which are written on small pieces of paper kept in
a bowl. He picks two chits up and calls those selected from the
audience. The participants have to guess the exact price of a
product. In Double Trouble (Zee TV), if one could not answer a
question, one had to go for a physical round (‘climb up the rope-
ladder and come back within 20 seconds’) and was eliminated
in case of a failure (see Roy 1999: 17–18).
v) Game shows testing the individual’s grasp of information
and physical ability had markedly increased in the
immediate aftermath of the 1991 liberalization.
Corresponding focus on the psychological interiority of the
participants started generating a great degree of affect in
these programmes. Stories of individual virtues and vices,
moral integrity and turpitude, competence of the body and
the mind lent certain elements of melodrama to all that was
shown on TV. The social, in this scheme of things, appeared
to be an effect of the personal and the moral. Beyond the
capitalist trait of portraying the individual as the driver of
the grand narrative of history, what television of the new era
 demonstrated was a playful engagement with life and world
in general. And such playfulness had mainly to do with one’s
luck. Capability alone doesn’t bring one success; one has to
be ‘lucky’ enough to be the winner of prizes in the lucky
draws. Betting was found in programmes like Double-O-Slip
(Sony TV), Joh Winner Wohi Sikander (‘Whoever Wins is
the King’, Sony TV) and the ‘Surf Wheel of Fortune’ (Sony
TV). The neo-liberal undermining of social construction and
historical agency of the individual in the times immediately
after the liberalization may also be taken as neo-conservative
reactions to the radical 1960s and the 1970s. Astrology, vaastu,
feng shui and other such vocations in the ‘luck industry’ seemed
to get a new lease of life due to liberalization’s opening up of
new technologies of circulation like internet, mobile
convergence and interactive promotional TV. As a whole,
television in the 1990s became the most significant
demonstrator of the discourses of personal ability and luck, two
ideas key to the sustenance of the ‘world view’ that drives
consumer culture.
vi) There were some programmes like Purush Kshetra (‘The Male
World’, Zee TV) with a fair degree of what is popularly known
as ‘social’ content, involving the common people and presenting
starkly ‘real’ problems and unpleasant issues. Patriarchy was the
key object of critique here, with strong focus on personal
agonies and struggle. Popular factual entertainment in the form
of talk shows started occupying a large space in Indian
television from this time where many issues not brought to the
domain of popular culture till then, were discussed openly.
While one should definitely look at these programmes as
exploring the new found possibilities of spreading awareness
 about certain social issues and questioning traditional social
outlook, one shouldn’t ignore in analysis a certain economy of
such exploration. Not all issues can be touched; the foundational
class-questions can never be addressed in the manner practices
like dowry or even patriarchy can be subjected to critique; the
boundary of activism seems to be greatly defined by only those
issues that the state considers as ‘problems’. Popular activist
television has always focused on issues about which there is a
fair degree of consensus between a majority and the state. This
is precisely the reason why a Satyamev Jayate can never
accommodate a discussion on the Armed Forces Special Powers
Act (AFSPA), 1958, that empowers the state to violate human
rights in places like Manipur. It is right to acknowledge the
contribution of such programmes towards spreading awareness.
But wrong would be not to analyse the ways such programmes
work within a horizon of possibility that the mainstream culture
offers as natural, given and irreversible. It would also be wrong
not to assume that ‘spreading awareness’ that such programmes
are worth can only happen under the condition of a perfect
liaison between the media, the state and corporate India, a
liaison that promotes ‘silence’ about many non-mainstream
issues.

Indigenization of the global: a key condition for participatory

culture
A major condition of possibility for Reality TV and participatory
culture in India was the transnational character of channels,
programming and formats, and certain practice of ‘indigenization’
(crucial for ‘identification’ to generate) that flourished in the 1990s.
The process of indigenization was first signalled when the STAR
started to produce programmes in India and transformed STAR
Plus to a Hindi-language channel. Prasad aptly summarized the
connection established in the 1990s between indigenization and
globalization:
The ‘indigenisation’ of transnational channels . . . provides an
interesting instance of the dialectic of globalization versus national
identity . . . Given the way it is developing STAR is definitely a
candidate for the kind of quasi-state television status that the
networks (ABC, NBC and CBS) enjoy in America. Other channels
that cannot indigenize content, like Discovery, are offering their
programs in Hindi. MTV, following Channel V’s example, is airing
more Indian Music Shows and looking for local VJ talent. It would
seem from all these instances that indigenization is the only path to
globalisation.
Looking at indigenization as a broader category beyond language, as a
process of re-fashioning the emergent global values to appeal to
national, regional and local identities, examples could be drawn from
many trends in the 1990s, the most significant was the TV commercial.
