“A Critical theory of the media cannot have the media as its center” (Negt 1978:63)

If Oskar Negt is to be taken seriously, I will not then start with television at the center, in the box, or on the screen. Rather, let us look at what the box is attached to, where it sits, what are its connections. To make this more specific, however problematically, something called `Asia’ will be content from afar, decentred (but perhaps re-centred). Then it will burn. Fire.

Ramayana

My interest in the screen image in Asia and the paraphernalia that surrounds television stems from my faulty memory of what is now probably an apocryphal story, but one with actual and resonant correlates.^[2] Much commented upon, and overdetermined in several ways, the broadcast of the serial Ramayana on Doordarshan in the late 1980s (1987-1990) in fact offers at least two stories that capture my attention. In one, the placing of devotional candles upon a television set during the broadcast led to the set catching fire. Sita in flames was made all too real for one accident-prone family. Television sets often carry a range of objects _ photos in frames, sporting trophies, souvenirs, and indeed my own has a candle atop it as I write while watching the international news. At the risk that these stories might overplay the mystico-religious register, my second example concerns the Haryana broadcast of Ramayana, which was interrupted by an unscheduled power outage, and subsequently the power station was besieged by a protesting crowd upset at having missed the show. Power is electricity is the spark that permits enlightenment, or at least storytelling in the electronic hearth that now dominates so many homes. These incendiary narratives do two things; they rehearse a fantasy rural-spiritual version of Asia on the one hand, an imaginary of timeless village and temple rusticity. On the other hand they link television to traditions of storytelling and the centre of social, familial and community space. Television as a myth maker at the centre of the social, at the centre of our rooms, our lives, it manifests some very old structural forms.

I want to talk about television in the context of the screen fantasy image and the circulation of `the idea of India’ abroad. I do not mean this as a Nehruvian update bulletin, nor as a simple rehash of the same old argument about how places and people are misrepresented, but certainly ideological critique has not been enough to yet displace the simplicity and stereotype of images of << poverty, flooding, temples, mosques, Taj, bucolic musicians, camels, cave complexes and Al Qaeda >> that `stand’ for South Asia in mainstream foreign media today. Images such as that of two aged politicians in politically appropriate `traditional’ dress (not Congress cloth today, but identified overseas as exotic garb) shaking hands after some brief stage managed regional summit (nuclear, Kashmir, trade), and a commentary sound bite from some pundit (i.e., western journalist) about intractable age-old rivalries, are still the common fare of the nightly news outside South Asia itself. I want to develop this through looking at several examples of news reportage, documentary `about’ South Asia _ primarily focussed upon geography documentary - and consider more general aspects of the televisual screen as an impoverished global eye, reducing the texture of life to a black and white in colour TV image. Here connections are reduced to content. At the very moment the television camera focuses its factual gaze on a colourful scene (`ethnic’ apparel, tradition, nature, disaster), this colour is rendered two dimensional and it is so often already scripted in a way that is left unchallenged.

Despite the `visibility’ of Bollywood and even the overdetermined success of some Bengali art cinema at international festivals, the image of `India’/South Asia appears on the world screen most often as a `realist’, but usually tragic, news item. Images of villages awaiting rescue from cyclone, flood, earthquakes, riot, famine. Images of high mountain military stand off or besieged temples, mosques, cave complex and Al Qaeda training camps: television is particularly well suited to containing tragedy within a box. On the small screen it is images and stereotypes or clichés that move. “Things happen to images, not people” (Delueze 1995:77). But representation of Asia indicates a corresponding nether side to the tragic image _ there is also a simultaneous positive gloss that is equally ideological _ the fascination with tradition. Sound bite emotional containment fuels the global rumor of a mythical third world Asia that is both traditional in dress and architecture (the Taj Mahal, camels, rustic musicians) and is a modern mess born of a debased modernity, that perhaps (the argument implies) only the restitution of colonialism could redeem (in the mindset of the imperialist power).

The double visage of India abroad is fantasy and sensation. On the one hand, the Hindi film glitz or traditional exotica of temples, rich fabrics, and pantomime handlebar moustaches. On the other, disaster, war, cotton-clad politicians discussing nuclear weaponry, and pantomime handlebar moustaches.

This doubled representation follows an ideological investment that eases and erases imperial guilt. From abroad, it is clear (the wish is) that the vibrancy (temples, fabric) of South Asia has not been destroyed despite the (rarely or reluctantly acknowledged) impact of 300 plus years of colonialism visited on the place. Reassured by tourist brochures that most of the temples remain, the disasters are attributed to contemporary dysfunctions: poverty, corruption and mismanagement. Such reasoning, sometimes explicit, affirms that India’s problems are Indian, Asia’s problems are Asian, and that independence and self-management were perhaps premature. A self-serving ideological psychic defense, to be resolved by more `development’ aid…

The sheer diversity of a continent of images is thereby channeled into a narrow ideological repertoire^[3]

Fire and screens

In order to kindle some critical sparks for this paper, let me suggest that it is no coincidence that the most popular TV show on Bengali television puts the hearth at the centre of the screen _ cooking, domestic tasks and so forth - all in a game-show format. It is also no coincidence that this show has yet to be exported to Britain _ it does not slot into the available stereotypes, and does not yet need to compromise to connect the dots to disrupt them. We might presume there are enough Bengali viewers (as there are), but probably expect this to change if the program proceeds towards a more global ambition in order to increase its market exposure.

In the waiting time before Rogere Ginni goes galactic, I want to take up the cooking metaphor of the fire in Plato’s cave… There could be many associations with the screen and the flame and this one seems as good as any a place to start (see Moore 2000:122 and Harbord 2002^[4]). In an overdetermined and well known passage, Plato presents a primordial cave in which we are offered the scene of shadows flickering on a wall. Those watching the images are incredulous when told of the sun outside the cave, which reveals a greater truth. As the story goes, the proto-television retains its viewers, who after all are chained to the scene and cannot look away.

In the worthy tradition of finding foundational moments of television in mythology (that Plato is not mythology is hardly a valid objection), I want to link the Ramayana television serialization with a number of other scenes of media screen and fire - the cooking show is just one among many. Fire, as we know, is both creative and destructive. It is endlessly fascinating (more than television) - `hard to light, it is difficult to put out’ - a malevolent spirit (Bachelard 1938/1987:64). I want to experiment with looking at television through a symptomatic examination of flames on the screen. This experiment may fail, and might seem spurious - think of grainy images of the Reichstag fire, of the Hindenburg zeppelin crash, of the burning monk during the Vietnam war, and of late night reruns of Cinema Paradiso. Nevertheless, Plato’s cave establishes the precedent with those shadows on the wall - television and fire are inexorably linked from the start _ and so I also want to invoke a mythic register as perhaps more than as metaphor, or as heuristic device. I have in mind myth as it might have been narrated in a reverie of those gathered around a campfire not unlike the one in the cave. There are any number of televisual and cinematic moments that might provide a kind of archive to enable this _ I invite readers to come up with their own greatest moments in flames. To sort television as a burning issue under a register of fire is a kind of contrivance no doubt, but a necessary one, and it allows me to think of storytelling, and so television, as a fundamentally social origin myth. By extension, I mean something more than mere historical development, rather also an extension of the social, connecting the physical body with its contexts. And if this is also about extension, then there is so much more to be said about distance.

