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Chapter 7: Mass Media and Communications

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In the middle of 1975, in a few hundred villages spread across six Indian states, something arrived that most people there had never seen before: a television set. It was not placed in a home. It was installed in a school, a panchayat building or an open courtyard, and a crowd gathered around it every evening. For about a year, from August 1975 to July 1976, a satellite beamed programmes directly to some 2,400 of these community sets for four hours a day. This was the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment, and it was run not by a company selling anything, but by the government of India.

The programmes were not made to entertain. They talked about better seeds and farming practices, about health and hygiene, about schooling, about the country and its plans. The state had decided that television could carry development into the countryside faster than officials on bicycles ever could.

Look around you now. A phone in a pocket carries film songs, cricket scores, news alerts and family messages, and nobody had to gather in a courtyard to receive them. Between that courtyard and your pocket lies the whole story of this chapter: how the media in India shifted from being an instrument of the state to being, very largely, a creature of the market.

Fig. 7.1

Fig. 7.1 – A village community television set during the SITE experiment.

NoteCuriosity Corner

Q1. Why are newspapers, radio, films and television called ‘mass’ media, and what makes them different from a letter or a phone call? Q2. Why did the colonial government feel threatened by Indian newspapers, and what did it do about them? Q3. In the first decades after Independence, why was radio owned entirely by the state instead of by private companies? Q4. Television and the Internet have grown enormously — so why has the circulation of Indian language newspapers gone up rather than down? Q5. Why do foreign channels that came to India in the 1990s now broadcast in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi rather than only in English?

This chapter will answer each of these questions. Keep them in mind as you read.

7.1 The Beginnings of Modern Mass Media

What Makes Media ‘Mass’ Media

Television, newspapers, films, magazines, radio, advertisements, video games and CDs look like very different things. A film is watched in a hall, a newspaper is read at a table, a radio programme is heard while cooking. Yet sociologists group all of them together under a single term, the mass media, and the reason lies in one word: mass.

They are called mass media because they reach mass audiences — audiences made up of very large numbers of people. The same film, the same bulletin, the same advertisement reaches lakhs of people who have never met one another. For this reason the media are also sometimes referred to as mass communication, or mass communications.

NoteDefinition

Mass media are the forms of communication — such as television, newspapers, films, magazines, radio and advertisements — that reach very large audiences, made up of very large numbers of people who are usually not known to one another.

For many in your generation, it is probably difficult even to imagine a world without some form of mass media and communications. That difficulty is itself a sociological fact worth noticing.

mass communication vs ordinary communication A letter, a phone call or a conversation across a shop counter is communication between known individuals; mass communication is directed at an unknown audience of very large size, and requires a formal organisation to produce and distribute it.

Q1. Why are newspapers, radio, films and television called ‘mass’ media, and what makes them different from a letter or a phone call?

A. They are called ‘mass’ media because they reach mass audiences — very large numbers of people at the same time. A letter or a phone call passes between people who know each other. A news bulletin does not: it is produced by a large organisation and addressed to a huge, anonymous public.

Media in Everyday Indian Life

Mass media is a part of our everyday life. In many middle class households across the country, people wake up only to put on the radio, switch on the television, or look for the morning newspaper. The younger children of the same households may first glance at their mobile phones to check their missed calls.

The media are not confined to the home. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters, painters and sundry other service providers in many urban centres have a mobile telephone on which they can be easily contacted — the phone has become a tool of work, not only of talk. Many shops in cities increasingly have a small television set, and customers who come in may exchange bits of conversation about the cricket match being telecast or the film being shown.

The media also stretch across distance. Indians abroad keep regular touch with friends and families back home over the Internet and telephone. Migrants from the working class population in the cities are regularly in touch with their families in the villages over the phone.

Have you seen the range of advertisements for mobile phones? Have you noticed the diverse social groups that they are catering to? The CBSE Board results are available on both the Internet and over the mobile phone. Indeed, this very book is available on the Internet.

  • Imagine a world where there is no television, no cinema, no newspapers, no magazines, no Internet, no telephones, no mobile phones.
  • Write down your daily activities for one day, and identify the occasions when you used the media in some way or the other.
  • Find out from someone of an older generation what life was like without any of these forms of communication, and compare it with your own life.
  • Discuss the ways in which work and leisure have changed with developments in communication technologies.
  • Kept as a class record over a week, this activity would make a good starting point for a CBSE project on media use in everyday life.
Four Sociological Questions About the Media

It is obvious that there has been a phenomenal expansion of mass communication of all kinds in recent years. As students of sociology, there are four aspects of this growth that are of special interest to us.

First, while we recognise the specificity of the current communication revolution, it is important to go back a little and sketch out the growth of modern mass media in the world and in India. Doing so helps us realise that, like any other social institution, the structure and content of mass media is shaped by changes in the economic, political and socio-cultural contexts. We shall see, for instance, how central the state and its vision of development were to the media in the first decades after Independence, and how in the post-1990 period of globalisation the market has a key role to play.

Second, this historical view helps us better appreciate that the relationship between mass media and society is dialectical — both influence each other. The nature and role of mass media is influenced by the society in which it is located; at the same time, the far-reaching influence of mass media on society cannot be over-emphasised. We shall see this two-way relationship as we discuss (a) the role of media in colonial India, (b) media in the first decades after Independence, and (c) media in the context of globalisation.

Q. If media and society shape each other, which one is the cause?

A. Neither, on its own. A society that is fighting colonial rule produces a nationalist press; that press, in turn, spreads and hardens anti-colonial opinion. Cause and effect run in both directions, which is exactly what ‘dialectical’ means.

Third, mass communication is different from other means of communication because it requires a formal structural organisation to meet large-scale capital, production and management demands. You will find, therefore, that the state and/or the market have a major role in the structure and functioning of mass media. Mass media functions through very large organisations, with major investments and a large body of employees. A single person can write a letter; nobody can single-handedly run a daily newspaper across ten cities.

Fourth, there are sharp differences between how easily different sections of people can use mass media. You will recall the concept of the digital divide from the last chapter — access to media and to communication technology is itself unequally distributed, by income, by region, by gender and by education.

The Printing Press and the First Mass Audience

The first modern mass media institution began with the development of the printing press. The history of print in certain societies dates back many centuries, but the first attempts at printing books using modern technologies began in Europe. The technique was first developed by Johann Gutenberg in 1440. Initial attempts at printing were restricted to religious books.

With the Industrial Revolution, the print industry also grew. Even then, the first products of the press were restricted to an audience of literate elites — a printed book is useless to a person who cannot read, and expensive for a person who cannot pay. It was only in the mid-19th century, with further development in technologies, in transportation and in literacy, that newspapers began to reach out to a mass audience.

