Winter Institute 2006

Mediascapes: Shifting boundaries, Contested Terrains

PUKAR’s Third Annual Winter Institute was held at the Tata Institute of Social Science (TISS) between the 10th and the 12th of February, 2006. Co-sponsored by TISS’ Centre for Media and Cultural Studies (CMCS), the Institute highlighted the theme of mediascapes and explored the impact of economic, cultural and technological change on the production and consumption of various media forms.

The Institute featured panel discussions and presentations by leading scholars, media producers and practitioners, and screenings of narrative and documentary films. The seminar’s central theme highlighted the tension between global mass consumer culture, and its associated media products, and the appropriation of media technologies by independent producers and grassroots movements. Acknowledging media corporatisation in India and abroad, as well as state, corporate, and market censorship as forces limiting the accessibility of diverse media products, speakers identified encouraging developments such as community radio, filmmaker-sponsored film festivals, and grassroots documentation as strategies to include diverse perspectives. Over the three-day seminar, more than 80 participants, including students, local journalists and media practitioners, joined the panel presenters to critically examine these issues.

The seminar opened on Friday morning with introductory comments by TISS Director Dr. S. Parasuraman, Dr. Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Director of PUKAR, and Dr. Anjali Monteiro, Professor of Media Studies at CMCS, highlighting the objectives of the seminar and activities of the sponsoring organizations. The introductory comments were immediately followed by the first panel discussion, featuring Dr. B. Manjula, Prof. B.P. Sanjay, and Prof. Vinod Pavarala, addressing the seminar’s conceptual themes. Drawing upon research conducted in BPO calls centres, Dr. Manjula, Lecturer in TISS’ CMCS, identified the culturally homogenizing effects of globalized production systems, as workers in India are expected to dress, speak, and act “American.” She argued that these imperialistic forces can be discerned in advertising and other media messages that increasingly speak to an urban elite audience, thus reshaping mass media as “class media.” The presentation by Dr. Sanjay, Professor of Communications at University of Hyderabad, held open the possibility for greater local influence on identity formation, arguing that global images and messages are adapted and contextualized for local audiences. Though suggesting that new, potentially empowering relations may be emerging between media producers and consumers, he concluded that existing power structures maintain the boundaries of media spaces. Launching the discussion, Dr. Pavarala, Professor of Communication at University of Hyderabad, challenged the notion that media globalization is necessarily imperialistic, suggesting that polyglot globalization and various resistance strategies enable the emergence of hybrid cultural forms.

The second panel addressed questions of training and credentials of media practitioners. Presentations by Prof. Shobha Venkatesh Ghosh, Head of the English Department at S.I.E.S. College, and Prof. Sudhakar Solomonraj, Head of Wilson College’s Political Science Department, discussed Mumbai University’s new Bachelors of Mass Media (BMM) course to question the objectives of media education, as well as the institutional structure and resource allocation of the University. While Dr. Solomonraj focused on the components and institutional history of the BMM course, Dr. Ghosh discussed the social implications of media pedagogy, analyzing the parallel objectives of producing critical media analysts and adept technological practitioners. With many students and faculty from BMM courses participating in the session, the ensuing discussion probed the objectives and experiences of the programme.

The seminar resumed at 6:30 at Jai Hind College Auditorium, in South Mumbai, for the seminar’s keynote address delivered by Mr. Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief and CEO of the Indian Express. The evening event began later than expected, due to unforeseen weather delays affecting Mr. Gupta’s flight from Delhi. After screening two PUKAR-produced films, Aur Irani Chai and Portraits of a Lane, Mr. Gupta arrived to speak to a slightly reduced audience. Mr. Gupta’s address engaged with the theme of mediascapes and offered his unique perspective on the contested terrain of media production. Speaking on both the business and content of print media, Mr. Gupta discussed the implications of media proliferation and diversification, changing socioeconomic structure of Indian society, and contemporary fiscal and business pressures on newspaper publication. The most engaging part of his presentation, however, was when he opened the floor to audience questions. Responding to insightful questions, he spoke candidly about the perceived problems with Indian print media and ways that newspapers are repositioning themselves amidst new challenges and increased competition.

Saturday’s seminar sessions engaged with issues of censorship, moral panics, and media representations of the city, while documentary films were screened on the tsunami’s impact on Chennai, cosmopolitan identities in Mumbai, Tamilian female poets, and images of utopia. The morning session featured Ms. Shohini Ghosh and Ms. Shilpa Phadke discussing the increased regulation and moral outrage around representations of gender and sexuality. Media scholar Shohini Ghosh discussed the state’s restrictions on sexual speech and images, based upon standards of morality generally presumed to be uncontested. She traced a shift, occurring both in public discourse and legal precedent, from the idea that the ‘image causes harm’ to the idea that the ‘image is the harm,’ and questioned implied conceptions of harm. She called for replacing moral absolutism with moral pluralism that contextualizes sexual speech and images. PUKAR Associate Shilpa Phadke noted that globalization has raised new anxieties about who defines the national community, and has led to the identification of the urban middle class Hindu woman with Indian female sexuality. Meanwhile, she asserted, issues of consent are muted, as the same moral outrage is used to characterize consensual and non-consensual sex acts. In popular representations of both consensual and non-consensual sex, this national archetype is used to characterize the sexual perpetrator and victim in class terms.