Himalaya

So as to keep this relatively coherent, and before exploring fire more closely _ I want also to present a very particular and even spectacular kind of televisual representation of South Asia as my `object’ for analysis. I have in mind an example taken from my own recent television viewership, the six part special Himalaya presented on British television late in 2004 by Michael Palin. No apologies that this research is coloured by subjective viewings of the screen/world (my worldview has always been framed), but to make a critical assessment of Palin’s program has, I think, general and valid implications for other telematic presentations of South Asia on screen, be these television news, other modes of documentary, cinema reruns or Merchant Ivory style films. Four hours of prime time high demographic mainstream Palin (352 minutes on the DVD version). The show I take as typical, `representative’ and symptomatic of much foreign documentary on Asia. Here Nepal is presented as a trekkers paradise, medieval, glacial, remote and timeless. Twenty million people, but its mostly Sherpas we meet.^[5] The mountains are the backdrop to a much bigger story: Palin’s quest is our own. There is a slippage of course in that Himalaya is not all South Asia _ the main focus is Nepal _ and the slippery cascade is also that the entire subcontinent is too often seen through the avalanche of images of India alone, so perhaps other angles are welcome. There could however be a number of alternative manifestations of the South Asian fantasy I have in mind. Topically contingent examples gleaned from the UK might also require some comments on Gurinder Chadha’s film Bride and Prejudice (2004), which seems to be an attempt to cash-in on Bollywood on the back of a British-Asian success story that is Bend it Like Beckham (2002),^[6] and examples from late night re-runs which regurgitate and regulate vestiges of and memorials for the Raj _ I have in mind specifically the film The Razor’s Edge from 1984. I do apologize for those who might not have seen these confections, but I will be careful not to give the best bits away.

An analysis of images of Asia could take numerous forms.^[7] As ideology critique - of content _ is predicated upon structure, the first almost predictable move after looking at the images is to ask how they were made. There has been considerable work in this regard; recently both Ulf Hannerz and Ursula Rao have, as anthropologists, separately examined the production of `news’ (Hannerz 2004, Rao 2005). What I hope to do is provide some background reflections on the connections of television to the productive circumstances, and consumptive contexts, of populist `documentary’ of the exoticist type represented, most recently, in the adventures of a British comic in the Himalayas.

The Mode of Production of both news and documentary on Asia for Britain is, at best, economical: freelance, semi-feudal, on a budget. Palin actually tells us little that is news, but his team is not unlike the stringers and crews that are responsible for more weighty versionings of the subcontinent. There is a camera crew, presenter and researcher contact person, and a series of not very well remunerated contacts, who, through serendipity, or accident, provide the story and colour for the presenter’s narrative. Palin stumbles across the Himalayas with a team of six, lucky to be invited to various arcane events or visit lesser or greater local rulers, personalities of living deities. His discussion with the Dalai Lama ponders bowel movements.

Palin’s Himalaya serialization is another in a grand tradition of minor televisual epics, and parallels with the Ramayana and Mahabharata, insofar as they were also occasions for the elaboration of ideological connections beyond the box in the corner, are not unwarranted. Palin’s epic presents what Paul Gilroy calls a `postcolonial melancholia’ (Gilroy 2004). Palin holds a candle, as they say, for the good old days of the Raj. This is a Raj of nostalgic fantasy, where enemies, subjects, and infuriating lackeys are now renovated and romanticized in a battered picture book of faded glories.

There is the semblance of `news’ reportage built into this picture. Episode three, for example, begins with an announcement from Palin that disavows the tranquility one might expect, and he will soon learn that `things in Nepal are not always the way they look, as communist insurgents have been waging war against the government’. After a spectacular micro-jet flight across the mountains, Palin arrives first of all in Lekhani in the company of a recruiting agent for a British Gurkha regiment. The irony of arriving with the military is lost on him “this has been a tradition for over 200 years” and the `problem’ of `the Maoists’ is made manifest only when the stiff-lipped British Gurkha agent lieutenant colonel Griffith does not return to the village in which Palin is camped. Understanding that the Maoists have `kidnapped’ Griffith, the crew and entourage nervously depart a place that had previously “seemed like a rustic backwater”, but now “friendly villagers seem like potential kidnappers”. There is a rush for the main road and it is only in Pokhara that it transpires that the agent was unharmed. This reassurance coming not before Palin has an encounter with three Israeli budget travellers who tell him that at the start of their trek they had been stopped by Maoists who demanded 1000 rupees and issued them with receipts, with a red flag stamp, that authorized travel in the region. Palin’s budget does not extend so far, but he has the drama his story needs.

In Kathmandu, Palin’s interview with the journalist Kundu Dixit, publisher of Himal magazine, is less revealing than it might have been.^[8] The clearly well-informed Dixit makes the relevant point that no-one wins in the war scenario, but there is no chance to explore issues such as US and UK military support, and armaments supply, for the royalist Rana regime, nor any chance to ponder the uncertainties of an increasingly militarized city. Instead, Palin’s programming prefers to segue into a sequence on the several sadhu’s that congregate around the main temple complex in the city. We are treated to an extended discussion of the dreadlocks and callisthenic achievements of an 87 year old Shiva Baba, who Palin pictures, but does not interview. A mildly amusing sexual innuendo, then a cut to the burning ghat and soon on to Red China with another wry irony: “from the land of Maoists, to the land of Mao” and “the red flag flies above the frontier”.

Guides

It is here that a large gap looms in this essay. What would repay extended study is the role of the narrator as controlling agent. Not just Valmiki, the narrator of the Ramayana, but also the media and mediating figure of the presenter Palin who is here on a quest. He carries the viewer into the mountains in a way wholly unlike the load bearing sherpas who carry his kit. The Himalaya is a fantasy image for such a quest, promising a vaguely understood notion of enlightenment, satori, moksha. This is why the sadhus must displace the Maoists in the mediated sequence of Palin’s narrative. The sadhus are there (in the film) to affirm a timeless devotional aesthetic, unaffected by the iniquities of contemporary politics, or inequalities and conflicts that might be rather wished away.