The consequence was quite unlike anything that had gone before. People living in different corners of the same country now found themselves reading or hearing the same news, on the same morning, about places they had never visited. It has been suggested that this was in many ways responsible for people across a country coming to feel connected, developing a sense of belonging or a ‘we feeling’.

Fig. 7.2

Fig. 7.2 – Workplaces of mass communication: the printing press and the modern newsroom.

The well-known scholar Benedict Anderson argued that this helped the growth of nationalism — the feeling that people who did not even know of each other’s existence could nevertheless feel like members of a single family. Print gave people who would never meet each other a sense of togetherness. Anderson thus suggested that we could think of the nation as an imagined community.

The nation as an ‘imagined community’ Proposed by: Benedict Anderson (writing in the later twentieth century) Core idea: A nation is ‘imagined’ because most of its members will never meet, yet each carries in the mind an image of belonging with all the others; print media, especially the newspaper, made this shared image possible. Key terms: imagined community, ‘we feeling’, nationalism Evidence: The spread of newspapers to a mass audience from the mid-19th century, so that distant strangers read the same news on the same day and began to think of themselves as one public. Limitation: ‘Imagined’ does not mean unreal, but the theory can be read as giving print too much weight; nations also rest on material things — a shared economy, a state, an administration, and, in India, a long anti-colonial struggle in which speech, song and procession mattered as much as the printed page.

The Press in Colonial India

You will recall how 19th-century social reformers often wrote and debated in newspapers and journals. The press was where argument about widow remarriage, education and caste practices actually took place.

The growth of Indian nationalism was closely linked to the struggle against colonialism, and it emerged in the wake of the institutional changes brought about by British rule in India. Printing, the railway, the postal system and English education were introduced to serve the colonial state — but they also gave Indians the means to speak to one another across regions.

Anti-colonial public opinion was nurtured and channelised by the nationalist press, which was vocal in its opposition to the oppressive measures of the colonial state. This led the colonial government to clamp down on the nationalist press and impose censorship, for instance during the Ilbert Bill agitation in 1883.

Association with the national movement led some of the nationalist newspapers — like Kesari (Marathi), Mathrubhumi (Malayalam) and Amrita Bazar Patrika (English) — to suffer the displeasure of the colonial state. But that did not prevent them from advocating the nationalist cause and demanding an end to colonial rule.

Q2. Why did the colonial government feel threatened by Indian newspapers, and what did it do about them?

A. Newspapers carried anti-colonial opinion to readers spread across regions and languages, and so helped build a public that thought of itself as one nation. The colonial state answered by clamping down on the nationalist press and imposing censorship, as during the Ilbert Bill agitation of 1883, and newspapers such as Kesari, Mathrubhumi and Amrita Bazar Patrika drew official displeasure — without giving up the nationalist cause.

The dates in Fig. 7.3 show how early this press was, and how many languages it spoke in.

Fig. 7.3

Fig. 7.3 – The early Indian press and its linguistic diversity.

  • Though a few newspapers had been started by people before Raja Rammohun Roy, his Sambad Kaumudi in Bengali, published in 1821, and Mirat-ul-Akbar in Persian, published in 1822, were the first publications in India with a distinct nationalist and democratic approach.
  • Fardoonji Murzban was the pioneer of the Gujarati press in Bombay. As early as 1822 he started the Bombay Samachar as a daily.
  • Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar started the Shome Prakash in Bengali in 1858.
  • The Times of India was founded in Bombay in 1861.
  • The Pioneer was founded in Allahabad in 1865.
  • The Madras Mail in 1868.
  • The Statesman in Calcutta in 1875.
  • The Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore in 1876. (Desai 1948)
The Media the Raj Allowed

Under British rule, newspapers and magazines, films and radio comprised the range of mass media available in India. Each stood in a different relationship to the colonial state.

Radio was wholly owned by the state. National views could not, therefore, be expressed on it. Newspapers and films, though autonomous from the state, were strictly monitored by the Raj — autonomy on paper is not the same as freedom in practice.

Newspapers and magazines, whether in English or in the vernacular, were not very widely circulated, because the literate public was limited. Yet their influence far outstripped their circulation. News and information were read aloud and spread by word of mouth from commercial and administrative hubs — markets and trading centres, as well as courts and towns. One printed copy could reach a hundred listeners.

The print media of the time carried a range of opinions, each expressing its own idea of a ‘free India’. Those were arguments about what kind of country was being fought for, not merely against whom. These variations were carried over into independent India — and, as the next section shows, into a very different relationship between the media and the state.

7.2 Mass Media in Independent India

7.2.1 The Approach

The country that became independent in 1947 inherited a press that had been monitored and censored, and a radio service that had been owned outright by the colonial state. What was the new nation to do with these instruments?

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, called upon the media to function as the watchdog of democracy. At the same time, the media was expected to spread the spirit of self-reliance and national development among the people. Both roles were asked of it at once — to keep watch on power, and to work alongside it.

You will recall the general thrust of development in the early years of independence in India from your earlier chapters: planning, industrialisation, and a state that led the effort. The media was seen as a means to inform the people of these various developmental efforts.

The media was also encouraged to fight against oppressive social practices such as untouchability, child marriages, and the ostracism of widows, as well as beliefs in witchcraft and faith healing. A rational, scientific ethos was to be promoted, because a modern industrial society was thought to require modern habits of mind.

This was not left to persuasion alone. The Films Division of the government produced newsreels and documentaries. These were shown before the screening of films in every movie theatre, documenting the development process as directed by the state. If you had bought a cinema ticket in the 1950s or 1960s, you watched a dam or a steel plant before you watched the film.

What should the media do in a newly independent country? View 1: The media should be a partner in nation building. A poor country needs its people to know about new seeds, new schools, new laws and new rights; a media that spreads this knowledge is doing democratic work, and the state is the only body with the reach to organise it. View 2: The media should be a watchdog. A press that is a partner of the government finds it very hard to criticise the government, and in a democracy the citizen needs an independent source of information about those in power. What both agree on: The media in a democracy has public responsibilities and cannot be judged only by what it earns.

Ask anyone you know from a generation that grew up in the first two decades after Independence about the documentaries that were routinely shown before the screening of films. Write down their recollections.

7.2.2 Radio

Radio in India did not begin as a government project. It began with amateur ‘ham’ broadcasting clubs in Kolkata and Chennai in the 1920s — hobbyists with transmitters. It matured into a public broadcasting system in the 1940s during the Second World War, when it became a major instrument of propaganda for the Allied forces in South-east Asia.

At the time of Independence there were only six radio stations, located in the major cities and catering primarily to an urban audience. By 1950, there were 5,46,200 radio licences all over India — a large number in absolute terms, and a very small one for a country of that size.

Since the media was seen as an active partner in the development of the newly free nation, All India Radio’s programmes consisted mainly of news, current affairs and discussions on development.

