1984: It is a television boom the like of which India has never seen. From the slopes of the Malabar Hills in Bombay, to lush green pastures near Meerut and the sprouting urban jungle of New Delhi’s Defence Colony, the fashionable New Alipore area of Calcutta and the trusted old Anna Salai Road of Madras, it is the same old spectacle of thousands of TV aerials sticking up in haughty silhouette.
The Indian channels are humming with cascading electromagnetic waves—some skimming along the earth, others ricocheting back from the two Bharatiya pies-in-the-sky hovering 26,000 km above the ground. Giant microwave towers have been set around the nation like stiff giants.
The TV commercial section never had it so good. The three daily Chitrahars, with three 10 minute slots on sale, are each fetching Rs. 2,000 per second.63
Then the authors return to reality, arguing that this futuristic ‘scenario is comic, conjectural, satirical, emphasizing the dark side of the millennium’. In their view, the ‘bumbledom of Doordarshan’ had so far only confirmed the ‘idiocy of its originators’; it had not ‘merely standardised mediocrity but institutionalized it’, mired as it was in a governmental ‘Rip Van Winkle slumber’. But the article was written because the authors had noted that Indian television now stood on the brink of what they called ‘the ‘Great Leap Forward’, ‘the biggest ever in Indian broadcasting’.64 They described the massive overhaul that Doordarshan was going through as it sought to create a nationwide network ahead of the Asian Games.
In order to understand the pivotal role of the Asiad in creating such a network, it is necessary to recount a short history of the medium in India. The next section outlines the contours of this story before returning to the Asiad and what it meant.
58 TV Sets: The Nehruvian Legacy
Independent India’s experience with television during 17 years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s stewardship was negligible. Although India did not inherit any television apparatus from the British on 15 August 1947, it did inherit a broadcasting structure in the form of All India Radio, with 14 radio stations, a developed bureaucracy and a colonial state’s mechanism for official censorship.65 Independent India followed the colonial practice of keeping broadcasting a preserve of the state, which fitted the larger Nehruvian idea of keeping the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy under state control. Except that, in this period, far from being a ‘commanding height’, broadcasting was barely a molehill.
The first television broadcasts were put together by All India Radio in September 1959. They were watched by ‘teleclubs’ organized around the 21 gifted television sets that were installed within a 25-km radius in Delhi.66 UNESCO chipped in with a gift of 50 television sets and the Ford Foundation helped fund the first formal educational telecasts for 250 schools around Delhi on selected days of the week.67 The initial broadcasts reveal the motivations of the programmers and their controllers: they were restricted to four subjects—road sense, food adulteration, care of public property and manners.68 It took another six years for a daily one-hour service to appear. This began in 1965 with help from the West German government and transmissions consisted of news bulletins in Hindi and agricultural programmes for farmers.69 Television continued to be run as an ad hoc division of All India Radio until 1976. Hemmed in by bureaucracy, and with no incentive for talent, programming, in the words of one observer, often ranged from the ‘staid to the downright ridiculous’. Bhaskar Ghose recalls seeing a song being telecast with only one image occupying the screen: a record playing on a gramophone.70 Of course there were some exceptions but more than anything else it was this image of a visual gramophone—’radio with pictures’—that typified television programming in its early years.