This is where I am reminded of watching late night television in the privacy of my own fantasy Asia. In The Razor’s Edge, originally a Somerset Maugham tale first filmed during the second world war,^[9] and then for the second time in 1984 with Bill Murray in the lead role, our hero, the shell shocked WWI veteran, is seeking an answer to his alienation and has travelled, reading the Upanishads, to Shangri-la. The head priest of the monastery where he ends up recognizes his problem as an attachment that must be broken and he sends Murray up the mountain to a snowbound hut for a week. Murray has firewood, and his holy books of scripture in which he seeks the goal of his long search. Only when the firewood runs out and the cold forces him to burn his beloved books to stay warm does he have his realization. The pages burn one by one in an elegant scene - cue uplifting raga - and Murray is then able to return home, rejoin the world, and take his place in America once more. This narrative of self-fulfillment is a common Western projection of `India’ as a place of spirituality in which the lost soul can find itself. What is unusual in this case is the passage through the burning book. Between the chakra-branded National Socialists in Germany burning the books of degenerate communists and Jews (in the mid 1930s) and the book-burning protests of Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (in the late 1980s) - the first approximately coinciding with the date Maugham wrote The Razor’s Edge, the second a just few years after the (re)making of the film version _ this enlightening textual conflagration confirms the phantasmatic Asia.

Books with fire scenes are legion and I see them as prototypes (or pyrotypes) of Palin’s film. What we have here is a rerun of the epic traveller’s quest _ a la Frodo and Gandalf from `Lord of the Rings’ _ with each day marked off one by one as ordeal, in the `tie-in’ book of the series. Palin promptly dispenses with the guides however,interviewing the Dalai Lama about his toilet habits seems more amusing that anything esoteric. No surprise that the holy leader laughs heartily through the interview up until the poignant moment when he pauses to consider seriously Palin’s impending visit to Tibet, wistful that he cannot go himself.

Politics does raise its ugly head here, since the issue of Tibet is an oft-screened one, as filtered through celebrity advocates like Richard Gere and the sometimes sari-clad musician Madonna. We are spared any hint of political journalism that might raise questions about Western armaments sales to Nepal (or for that matter Indian military support to the Royal Nepal Army and King Gyanendra). Instead we are left to affirm the hegemonic pro-Llama views of the anti-China lobby. No wonder than I am surprised that my viewing is interrupted by a snippet of news that underlines the discrepancy between the example of Palin/Llama and the wider critical view of television I want to consider in this paper. The incendiary incident that intervenes is one I find on the internet:

Nepal Maoists bomb TV station (February 26, 200510:35 IST)

Heavily-armed Maoists torched and bombed a regional station of the state-run Nepal Television, causing damage worth over Rs 4 crore and disrupting the broadcast indefinitely even as the security forces gunned down 10 rebels and lost four of their own men in a clash in the west of the kingdom. The regional station of Nepal Television at Kohalpur in Banke district of mid-western Nepal was torched and bombed by hundreds of Maoists on Friday, NTV sources said. The regional broadcast of the NTV has been disrupted indefinitely after the explosion. … The Maoists also looted seven cameras and several other equipment from the station. However, no one was injured in the incident, the sources said. (http://www.rediff.com/news/2005/feb/26nepal.htm)

This incident contrasts with Palin’s travels, but I read it also as symptomatic, as an example of what Raminder Kaur calls a `combined media and political performance’ (Kaur 2003:5). Although Palin travels through Nepal without a spiritual guide, he has both various local guides _ a British military recruiter, a sherpa, a tout, a journalist - and he himself is our guide. In both geographical and ideological terms, the presenter is a point of view characterization who is an emblematic performer of the refracted visitor’s conception of Asia. Geopolitical military intrigue is smuggled in with the scenes as the presenter mediates our orientations along an already well-trodden campaign trail. The surprises on the way, like the eagerly anticipated 360 degree views, are not so surprising after all.

Palin’s own narrative is intentionally and aesthetically low budget at the level of content.^[10] Glimpses of events, parts of longer interviews, and plenty of the presenter sitting on a rock resting after a long march provide more than circumstantial evidence that the great game continues. The briefest of meetings with the tourist trekkers, who had proudly displayed their `Maoist’ permit to trek, is followed soon after by a scene in which Palin rests his weary feet in the waters of a mountain stream. This low-fi home movie feel is a strange contrast to the massive marketing of the series for British television. The book tie-in that is a pre Christmas bestseller; the DVD available for the January sales; Palin interviewed on numerous morning radio shows _ all extend the television show into the public domain with fanfare.

Image

In this way then, attention could be focussed upon the telematic circulation of images of Asia. The staple strategy of political economy of the media is to examine ownership, which is still much debated in terms of ideology, state developmentalism or private capital. Structured managerialism still clearly operates to suppress dissent; while audiences are not passive, the exclusion of some possible images limits choices; and entertainment has seemingly triumphed over education, probably because work is so bad (hard, stressful or unrewarding) that leisure time needs to be recuperative (mind-massage). Marketing diversifies but does not negate the tendencies identified above, and new media promised much but already seems to reflect a well-ingrained pattern.

Who then chooses the images? Looking at South Asia from England, we are shown mosques turned to rubble by the saffron suited, or later by military booted; the memory-enhanced sons of Shiva are idolized in stone and drink milk before the cameras; the offspring of airline pilots and Italian beauties become preternaturally political before the fawning journalist; debonair, if aged, Bollywood icons end up as curiosity reports of the Indian version of `Millionaire’ (`crorepati’); on-the-set exposes of Gurinder Chadha making Bride and Prejudice show more of Indian cinema than many will ever really get to know.

More professional news reportage is not all that different in terms of contact,presenter and crew. My focus on Palin should not excuse his mostly harmless antics in a diminutive mode, but let me here single out another simplistic, and symbolic, example. When the former Python travels to a school in Himalaya (the grouping of the six countries he visits under this single sign of his title must inevitably homogenize the diversity he finds), there is one disarmingly charming scene with kids (who are always photogenic, aren’t they). The bumbling performer, dishevelled and endearing,entertains them with a slapstick routine in which he keeps on losing his shoe. This, for some, could not but evoke parallels with another recent footwear scenario in another part of the `East’: the staged slapping of Saddam Hussain’s statue with slippers in Baghdad in 2003. A Cinderella scene this was not.