AIR’s broadcasts did make a difference. In the 1960s, when the high yielding varieties of food crops were introduced in the country for the first time as part of the Green Revolution, it was All India Radio that undertook a major countryside campaign on these crops, on a sustained day-to-day basis, for over ten years from 1967. Special programmes on the high yielding varieties were formed in many AIR stations across the country. These programme units, manned by subject specialists, undertook field visits and recorded and broadcast first-hand accounts of the farmers who had started growing the new varieties of paddy and wheat. (Source: B. R. Kumar, “AIR’s broadcasts did make a difference”, The Hindu, 31 December 2006)

Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.4 – An All India Radio studio in the 1940s.

The photograph in Fig. 7.4 is of Amita Roy (later Malik), a disc jockey at All India Radio, Lucknow, in 1944. A noted media person and film critic, she joined All India Radio at a time when there were very few women in the field, and later broadcast with the BBC, the CBC and other international broadcasting organisations. A doyenne among women journalists, she is well known for her film, radio and television criticism and for her columns in leading newspapers.

Entertainment enters state radio

Apart from All India Radio’s news broadcasts, there was Vividh Bharati, a channel for entertainment that primarily broadcast Hindi film songs on listeners’ request. In 1957, AIR acquired the hugely popular channel Vividh Bharati, which soon began to carry sponsored programmes and advertisements and grew to become a money-spinning channel for AIR.

This is worth pausing over. The state broadcaster, set up to inform and to develop, found that its most profitable offering was film music — and that advertisers would pay to sit beside it. The market had entered public broadcasting through the entertainment door, decades before liberalisation.

Q3. In the first decades after Independence, why was radio owned entirely by the state instead of by private companies?

A. Radio was inherited from a colonial government that had owned it outright, and the new Indian state saw it as an instrument of national development rather than of profit. Mass communication needs large capital and a formal organisation, and in a poor country the state was the only body able to build a network reaching the whole population. Its purpose was to carry news, development messages and a rational, scientific outlook to citizens — not to sell them goods.

The spread of the transistor

When India gained independence in 1947, All India Radio had an infrastructure of six radio stations, located in metropolitan cities. The country had 280,000 radio receiver sets for a population of 350 million people. After independence, the government gave priority to the expansion of the radio broadcasting infrastructure, especially in state capitals and in border areas.

Over the years, AIR has developed a formidable infrastructure for radio broadcasting in India. It operates a three-tiered service — national, regional and local — to cater to India’s geographic, linguistic and cultural diversity. The three tiers are not a technicality; they are how a single broadcaster speaks to a country of many languages.

The major constraint on the popularisation of radio initially was the cost of the radio set. The transistor revolution in the 1960s changed that. Battery-operated sets made the radio mobile — it could go to the field, the shop, the bus stand — and the unit price fell substantially.

Table 7.1 lets you see the scale of the change. Six stations serving a handful of urban listeners in 1947 became a service that, by 2000, was reaching around 110 million households — two-thirds of all Indian households — in 24 languages and 146 dialects, with more than a third of those households in rural areas. As of today, AIR has grown to 480 stations and 681 transmitters, covering 99% of the population spread over 92% of the area of the country.

Table 7.1 – The growth of radio broadcasting in India: selected indicators | Year | Indicator | Figure | |—|—|—| | 1947 | Radio stations (metropolitan cities) | 6 | | 1947 | Radio receiver sets | 280,000 (for a population of 350 million) | | 1950 | Radio licences in India | 5,46,200 | | 2000 | Households listening to radio | around 110 million (two-thirds of all Indian households) | | 2000 | Languages / dialects of broadcast | 24 languages, 146 dialects | | As of today | AIR stations / transmitters | 480 stations, 681 transmitters | | As of today | Coverage | 99% of the population, 92% of the area |

Q. Why did the cost of a radio set matter so much sociologically?

A. Because a medium reaches only those who can afford the receiver. As long as a radio set was expensive and had to be plugged in, radio was largely urban and largely middle class. The cheap transistor turned it into a genuinely mass medium — an early illustration of how access, not just content, decides who the ‘mass’ in mass media actually is.

Wars, tragedies and the expansion of AIR. Wars and tragedies have repeatedly spurred All India Radio to expand its activities. The 1962 war with China prompted the launching of a ‘talks’ unit to put out a daily programme. In August 1971, with the Bangladesh crisis looming, the News Service Division introduced news on the hour, from 6 o’clock in the morning to midnight. It took another crisis, the assassination of Rajeev Gandhi in 1991, for AIR to take one more step and have bulletins round the clock.

7.2.3 Television

Television programming was introduced experimentally in India as early as 1959, and its stated purpose was to promote rural development. Later, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) broadcast directly to community viewers in the rural areas of six states between August 1975 and July 1976. These instructional broadcasts reached 2,400 television sets directly, for four hours daily.

Meanwhile, television stations were set up under Doordarshan in four cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Srinagar and Amritsar — by 1975. Three more stations, in Kolkata, Chennai and Jalandhar, were added within a year. Every broadcasting centre had its own mix of programmes, comprising news, children’s and women’s programmes, farmers’ programmes, as well as entertainment programmes.

The turn towards the advertiser

As programmes became commercialised and were allowed to carry advertisements of their sponsors, a shift in the target audience was evident. Entertainment programmes grew, and they were directed at the urban consuming class.

Notice what drives this shift. An advertiser does not pay for viewers; an advertiser pays for viewers who can buy. The moment a broadcaster’s income depends on advertising, its programmes begin to tilt towards the audience with money to spend — which in India of the 1980s meant the urban middle class rather than the village that SITE had been built for. This is commercialisation: the reshaping of content by the need to sell audiences to advertisers.

The advent of colour broadcasting during the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi, and the rapid expansion of the national network, led to rapid commercialisation of television broadcasting. During 1984–85, the number of television transmitters increased all over India, covering a large proportion of the population.

Fig. 7.5

Fig. 7.5 – The growth of television broadcasting in India.

Identify a cross-section of people from an older generation. Find out from them what television programmes consisted of in the 1970s and 1980s. Did many of them have access to television at all?

The age of the soap opera

It was in this period that indigenous soap operas, like Hum Log (1984–85) and Buniyaad (1986–87), were aired. They were hugely popular and attracted substantial advertising revenue for Doordarshan, as did the broadcasting of the epics — Ramayana (1987–88) and Mahabharata (1988–90).

A soap opera is a particular kind of programme, and it is worth defining precisely, because it is built to hold an audience week after week.

NoteDefinition

A soap opera is a serialised, continuous story. Individual storylines may come to an end, and different characters may appear and disappear, but the soap itself has no ending until it is taken off the air completely. A soap opera presumes a history that the regular viewer knows — he or she becomes familiar with the characters, with their personalities and with their life experiences.

