In recent years, postcolonial media scholars have begun to focus their attention on the dialectic relations between state and media policies (McDowell, 1997; Chakravartty, 2004; Kumar, 2006; Jeffrey, 2006). While such scholarship has persuasively analysed the construction of nationalism and examined the debates surrounding autonomy and deregulation in Indian media policies in the context of economic liberalization, a significant absence from this body of work is an engagement with how the concept of sovereignty is being reworked in the moment of globalization. In addition, two issues manifest within communication research and postcolonial media studies that pertain to an understanding of the state as a container and a fixed entity, and the absence of adequate theorization of broadcasting and space. According to Raka Shome (2004: 40), ‘Communication research, for the most part, has yet to address in a systematic way the role space plays in the (re)production of social power.’ A few studies—collected in a book, MediaSpace—have taken up questions of space in terms of different media modalities: radio, television, computers, and video-gaming. Clive Barrett (2004) offers persuasive theoretical reflection on space and public life via the specific writings of John Dewey, Harold Innis, and Raymond Williams. Despite these contributions, broadcasting and space in the postcolonial contexts remains unexamined. More importantly, however, such studies have not produced a theoretical account of how broadcasting and media policies are connected with state spatialities as well as temporalities.

This chapter makes two interrelated claims. First, a ‘spatiotemporal’ discourse can be discerned in broadcasting and media policies that has framed nationalism, globalization, sovereignty, and citizenship, and India's nation state has historically elaborated two overlapping modalities of power: national sovereignty from 1947 to 1990, and governmentality since 1991. Second, taking a cue from Manu Goswami's (2004: 4) insights, I suggest that to understand the spatiotemporal discourses and the modalities of power, we need to move beyond ‘methodological’ nationalism: that is, explanations that treat the state as a container and a fixed entity, where social relations are organized within territorially bounded national spaces. Indeed, the spatiotemporal discourse of the state can be grasped through a transnational framework that considers national and international as part of the wider global field of relations.

This book explored the history and development of broadcasting in late colonial and postcolonial India through an examination of the intertwined genealogies of sovereignty, public, religion, and nation, and the spatiotemporal dynamics of radio and television. The colonial constructions of sovereignty, public, religion, and nation that underpinned the formative period of broadcasting continued to operate in the postcolonial careers of radio and television largely shaping the structural, institutional, and policy discourse. While the study of broadcasting's administrative structures and bureaucratic forms revealed particular configurations and power modalities, analyses of television's programme narratives and viewers’ reception context pointed to incommensurability between the concepts and their explanations of sociocultural practices, with religion and the public in particular, as the most problematic. I argued that scholarly studies of India's state-run television glossed over the religious, the particular interplay between religion and secularism, and have not paid attention to how the colonial construction of broadcast public and the public– audience dialectic.

To overcome the incommensurability—and the conceptual conundrums — posed by colonial constructs, specifically religion and the public, I developed a theoretical approach drawing on Ricoeur's formulation of the ‘double hermeneutic’ and Foucault's late work on the ‘hermeneutics of the self’. The analytic orientation enabled me to pursue concrete examination of modes of power and narrative dimensions that underpinned sovereignty, public, religion, and nation; more crucially, however, the heterodox theoretical approach opened up the possibility of exploring divergent meanings of religion and the public that existed in late colonial and postcolonial India, and the particular ways in which these operated in television narratives—at the aesthetic, cultural, and symbolic levels, in stories, plots, events, kinship relations, characters, and the life-worlds.

Instead of summarizing the chapters, I offer commentary on the Eurocentric/Western conceptions of history, modernity, and religion, especially since the presence of the universal categories in contemporary India continue to obfuscate, rather than illuminate and clarify historical, social, and cultural processes. In the following, I briefly explore some recent scholarship in television studies in India as well as the West, pointing to their possibilities and problems in reconceptualizing media and communication studies (MCS) in India. Next, I draw on few scholarly writings in philosophy, neo-Marxist critiques, postcolonial, South Asian, and religious studies that present strategies on how to engage and move beyond the Eurocentric/Western universals.