India’s television encounter of the 1960s remained a developmental exercise and a curiosity restricted only to a few bureaucrats, politicians and select localities in Delhi. For the rest of India, television simply did not exist. The lone transmission from Delhi operated on a weak signal and the state simply did not allow any infrastructure for the development of the industry. When Nehru died in 1964 the country had a grand total of 58 licensed TV sets.71 None of this reflects planned social intervention through broadcasting, and certainly no concern for entertainment. Nehru saw no reason for the commercial development of broadcasting and the disliked advertising, as his writings before independence reflect:
With all its splendid manifestations and real achievements, we have created a civilization which has something counterfeit about it. We eat ersatz food produced with the help of ersatz fertilizers; we indulge in ersatz emotions, and our human relations seldom go below the superficial plane. The advertiser is one of the symbols of our age with his continuous and raucous attempts to delude us and dull our powers of perception and induce us to buy unnecessary and even harmful products.72
The first Indian television factory opened in 1969 in Kanpur and, in an indication of the minuscule size of the existing market, produced 1,250 sets in its first year of manufacture.73 Broadcasting had largely been ignored and 10 years after independence fewer than one in five Indian villages, where 85 per cent of the population lived, had a radio.74 Private commercial broadcasting, and advertising, was illegal because broadcasting was expected to serve the state’s objectives—yet the state’s planners, Nehru’s influential circle at the Planning Commission, did not follow this strategy with any zeal. Not surprisingly, in a scathing report in 1966, the Chanda Committee blamed the poor state of television on a mindset that saw television as ‘an expensive luxury intended for the entertainment of the affluent society’ and one that could wait until the fulfillment of the larger blueprint for economic development.75 It is clear that on the highway of Nehruvian planning broadcasting was a distant outpost, far from the main route but considered strategic enough to warrant a permanent guard. The state’s busload of goodies, and it was a large busload, mostly bypassed it but stopped by occasionally with the promise of a regular fixture when the roads were better connected and streetlights had been put up.
Indira, ‘the televisionary’: The Lead-up to the Asiad
Television had been restricted to the Delhi area until as late as 1972 when a TV transmitter was set up in Bombay, followed by strategic transmitters in the border cities of Amritsar and Srinagar in 1973.76 This was still nowhere near a national presence and the first semblance of a symbolic India-wide network emerged only in the first year of the Emergency, with the setting up of new stations in Lucknow, Madras and Calcutta in 1975. With severe censorship imposed upon the print media, the Indira Gandhi government saw broadcasting as a crucial tool to direct public opinion.77
For a variety of reasons, Indira Gandhi understood the potential of television as a mass medium far more than any of her political contemporaries. In this context, Sevanti Ninan has noted an old joke about India’s first three prime ministers: ‘Nehru was a visionary, Lal Bahadur Shastri a revisionary and Indira Gandhi a televisionary’.78 Indira Gandhi kick-started the process that turned television into a mass-medium. One reason for this was her faith in development communication, goaded on by the visionary scientist Vikram Sarabhai. The Emergency was also the high point of experiments like SITE which sought to use the power of satellites and television for rural education.79 However, as one critic wrote just after the Emergency, ‘Mrs. Gandhi didn’t give it [television] much importance…until she discovered what a powerful weapon it could be both for offence and defence’.80 Mrs. Gandhi’s policies bear this out. As she turned Nehru’s lofty but flawed ideal of centralized planning81 into dogma, inserting ‘socialism’ into the constitution and unleashing a new brand of populist politics to successfully break the power of the Congress hierarchy, Mrs Gandhi saw the potential for using television as the state’s visual messenger. In essence, this was based on what has been called the hypodermic needle model, so dear to Soviet-style planners.82 Television was to be the syringe that would deliver the required medicine into society, the assumption being that it would be accepted unquestioningly by every host. Of course, communi
cation studies from the 1970s onwards have shown that television reception works in much more complex ways and that different people interpret the same messages differently based on their individual circumstances. 83
At the height of the Emergency in 1976, three important things happened: television was separated from All India Radio and put under a new entity called Doordarshan, though it remained under the control of the ministry of information and broadcasting; the government reduced excise duties on television sets, which encouraged local manufacture; and for the first time, advertising was allowed on television. All three measures spurred the expansion of television. The creation of Doordarshan meant the recognition of television as a separate medium from radio and the easing of duties led to a spurt in the production of television sets. From just one company producing 1,250 sets in 1969, India had progressed to 40 companies making a quarter of a million by 1977.84 All of these measures would come together in the lead-up to the Asiad when television was truly pushed into a giant leap forward.