Hum Log was not only entertainment. It was a deliberate experiment in using a popular serial to teach, and it was studied closely.

Arvind Singhal and Everett Rogers — the audience of Hum Log Question: What happens when educational messages are deliberately placed inside a popular entertainment programme, and how do viewers relate to the characters? Method: Study of the making and reception of India’s first long-running soap opera — 156 episodes broadcast in Hindi over 17 months in 1984–85 — using audience ratings, viewers’ letters and reports of viewing behaviour. Finding: The serial used the entertainment-education strategy, intentionally placing educational content in an entertainment message, and promoted social themes such as gender equality, small family size and national integration. At the end of each 22-minute episode, the actor Ashok Kumar summarised the lessons in an epilogue of 30 to 40 seconds, connecting the drama to viewers’ everyday lives — for instance, asking why a character who drinks behaves badly, what could reduce alcoholism, and what the viewer could do about it. The audience showed a high degree of parasocial interaction: many viewers adjusted their daily schedules to ‘meet’ a favourite character ‘in the privacy of their living rooms’, and some reported talking to the characters through their television sets (“Don’t worry, Badki. Do not give up your dream of making a career”). Hum Log achieved ratings of 65 to 90 per cent in North India and between 20 and 45 per cent in South India; about 50 million individuals watched the average broadcast; and it drew over 400,000 letters from viewers — so many that most of them could not even be opened by Doordarshan officials. Meaning: It established that mass media can carry social messages very widely and that audiences form real emotional bonds with fictional characters. But it also invites caution: high ratings and letters tell us that people watched and felt, not that they changed how they lived — and a strategy that teaches through a sponsored serial hands considerable influence to whoever pays for the airtime.

The advertising carried by Hum Log promoted a new consumer product in India — Maggi 2-Minute noodles. The public rapidly accepted this new consumer product, suggesting the power of television commercials. Advertisers began to line up to purchase airtime for television advertising, and the commercialisation of Doordarshan began.

Broadcasting as a state project vs broadcasting as a market product | Feature | State-led broadcasting (1950s–early 1980s) | Commercialised broadcasting (from the 1980s) | |—|—|—| | Who pays | The government, out of public funds | Advertisers, who buy airtime | | Main purpose | Information, development, national integration | Holding an audience that can be sold to advertisers | | Audience aimed at | The citizen, including the rural citizen | The urban consuming class | | Typical content | Newsreels, farmers’ and development programmes, discussions | Soap operas, entertainment, sponsored programmes | | Measure of success | Reach and development impact | Ratings and advertising revenue |

Television today

Today, the situation of the television industry is very different. The Annual Report released by TRAI for the year 2015–16 clearly stated that India has the world’s second largest TV market after China. As per industry estimates, as on March 2016, of the existing 2,841 million households, around 1,811 million have television sets, which provide services of cable TV, DTH and IPTV, in addition to a terrestrial TV network of Doordarshan.

7.3 Globalisation and the Media

You have already read about the far-reaching impact of globalisation, and about its close link with the communication revolution, in the last chapter. This section asks what that impact looks like when we turn the lens on the media themselves.

The media have always had international dimensions — the gathering of news stories from abroad, and the distribution of primarily western films overseas. Globalisation did not invent the foreign correspondent or the imported film.

What changed is the framework. Until the 1970s, most media companies operated within specific domestic markets, in accordance with regulations laid down by national governments. The media industry was also differentiated into distinct sectors: for the most part, cinema, print media, radio and television broadcasting all operated independently of one another. A film company made films; a newspaper printed newspapers.

In the past three decades, however, profound transformations have taken place within the media industry. National markets have given way to a fluid global market, while new technologies have led to the fusion of forms of media that were once distinct. The same company now owns the newspaper, the television channel and the FM station; the same device plays all three.

Globalisation and the case of music. It has been argued that the musical form lends itself to globalisation more efficiently than any other. This is because music is able to reach people who may not know the written and spoken language in which it is sung. The growth of technology — from personal stereo systems to music television (such as MTV) to the compact disc (CD) — has provided newer and more sophisticated ways for music to be distributed globally.

The fusion of forms of media. Although the music industry is becoming ever more concentrated in the hands of a few international conglomerates, some feel that it is under a great threat. This is because the Internet allows music to be downloaded digitally, rather than purchased in the form of CDs or cassettes from local music stores. The global music industry currently comprises a complex network of factories, distribution chains, music shops and sales staff.

  • If the Internet removes the need for factories, distribution chains, music shops and sales staff by allowing music to be marketed and downloaded directly, what will be left of the music industry?
  • How do you see the influence of mobile applications on the music industry?

The changes that have taken place in mass media are so immense that this chapter can probably give you only a fragmentary understanding of them. As a young generation, you can build upon the information provided here. Let us look at the changes globalisation has brought about in the print media (primarily newspapers and magazines), in the electronic media (primarily television), and in radio.

7.3.2 Television

In 1991 there was one state-controlled TV channel, Doordarshan, in India. By 1998 there were almost 70 channels. Privately run satellite channels have multiplied rapidly since the mid-1990s. While Doordarshan broadcasts over 35 channels, there were about 900 private television networks broadcasting in 2020.

The staggering growth of private satellite television has been one of the defining developments of contemporary India. In 2002, 134 million individuals watched satellite TV on an average every week; this number went up to 190 million in 2005. The number of homes with access to satellite TV jumped from 40 million in 2002 to 61 million in 2005. Satellite subscription has now penetrated 56 per cent of all TV homes.

Table 7.2 – Growth of satellite television in India, 2002 and 2005 (in millions) | Indicator | 2002 | 2005 | |—|—|—| | Individuals watching satellite TV, average per week | 134 | 190 | | Homes with access to satellite TV | 40 | 61 |

Fig. 7.7

Fig. 7.7 – The explosion of satellite television in the consumer market.

How private satellite television arrived

Two events in a single year opened the door. The Gulf War of 1991, which popularised CNN, showed Indian viewers what round-the-clock international news looked like. In the same year, the launching of Star-TV by the Whampoa Hutchinson Group of Hong Kong signalled the arrival of private satellite channels in India.

In 1992, Zee TV, a Hindi-based satellite entertainment channel, also began beaming programmes to cable television viewers in India. By 2000, 40 private cable and satellite channels were available, including several that focused exclusively on regional-language broadcasting, like Sun-TV, Eenadu-TV, Udaya-TV, Raj-TV and Asianet. Meanwhile, Zee TV launched several regional networks, broadcasting in Marathi, Bengali and other languages.

None of this could have reached homes without the cable. While Doordarshan was expanding rapidly in the 1980s, the cable television industry was mushrooming in major Indian cities. The VCR greatly multiplied entertainment options for Indian audiences, providing alternatives to Doordarshan’s single-channel programming. Video viewing at home, and in community-based parlours, increased rapidly, and the video fare consisted mostly of film-based entertainment, both domestic and imported.