This book presents a new perspective on broadcasting by bringing together two neglected areas of research in studies of media in India—(a) the intertwined genealogies of sovereignty, public, religion, and nation in radio and television and (b) the spatiotemporal dynamics of broadcasting—into a single analytic inquiry. I argue that the spatiotemporalities of broadcasting and the interrelationships among the public, religion, and nation can be traced to an organizing concept that shaped India's late colonial and postcolonial histories: sovereignty. In what follows, I describe how sovereignty in its various incarnations functioned as an organizing concept for the associated ideas of public, religion, and nation; discuss the spatiotemporal underpinnings of broadcasting; elaborate the book's theoretical approach distinguishing it from other approaches; and sketch the chapter outlines.

In 1995, the Supreme Court of India, ruling in the case involving the Secretary, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, versus the Cricket Association of Bengal, declared that ‘the Air waves are public property’; the state-run television does not hold exclusive monopoly over broadcasting, and ‘the broadcasting media should be under the control of the public as distinct from the government’. The Court's strictures precipitated a series of policy measures instituted by the Indian government through parliamentary and bureaucratic committees to create an autonomous corporation for the management of the state-run television network. The ruling also triggered spirited discussions among journalists, policy makers, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and the scholarly community that centred around the category of ‘the public’: what was this public that the Court was putting in place, and how should one situate it in relation to the rapid transformations wrought by media privatization and economic liberalization?

While the arguments varied across ideological lines, all agreed that the Court's ruling marked a decisive moment for Indian broadcasting. Yet none broached the juridical reasoning that informed the judgment, that is, the particular ways in which law and legal codes were deployed, the citations as well as transfer of ideas and knowledge from earlier court decisions, broadcast laws from the US and Europe, mobilization of the rights discourse, and so on.

This chapter explores people's memories of Doordarshan in the 1980s; a decade which witnessed rapid expansion of the television network and the emergence of a wide range of programmes such as drama, classical and film-based music, historical, mythological, and fictional narratives, soap operas, sitcoms, serials, and so on. It is not unusual for people to have memories of their first encounters with television, the particular experiences of watching ‘favourite’ programmes, remembering advertisements, jingles, parts of programmes, television personalities, and so on. Should we dismiss these as nostalgic and sentimentalized accounts, the fragmentary moments of their lives and experiences that have no bearing on the present? I argue in this chapter that the idea of nostalgia is not a singular experience of the past, but rather, it contains alternative, generative, and productive modalities in the reconstruction and remembering of the past (Pickering and Keightley, 2006). The question, therefore, I like to consider is not whether memories are authentic, but rather how, and to what end, memories are mobilized in people's practices of remembering. Overall, the chapter foregrounds people's memories of the everyday experiences, and knowledge of television paying heed to the argument of Darian-Smith and Turnbull (2012: 1) that ‘… the everyday “informal knowledge” about television and its technology as experienced by those who are watching it has been displaced by the “formal knowledge” of those equipped with the appropriate fashionable theory to analyze it’.

Although memory is crucial to individual and social identity formation, and some recent work in media and television research has explored television as ‘memory-text’, and the mnemonic practices it has engendered in the ideological construction of the past, the broader theoretical relations across television, memory, and history, particularly as they pertain to how people's memories shape their personal and social identities as audience, viewers, and the public remain unexplored. The chapter is organized in four sections. The first section is a critical discussion of recent work on television memories and ‘memory studies’, pointing both to their potential contributions and limitations in examining people's personal and social identities. I argue that Ricoeur's work on memory, history, and narrative identity offers productive analytic insights in studying the interplay of personal and social identities.

In recent years, discussions in social sciences and postcolonial studies have identified cosmopolitanism and post-nationalism as two major notions that seek to surpass the nation-state. As a framing device for the paradigm of globalization, certain components of the post-national thesis have indeed proved influential in explaining the gradual erosion of the old certainties of nation-state, but do not adequately explain how the nation-state itself is accommodating globalization to preserve, and thereby strengthen, its hegemony. Interestingly, the ascendancy of such ideas has been accompanied by the gradual dislodging of materialist critiques of capitalist expansion (read: globalization) in the postcolonial world. One can discern a certain disquiet that prevails behind the sophistications and subtleties through which the contemporary moment of globalization is being theorized. In postcolonial India, the two ‘cultural systems’, nationalism and globalization, have an enduring influence, and it would be theoretically significant to trace their mutual effects in the context of the music video genre, particularly the procedures through which ideas of patriotism get articulated.