To ‘Muster a National Will’: The Asiad and the Idiot Box
Television became a mass medium in India only during the 1980s. Three factors contributed to this: the creation of a national network of transmitters linked with satellite technology; Doordarshan’s commercialization and resultant focus on entertainment; and economic reforms that made television sets cheaper. The turning point for television was 1982. The New Delhi Asian Games are widely held to have been the trigger that unleashed its potential and the decisive leap was possible because a number of policies that had been initiated in the 1970s came to fruition at the crucial moment. The Asian Games was a stage for the government to showcase a shining India to itself and to the world and television was the medium. Appu, the elephant mascot of the Games, was also symbolic of the advancing, prosperous nation-state, but taking Appu to the drawing rooms of its citizens required a unified national service along with an enhanced level of technology to facilitate it. This capacity had to be created if India had to look good internationally and the Asian Games, therefore, became the catalyst for sprucing up television and stitching for it a brand new suit.
The first direct result of the Asian Games was the introduction of colour television and the creation of a ‘national’ service. As the host country, it was up to India to provide a live telecast of the Games to other participating countries and Doordarshan’s technical backwardness was painfully brought home. Doordarshan still operated in black and white and Vasant Sathe, minister for information and broadcasting, discovered to his horror that even tiny Sri Lanka had colour television. Many of the broadcasting organizations from the participating countries demanded colour feeds, and it would not do to appear backward. Despite stout resistance from the prime minister’s scientific advisors, who cited the traditional argument about India not being able to afford the luxury, the decision was taken to convert to colour transmission.85
The most significant milestone of 1982, though, was the introduction of what later came to be known as the National Programme, joining together previously unconnected television centres. Within the dominant ideology of the state, television had always been seen as an agent for political and cultural control but the development of the indigenous satellite programme in 1982, for the first time, provided a viable instrument to realize this vision. The launch of INSAT-1A, and later INSAT-1B, allowed the creation of the National Programme which was envisaged as a tool for uniting people and for developing an awareness of the ‘oneness of India’. The satellite system allowed a massive expansion of television through a gradual build-up of low power transmitters that could pick up television signals bounced off satellites. It freed Doordarshan from the complexity of starting a new programme production facility every time it set up a relay transmitter and it meant that every transmitter in the country could pick up the television signal from the centre in Delhi.
Symbolically, the ‘national’ colour transmissions and the National Programme commenced on Independence Day in 1982.86 The National Programme included news bulletins in Hindi and English along with current affairs programmes that were meant to take the nation-state, in all its splendour, directly to viewers. For the first time, all of India would see the same image at the same time and the Asian Games could be transmitted to every home across the country in glorious colour. The catalyst for the National Programme was the Asian Games and the official motivation behind it is revealing. It was aimed as much at the domestic audience as it was at the foreign. According to the government’s Asian Games Report, the main thrust of the TV programmes was:
To reassure the public, domestic and foreign, that the Games would take place on schedule…To stimulate interest and muster a National will, behind Asiad 82, and make the people realize that as hosts, both our national honour and prestige was involved.87
To muster the ‘national will’ so dear to Indira Gandhi’s government, for the first time in India, the Asian Games programming was telecast live to 41 stations nationwide. Of these, 27 were connected directly to Delhi via the indigenous satellite INSAT-1A 88 This is not to suggest that the unified National Programme would not have fructified without the Asiad. It is true, however, that the Games gave an almost war-like urgency to the effort that would otherwise have taken much longer. For instance, Doordarshan set up an Asian Games cell in early 1981. Its task was to provide comprehensive coverage of the Games to the Indian audience as well as to foreign TV organizations, either through direct relay via satellite or through recorded programming. It was upon its recommendations that the government leased a television transponder from INTELSAT that enabled the live coverage.89 No wonder the Asiad organizers boasted:
