The Televised Community. Culture, Politics, and the Market of Visual Representation in India [Elektronische Ressource] / Britta Ohm. Betreuer: Werner Schiffauer

Britta Ohm

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• Ethnologie

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• Publié par: europa-universitat_viadrina_frankfurt_-oder
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 23
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

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Britta Ohm



The Televised Community
Culture, Politics, and the Market of Visual Representation
in India









Dissertation, submitted 09.02.2007, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Chair for Comparative
Cultural and Social Anthropology, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany



1. Supervisor: Prof. Werner Schiffauer
2. Supervisor: PD Dr. Barbara Wolbert









TO ALEX
Acknowledgements

I have to thank a long list of people for making this study possible, many of whom I do not
even know by name but who have helped in everyday ways. I am particularly grateful to my
interview partners, the overwhelming part of which welcomed me open-heartedly in their
offices, workplaces and even beyond that in their private lives and was willing to share
sometimes hours with me despite work pressures and metropolitan hectic. It is they, even
though they do not all figure in the writing in a thoroughly affirmative way, on whose
readiness to talk this study basically rests.
Very special thanks go to my mother, Helga Ohm. Her uncompromising support, mentally
and materially, which she extended often despite inner quarrels with my increasing shift
towards a region of the world she has never visited (and, supposedly, will not any more), gave
me a lot of confidence and enabled me to pre-finance parts of my research and to afford extras
that my work - and my soul - sometimes badly required. (Almost) the same accounts for my
godmother, Maria-Theresia Piechotta.
I am grateful to my supervisors Werner Schiffauer, for teaching me what anthropology can
be, and, especially, Barbara Wolbert, for her unrelenting mental and practical encouragement.
I thank the sarai media initiative in Delhi for technical and infrastructural support and many
good conversations and am indebted to Debatri Das, Susanne Gupta, Samina Mishra,
Umakant, Chinmaya Khatri, Vinay Choudhary, Parvati Balagopalan and Klaus Voll for
making my times in India enjoyable and for making me always look forward to coming back.
I thank Ina Kerner for going all the way with me, Barbara Christophe, Nicole Wolf, Julia
Eckert, Nadja-Christina Schneider, Sophia Bech, Rita Panesar, Giti Thadani and the
Colloquium of the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Viadrina-
University Frankfurt/Oder for various debates of ideas and for providing valuable inputs to
the manuscript at different stages. Needless to say that all mistakes and errors in the present
text are solely mine. I am grateful to Christiane Brosius and my students in the seminar “The
Changing Cultures of Television in South Asia” at the Institute for South Asian Studies,
University of Heidelberg, for their curiosity and interest that helped me to look at some of my
fieldwork material I presented to them with different eyes. I thank Christiane Kerlen, Martin
Saar, Ulf Maaßen, Matthias Bertsch and Philip Krippendorff for their enduring friendship
despite my long mental and physical absences – and, in the case of Martin, despite my
increasing presence – and Felicity Nicholson for many relaxing and inspiring conversations about India and the world. Most of all, however, I thank Alex Nicholson for still being with
me. He could not have chosen a more difficult time to meet me.
The research for this study was financed by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Berlin, and I
received generous funding from the “Programm zur Förderung von Frauen in Forschung und
Lehre” (Programme for the Promotion of Women in Research and Teaching) at the Humboldt
University, Berlin, whose discontinuation will mean one institution less amongst the very few
that resist bureaucratic strangleholds and academic vanities and put the interest and need of
the scholar first.