What I want to suggest with these intemperate criticisms of documentary-light versions of Asia is that we need to rethink ideology critique. Would it be possible to see television not as a manipulated medium or even as tainted imported technology (television of national development, or as advertising vehicle for commodity culture) but rethink in a radical way that goes beyond its technical and managerial specifications? A broadcast medium bringing news from afar, yes (eyewitness news, the latest products embedded in reassuring stories about the timeless past), and ideology critique must engage with the world that is brought into being through television, not as technologically determinant media, but as media and technology that worlds our world. Sure, television reduces everything to an image in a box, expands this imagery everywhere and miniaturizes with astonishing global ambition, but do we recognize this as our world, as integral part of our world?^[11]

The idea of connections surrounding television might also be taken metaphorically to reference questions of civil society _ the television news service as public forum, connected to democratic or social formations that have the potential to transform our world. Television as the `vehicle’ that brings democratization has itself a long tradition, and perhaps the Maoist (and not only the Maoist) opposition to the King in Nepal is televisual in sentiment here as well (see Karki and Seddon 2003). It is difficult to argue this case for democratic television in a place like Britain (where property ladder shows are hardly democracy) or in terms of media flows (where bad soaps are sold cheaply worldwide, see Appadurai 1996), but certainly in the present conjuncture democracy and television are linked. Linked, of course, negatively, where on-screen images of Asia more often than not come with car bombs, detention camps and body counts.Militarism is directly implicated here with the reputation of even the landlocked Hindu kingdom of Nepal constructed through violence (the death of King Birendra and family at the hands of the prince in 2002^[12]). Even in the scene where Palin emphasizes Nepal as the home of the Gurkha, though, he notably keeps the discussion limited to the cultural level of age-old traditions of militarism, fostered by British pluck, rather than the far more brutal and exploitative aspects of colonialism, right up to the present. Is it surprising to link the supply of guns to the handling of cameras? The camera is a Cyclops, a limited powerful thug. Having one eye is of course a mark of lesser intellect compared to two eyes, or even the three eyes of the deity. Yet the simplicity of the one-eyed perspective has come to be associated with documentary truth when exactly the multiple eyes of the television system that links many views together might have suggested a democracy to come. The Maoists challenge this as they both burn the station and steal the cameras -- a radical democracy is the cathexis of insurgency.

Fetishism

All of which makes me want to suggest a rethink of ideology critique of television that might take Marx’s Capital as a guide. The world now appears as an immense collection of images: single scenes, repeated over and over in a blur. The media seems to be an endless archive of representations, a global montage machine. But the image has a fetish character (I know India is not this picture, but…)

How did images become such fetish objects? Did they creep up on us? Victor Burgin notes the `state of distraction’ that accompanies the viewing of films today: `the distraction that typically accompanies an evening’s television viewing - answering telephone calls, fixing drinks, chatting, `zapping’, flipping through newspapers and magazine, and so on’ (Burgin 2000:33). With Barthes, he distinguishes this from the cinema experience, but maybe Burgin would do well to get a widescreen TV, give up the booze, pay attention, and turn off the light. Television does not need to be mundane, although one of its joys is that it can be. What is wrong with a boozy day in front of the cricket? It is safe, it is not crowded, it is not the streets and it is not dark - the homo-erotic charge of sports television is reliable, scheduled, and sponsored. Be Lethargic.

Rachel Moore equates watching film in the dark with the archaic, but now lost, unity of the hearth fire that was used for warmth, cooking and light (Moore 2000:122). But a still more appropriate substitute for the disenchantment of the social space of the campfire (Moore follows Schivelbusch 1988:220-21) is the communal television experience with its movies, DIY shows and cooking programs. That these do not happen in a single space, but rather a time slot, is a change in the geography of unity rather than its loss. Nevertheless:

`Like fire, cinema brings us alone together, and although we watch the same embers and shoots of flame, its contemplation may take us in different directions. Like fire, cinema exceeds mere function’ (Moore 2000:10)

The only trouble is that this extravagant metaphorics could lead almost anywhere, and if we free associate television with fire, light, luminosity and insight we might meditate upon knowledge and vision, the daylight (let there be light…), the lantern (Zarathustra…) and the lamp (Aladdin…). As if enlightenment were an unproblematic advance (as anti-monarchy, it well may be), fire is also a weapon (literally as firepower, and in India Agni is the name for a ballistic missile). Fire may cleanse, but it also destroys. It is divine avenging spirit and productive furnace of hell, with Lucifer it is both the fall and purgatory. May Day though is the celebration of both Beltane and workers’ power; fire produces both steam and ash; energy and residue. It is made by friction or a spark; a smouldering beginning or a sudden crash of lightning; the image of god, spirit, cherubim; yet also hocus pocus, and obscurantist smoke and fog; fiery, inflamed, incandescent, excited; related both to flagrant and flamboyant. Why then is it that so often television does not at all encourage that reverie that Bachelard identified in fire (this is also discussed in Moore 2000:130). Late night TV is especially evocative of the narcoleptic campfire -- flickering shadows the only light lulling us towards unconsciousness. The embers of the late late show shine with a soporific glow and contemplation need not be profound.

Prosthesis

For Bachelard fire is the metaphor of metaphor (1938/1987:111). Citizen Kane ends with Rosebud in flames (Moore 2000:150). I would like to extend the collecting metaphor that can be drawn from Kane’s furnace to think of the consumption process that is television in the wider sense. Just as collecting took over Kane’s life (and indeed the Hearst role model), I am interested in collecting stories like the one about candles on the television showing Ramayana. Palin also collects.

I am interested in things that are attached to television as well as those things that escape the box in the corner. I can see how television drifts into the layout of our rooms, like smoke. Television inexorably seeps into other parts of our world. Unlike anything else in quite the same way, the television can reach out and grab our attention, it distracts, it interrupts. But it is perhaps less like the mesmerizing quality of a campfire: before television a conversation can become difficult, intermittent, haphazardly unfocussed. Here is another phantasmagoric quality: we have all no doubt noted at some time when someone we were talking to was found not to be listening to us because the box in the corner held their attention. I think this happens less frequently with other appliances: the cooker, radiator, air-conditioning unit, or even windows (but possibly not Windows XP and the internet). Television is restless and demanding.

Hence, it proliferates objects into the room. The remote control device, the television guide, ornaments and aerial wires, video tapes and DVDs on the shelves where books might have been (I do not want to denigrate television here, but this is an old routine). Interactions between people turn to discussions of programs, even when `there was nothing good to watch last night, was there?’ Television is colonization in the minor key _ all the more insidious for that _ or subsumption in the real sense, of every part of our day. It is not just (if at all) a colonization by technological import, but rather the culture industrialization of all of our lives. Television is invasive because it turns everything into storytelling, into a commodification of time and space that was prepared by storytelling, fellow feeling, companionship, and desire. We were always getting ready for television and our televisual friends: the fetish structure is confirmed by the box.