The Asian Games brought about more changes in the TV technology in India, than at any time since its inception. The smooth and excellent changeover to colour technology, during the Asian Games will always be a remarkable feat by Doordarshan, as also their contribution towards the generating of sports consciousness among the people, throughout the length and breadth of India.90
Part of the changes was the introduction of new equipment, new technology and new training to Doordarshan’s staffers. As Bhaskar Ghose, who later headed Doordarshan, noted: ‘Equipment poured in; squads of programme executives and engineers were sent for training and Doordarshan entered the age of modern television.’91
This was not without hiccups. For instance, the special underwater cameras necessary for the coverage of swimming events never arrived. Doordarshan’s producers, who had no prior training in sport coverage, had no choice but to innovate. Bhaskar Ghose, in his memoirs, recounts an incident in this regard that was to become a part of Doordarshan lore. A producer from Calcutta, Ananya Bannerjee, was in charge of the swimming coverage and all she had was a normal camera. So she laid a set of rails along the swimming pool on which a camera trolley could be pulled as the swimmers raced each other. It was the only way the swimming event could be covered but the sight of the rusty rail tracks alongside Delhi’s brand new swimming pool was ugly and Vasant Sathe was furious. According to Ghose, he ordered that the rails be removed immediately. The feisty Ms Bannerjee stood her ground. ‘I put them there,’ she retorted, ‘and they will stay there’. A nonplussed Sathe relented and though Ananya was later taken to task by her terrified superiors, her trolley on rails stayed and the coverage, it seems, ‘was pretty good’.92 With such improvisation and typical jugaad was the Asian Games covered. What the historian cannot afford to miss from this incident is the unusual similarity it bears with the technique used by Leni Reifenstahl in shooting Olympia during the 1936 Berlin Olympiad. Whether or not Ananya had seen or read about Olympia, the similarities lead us to surmise that she was well aware of the techniques used almost fifty years earlier.
The preparations for the Asiad gave Delhi’s television czars the technology to create the National Programme, thus starting a new era in Indian television. Not surprisingly, the reception of this programming never quite had the impact that was intended and varied greatly across reg
ions. The state controlled television but it was also a cultural arena where ideas circulated, often with unintended consequences.93 The National Programme created, for instance, a great deal of regional resentment in non-Hindi-speaking areas. Between 8.30 p.m. and 11 p.m. daily, all regional stations had to perforce link up to the National Programme from Delhi but the problem was that this programming was largely in Hindi. Bhaskar Ghose cites how the chief secretary of Tamil Nadu accused him of dividing the country and the chief minister of Karnataka sarcastically thanked him for reducing the load-shedding in his state as ‘all television sets were switched off after 8.30 p.m. as soon as the National Programme started’.94 As Table 8.2 shows, until then the limitations of technology had meant that the existing Doordarshan centres outside Delhi enjoyed virtual autonomy and freedom in local programming. They were government stations, but virtually independent of each other. Technology now allowed Delhi to take control and become predominant with its Hindi and English programming.
Table 8.2
Doordarshan Today
JULLUNDUR-AMRITSAR
8-02 p.m, Punjabi lok geet 6.15 Jhil mil tare 6.45 Kudrat de sab bande 7.00 5th World Cup Hockey 7.30 Assin tussin 8.00 News 8.20 Aur bhi gham hain zamane mein (Part VIII) 9.00 ‘Majama’ skit 10.00 Caravan
DELHI
2 p.m. Direct telecast of the 5th World Cup Hockey Tournament at Bombay 6 p.m. News in brief 6.02 Children’s programme 6.15 Nazrulgaan: Aparajita Ghosh 6.30 Nagar Nagarik 7 Krishi darshan 7.30 Pradeshikchitrahaar 8 Samachar 8.20 Aur bhi gham hai zamane mein — a serial play 8.50 A film on Martin Luther King 9.20 Apne hi desh mein 9.45 News 10.05 Patrika.
SRINAGAR
7 p.m. Butraat: Death anniversary of Lal Bahadur Shastri 7.30 Chhakri Ruff: Kashmiri folk music 7.45 Badhte qadam 7.15 Naqsho naghma 8.55 Khel aur khilari 9.25 Ab kya hai: a serial feature in Urdu.
Olympics-The India Story Page 25