Contents

1. Introduction 1

Part I

2. Re-Inventing the Nation and its Medium 10
2.1. Difference Instead of Distinction: The Nation-State in Appadurai
and the Subaltern Studies Group 17
2.2. The Anthropologicalisation of the Subaltern 26
2.3. The Local and the Global: Visions of Salvation in Nandy
and Appadurai 33
2.4. Whither the Nation-State? 42
2.5. The Location of Television 45
2.5.1. In the Trap of Teleology 46
2.5.2. Twins of the Modern: Television and the Nation 49
2.5.3. In the Throes of the Nation 54
2.5.4. The Transnational and the Global 61

3. The Limits of Transnationalism and the Limits of Resistance 63
3.1. De-Ideologising the Medium: Transnational Companies and
the ‘Cultural Turn’ 69
3.2. The Defensive, the Absentee and the Complicit State 76
3.3. The Wave of Indian Television and the Difficulties in Getting to the Shore 88
3.4. De-Ideologising the Message: The Nation of Numbers 100
3.5. Moral Panic in the Making: The Nation of Values 106

4. The ‘Split Public’ Revisited: The Trajectory from ‘English’ to ‘Hindi’ 115
4.1. The Freedom of Imprisonment on a Hinglish Island 121
4.2. Prepositions of ‘Culture’: Education Denied and Training Disabled 128
4.3. Terminating Hybridity: From the Elite to ‘The People’ 140
4.4. Aaj Tak: The Upward Mobility of ‘Hindi Hindi’ 145 Part II

5. The Ethnographic Moment: Arriving at “Gujarat” 155
5.1. Time and the Vanishing Other 155
5.2. Not Just Another Riot: Why Gujarat was Different 169
5.3. The Economical and the Ideological 175
5.3.1. Contained by the Global: Bombay 1993 176
5.3.2. Contained by the Local: Gujarat 2002 183
5.3.3. Taking Sides 198

6. The Media and Its (Unravelling) Public 201
6.1. The Inability to Mourn and the Unwillingness to Resist 202
6.2. Democracy Deadlocked: The Sangh Parivar’s Dominant Discourse of Defense 213
6.2.1. Polarisation Organised and Equalisation Demanded 219
6.3. In Medias Res: The Power of Impotency 233
6.3.1. Impartial Media in a Partial State 237
6.3.2. Variations of Distance: Cultural Reproduction and Political Exposure 245


Part III

7. From the Society of Discipline Towards the Society of Control 260
7.1. The Visual and the Commercial 262
7.2. The Battle of Images and People’s Television 269
7.3. Entertaining Hindutva 285

8. The Waves of Hindutva and the Victory of Television 298
8.1. De-Ideologising the Image: The Educational and the Commercial 302
8.2. Closing the Circle: From the Mythological to the K-formula 310
8.3. Manufacturing Success: The Tandem of the K-formula 320
8.3.1. A Crore for ‘Indian Ethnic Knowledge’: From Bachchan-the-Hero
to Bachchan-the-Host 321
8.3.2. Life According to the Soap 332
Conclusion 350

Bibliography 356
Glossary 376
List of Abbreviations and Organisations 380
Appendix: Ownership of Broadcasters and Chronology of their Appearance in India 382

1. Introduction

This book was not meant to be a study on Hindu nationalism and television in India, at least
not to the degree it has turned out to be. It was meant to be a study on the negotiation of the
nation-state in a transnationalised and privatised television landscape. Seeing television not as
a distinct field but taking it as an intrinsic part of contemporary society and thus as a form of
looking at and understanding its processes, it aimed at attempting an anthropology of the
nation’s cultural and political production in a transnationalised and globalised context.
To a large extent, this is what it has become. The vagaries of fieldwork, however, always
entail the aspect of incalculability as they catapult the researcher, however well prepared he or
she might be, into a particular historical moment in time of the society he or she travels to.
This general aspect of the momentary was in my case anyway enhanced by the inherently
ephemeral character of the television image that I was directly dependent on (in the very
practical sense of spending many of my hours in front of the TV). But it became even more
intensified by accidentally starting my work at the very moment (in late February 2002) of the
outbreak of fierce violence in the West Indian state of Gujarat, whose government – like that
of the Indian state government – was constituted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the
parliamentarian affiliate of the Sangh Parivar (the ‘family’ of Hindu nationalist
organisations). The violence quickly turned out to represent the most thoroughly state
orchestrated and most enc