Mapping India's television landscape: constitutive dimensions and emerging issues

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the Indian television sector has experienced a profound transformation with regard to policies, players, production and practices. Exploring this altered landscape, this essay argues that the present television landscape in India represents a heterogeneous, ‘rhizomatic’ formation characterized by complex constitutive dimensions that simultaneously reflect both the forces of media globalization and local, contextually rooted elements and realities. These dimensions include the primacy of the market and the growing alliances between global and local media companies (which mimic global trends) on the one hand, and the dominance of limited formats, the film industry's invasion of televisual space, the meteoric rise of the regional in television and the paradoxical condition of the public broadcaster which combines massive reach with a viewership confined increasingly to poorer, rural audiences (which variously represent the specificities of the Indian situation) on the other.

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