So, I am arguing that we need to rethink this fetish of image and TV screen more systematically (as a system, as a global apparatus). To open another angle on this same speculation, might we think of television as a prosthesis of the social - like books which help codify memory - a means of ordering, recording, of power and persuasion. An observation from afar, it shares the structure of remote killing, it invades our space: suicide bombing is the camcorder version.

TV as prosthesis _ we might also call this the network eye. After convergence, this becomes especially important as new media subjectivity, and intersubjectivity, opens potentials and possibilities for television that were hitherto not yet realised (Spigel and Olsson 2004). That is, the potentials of television as prosthesis are only now emerging, and even still without clarity. As an apparatus, the television is a multifaceted and multiconnected social machine that irrupts into our homes and more. Toby Miller points out the obvious future: “A TV-like screen, located in domestic and other spaces,transmitting signs from other places” (Miller 2002:3). The extended apparatus of television infiltrates with an enormous global architecture that comes equipped with broadcasting stations, satellite relays, cameras technology, edit suites, newsrooms,producers of programs as well as producers of machines for making programs, tape and lighting stores, commentators and commentaries, schools of television and journalsdevoted to its discussion; study programs, degrees, credentials, awards; conferences and journalism; books, newspapers, footnotes and indexing; promotions, advertisements, embedded correspondents and al Jazeera; CNN and Dan Rather; Michael Palin and Gurinder Chadha; scandals and weather girls. The systematic impact of television is as global as we are _ and there is no (need to go) outside.

But is all this new? If the television as campfire metaphor has been replaced by television as social prosthesis we must assume that changes in technology such as VCR, satellite, and digital innovation have scattered the embers of the incandescently gleaming box. Certainly viewing habits, and advertising strategies, have gone through some recent adjustments. The hand-dialled set has been replaced by the remote-control and channel surfing, streaming media is controlled by the click of an optical mouse, there is television in waiting rooms, on buses, huge city centre billboards and in video art museums. For me this suggests the social connectivity of the television network is ever more subsumed within our daily lives; or rather, our daily lives are co-constituted with the social network which is the electronic hearth. We gather around the screen, still warmed by its radiant lustre.

The lustre of television _ is also a personality, or even celebrity machine. I always fancied that one way to gauge the prosthetic effect of television would be to examine how the body image of a personality, say the national leader, is plugged into the body politic, or the nation, through the dissemination of images of that leader. The circulation of the image becomes the stand in, or doppelganger, for the leader’s corporeal self. This was something that was confirmed by the US Presidential process from the time of John F. Kennedy on, but especially with Reagan. In India no-one needs to be reminded of the screen presence and subsequent political stature of MGR. It might however be well to recall that this stand-in scenario of representation has always been with us as well (see Marx’s analysis of representation in the 18^th Brumaire, Marx 1852/2000). The extension of television to the time of Napoleon is only the recognition that the culture industry explosion has made potatoes in a sack of us all.

Distance

There was then, as Scott McQuire once said, never any reason to believe in a time when television did not exist (McQuire 1986).^[13] Clearly, television exhibits some very weird features. It is a time folding device. You can be in your living room and on the Serengeti at the same time. It is eyewitness now live news, and it is a second sight history making machine. Palin’s Himalaya is timeless in the way Johannes Fabian exposed as old colonial trope in his book Time and the Other (Fabian 1990) But there is always a danger in advocacy of both past and the now. This issue burns a hole in time and again reminds me of the burning TV that triggered my interest in the Ramayana. Yet a more analytical tracing of how the thematic of fire and crisis is variantly dealt with might lead to a (renewed interventionist) scholarship, if it were not so easy to fall into the dangers of Orientalism here… Let us risk this then, to discuss Ramayana further.

It would not do to import the old tribe, village and myth categories of colonialist anthropology. Voyeuristic obsession with the (broad) caste system should be abandoned. Nonetheless, some old wounds are opened when television burns in Ramayana _ which of course also includes Sita’s ordeal by fire (sati and its histories). Television is not a mysterious magical moment and this moment is not a magical mystery but a signifier of the close relation between fire and the screen. The idea of the electronic hearth is not new.

The very first surviving Indian feature film, Raja Harischandra, made in 1913, was based on the Ramayana. Since then hundreds of films have drawn on the Ramayana and Mahabharata for plots (Dissanayake 2003:205).

Mankekar notes that the retelling of the `ancient’ Mahabharata in the new media of television means that, like all such stories, “its meanings acquire new valence with every telling” (Mankekar 1993:469).

The Mahabharata is of course one of those ur texts of South Asian storytelling.Indeed some have suggested its magical realist qualities alongside its more traditional ideological dimensions. As extreme examples of these bookends of pre-modernity and post-modernity: the epic’s author intervenes to impregnate a character when a crucial male bloodline is at an impasse, the doctrine of karma is inherently hierarchical and conservative, and there are multiple lines of critique. The audiences however were huge.^[14]

In the scene that presents Draupadi’s disrobing, nationality and sexuality overlap in the folds of a sari made endless by the defensive magical decorum of Krishna. If we are to take reception theory seriously _ i.e., as not just an empiricist corrective to theories of the hegemonic gaze _ then we must admit that the Draupadi scene also can be read in multiple ways. Viewers might see Drapaudi as wronged, as victim, as proud, a symbol, as polygamist. There are those who think that the Mahabharata allowed more open and multiple readings than the Ramayana because it is a more complicated text (Mankekar 1993:471) _ but its audience was even larger, so I wonder if this qualifies. The openness of reception theory readings must surely be limited by economies of scale. How much does ideology critique still matter? Very much indeed, despite the occasional Muslim identification with Draupadi.

But let me not get ahead of myself _ evoking the multiplicity of even single images I should be able to avoid sectarian investments so as to sidestep a dubious Hindu chauvinism that would make too much of Ramayana or Mahabharata as metaphor. Let us imagine television (TV as a box of life) as a magic global eye that reduces the colour of life to pixilated squares. I want to claim Draupadi as the emblem of that very moment when the television camera focuses in upon a `colourful India scene’ (as I said: ethnic apparel, tradition, natural disaster). Her multiple positionality and her polyandrous vitality challenge the paradoxical way that colour and conflict is rendered two dimensional. In comparison, Palin’s version of the myth of Asia is limited television. Simplified. A cookery book. Colonialism and communists substituted with scenic views and silent sadhus. Real relations between people are obscured in the montage of image.