By 1984, entrepreneurs in cities such as Mumbai and Ahmedabad had begun wiring apartment buildings to transmit several films a day. From there, the numbers ran away, as Table 7.3 shows.

Table 7.3 – Number of cable operators in India, 1984–1999 | Year | Number of cable operators | |—|—| | 1984 | 100 | | 1988 | 1,200 | | 1992 | 15,000 | | 1999 | about 60,000 |

Read the table as a social fact, not merely an economic one. A cable operator is a local person with a dish, a wire and a route through the neighbourhood. Sixty thousand of them meant that a global broadcasting industry entered Indian homes through a network of very small, very local businesses.

The global channel learns the local language

The coming in of transnational television companies like Star TV, MTV, Channel [V], Sony and others made some people worried about the likely impact on Indian youth and on Indian cultural identity. The fear was of a one-way flow: western programmes, western language, western tastes.

But most of the transnational television channels realised, through research, that the use of the familiar is more effective in procuring the diverse groups that constitute the Indian audience. Audiences, it turned out, did not want to be spoken to in a language they did not use.

The early strategy of Sony International was to broadcast 10 Hindi films a week, gradually decreasing the number as the station produced its own Hindi language content. The majority of the foreign networks have now introduced either a segment of Hindi language programming (MTV India) or an entire new Hindi language channel (STAR Plus). STAR Sports and ESPN have dual commentary or an audio soundtrack in Hindi, and the larger players have launched specific regional channels in languages such as Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and Gujarati.

Perhaps the most dramatic adoption of localisation was carried out by STAR TV. In October 1996, STAR Plus — initially an all-English general entertainment channel originating from Hong Kong — began producing a Hindi language belt of programming between 7 and 9 PM. By February 1999, the channel was converted into a solely Hindi channel, and all English serials shifted to STAR World, the network’s English language international channel. The advertising that promoted the change included the Hinglish slogan ‘Aapki Boli. Aapka Plus Point’ — your language, your plus point (Butcher, 2003).

Both STAR and Sony continued to dub US programming for a younger audience, as children appeared able to adjust to the peculiarities that arise when the language is one and the setting another. Have you watched a dubbed programme? What do you feel about it?

Does the globalisation of television wipe out local culture? View 1: It threatens it. Ownership is concentrated in a few transnational companies; formats such as reality shows are modelled along the lines of western programmes; and content is shaped by what advertisers will pay for, not by what a society values. Localising the language does not change who owns the channel or who profits from it. View 2: It transforms it, and sometimes strengthens it. The channels that succeeded in India were the ones that switched to Hindi and to regional languages, produced Indian content, and built regional networks; the audience forced the global company to become local. Regional-language broadcasting expanded rather than shrank. What both agree on: The arrival of global media does not leave a local culture untouched — the question is whether what emerges is a copy, a hybrid, or something new.

Q5. Why do foreign channels that came to India in the 1990s now broadcast in Hindi, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi rather than only in English?

A. Because research showed them that the familiar works. An Indian audience is huge and diverse, and most of it does not watch television in English. Channels that wanted that audience — and the advertising revenue that comes with it — had to speak its languages: Sony began with Hindi films, MTV added Hindi programming, STAR Plus turned itself into a Hindi channel in 1999, and the big networks launched Bengali, Punjabi, Marathi and Gujarati channels. The global company adapted to the local market because the local market was the prize.

News, entertainment, and what gets left out

Most television channels are on throughout the day, 24×7. The format for news is lively and informal. News has been made far more immediate, democratic and intimate — a viewer in a small town can watch a debate as it happens, and can sometimes take part in it. Television has fostered public debate and is expanding its reach every passing year.

This brings us to a question that will not go away: whether serious political and economic issues are neglected in the process.

There is a growing number of news channels in Hindi and English, a large number of regional channels, and an equally large number of reality shows, talk shows, Bollywood shows, family soaps, interactive shows, game shows and comedy shows. Entertainment television has produced a new cadre of superstars who have become familiar household names, and their private lives and rivalries on set feed the gossip columns of popular magazines and newspapers.

Reality shows like Kaun Banega Crorepati, Indian Idol and Bigg Boss have become increasingly popular. Most of these are modelled along the lines of western programmes.

Look at a week’s television listings. Which of these programmes can be identified as interactive shows, which as family soaps, which as talk shows and which as reality shows? Discuss your classification in class.

When the camera will not look away

Competition for viewers does not only decide what is shown. It decides how far a channel will go.

A rescue that became live television. A five-year-old boy fell into a borewell shaft in a village in Kurukshetra, Haryana, and was rescued by the army after a fifty-hour operation, in which a parallel shaft was dug through a well. A closed-circuit television camera had been lowered into the shaft along with food. Two news channels suspended all other programmes and all other reporting, and for two days ran continuous footage of the child from inside the shaft. They interviewed people outside temples, asking them how they felt about him, and asked viewers to send SMSes for him. Thousands of people descended on the site, and free community kitchens ran for two days. It created national concern bordering on hysteria, and people were shown praying in temples, mosques, churches and gurudwaras. There have been other such instances of television intruding into the personal lives of people.

the camera, the audience and the person being filmed A child in a shaft cannot consent to being filmed, and a family in the middle of an emergency cannot weigh what it is agreeing to. When a channel’s revenue depends on holding an audience, private distress becomes valuable content, and the line between informing the public and turning suffering into spectacle grows thin. The sociological question is not whether the individual journalist is unkind — it is why an industry organised around ratings produces this result again and again, and what rules a democracy might reasonably want in reply.

You may have watched a live rescue operation, or a similar event, on television. Organise a debate in class around the following points: 1. What is the likely impact of competition among television channels to outdo one another in running exclusive live coverage of events, in order to gain higher viewership? 2. Can we look at this as a kind of voyeurism — a peep into other people’s private moments — indulged in by television cameras? 3. Or is it an example of the positive role played by television in highlighting the plight of the rural poor?

7.3.3 Radio

In 2000, AIR’s programmes could be heard in two-thirds of all Indian households, in 24 languages and 146 dialects, over some 120 million radio sets. Radio, in other words, was not dying when private FM arrived; it was already the most widely spread medium in the country.

The advent of privately owned FM radio stations in 2002 provided a boost to entertainment programmes over radio. In order to attract audiences, these privately run radio stations sought to provide entertainment to their listeners.

Their content is shaped by a rule as much as by taste. As privately run FM channels are not permitted to broadcast any political news bulletins, many of these channels specialise in ‘particular kinds’ of popular music to retain their audiences. One such FM channel claims that it broadcasts ‘All hits all day!’

