Olympics-The India Story

by Boria Majumdar

  From 1982, the expansion of the television network became a key governmental priority. Doordarshan’s budget, for instance, swelled from Rs 5 crore in 1980–81 to Rs 14 crore in 1982–83.95 The expansion drive thereafter continued like a juggernaut. To cite one example, between July and October 1984, practically one transmitter a day was commissioned.96 India had only 18 TV transmitters in 1980. By 1985 this number had increased to 172 and more than 500 transmitters were functioning by the end of the decade.97 The planned penetration was accompanied by an expansion of viewership as well. India had a little over 2 million TV sets in 1982. It had taken two decades to reach that figure but it is from the Asiad onwards that we see the makings of a mass medium. By 1986, 3 million TV sets were being produced in India, including 7 lakh colour sets98 and by 1992, 34 million Indians owned TV sets.99 By the end of the decade, television had turned into a mass medium with a nationwide penetration.

  This process was also helped by a broader attempt within the government to undo the failures of the ‘licence-permit raj’ and Indira Gandhi’s pro-business policy turn between 1980 and 1984. As part of this change, duties on import of colour television sets had been reduced in 1982 and those on electronic imports were also relaxed. The bureaucratic state was not dismantled but steel and cement prices were decontrolled, manufactured imports were liberalized and controls on entry and expansion by national firms in certain sectors were eased. This was an early phase of economic liberalization. Mrs Gandhi’s critics characterized it as a ‘rightwards’ turn while her advisers called it ‘pragmatic’.100

  Rajiv Gandhi tried to make an explicit break with the past in 1985 with the open enunciation of a new economic policy and the first liberalizing budget of this early phase of opening up. The 1985 budget included measures for liberalization of import restrictions, especially in electronics.101 This made television sets cheaper and, spurred on by the increasing penetration of Doordarshan’s transmitters, sales shot up.

  Television’s exponential expansion in the 1980s was also fuelled by, and synonymous with, its commercialization. Until the late 1970s, television was an enterprise of, by, and for the socialist state but advertising became capitalism’s Trojan horse into this system. Entertainment programming was introduced in tandem with national programming in the early 1980s and it rode on the back of two related developments: the advent of commercials and the out-sourcing of programmes to independent producers. The creation of a ‘national’ network became a magnet for advertisers because it opened up the possibility of constructing a ‘national’ market. It changed the very nature of Doordarshan and fuelled the massive expansion of television in the 1980s. It is significant that advertising before the Asiad initially had little immediate impact. In its first year, 1976–77, Doordarshan made less than one per cent of its annual budget from advertising.102 The reason for this initial lukewarm response by private industry lay in the limited reach of Doordarshan at the time. Television penetration was very low and because there was no unified ‘national’ broadcast, there was no ‘national’ market for advertisers to target. The handful of TV stations that existed were not connected to each other. In the absence of powerful transmitters and satellite technology, each local station produced its own programming, predominantly in its own regional language, and practically functioned as an autonomous government unit. The Asiad and national programming changed all that.

  Encouraged by the phenomenal success of Hum Log, which also became a vehicle for turning its sponsor Nestle’s Maggi noodles into a highly successful brand, a number of companies rushed in to sponsor a slew of popular television serials—Buniyaad, Ramayan, Mahabharat, Khandan, Nukkad and Chanakya—as telecast fees and commercial airtime rates got higher and higher.103 A look at Doordarshan’s advertising revenue from 1977 to 1994 in Fig. 8.1 illustrates the fast pace of advertising growth. Between 1980–81 and 1990–91, the revenue increased a whopping 31 times, from Rs 80.8 million to Rs 2.53 billion. At the start of the decade this had seemed an unlikely possibility. Doordarshan’s revenue of Rs 7.7 million in its first year, 1976–77, had been less than one per cent of its annual budget. By 1990, Doordarshan’s advertising revenue constituted about 70 per cent of its annual expenditure.104