The second morning session explored how representations in and of the city are used to address issues of class, gender, and the nation. PUKAR Associate Rahul Srivastava wove three distinct presentations together into a lucid discussion of urban identity. Filmmaker Venkatesh Chakravarthy used Chennai as a basis for engaging with class as an implied, but rarely explicit, category in popular media. Abeer Gupta critically analyzed the archetype of the “angry young man” as portrayed in Dev and other popular Hindi films, used to depict masculine negotiations with society, state power, and the city. And filmmaker Paromita Vohra used her two-part film, Cosmopolis: Two Tales of a City to interrogate the unquestioned representation of Mumbai as a cosmopolitan city that fails to account for power, resistance, and change. Discussion touched on each of these themes, highlighting how urban transformations, crisis and resilience, which continually reshape the city, recast collective representations.

Saturday afternoon featured a discussion of the objectives, strategies, resistance to state-sponsored regulation and censorship of commercial and documentary films. Mr. Amit Khanna, CEO of Reliance Entertainment and President of the Film and Television Producers Guild of India, spoke of his participation in a forum to evaluate and revise the certification process of the Central Board of Film Certification. He asserted that change to the existing structure of the Censor Board is inevitable and discussed a decentralized system of self-reporting as one option currently being explored. Discussion following his presentation was somewhat heated as several participants expressed opposition to state censorship in any form. Mr. Khanna took a more pragmatic approach, asserting that the state would continue to scrutinize and certify films in some form. He maintained that corporate producers and distributors do not engage in censorship and simply respond to state mandates, market forces, and public preferences. Filmmaker Surabhi Sharma spoke about the experience of screening non-certified films at film festivals and the grey area between legality and illegality in which most documentary and independent filmmakers exist. She spoke about the insecurity and attacks on filmmakers resulting from the current film certification system and heightened moral panics.

The screening and discussion of two documentary films ended the day on Saturday. Filmmakers and TISS faculty Dr. Anjali Monteiro and Dr. K.P. Jaysankar first presented SheWrite, a documentary weaving together narratives and writings of four Tamil women poets. The film documents the poets’ discovery of their creative voices and their decisions to engage in the subversive act of producing works that challenge familial and societal expectations. An engaged discussion, lead by Shilpa Phadke, raised issues of feminine empowerment, political awakening, and spaces carved out for the exploration of female sexuality. Finnish filmmaker Lasse Naukkarinen then screened his film Once Upon a Time There Was a Utopia, which explores themes of nostalgia and nightmare as it recounts the student protests and social movements of 1960s and 1970s. A very personal film, the documentary presents a collage of personal photographs and film footage that reveal the filmmakers’ own idealism in this period of tumultuous social and political change.

Sunday’s sessions featured three panel discussions and one short narrative film. The first session highlighted ways that communication technologies are appropriated to facilitate certain agendas. Dr. Vinod Pavarala first spoke about the struggle for community radio. He showed a brief documentary film that illustrated the use of community radio in rural development and discussed community-produced media as an alternative to both private-sector and state-sponsored media production. Highlighting the political constraints on community broadcasting, Dr. Pavarala called for greater media democratization based on principals of universal access and more equitable resource allocation. Researcher Shuddhabrata Sengupta then spoke about the ways in which information technologies have been used historically in South Asia, emphasizing their application for surveillance and monitoring. He traced developments in scientific and technological modes of identification, rooted in now often discredited assumptions of socio-biology, and identified a resurrection of such technologies to support contemporary state-sanctioned surveillance. Indranil Chakravaty, project director of Comet New Media Initiative, lead an exciting discussion on the potentially empowering and repressive appropriations of communication and information technologies.

Ms. Madhushree Datta, Director of Majlis, and actor and activist Mr. Farooque Shaikh discussed the representation of resistance in documentary filmmaking. Madhusree argued that as publics and viewing audiences expect resistance struggles to be aggressive and angry, documentary filmmakers tend to oblige these preconceptions and work within these established conventions. She asserted that the images of small transgressions and subversions by ordinary people are lost when resistance is represented only through its most aggressive manifestations. She called for greater nuance, subtlety, and the use of images that violate expectations when representing resistance. Farooque Shaikh echoed the need to document everyday forms of resistance and challenged her to think about the diversity of documentary forms, including those that meet the objectives she outlined. Discussion was followed by a screening of Naata, a documentary by Dr. Anjali Monteiro and Dr. Jaysankar, highlighting the friendship between a Muslim and a Hindu man living in Dharavi and their efforts to establish community and religious unity in the wake of the 1992-93 Hindu-Muslim riots that ravaged the neighbourhood and much of the city. Dr. Amita Bhide, professor in TISS’ Urban Studies Unit, lead a discussion of the film, centring on cohesion and conflict in community formation.

The seminar’s closing session featured a presentation by Ms. Sujata Babar of Abhivyakti, a Nashik-based organization that uses media production as part of its broader development activities, and the screening of The Other Side of Childhood, an animated narrative film by New York-based filmmaker Ms. Mridu Chandra on boy prostitution. Sujata Babar discussed strategies Abhivyakti uses to engage with community organizations and development actors to facilitate better communication and media strategies. The Other Side of Childhood, based on interview research conducted by Sahil, a Pakistan-based NGO, tells the story of Waheed, a fictional adolescent boy who ends up working as a prostitute at Pakistan’s largest truck servicing station. Discussion was quite heated as the film invoked a strong response and raised questions of how to represent such complex issues in sensitive and empowering ways.

This year’s institute brought together an impressive group of scholars, media producers, and practitioners who engaged thoughtfully with the seminar’s themes and collectively explored the contested terrains of mediascapes. Though by no means conclusive, discussion addressed some of the inherent contradictions and unexpected implications of cultural and technological change. Some of the important issues identified included the increasingly ambiguous role of the state as funder, supporter, and regulator of media products, the disproportionate authority of the market to determine consumer access, and the potential empowerment of self-documentation activities.

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