Resistance and Interpretation

Is Draupadi an alternative figure? It is well to remember how the celebration of resistance has often been criticized. Interesting here in the context of representations of South Asia is Madhava Prasad’s work on ideology. Prasad argues that ethnographic audience studies in the west find `resistance’ - where viewers “never completely fit the position that the text offers” - while studies in the east find “non-western subjects…distinguished by being completely at home in their ideological environment, the films they see corresponding exactly to their needs” (Prasad 1998:15n). Resistance has been a long beloved theme of cultural studies and has dominated audience studies for some time. It would be not be sectarianism to suggest that there is a misplaced optimism on the part of former leftists who, instead of organising struggles prefer rather to find the anti-hegemonic resistance of the subordinate classes already prepared for the screen (just made for documentary). Such documentarists and their critical acumen still seem strangely inadequate to the effort required to displace power and win, but nevertheless. That this deserves more than the footnote Prasad offers is clear as it shows the persistence of a hierarchical othering that is fantasy on both sides, and that the mess of reality in film, or TV, is never so neat as much audience/ethnography analysis would contend. Here we need to go beyond the audience. (cf. Theodor Adorno: “sociological research that would prefer to avoid the problems of analysing production and to confine itself to questions of distribution or consumption remains imprisoned in the mechanisms of the market and hence gives its sanction to the primacy of the commodity” Adorno 1999:6).

Which is to say, even the analysis is part of ideological struggle; as Prasad reminds us, films, and so also television serials, are works of ideology, not mirrors of reality (Prasad 2000: 237). Let us not assume that listening to television or Ramayana is either a case of total interpolation (she is always Sita) or of fully dynamic resistance (I am Ravanna one day, Hunaman the next, Sita another).^[15] The pursuit of the audience leaves the politics of production untouched.

In a densely argued and engaging book that deals with television in India, Arvind Rajagopal discusses the way Doordarshan state monopoly television largely failed to translate existing televisual sensibilities into the actual mechanics of television broadcasting. Ignoring audience research that indicated the popularity of entertaining storytelling (and why not, Adorno would approve), the plodding paternalism that managed State television was, for many years, the provenance of crushingly boring content (but audience research was hardly needed to tell us this).

Doordarshan offered a mirror to the state’s official aspect, presenting it as it wished to be seen. In practice, this meant that the political party and the leader in power at any given time were presented making speeches, cutting ribbons, presiding over parades, and deliberating at meetings (Rajagopal 2001:77).

Rajagopal is concerned here to show that not many were watching these moments of state propaganda (just 3 million sets in 1983, 13 million in 1987, etc.) and that people preferred films and songs. It is, however, not the case that broadcast State media was without a resonant audience in India. Consider the how and why of Gandhi’s radio broadcast successes of the 1930’s. Why was India so well prepared to hear him if not the already marked out space of the democratic sphere, or civil society, anticipated already, now mediatized?

At one level at least, `Ramayana is basically a secular epic’ that even Gandhi saw as `an expressive metaphor to symbolize a welfare state’. So says S.S.Gill the Minister of Information and Broadcasting who commissioned Ramanand Sargar to produce and direct the serial. This of course is contested terrain; if the State introduced Ramayana to television, did it do so for ideological purposes, or to satisfy an impulse to entertain? Whatever the intentions, the markers were already in place and the politicization of the epic was only enhanced by the technological trickery which made, “divinity appear as merely the sum of spectacular effects” (Kaur 2003:91). Whatever the case, the program did have some impact on the space of television and its articulate with the body politic. It is less clear that television changed Ramayana although it is perhaps true that the multiplicity of possible interpretation makes mythology more vulnerable and available for adoption by all manner of interests. As Rajagopal notes:

The difficulty in discussing the Ramayana is that we are not referring to a single literary work … rather, it refers to an extraordinary broad range of texts and performative traditions, from devotional vaishnavite retellings, to Buddhist and Jaina variations, to political propaganda, to folkloric domestications of a high classical form, and beyond (Rajagopal 2001:87).

Could we say that Ramayana is the foundation of television? Perhaps this is a frivolous speculation, best ignored. Himalaya does plug into the same public-mythic space, and the story-quest, the book, the documentary serial and now satellite and DVD versions achieve the saturation coverage for the same. We do not hear even a fraction as much news from the Maoists themselves.^[16]

My argument is not that subcontinental television should be made in order to broadcast and showcase a better Asia to the world, though certainly quality documentary and filmic production that challenges the mundane Palin model could be more widely disseminated. I recognize that production of content for outside broadcast need not be the best choice for those pressed for time and resources, who might better make content (critical, informative or entertaining) for their own constituencies. But what if the idea that television is a foreign import, and that commentaries on television in Asia are already informed with a media imperative mindset, were not taken wily-nily at face value? Rajagopal points out the `knowing eye’ of television scholarship which tends to see television as a late arrival to South Asia, and is then concerned only with a “focus on direct control of software and media corporations, and [with] point[ing] to Western interests being served by institutions and images endorsing the West’s eminence” (Rajagopal 2001:75). This is a kind of digital `intimate enemy’ argument that, Rajagopal argues, must be supplemented by noticing “how the imagination is blunted in apprehending a transplanted technology’s distinctive history” (Rajagopal 2001:75).

Invention of Television

The need to think differently about television is a part of the disruption required to displace the Himalayas. No easy task, since without doubt television in South Asia is determined, in its operation, by local structures and possibilities (Prasad 1998:3),just as it is everywhere. How these local considerations then shape, distort, or confirm, the productive practices of documentarists from abroad requires further study. What is needed is an assessment of the longitudinal forces at stake, the various deep conditioning factors and metaphysical strictures within which a politics of television may then engage.

Media ownership and control of context, market and commercial imperatives,including new media convergence tend not, despite investments in criticism, resistance and possibility, to facilitate an alternative thinking of the business of television. The conditions of production and control - the hegemony of the televisual culture that manages the imagination - is not challenged where thinking about television still follows the center-periphery formal subsumption and cultural imperialist models. Images of Asia abroad reinforce this absent alternative, we do not escape the cave, and the `East’ remains in shadow.

To imagine otherwise, to enlighten ourselves, to re-orient television - this might mean to invert the developmental sequences somewhat, to recast Asia as the center,especially in terms of the development of television. This might be to see Ramayana and Mahabharata, and real subsumption and the phantasmagoric of Bollywood or the agency of images, as a productive basis for a rather different view of television. Television as counter-hegemonic, social uplift, anti-realist, libidinous investment contra the festishizing, trinketization that is capital. Television puts the trinkets back in the box. Curse and reprieve. Would it be possible to see television as an invention of Asia? Plato would turn in his cave (and perhaps see the sun). There is no doubt this is a risky suggestion, but the thought that representation begins with fire is not unthinkable.