Q. Why does a rule about news end up shaping the music you hear?

A. If a station cannot compete on news, it must compete on everything else. Barred from political bulletins, private FM channels differentiate themselves by sound — one plays only new film hits, another only retro songs. A regulation about politics quietly becomes a regulation about music.

Most of the FM channels that are popular among young urban professionals and students belong to media conglomerates — large companies that own several media businesses at once. ‘Radio Mirchi’ belongs to the Times of India group, Red FM is owned by Living Media, and Radio City by the Star Network.

What is missing is as telling as what is present. Independent radio stations engaged in public broadcasting, of the kind that National Public Radio (USA) or the BBC (UK) represent, are absent from our broadcasting landscape. India’s radio is either state-owned or commercially owned; the independent public broadcaster is the third possibility that has not taken root here.

Fig. 7.8

Fig. 7.8 – A modern private FM radio studio.

The local turn

The potential for using FM channels is enormous. Further privatisation of radio stations, and the emergence of community-owned radio stations, would lead to the growth of radio stations. The demand for local news is growing, and the number of homes listening to FM in India has reinforced the worldwide trend of networks being replaced by local radio.

The box below reveals not only the ingenuity of a village youth, but also the need to cater to local cultures.

A village FM station in Bihar. It may well be the only village FM radio station on the Asian sub-continent. On a balmy morning in Bihar, Raghav Mahato gets ready to fire up his home-grown FM radio station. Thousands of villagers living within a 20 km radius of his small repair shop tune their radio sets to catch it. After the crackle of static, a young voice announces: “Good morning! Welcome to Raghav FM Mansoorpur 1! Now listen to your favourite songs.” For the next 12 hours the station plays film songs, broadcasts public interest messages on HIV and polio, and carries snappy local news — including alerts about missing children and the opening of local shops. Raghav and his friend Sambhu run the station out of a thatched-roof electronics shop, which doubles as a radio station and repair shop.

His transmission kit, which he built himself, cost him 50 rupees, and is fitted to an antenna on a bamboo pole on a neighbouring three-storey hospital. The shack holds some 200 tapes of local Bhojpuri, Bollywood and devotional songs. In many parts of Bihar, where power supply is unreliable, the cheap battery-powered transistor remains the most popular source of entertainment. Raghav earns nothing from the station; his repair work brings him about two thousand rupees a month. He did not know that running an FM station requires a government licence, and when he was told his station was illegal he shut it down — until local villagers thronged his shack and persuaded him to resume. “Women listen to my station more than men,” he says; devotional songs are aired at dawn and dusk for women and older people. With no phone-in facility, listeners send their requests through couriers carrying handwritten messages, or telephone a public telephone office nearby. (Source: BBC News, 24 February 2006)

Notice what this small station has that the conglomerates do not: it knows the names of the shops it announces, and the songs its listeners actually want at dawn. The worldwide trend towards local radio, and the case for community-owned stations, rests on exactly that kind of knowledge.

7.4 Conclusion

That the mass media are an essential part of our personal and our public life today cannot be emphasised enough. They are in the household before breakfast and in the pocket all day.

This chapter can in no way capture your own life experience with the media. What it has tried to do is something different: to understand the media as an important part of contemporary society, rather than merely to describe them.

It has done so by keeping several dimensions in view at once — the link between the media and the state, and between the media and the market; the social organisation and management that a mass medium requires; and the relationship between the media and their readers, listeners and audiences.

In other words, this chapter looks in two directions at the same time. It looks at the constraints within which the media operate — of capital, of ownership, of regulation, of the need to hold an audience. And it looks at the many ways in which the media, in turn, affect our lives.

That two-way view, as Fig. 7.9 sets out, is what the sociology of the media is for. To ask only “what does television do to us?” is to forget who owns television and who pays for it. To ask only “who owns the channel?” is to forget the viewer who chooses, argues, writes letters and switches off.

Fig. 7.9

Fig. 7.9 – The three forces that shape mass media.

7.5 Summary

What mass media are

  1. Mass media include television, newspapers, films, magazines, radio, advertisements, video games and CDs. They are called ‘mass’ media because they reach mass audiences — very large numbers of people who do not know one another. They are also referred to as mass communications.

  2. Mass communication differs from an ordinary conversation, letter or phone call: it requires a formal structural organisation to meet large-scale capital, production and management demands. This is why the state and/or the market always have a major role in how mass media are structured and run.

  3. The relationship between media and society is dialectical — society shapes the media, and the media shape society.

  4. Access to media is unequal. The digital divide means that different sections of people can use the media with very different degrees of ease.

The beginnings of modern mass media (7.1)

  1. The first modern mass media institution began with the printing press, developed by Johann Gutenberg in Europe in 1440. Early printing was restricted to religious books, and the first products of the press reached only an audience of literate elites.

  2. With the Industrial Revolution, and with improvements in technology, transportation and literacy by the mid-19th century, newspapers began to reach a mass audience. People in distant parts of a country read the same news and began to feel a sense of belonging, a ‘we feeling’.

  3. Benedict Anderson argued that this helped the growth of nationalism, and that the nation could therefore be thought of as an ‘imagined community’ — a community of people who will never meet but who feel like members of one family.

  4. In India, 19th-century social reformers debated in newspapers and journals, and the nationalist press nurtured and channelised anti-colonial opinion. The colonial state responded with clampdowns and censorship, as during the Ilbert Bill agitation in 1883. Papers such as Kesari, Mathrubhumi and Amrita Bazar Patrika drew official displeasure but continued to demand an end to colonial rule.

  5. Under the Raj, radio was wholly owned by the state, while newspapers and films, though autonomous, were strictly monitored. Circulation was small because the literate public was limited, but influence far outstripped circulation, as news spread by word of mouth from markets, courts and towns.

Mass media in independent India (7.2)

  1. Nehru called upon the media to be the watchdog of democracy, and at the same time expected it to spread self-reliance and national development. The media was to inform people about development, fight practices such as untouchability, child marriage and the ostracism of widows, and promote a rational, scientific ethos. The Films Division produced newsreels and documentaries shown before every film screening.

  2. Radio began with amateur ‘ham’ clubs in Kolkata and Chennai in the 1920s and became a public broadcasting system in the 1940s. At Independence there were six radio stations and 280,000 receiver sets for a population of 350 million; by 1950 there were 5,46,200 radio licences.

  3. All India Radio’s programmes were mainly news, current affairs and development — including a sustained campaign on high-yielding varieties from 1967. In 1957 AIR acquired Vividh Bharati, which carried sponsored programmes and advertisements and became highly profitable: the market entered state radio through entertainment.

  4. The transistor revolution of the 1960s made radio cheap and mobile. By 2000, radio reached about 110 million households — two-thirds of all Indian households — in 24 languages and 146 dialects. AIR today has 480 stations and 681 transmitters covering 99% of the population over 92% of the area.

