International Conference
50 Years of Indian Television: Contemporary Issues
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India,
July 14 and 15, 2009.
Concept Note
Television has played a crucial role
in the creation and dissemination of Indian popular
culture. In the early years of its history, writing
on television consisted mainly of journalistic criticism
or bureaucratic policy statements and appraisals.
The past two decades, however, have seen the publication
of a number of academic titles that have scrutinized
the medium at greater depth. Today television studies
is a thriving field of research located at the crossroads
of a variety of academic disciplines including Anthropology,
Communications, Film, Literature and Cultural Studies.
Academic interest in television has
coincided with major changes in the nature of the
medium. Because of the shift from state-controlled
to privatized broadcasting that occurred in the wake
of liberalization, television is now a primary purveyor
of a consumer-oriented popular culture and a crucial
site for the playing out of mass-mediated politics.
Given these developments, we feel that this is an
opportune moment to take stock of contemporary research
and to create new frames that will help us better
understand television’s important role in the
making of contemporary modernity. The international
conference titled ‘50 Years of Indian Television:
Contemporary Issues’ will assemble some of the
leading scholars in the field and hopes to make a
decisive impact on the field of television studies.
The conference will address a wide range of issues
and questions: citizenship, media publics, political
coverage, global and local television, television
genres, broadcasting policy and television theory.
The papers presented at the conference will be published
in book form and will hopefully become a resource
for future scholars in the field of media and communications.
.
Tentative list of panels
1. Theories of television and the
Indian context
Papers on this panel are expected to address theoretical
issues related to India’s encounter with the
apparatus of television. The panel will consider the
way TV theories originating in the West can be problematized
in the Indian context. The key areas of examination
would be how the specificity of the post-colonial
situation or of ‘globalization in the third
world’ forces us to review the theoretical frameworks
that inform media theory in general.
2. Historicizing Indian television
Apart from analyzing the key phases of the history
of Indian television, the panel is also expected to
critically examine the methodological problems in
historicizing Indian television and to raise related
issues in historiography. Key areas of focus include
the histories of Doordarshan, shifts in the codes
of popular culture in the 1990s brought about by a
major relocation of television-oriented cultures from
regimes of the State to those of the market, the structure
and content of television in the age of transnational
programming.
3. Policy
The panel will try to address the key debates around
television policy in India and examine how questions
of policy could be related to issues of governance,
pedagogy, democracy and popular culture. Papers will
examine particular legislations and acts like the
Prasar Bharati Act or the proposed moral guidelines
for representation, terrains of illegality like the
cable networks, and television’s capacity to
generate public debates.
4. Industry
The panel will include presentations on the economic
aspects of production, distribution, transmission
and reception of television programmes in India. The
historical liaison between democracy and capitalism
and television’s role in sustaining that would
be a major point of concern. Papers will analyze issues
of investment, advertising, labour and professionalization
in the Indian television industry.
5. Genres and Global Formats
The panel will focus on particular genres such as
soap, quiz shows, reality TV and sports, and will
also extensively examine the mutations that global
TV formats have undergone in India. A key area of
concern would be the problem of defining the nature
of “universal” genres or formats as they
get played out in specific cultural contexts.
6. Gender and Sexuality
The papers on this panel will try to locate the complex
of gender stereotypes on Indian television, as well
as the way Indian television has emerged as a major
repository of alternative gender-roles and sexualities.
7. Audience
The panel wishes to address questions related to the
composition, viewing habits, and opinions of the contemporary
Indian audience.
8. Televisuality
This panel will discuss the notion that television,
along with film and the Internet, helps create a ‘televisual’
culture. Issues that the panel wishes to address are
liveness, publicness and network logics that are creating
a new environment of sociality and interaction in
post-liberalization India.
Conveners
Abhijit Roy
Department of Film Studies and the School of Media,
Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University, Kolkata
Biswarup Sen
Department of English and the School of Journalism
and Communication,
University of Oregon