To take that campfire, and Ramayana, and cricket, as subcontinental inventions of television is not implausible (cricket because its done well, the camera crew has a good ideas as to where the action will be, and can set up ahead of time at Eden Gardens or similar). To do this simply implies a critique of television as local ideology. Hindutuva is not there `in’ the Ramayana or Mahabharata just as nostalgic diasporic conservative longing is not built into the exported Bollywood film every time, but it is there in the possible interpretations and the extensions of the programming to the world. The question to ask now is what composition of forces and what critique of ideology would be required to combat right wing appropriations?

This does not erase the doubt that to make the campfire the antecedent of television is nostalgic traditionalism and anti-modern fantasy all over again. But what if it were through this dangerous thought experiment that the prohibition against thinking differently about television were to be lifted? A peal of spring thunder breaks over Nepal; the lightning strike lights a fire; the Rana dynasty totters at last. There will always be debts to pay, but the justice of them might be contested. Prometheus steals fire as freedom for humanity - a technology that gives the naked fool a chance to survive, with warmth, light, sustenance (cooking) and fun (fire-water), but it is hard to control, and his liver pays the price.^[17]

So does it make a difference to our assessment of television in Britain if we think of television itself as an Asian form? Certainly it is produced both here and there; the old dissemination model at least is reversed/disturbed. But, more fundamentally, if the capital investment is not primarily diasporic, what consequences follow?

I suspect there are many more ways to rethink South Asian television as the center rather than an imported media brought by imperialism to the periphery. This is not to deny media imperialism, but rather to tamper with its guiding assumptions, to invert its logic. So as I am watching The Razor’s Edge and Bill Murray is looking for enlightenment, I also am sure that the exploration of things and connections between them are occluded in the fetish character through which we are compelled to comprehend otherwise social and productive relations. Hence the need to examine those relations of production that enable events like Himalaya to be screened, but also the need to examine the epiphenomenal vectors of television and its connections to commoditized performance as advertising, as trinketization and as culture at war. These are themselves a fetishised index of (international) social relations, congealed or reified as connections between things and as the mediated performance of the political.

Coda

What then, for news and documentary of Asia in the Palin type? The quest for knowledge is stalled on the mountain top because commercial and military imperatives govern the way in which Asia is known - a backdrop to the extraction of products, trinkets, icons, terror. This too is not merely ideological but relies upon an identified market segment characterized by passing interest in a natural - exotic - nostalgic subcontinent. We might call the ideological context colonial melancholia (after Gilroy, 2004) and note that the dominant tropes on the screen are of time past and of practices arcane. A kind of pseudo-popular historical programming that sells relatively cheap product on relatively expensive airtime (Palin was on at 9 pm Sunday) for substantial gain (advertising revenue for `new’ products). The margins for Palin here are neither huge, nor insignificant, and as a potential cross-over audience can be assumed with divergent interpretations of Palin’s antics, there is plenty of margin for the programmers themselves. Palin sells ads and books - a hugely successful Christmas hit selling 250,000 - great for a TV tie in. A similarly split audience would be typical for production like Bend it Like Beckham, Bride and Prejudice, Ask the Kumars and Cricket. Cricket itself is cheap TV - the producers know in advance where the game will be played.

As Ashish Rajadhyaksha points out, the hyped `Indian Summer’ of 2002 in London may have showcased filmstars, food and music form the subcontinent _ all things Indian at Selfridges department store - but two things were conspicuously absent: `the political … and the Indian state’ (Rajadhyaksha 2004:56). The erasure of political content (beyond a brief mention of the Maoists in Nepal and some wry comments from the Dalai Lama) show that the Palin style of docu-tainment is of a type with the marketing of exotica in other parts of the new `subcontinental Britain’ in which an Indian summer could be staged. South Asian exotica in Britain has a much longer history of course (see Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma 1996) but the point is worth stressing. What is it we see here and on television? The fire of inspiration? Or is it only an electric radiator glow of difference? The screen has become safe to touch; its great potential is tamed and insipid. Embers, and even ashes, from afar (cf Lévi-Strauss). Should I seek out a documentary conflagration to light the way? I am of course also waiting to see what use the Maoists make of the seven video cameras looted from Kohalpur in February while the television station was burning. The utilization of video by political groups becomes much more disturbing when executions and beheadings are measured up against US military documentation (say of smart bombs) and the videographic war on terror is seen not only as a public screen. But this is another essay, and these are not explorations but implorations of television; the investigation is a demand to begin to think the ways television is in our thinking. I am concerned at how television watches our every move; it is why I have a lighted candle on the set; to remind me of the cave, and to keep me looking to the light.

 

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¹ I apologize in advance for the speculative character of this paper, which was initially presented as a provocation at the 2004 seminar on television at the Film Studies Department of Jadavpur University, Kolkata. Thanks to Sherilyn Saporito, Biren Das Sharma, Shiv Visvanathan, Bhaskhar Mukhopadhyay, Abhijit Roy and Atticus Narain (none of whom can be blamed for the faulty transmission and bad camera angles I provide).

² I take justification for (re) telling anecdotes from anthropological training, held in critical suspension. But also from the comments by Gregory Ulmer, in his book Teletheory, that associate television, and especially television news and the teaching of television studies, with a specifically `anecdotal structure’ (Ulmer 1989:72).

³ It is my argument that international televisual interest in South Asia is predicated upon two ideological strategies _ representation of good Asians and bad ones: demons and exotics. This can be seen in news reportage of Asia _ disasters or quaint customs _ just as it can be seen in representations of Asians in Britain _ bad Muslims, spicy food (Asian cool). Rarely does a media event depart from these co-ordinates, but when it does, this cannot be contained within the terminology of diaspora, complexity and flow. Here I am building on the work of a group of scholars who have, over ten years, interrogated the
representation of diasporic South Asians as exotic, trendy, in fashion, at a time that coincides with increasing racism, attack and murder-the first of these texts was Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music eds. Sharma, Hutnyk and Sharma 1996, see also: Kalra and Hutnyk 1998, Sharma and Housee 1999, Kaur and Hutnyk 1999, Kalra 2000, Hutnyk 2000, Kaur 2003, Kalra, Kaur and Hutnyk 2005 and Ali, Kalra and Sayyid 2005.