  Fig. 8.1: Doordarshan Gross Advertising Revenues (Rs million)105

  The focus of this advertising was on ‘exploding new middle classes’; television, in the eyes of the advertisers, enabled their transformation into consumers. One of the classic studies of Indian advertising, William Mazarella’s Shoveling Smoke, documents how advertisers and marketers certainly saw television as the one crucial factor that led to the creation of a new, consuming middle class in the 1980s, as opposed to traditional notions of saving and hoarding money. In the words of one marketer, the new commodity images on television opened up for millions ‘whole new worlds which they never knew existed’.106 Mohammad Khan, who in a four-decade career in advertising, set up three cutting edge advertising agencies— Rediffusion, Contract and Enterprise—argues that television induced ‘a 180 degree change in consumer attitudes’. As he put it:

  The biggest turning point has been commercial television. We used to live in a culture that saved money, stashed it underground or invested in gold. Anything that gave you pleasure was considered immoral. TV showed us the world and opened the floodgates for consumerism.107

  This perception, in turn, fuelled television advertising and by the end of the 1980s, Doordarshan was hooked on to its new cash cow. Television programming became increasingly focused on the middle classes and yet Doordarshan always had to balance its newly emerging commercial ethic within a public discourse that repeatedly emphasized the need for programmes harnessed to the modernist project of national development.108 Doordarshan’s entire strategy was focused on co-opting upwardly mobile classes who were ‘captured’ simultaneously as a market for consumer goods advertised by sponsors of programming and as an audience for nationalist serials.109 Television heralded a new era of consumerism.

  The power of the medium is such that it unleashed deep and unanticipated processes within Indian society. The televised portrayal of Ramayan (1987–90) is a case in point. India’s greatest epic now adapted for the small screen on the brand new national network would never have had the kind of impact it eventually did if it had been telecast in the old days of unconnected TV stations working in splendid isolation. It was commissioned by the same S.S. Gill who, by a quirk of fate, was in charge of the Asiad secretariat in 1982 and by now was information and broadcasting secretary. Gill emphasized that the epic encapsulated pan-Indian, and indeed, universal values110 but it was criticized for being perceived in the context of the rightward shift of the Rajiv Gandhi regime in the same period, exemplified by the central government’s role in allowing the Babri Masjid’s locks to be opened. Ramayan fed on religious fervour and quickly turned into ‘Ramayan fever’. Contemporary press reports detailed instances of mass devotion and empty streets when the series aired on Sunday mornings:

  In many homes the watching of Ramayana has become a religious ritual and the television set…is garlanded, decorated with sandalwood paste and vermillion, and conch shells are blown.111

  There is now a substantial literature establishing the crucial role Doordarshan’s Ramayan played in fashioning the setting for the Hindutva revival in the mid-1980s which centred around the Ram Janmabhoomi–Babri Masjid dispute. As Arvind Rajagopal points out:

  Drawing on myth and devotionalism to portray a golden age of tradition that was yet ahead of the modern era in statecraft and warfare, the show which ran from January 1987 to September 1990 adroitly made appeals to diverse social groups, under a symbolic rubric that could be tied to the banner of Hindu assertion…If inhibition and prohibition earlier joined to limit religion’s use for systematic political mobilization, what was offered now was an extra charge in bringing together previously separated realms.112

  While it is impossible to establish any direct link between the series and the politics of the p
eriod, television certainly reshaped the context in which politics was conceived, enacted and understood. Ramayan symbolized the central role television had come to occupy as a cultural and political actor in Indian society by the late 1980s. By the end of the 1980s, it had become a nation-wide phenomenon and was embedded in popular culture.

  The fervour around Doordarshan’s Ramayan illustrated that at a deeper level, when television arrives in a society, it alters the societal matrix. For instance, writing of the social impact of television when it first arrived in Canada, Robin Jeffrey recounts:

  Our habits changed. At first, before our family had a television, we started dropping in on friends at the starting times of popular programs. Then, when we had a television set, we went out much less and stayed up later at night. Sports, election nights and momentous events kept us around the set like thirsty animals around a waterhole.113

  The exact nature of television’s influence on societies has been debated ever since Marshall McLuhan argued that new technology itself was a ‘revolutionizing agent’,114 coining his now famous aphorism: ‘The medium is the message’. Insisting that every new technology, by itself—from the wheel and the alphabet to the telegraph and television—had changed social relations and mental attitudes,115 McLuhan understood new media like television ‘not just [as] mechanical gimmicks for creating illusions of the world’, but as containing ‘new languages and unique powers of expression’116:

  The new media are not ways of relating us to the old ‘real’ world; they are the real world and they reshape what remains of the old world at will…The effects of new media in our sensory lives are similar to the effects of new poetry. They change not our thoughts but the structure of the world.117

  In the Indian case, Doordarshan’s Ramayan was only the outward manifestation of the deep subliminal changes that the national television network, created in part due to the Asiad, had begun to effect within the societal framework.

