The rise of national programming: the case of Indian television

Globalization and Grassroots

“…It also became notorious for its remote and sluggish bureaucratic culture, directed from Mandi House in New Delhi, whose mandarins were charged with the state's tasks of national integration, economic development and the maintenance of cultural identity. In practice, critics claimed, this meant fostering an Indian identity based on the urban middle classes, consumption and Hindi-Hindu hegemony (Mazzarella, 2003;Monteiro & Jayasankar, 2000;Rajagopal, 1993).…”

Deregulation of television broadcast in India: Cultural and informational impacts

“…On the other hand, a majority of India's population still needs to recognize the need for education and information through the media. As some critics fear, it is only too easy for Doordarshan to shift its priorities informally from development to revenue-gathering (Rajagopal, 1993). In the case of Turkey, privatization in the late 1980s brought about a philosophical change from a monopolistic hold by the government to a democratic 'choice'.…”

“…This is not the entire problem, however. Researchers have found that even when specific educational programmes were targeted at potentially interested audiences, they failed to win attention (Rajagopal, 1993). This somewhat discouraging phenomenon raises questions as to whether it is a failure of the policy itself, or a bottleneck in its implementation.…”

“…Scholars such as Rajagopal (1993) and Contractor et al (1993) have treated the issue wifh the conventional disdain shown for non-educational entertainment. Yet, what is lost in informational terms may have been regained at least in part in cultural terms.…”

Displacing Creativity: Artists, Space Scientists and Audience-Led Television in 1970s India

“…1 The aim of this short paper is to indicate the involvement of creative practitioners whose methods and motivations carried with them the aspiration to open up the creative agency of audiences. Alt hough some documentation exists of the involvement of staff and students from the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad and the National Film and Television Institute (NFTI) in Pune (Seminar, 1978), the important role of creative interventions is absent from recent historiographies charting the significance of SITE in the Indian space program (Rajagopal, 1993;Harvey, 2000;Siddiqi, 2015). The research for this article (and a fuller account in process) is the result of a year spent in Ahmedabad, the epicenter of the project, gradually gathering together the many threads of the narrative from archives and original participants, who revealed the nuanced, serendipitous and often tactical ways that creative practitioners integrated with the work of ISRO scientists.…”