It is important to remember that ‘indigenization’ could not be a simple
process of merely ‘fitting into’ any stable and straight-jacketed notion of
‘India’, but had to assume an ‘Indianness’ that was always multiple and
in flux. Along with adopting wholeheartedly the global consumerist
tenor, the new commercials made it a point to project a successful and
self-sufficient India. BPL-Sanyo commercials, which counted on the
celebrity status of the film star-turnedentrepreneur Amitabh Bachchan,
tried to counter the effect of the entry of the transnational brands like
Sony, Akai and Panasonic in the Indian market by posing Amitabh
Bachchan in front of international landmarks in London and Paris.
Bachchan said in one of the commercials ‘kahte hain international naam
ho to sab chalta hain’ (‘people say any “international” name sells’) and
the commercial ended with BPL’s logo and the catch line ‘Believe in
yourself’. This was clearly an indication of a double take on
‘international’ brands that the Indian entrepreneur harboured at this point
of time in the face of global challenges. The statement made by
Bachchan may mean that the international brands have earned a name
because of their quality or it may also mean that they are mere names,
without much substance for us, to be transformed into something
substantially Indian. Whatever may be the case here (I think both of
these levels simultaneously play here), the key point at both of these
levels is that the consumer wants something of international quality or
name. But this was not enough. Time had come to ‘believe’ that an
Indian brand could achieve such international standard and infuse Indian
quality in international names. In both of these cases, trying to innovate
the distinctly Indian or an Indian product of international standard, the
Indian and the international seem to be located at a distance from each
other, each struggling to fit into the other’s context.
He argues that a look at the history of participatory entertainment
programming on Indian television, the former tendency (effort to present
the ‘truly Indian’) flourished in the early period of India’s liberalization,
but largely waned in the new millennium to pave the way for
indigenization. The preponderance of indigenous formats from the
cultural magazine programme Surabhi to singing competitions like
Close Up Antakshari and TVS Saregama to dance competitions like
Boogie Woogie, all signalled in the 1990s certain effort to locate ‘India’
amidst a popular notion of globalization that largely meant
‘Westernization’. Something like a ‘global standard’ was always
working as an aspiration at the back of each of such programmes. Such
‘Indian’ drives to engage with the global is what AR suggests acted as a
major condition for the ‘indigenization’ that we are witnessing in an
Indian Idol or KBC where the global and the local don’t show distinct
signs of struggle but have achieved a relatively coherent bond. The
popular sense of the ‘Indian’ now seems to have greatly appropriated the
global as a condition and a value.
In both of these forms of negotiation – engaging the familiar signifiers
of ‘Indian popular’ to take the lead in hybrid formations (being the
major trend in the 1990s) or transforming this hybridity into a sense of
wholeness where the Indian and the Global become inter-constitutive –
the idea of what constitutes the ‘Indian’ (way of living, values, morality)
continues to be hegemonic in many senses. Stark display of ethnicity
started looking unfashionable in the new terrain of national identity
already in the 1990s. In one of the Ortem fan commercials, men from
different states in India (Bengal, Punjab and many others) pronounced
‘ortem’ in the accent of their respective provincial vernaculars. A
teenaged girl, who looked Indian but whose ethnic identity was not
made discernible, appeared every time to say ‘no’ to them. At last a
handsome, jeans-clad young man, whose provincial origin could not be
figured as well, appeared with what was the familiar Indian way of
sophisticated English pronunciation and then the girl said ‘yes’. The
commercial suggested that in order to be an ‘Indian’ one had to amply
conceal one’s ethnic identity. This may not have been the notion of
Indianness in all spheres, but in the sphere of the consumerist popular
which the average Indian aspired to be part of in the 1990s, globally
conditioned nationality and citizenship started emerging as a new value.
Without the history of such indigenization where the global remained a
condition, Reality TV formats wouldn’t have been successful in India
and anywhere in the world. Such a popular took some time to move
from the abstraction of a ‘national popular’ to the many ethnicities and
localities that too, after a point of time, started emitting the charge of the
global. The exploration of small towns and remote corners of India by
capital and media would be much more evident in the programming of
the new millennium.
It is all very well that we look at participatory programming typified
by post-2000 Reality TV as a break from televisual traditions in
India, since a great deal of innovations and novelty can be marked
at the turn of the century in efforts to involve the audience.
locating such programming within a larger historical context would
give us a truncated view of conditions that made possible the 21st
century brand of participatory culture, marked by certain
capability of a network of consumer-audience to mobilize itself as a
public.
If television was the most significant agent behind the creation of a
pan-Indian network in the 1980s and 1990s, by the turn of the
century it was convergence of a host of networking technologies
from television and the internet to mobile phones and social media
that helped reconfiguration of such network. Such developments
have not essentially marked the dissolution of the agency of the state
but the rise of Media, in the singularized popular sense of a super-
visioning, ‘never-to-be-objectified’ and benevolent institution, that
claims to represent the ideals of both the state and market and thus
to represent the public at large more aptly than any other
institution. The public in turn, using the media and the networking
technologies, tends to emerge as a relatively autonomous institution,
representing the ‘collective conscience of the society’.