  Writing in 1985, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi emphasized the long-term impact of television and the Asiad on Indian sport:

  The IX Asian Games marked the start of a new era in Indian sport-consciousness. Thanks to the television explosion, which occurred simultaneously with the Games, the entire nation participated in them, and the eyes of the young and not so young were riveted on the stadiums and tracks in Delhi.118

  Rajiv was right except in one detail. The impact of the ‘television explosion’ went far beyond the realm of sport. The Asiad, in fact, was pivotal in creating a new televisual Indian public—television augmenting the creation of new notions of identity, consumerism, culture and nationalism.

  CONCLUSION

  The 1982 Asiad was a landmark in Indian history on various registers. It became Indira Gandhi’s vehicle for rehabilitating her global image, battered black and blue by the Emergency. Juan Antonio Samaranch’s award of the Olympic Order of Gold to the Indian prime minister in 1983 marked the culmination of a systematic engagement between Mrs Gandhi’s government and the IOC after a sustained war of attrition between her and Indian sports administrators during the years of the Emergency. The Games were as important in India’s global branding as they were in the government’s domestic positioning. The Asiad became the government’s vehicle to propagate nationalism and led to a concerted nationwide effort to project India as a modern nation on the world stage. It also irrevocably changed Delhi’s skyline, with the construction of large-scale new infrastructure and the improvement of existing facilities.

  But by far the greatest legacy of the 1982 Asiad was the creation of the nationwide television network. Created to showcase India and the Games for distant lands, but equally to bind the nation into one community focused on this one event, the television network irrevocably changed India. A nationwide network may have been created anyway had the Asian Games not been held in India but there is no doubt that the Games proved to be a major catalyst. The government was forced to pursue television as a priority and policies initiated in the 1970s all came together as the Asiad provided the spark and an immediate urgency. Television policy encapsulated the state itself and the television set was envisaged as the nation-state’s daily messenger into citizen’s homes. A national service was created in 1982 precisely to project this. The Asiad was a landmark in the creation of a new ‘visual’ public. The daily ritual of Indians everywhere watching the same programming at the same time was meant to reinforce the centrality of the nation-state. Its impact, of course, differed widely but the creation of mass television in India is the true legacy of the Games. The advent of television as a major factor in Indian society was to have a far-reaching impact on Indian sport and it is to this that we turn in the next chapter.

  9

  When Olympic Sports Lost Out

  Cricket, Television and Globalization in India

  One of the greatest tragedies of our hockey is that its most glorious phase preceded the era of live television in India.

  —Shekhar Gupta, 20021

  Television makes cricket bigger than the sport and the time that each cricket player gets on the screen is more than even what Shahrukh Khan enjoys on a 70mm multiplex.

  —Sundeep Misra2

  CAFÉ 20:

  AAJ TAK BHANGRA, CRICKET AND A HUNGER STRIKE

  The twenty-fourth day of September 2007 began as just another day on Aaj Tak, India’s most popular Hindi satellite news channel. The first news bulletin of the day opened with the headlines of the hour but when the camera cut to the news anchor, viewers saw a sight they had never seen before. Instead of the usual serious looking news anchor, dressed in a tie and suit, and sitting in the usual news studio, the camera cut to a new special studio with the tagline Café 20 prominently displayed in the background. Eight of Aaj Tak’s most prominent news anchors were sprawled out at four separate tables in a café-like setting and they were all wearing the Indian cricket team’s blue uniform. It was the morning of the India—Pakistan final in the Twenty—Twenty Cricket World Cup in South Africa and India’s biggest news channel had decided to focus on the build-up to the game, to the exclusion of all other news.

