Remote Control is a good title for a book on the media. It tells you that this book is about television and that it has some comment to make about the remote control and what it signifies. Shoma Munshi, a professor of anthropology at the American University of Kuwait, has already authored two books on the media and co-edited one. Add endorsements from Rama Bijapurkar and Santosh Desai, master observers of consumer behaviour, and you are set. So, I began to read the book with my usual enthusiasm for any academic work on the Indian media and entertainment space.
Ms Munshi uses three programming genres - reality TV, news and soap operas - to comment on TV programming and what it says about India, Indians and their sense of identity and how that is changing. Her choices are interesting. General entertainment channels, or GECs, constituted more than 52 per cent of the time Indians spent viewing TV in 2012, according to TAM Media Research data. This is across all Indian languages and English. Both soap operas and reality TV form part of this 52 per cent . News is another seven-odd per cent of the total viewing pie. All of them involve Indians in more ways than one.
There is, in fact, an osmotic relationship between them. Soap operas and reality TV try to mirror Indians and their aspirations or frustrations. These change with exposure to the media. Ms Munshi brings out many of these linkages. She also reckons that reality TV allows some of India's marginalised minorities, whether North-Easterners or the poor, to become part of the mainstream - for example, the Prince Dance Group from Odisha that participated in India's Got Talent (Colors). It was a group of immensely talented dancers, labourers in real life, who were winners in season one (2009). So the book has lots of interesting stuff for anyone who likes to observe or analyse the Indian media.
It, however, falters in three areas. One is the research itself. The book relies too much on the opinions of people such as Santosh Desai, Jaideep Sahni et al. They make interesting copy. But just having lots and lots of quotes from people does not necessarily constitute evidence, insight or even anecdote. There are a whole lot of data on viewing and consumer behaviour on TV that Ms Munshi could have drawn on more heavily. She uses TAM, but without diving deep into the data to see the patterns that emerge on viewing behaviour and, therefore, the India they reflect. For example, film is the second most-watched programming genre on TV in India, after GECs. But the way films are watched, what is watched and where tell a different story from what works in theatres. Films, however, find patchy mention in the book.
Two, the book does a good job of warning you, again and again, about the context in which a point is made. For example, I really like Ms Munshi for not sneering at the K serials, the ones that Ekta Kapoor made and that dominated Indian television from 2000 to 2008. Too many academics do that. She discusses them matter-of-factly - like other shows - in the context of what Indian society, television and its reach were like at that time. Time and again she contextualises her comments by saying that TV was a largely urban phenomenon for many years. It was only when it spread to smaller towns that broadcasters pushed for changes in programming, which led to shows such as Balika Vadhu and so on.
But what I would have really liked - and you can accuse me of wishful thinking - is contextualising all that is happening in, say, soap operas in India to what is happening in China or what happened in the US in the sixties and seventies when soaps ruled the roost. What was the sociological food processor, the one that mixes society and the media, doing then? Ms Munshi's position and experience are the perfect place from which such comparisons could have been drawn.
Add another dimension to this. There is no talk of any other language except Hindi. Tamil shows, in a market that is as competitive as Hindi, have been more progressive and better written on most days. Marathi reality shows and soaps are fantastic in their ability to dip into literature and history to come up with progressive stories. How are they changing the nature of consumerism? Why does news rock as a genre in Andhra Pradesh?
A whole lot of perspective could be brought by getting other parts of India into the picture. Roughly half of all the viewership and revenues in India's Rs 37,000-crore TV industry go towards languages other than Hindi. Yet Ms Munshi's book, which is about "Indian television", talks largely about Hindi programming.
Three, the book has a lot of material but a loose structure. Ms Munshi does not decode her evidently good interviews into insights backed by further research. She just keeps quoting from them to make a point. What I have missed the most in this well-intentioned book is: what is the pattern that the author sees, how is it changing and where could it go, based on learnings from other markets. Remote Control could have done with some tight editing and a more structured approach, especially because it is a book about soft issues.
REMOTE CONTROL
Indian Television in the New Millennium
Shoma Munshi
Penguin Books; 312 pages