Leela Fernandes (2000: 612) probed the post-national thesis by examining ‘the ways in which “globality” is invented through the deployment of nationalist narratives’, while pointing out to the ‘hybrid’ relationship between the national and the global, and the place of gender in such configurations. In addition, Arvind Rajagopal (1998: 16) noted that the national and the global were increasingly being shaped by Hindu themes and idioms, which coincided with the expansion of state-run television thereby creating a single mediated visual regime from the late 1980s. Indeed, for Rajagopal, the confluence of several forces such as economic liberalization facilitated the rise of right-wing politics in India. For Rajagopal, therefore,

Secularism, perhaps more than any other category or concept, has increasingly become entangled with religious practices in several postcolonial societies (Majid, 2000). Although most political and religious conflicts in this part of the world have their beginnings in this entanglement, various responses to these conflicts have generally taken two approaches: they either assume the resurgence of religious identities as a result of an encroaching secularism, or consider secularism and religion as two opposing and incompatible value systems. However, events of the last few years, especially 9/11, the subsequent ‘global war on terror’, and the rising violence from Darfur to Somalia underscore the importance of engaging religion. It should be noted that in certain manifestations religion and secularism can become tyrannical, and one needs to be vigilant against the violent epistemologies of both.

The postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty, reacting to the secular intellectual incredulity towards religious beliefs and practices, urges that we pay close attention to ‘the importance of faith in guiding contemporary imaginations of the political’ (Chakrabarty, 2004: 462). To engage religion in terms of a critical inquiry or ‘political theology’ is to explore the practices of ethics and tolerance among various religions, and to identify points of conversation with secularism. In a similar gesture, William Connolly (2006) argued that religious practices and secular principles ought to be brought into a productive dialogue. Furthermore, Chakrabarty and Connolly point out that pursuing religion and secularism as binaries may be theoretically untenable and practically unsustainable given the fact that in most postcolonial and non-Western contexts—and, perhaps, even in the Western world—religion and secularism frequently overlap.

Similarly, Jose Casanova (1994), in his comparative historical work on religious movements, pointed out that along with the rise of religious fundamentalisms of various hues, there have been important conversations across the boundaries of the religious and the secular:

It has been over half a century since television was instituted in India. Although scholarship on Indian television has provided valuable insights into its structural, textual, and reception contexts, a sustained examination of its narrative forms, for the most part, remains unexplored. In addition, a significant number of television serials translated from literary works have not been studied. In this chapter, I argue that a critical study of television's narrative forms that looks at how its repertoire of cinematic codes, techniques, and styles involve a complex overlapping between myth, realism, and melodrama will enable a better theoretical understanding of Indian television. In what follows, I discuss the television serials Mailā Anchal (1987–88, dir. Ashok Talwar), Rāg Darbārī (1986–87, dir. Krishna Raghav), and Godān (2004, dir. Gulzar) transmitted on the state-run television network, Doordarshan. These serials, adapted from literary works, deal with questions of late colonial and postcolonial identity in the countryside in terms of the dialectic tensions between the forces of tradition and modernity, local politics, nationalism, development, encroaching capitalism, public life, and more specifically, on the human condition. They frame the various issues through complex ‘mythic-realist’ narrative forms. For instance, the literary adaptations look at the effects of the process of development—through local (rural) politics, state institutions, and bureaucracies—in the lives of ordinary Indians, mostly peasants and working class. Both a critique and valorization of anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalism, the television serials portray the stories and plots in terms of a complex interplay between religious beliefs and practices and the secular vocabularies of public institutions. The main focus of this chapter is to explore the ‘ways’ through which the literary works (novels) are translated for Doordarshan and the presence of pre-capitalist performative practices in the televisual reconfigurations of myth and realism. Indeed, in the present moment of globalization and ‘neoliberal’ conjuncture in India, and in the larger contexts in which scholars have characterized television as part of the machinery of capitalism, it is crucial to develop critiques to engage with forms of television. This chapter offers such a critique by exploring specific forms of literary-based televisual narratives.