  Significantly, the anchors on display were not the usual sports reporters or commentators. These were men and women who normally presented the channel’s mainline political coverage. Prominent among them was the channel’s executive editor Deepak Chaurasiya, usually seen only outside the offices of the BJP or the Congress. Their dressing up in the Indian team’s colours was the equivalent of John Simpson of the BBC wearing the Union Jack and turning up in the news studio to cover an Ashes game between England and Australia. Café 20 was as clear a signal as possible that in an overcrowded satellite television market, Aaj Tak had hitched its fortunes to the aspirational nationalism of the Indian cricket fan. To drive the point home, the Aaj Tak logo was prominently displayed on the Team India jerseys the anchors were wearing, right next to the logo of Team India. The game itself did not begin until 5.30 p.m. India time but Aaj Tak’s Café 20 began early in the morning and continued through the day. There was no pre-match analysis or reporting—simply news anchors in the Indian colours chatting informally about what they felt about the cricket team. One anchor held up a cricket bat as he showed the viewers his own take on the square cut, another demonstrated the intricacies of leg-spin bowling, while a third fondled his cricket pads.

  When the match ended in an Indian victory after a nerve-wracking thriller that went down to the last over, the Aaj Tak camera cut once again to Café 20. This time the studio had not just the eight anchors who had begun the day’s programming, it was overflowing with Aaj Tak’s entire Delhi staff—all dancing in gay abandon to the tune of a dholak specially brought in for the occasion. Dancing with Aaj Tak was Kapil Dev, the first Indian captain to win a World Cup (in 1983), who had stayed in the studio through the day as a contracted expert. As other news channels went around the country showing instantaneous street celebrations, for 20 minutes, Aaj Tak’s viewers saw only one sight: its entire staff doing a Punjabi bh
angra in concert with Kapil Dev. It was yet another reaffirmation of television’s allegiance to the tricolour: cricket, nationalism and television mixing in a seamless hue that more than anything else encapsulated how tightly India’s satellite television revolution is inextricably entwined with cricket.

  Aaj Tak was not an exception. Every other news channel—and India now has more than 50 24-hour satellite news networks (the equivalent of more than 50 Indian CNNs) in 11 languages—focused almost exclusively on cricket that day. An alien landing in India and watching Indian television that day would not have been wrong in assuming that cricket was the only news in the country that day. Yet it was a day when the ruling Congress announced the accession of Gandhi scion Rahul to a formal position as general secretary in the party’s hierarchy and one of the Left parties supporting the Congress government targeted Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as ‘immature and inexperienced’ for pursuing India’s nuclear deal with the United States. These barely featured as news. But news television’s tunneled focus on cricket wasn’t just a product of what is now a cliché: the fanatical Indian support for cricket. There was a clear economic dimension to the cricket coverage. According to one senior television news manager, his network had received more advertising for coverage of the Twenty-twenty World Cup, two months before the tournament even began, than the entire advertising it received for covering the Union Budget.3 This, when the concerned channel was not even broadcasting the event—broadcast licensing rules allowed it only limited use of the actual match footage.4 The economics of the private television business and the heavy advertiser interest in cricket meant that the news channel could not but focus its energies on the game.

  Television coverage offers a useful prism to understand the contours of modern Indian identity; in a complex process of diffusion it subsumes both cause and effect. Television producers are cultural gatekeepers, mediators of what they understand to be an ‘Indian’ identity, as they try to appeal to it for economic profit. We have argued elsewhere that in a land divided at multifarious levels by factors like language, caste and custom the unrelenting drive to construct and capture a national market for maximizing profits led television producers and advertisers to turn to cricket as the lowest common dominator. Channels turned to cricket because of its indelible link with what might be termed ‘Indian-ness’.5 Their focus on cricket, in turn, further augmented its equation with notions of Indian identity. This is a process that unfolded through the 1990s and Aaj Tak’s Café 20 was only the latest alliteration on this palimpsest. There is now a substantial literature tracking how cricket, from the colonial era, has always had a political dimension in India and much of this literature attributes the striking pre-eminence of cricket in the Indian imagination to a set of complex and contradictory processes that parallel the emergence of an ‘Indian’ nation.6 As a crucial hinge of the modern Indian nation, cricket is also the easiest way to register on TV ratings.