  5. Television began experimentally in 1959 to promote rural development, and SITE broadcast to 2,400 community sets in rural areas of six states between August 1975 and July 1976. Doordarshan stations were set up in Delhi, Mumbai, Srinagar and Amritsar by 1975, with three more added within a year.

  6. Once programmes were commercialised and carried advertisements, the target audience shifted towards the urban consuming class. Colour broadcasting at the 1982 Asian Games and the expansion of the network accelerated commercialisation.

  7. Hum Log (1984–85), India’s first long-running soap opera, used the entertainment-education strategy. Singhal and Rogers found high parasocial interaction, ratings of 65–90 per cent in North India and 20–45 per cent in the South, around 50 million viewers per broadcast, and over 400,000 letters. Its advertising promoted Maggi noodles, and the commercialisation of Doordarshan began.

  8. The print media after Independence continued as a partner in nation building; journalism was regarded as a ‘calling’ before it became a profession. The gravest challenge to the media was the Emergency of 1975 and the censorship that came with it; democracy was restored in 1977.

Globalisation and the media (7.3)

  1. Until the 1970s most media companies worked within domestic markets under national regulation, and cinema, print, radio and television operated as separate sectors. In the last three decades national markets have given way to a fluid global market, and new technologies have fused forms of media that were once distinct — as the case of the music industry shows.

  2. Contrary to expectation, print media in India expanded rather than declined. Indian language dailies grew from 191 million readers to 425 million by 2019, while English dailies stagnated at around 31 million.

  3. The reasons are, first, a rising number of literate migrants in the cities (Delhi’s Hindustan went from 64,000 copies in 2003 to 425,000 by 2005), and second, the ability of Indian language papers to meet small-town and rural needs — district and block editions (Malayala Manorama, Eenadu), colloquial language (Dina Thanthi), supplements, new printing technology and aggressive marketing (Dainik Bhaskar).

  4. Growth came at a price: lower cover prices meant greater dependence on advertisers, who gained a larger say in content, and reading habits fragmented, encouraging infotainment — information packaged as entertainment.

  5. Television changed even faster. From one state channel in 1991 to almost 70 channels by 1998 and about 900 private networks by 2020. The Gulf War of 1991 and the launch of Star-TV signalled the arrival of private satellite channels; Zee TV followed in 1992; cable operators multiplied from 100 in 1984 to about 60,000 in 1999.

  6. Fears that transnational channels would erode Indian cultural identity were only partly borne out. Research showed the channels that the familiar sells, and they localised: Sony broadcast Hindi films, MTV added Hindi programming, STAR Plus became a Hindi channel by 1999, and regional-language channels multiplied.

  7. Round-the-clock news has made television immediate, informal and intimate, and has fostered public debate — but it also raises the question of whether serious political and economic issues are neglected, and whether competition for ratings turns private distress into spectacle.

  8. Radio remains widely spread. Private FM stations from 2002 boosted entertainment; barred from political news bulletins, they compete through popular music, and most belong to media conglomerates. Independent public broadcasters of the NPR or BBC type are absent in India. The growing demand for local news, and cases such as a village FM station in Bihar, point to the potential of community-owned radio.

Conclusion (7.4)

  1. The media must be understood in two directions at once: the constraints of capital, ownership, regulation and audience within which they operate, and the many ways in which they, in turn, affect our lives.

7.6 Key Terms

  1. Censorship — Control by the state (or another authority) over what may be printed or broadcast; used by the colonial government against the nationalist press, and again during the Emergency of 1975.

  2. Commercialisation — The process by which media content comes to be shaped by the need to attract advertisers, so that programmes are aimed at audiences who can afford to buy what is advertised.

  3. Dialectical relationship — A two-way relationship in which each side shapes the other; society shapes the media, and the media in turn shape society.

  4. Digital divide — The unequal ability of different sections of people — by income, region, gender or education — to gain access to and make use of media and communication technology.

  5. Imagined community — Benedict Anderson’s idea that a nation is a community of people who will never meet one another, yet feel they belong together; print media, especially newspapers, helped create this shared sense of belonging.

  6. Infotainment — A combination of information and entertainment; news and information presented in an entertaining form in order to hold the interest of readers or viewers.

  7. Mass communication — Communication directed at a very large, unknown audience, which requires a formal structural organisation with large capital, production and management to carry it out.

  8. Mass media — The forms of communication — television, newspapers, films, magazines, radio, advertisements and the like — that reach mass audiences made up of very large numbers of people.

  9. Media conglomerate — A large company that owns several media businesses at once, such as newspapers, television channels and radio stations.

  10. Parasocial interaction — The one-sided emotional bond that audience members form with media characters or personalities, as when viewers rearrange their day to ‘meet’ a favourite soap opera character or speak to them through the television set.

  11. Public broadcasting — Broadcasting owned and run in the public interest rather than for profit; in India, radio and television broadcasting was for decades wholly state-owned, and independent public broadcasters of the National Public Radio (USA) or BBC (UK) type are absent.

  12. Soap opera — A serialised, continuous television or radio story with no fixed ending, in which characters and their histories become familiar to the regular viewer.

7.7 Points to Ponder

  1. If a newspaper is sold for less than it costs to print, someone other than the reader is paying for it. What does that do to the idea of a free press?

  2. Nehru asked the media to be both a watchdog of democracy and a partner in national development. Can one institution do both at once, or does each role weaken the other?

  3. Anderson argued that the newspaper helped people who would never meet feel like members of one nation. Do today’s media — hundreds of channels, endless feeds, each addressing a segment — still build an imagined community, or do they build many smaller ones?

  4. Global television channels came to India speaking English and stayed by speaking Hindi, Tamil and Marathi. Is this a victory for local culture, or simply a more effective way of selling a global product?

  5. The cheap transistor turned radio into a genuinely mass medium; the price of a device decided who counted as the ‘mass’. Which technologies are performing that role now, and who is still being left out?

  6. A village FM station knows the names of the shops it announces; a national network does not. What can very local media do that very large media cannot — and what can they not do?

7.8 NCERT Questions

  1. Trace out the changes that have been occurring in the newspaper industry. What is your opinion on these changes?

  2. Is radio as a medium of mass communication dying out? Discuss the potential that FM stations have in post-liberalisation India.