⁴ I discuss Rachel Moore’s work in more detail later in this paper. Janet Harbord, writing on cinema, all too briefly tempts us with a meditation on thermodynamics, and references Seigfried Kracauer’s idea of a thawing of modernity, with heat lost as escaping energy, as excess. She compares this with Benjamin’s fascination with snowdomes, coolness, the frozen temperature of the congealed image (Harbord 2002:34). The snowdome as television is itself provocative and suggests another climate altogether. At the end of her book the second law of thermodynamics, where heat is thrown off in the productive process, allows Harbord to present the technology as mediator of the tension between modernity and postmodernity, between tradition and revolution. This interest in the temperature of (re)production is what I would gloss as a taste for waste. I’d like to think of this excess material as the fuel for the metaphor of the electronic hearth, and so in this sense we have the mediation of `productivity versus waste, or heating up versus cooling off … across and within different, often competing processes’ (Harbord 2002:160).

⁵ Documentaries about Nepal most often focus upon trekking and the Sherpas, or the trafficking of Nepalese girls to the sex trade in Mumbai, with obligatory section on the girl-god of Kathmandu. For text on the Sherpas, see Fisher 1990. Also see Campbell 1997 for discussion of the Tamang peoples.

⁶ I have written elsewhere of the problematic ambition of an Asian girl who wants to be just like the white ubermensch, David Beckham. Both amusing and provocatively compromised, she has to go to America to succeed. See Hutnyk 2005.

⁷ There is a vast literature on this released in the wake of Edward Said’s book Orientalism in 1978. My own work has worried at this groove for some time, with The Rumour of Calcutta: Tourism, Charity and the Poverty of Representation in 1996, and Critique of Exotica: Music, Politics and the Culture Industry in 2000.

⁸ Himal also operates an impressive film festival that provides an antedote to Himalaya: “Film South Asia is a competitive biennial festival of documentary films on South Asian subjects that provides a quality platform to exhibit new works and to promote a sense of community among independent filmmakers. It is organized by Himal Association, a not-for-profit institution dedicated to spreading knowledge and information in Nepal and South Asia.” http://himalassociation.org/fsa/

⁹ The first film version of The Razor’s Edge was made in 1942, starring Tyrone Power. The clunky sets indicative that it was not filmed on location. Again see Hutnyk 1996.

¹⁰ The example of the `six degrees of separation’ theory of documentary structures this ever more inexpensive docu-fabulist mode. In another similarly lightweight contrivance, a woman in Wales wants to reach Mongolia through less than 7 `contacts’ and a film crew (and sometimes herself direct to camcorder) tells the story. [the name of this show was `Six Degrees of Separation’]. Other documentarists complain of the strictures that require them to mass produce human interest stories, that there be a clear `angle’ on what they do, that the show take account of the audience (`lowest common denominator’) and where studio interference imposes conditioning tropes upon creative reporting, anything actually newsworthy is excluded or edited, and the containment of anything really surprising is effected by commercial dictat. What would a radical Himalaya look like? What might set television alight?

¹¹ Or is it just Truman World^TM? In his book Picturing Theory, anthropologist Jay Ruby discusses the “not illogical merchandising direction [of] The Truman Show [which] contains ‘references to memorable episodes over the years, postcards of favorite moments in the show, obscure characters from the program’s past years, various bits of Truman trivia and a catalog of products featured on the show, offered for sale and snapped up by its loyal international audiences, “(Ruby 2000:250, quoting the Paramount Pictures Press kit for the film). Ruby’s point is that anthropologists cannot pretend to study people without the context of commercial capitalism; similarly television without its connections would be television out of context. Yet, if Ruby wants to modernize anthropology, we might ask why his book is subtitled `explorations in film and anthropology’ (my emphasis), as if the explorer’s quest (Palin again) were something that did not need the (idea of the) pristine and untouched other as its (slightly tarnished) holy grail. I have always wondered why texts on visual anthropology, and film history in general, are fixated on the founding practitioners and nothing from `before’ (I owe this point to Scott McQuire 1986, but also to new work by Theresa Mukuriya on precursor techniques of photography - Ph.D. project, Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths).

¹² Portrayals of the massacre by the prince soon fell into a predictable pattern, foregrounding Nepal as timeless wonderland, subject to weirdness. Ancient culture distorted by partial modernity provokes a death craze, followed by repressive military crackdown and despotic rule. Armaments sales from the west again overlooked in support of counter-insurgency against the Maoists. On the one hand the spiritual kingdom, on the other the militarisation of the mountains _ the razor’s edge is sharp indeed.

¹³ I take further justification for a pan-televisual view of the world by reading inversely when Raminder Kaur writes of performance: “There is a tendency, due to the entanglements of media with technological developments, to posit that the mediated comes after performance. Such views assume that what was before technological reproduction was somehow authentic, raw, and not represented in other forms … One is not necessarily anterior to the other” (Kaur 2003:16). I will read television backwards into performance, even if it remains the case that all of South Asia is not yet adequately screened, it certainly is multiply mediated.

¹⁴ I am intentionally avoiding audience studies of television here, but it is not that I am unaware of them, nor do I think they are insignificant. As ever, I have learned much from the insights of David Morley in a sustained publishing career that stretches from The Nationwide Audience: Structure and Decoding (1980) through to Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (2000). In the latter book especially there is a sustained discussion of television and distance, encompassing exposure of French government restrictions on North African immigrant viewing habits and anxieties about national integrity in the face of global media (Morley 2000: 103) through to the anxieties of shoppers purchasing exotic consumer products in purpose-built shopping malls (Morley 2000:237). Though it is difficult to see how the celebration of border crossing which is then rightly followed up by critiques of the erasure of `ethnic’ peoples at the very moment of cultural and
gastronomic celebration, can then also ignore the necessity of a concomitant political and economic readjustment. Morley’s condemnation of any pandering to those who would prefer to stay home and `cultivate new arts of reading existing travellers’ tales’ (Morley 2002:235) might line Palin’s project up in his scattergun sights, but there is a redistributive politics that must necessarily go along with `talk’ about the reconfigured nation. The facile multiculturalism that has been so roundly critiqued must be displaced into something that offers more viable financial, economic, democratic options, for all.

¹⁵ The now almost obligatorily dutiful observance that the Ramayana is `open to various interpretations’ is also made in Kaur 2003:117.

¹⁶ For those who do have an interest, a series of reports from the participants and critical commentary is available in the theoretical journal of the Maoist International Movement, MIM Theory, available at: www.etext.org/Politics/MIM, and see also A World to Win at www.awtw.org for an alternate Maoist angle.

¹⁷ Prometheus angers the titan Zeus by dividing a sacrificed bull unfavourably to the gods (meat for man, bones for the deity) and in response Zeus withholds fire for cooking from mankind. Prometheus goes to Olympus and steals some embers of fire, hiding them inside fennel, and gives them along with arts and sience to humanity. In retaliation Zeus creates Pandora who has a box - television perhaps - that should not be opened lest all manner of problems escape, as they do. See also McLuhan 1967 for consideration of the ways television could be a tool for education, but isn’t.