w hybrid genres of programming. Because private television came to India as a foreign entity, Indian producers in the early years largely followed Western formats, which served as a benchmark. As competition intensified, however, economic pressures turned news producers into mediators of what they understood to be an ‘Indian’ identity. They tapped into Indian oral traditions and traditional patterns of social communications that historians and sociologists have long documented and channeled them into television. The ‘mediated’ nature of the tele-visual medium means that these traditions are not transferred as is, but repackaged with the use of new interactive technologies in a form that resembles, but is still vastly different from, the original. It uses cricket to illustrate what this means for notions of identity and Indian-ness.

Satellite television is one of the most obvious manifestations of globalization. Its technological capabilities have been adapted in unforeseen ways but debates on globalization, media and cultural impact have struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation. The central problem in cultural debates on globalization has been the ‘tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization. But many of these debates revolve around the traditional notions of a dominant center and dependent periphery and, though many scholars have argued in favor of more ‘hybridized’, complex and overlapping information flows, empirical work on how such processes work within the non-Western media has been thin.

 
This book is a seminal, but by no means comprehensive, work on the evolution of television in India. There is a need to have a look at the regional television too. Moreover, the book confines its study to news channels whereas the impact of non-news or entertainment television on India’s political, social and cultural aspects needs to be evaluated too.

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 No where you have mentioned the name of former prime minister Mr P V Narashima Rao, who actually liberised economy, which gave a boost to Indian Television Industry

V Gokulananda | July 8, 2010