  3. Trace the changes that have been happening in the medium of television. Discuss.

7.9 Objective Questions

  1. Printing books using modern technologies was first developed in Europe by:
    1. Benedict Anderson
    2. Johann Gutenberg
    3. Raja Rammohun Roy
    4. Ramoji Rao [1 mark]
  2. The Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE) broadcast to community viewers in the rural areas of six states between:
    1. 1959 and 1960
    2. August 1975 and July 1976
    3. 1982 and 1984
    4. 1991 and 1992 [1 mark]
  3. Colour television broadcasting was introduced in India during:
    1. the Emergency of 1975
    2. the Asian Games in Delhi in 1982
    3. the Gulf War of 1991
    4. the telecast of the Ramayana in 1987 [1 mark]
  4. The Hinglish advertising slogan ‘Aapki Boli. Aapka Plus Point’ was used to promote the change of language on:
    1. Zee TV
    2. MTV India
    3. STAR Plus
    4. Sony [1 mark]
  5. All India Radio acquired the entertainment channel Vividh Bharati in the year:
    1. 1947
    2. 1950
    3. 1957
    4. 1967 [1 mark]
  6. The idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ is associated with:
    1. A. R. Desai
    2. Benedict Anderson
    3. Melissa Butcher
    4. Everett Rogers [1 mark]
  7. Assertion (A): Entertainment programmes on Doordarshan came increasingly to be directed at the urban consuming class. Reason (R): Once programmes were allowed to carry advertisements of their sponsors, the target audience of television shifted.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  8. Assertion (A): Many privately run FM channels in India specialise in ‘particular kinds’ of popular music. Reason (R): Privately run FM channels are not permitted to broadcast political news bulletins.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  9. Assertion (A): The circulation of newspapers in India declined once television and the Internet expanded. Reason (R): The readership of Indian language dailies grew from 191 million readers to 425 million readers in 2019.
    1. Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
    2. Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
    3. A is true, but R is false.
    4. A is false, but R is true. [1 mark]
  10. Match the newspaper in Column A with the language in Column B.
Column A Column B
a. Kesari i. Malayalam
b. Mathrubhumi ii. Tamil
c. Amrita Bazar Patrika iii. Marathi
d. Dina Thanthi iv. English

[1 mark]

  1. Match the person in Column A with the publication in Column B.
Column A Column B
a. Raja Rammohun Roy i. Bombay Samachar
b. Fardoonji Murzban ii. Eenadu
c. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar iii. Sambad Kaumudi
d. Ramoji Rao iv. Shome Prakash

[1 mark]

  1. Fill in the blank: At the time of Independence, All India Radio had an infrastructure of __________ radio stations, located in metropolitan cities. [1 mark]

  2. Fill in the blank: The combination of information and entertainment in the presentation of news is called __________. [1 mark]

  3. State whether the following statement is True or False: Under British rule in India, radio was wholly owned by the state, and national views could therefore not be expressed on it. [1 mark]

7.10 Check Your Concepts

  1. What is meant by ‘mass’ media? Name any two forms of mass media. [2 marks]

  2. Define infotainment. [2 marks]

  3. What is meant by the digital divide? [2 marks]

  4. Name the two publications started by Raja Rammohun Roy, and state the language of each. [2 marks]

  5. What is a soap opera? Give one example from Indian television. [2 marks]

  6. State any two aims that the Indian state set for the mass media in the first decades after Independence. [2 marks]

  7. Differentiate between mass communication and ordinary, everyday communication, giving one example of each. [4 marks]

  8. Explain, with one Indian example, what is meant by saying that the relationship between the media and society is dialectical. [4 marks]

  9. Why did the colonial government clamp down on the nationalist press and impose censorship? Give reasons. [4 marks]

  10. Give reasons for the remarkable growth of Indian language newspapers in India. [4 marks]

  11. Look again at Table 7.3 in section 7.3, which gives the number of cable operators in India in 1984, 1988, 1992 and 1999. By roughly how many times did the number of cable operators multiply between 1984 and 1999? What social change does this increase reflect? [4 marks]

  12. Look again at Table 7.1 in section 7.2. Using the figures for 1947 and for 2000, describe how far radio had spread in India, and explain one reason for this change. [4 marks]

  13. Differentiate between broadcasting as a state-led project and broadcasting as a market product, using examples from Indian television. [4 marks]

  14. Explain Benedict Anderson’s idea of the nation as an ‘imagined community’. What evidence supports it, and what is one limitation of the argument? [6 marks]

  15. “After Independence the media was asked to be a watchdog of democracy and, at the same time, a partner in national development.” Discuss both expectations with Indian examples, and explain the tension between them. [6 marks]

  16. Discuss the causes and the consequences of the commercialisation of television in India. [6 marks]

  17. How far do you agree that the arrival of global television channels has wiped out local culture in India? Evaluate the claim using evidence from the chapter. [6 marks]

  18. Describe the Hum Log* experiment in entertainment-education — what it attempted, what was found about its audience, and what its limitations were.* [6 marks]

  19. Newspapers in India have expanded even as their cover prices have fallen. Explain why this has happened, and evaluate the argument that it has made newspapers less free rather than more. [6 marks]

7.11 Passage-Based Questions

  1. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    The office of a Hindi daily in a district town of northern India occupies two rooms above a shop. Fifteen years ago it carried the same pages as the state edition; today it brings out a block edition of its own, with school results, market rates and the reopening of a repaired road. Its reporters carry small digital recorders and send photographs from their phones to a central desk two hundred kilometres away. The cover price has been cut twice in five years. On most mornings, four of the sixteen pages are supplements paid for by advertisers, and the editor admits that the sports supplement is what keeps the paper alive.

    1. Identify the two reasons, discussed in the chapter, for the growth of Indian language newspapers that this passage illustrates. [2 marks]
    2. Explain how new technology has changed the work of the reporter described here. [2 marks]
    3. What risk arises when a newspaper’s survival depends on advertisers rather than on readers? [2 marks] [6 marks]

  2. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    For two days in June, a news channel suspended its normal programming to cover a rescue operation at a collapsed building in a small town. Cameras remained on the site through the night. Viewers were invited to send messages of support by SMS, and a panel of celebrities discussed the rescue between bulletins. During the same two days, a state assembly debated its annual budget; the channel carried thirty seconds on it. The channel’s ratings for the week were its highest in two years.

    1. Which features of contemporary television, discussed in the chapter, does this account illustrate? [2 marks]
    2. Explain why competition for ratings can lead channels to cover events in this way. [2 marks]
    3. What ethical concerns does such coverage raise for the people being filmed and for the viewing public? [2 marks] [6 marks]

  3. Read the passage and answer the questions that follow.

    In a small town, a radio station run by volunteers broadcasts for six hours a day. It plays folk songs, announces the timings of the health centre, carries messages about lost cattle and about the school admission dates, and reads out a short bulletin of local happenings. Nobody is paid, and the equipment sits in a rented room behind a cycle shop. Forty kilometres away, in the city, an FM channel owned by a large media group plays film hits all day, runs contests, and carries no news at all. Its listeners are mostly students and young office workers.

    1. State two differences between the two stations described, in terms of ownership and purpose. [2 marks]
    2. Why does the city FM channel carry no news bulletins? [2 marks]
    3. What does the chapter suggest about the potential of community-owned radio in India? [2 marks]