Television is a central cultural institution of our society. In its centrality, it articulates the primary concerns of human existence and in ways which are themselves primary.
Roger Silverstone (1981, p. 181)
A social or cultural phenomenon can be identified as āreligiousā if it fulfils certain functions normally ascribed to religion, such as the provision of purpose in life, hope in the shadow of death, and meaning in the face of suffering and injustice. ā¦ religion is not unique in providing strategies to overcome fear, despair and hopelessness.
Christopher Partridge (2009, pp. 499ā500)
In what ways does religion manifest itself on television, and how are these experienced? How does the medium relate to key aspects of our life? How do the sacred and the profane reconfigure themselves in and through television? What religious roles do professional journalists, other media persons and performers, and even audiences, play on/through television? How does television contribute to the resurgence of religion in contemporary societies? Why do certain broadcasts become so electrifying?
This book addresses some key questions that can be raised about the relationship between television and religion. Televisionās association with religion has been a subject of intense scholarly interest ever since the 1960s as televangelism emerged as a phenomenon in North America. Christian televangelism was later exported to other parts of the world where soon not only indigenous proselytization programmes and dedicated religious channels sprang up, but televangelism in other religious traditions and regional languages also started competing with each other in the rather lucrative god market. Indiaās case is a classic instance. Not only are there a large number of religious channels today, including translational ones but additionally a plethora of mythological serials and religious drama series continue to be shown on prime time across national and regional general entertainment channels; even news channels broadcast regular programmes based around religious mythologies.1
However, taking this as a point of departure and moving away from televangelism and programmes based on mythological themes that dwell in the realm of explicit or institutional religion, this book looks at how the otherwise profane everyday television turns sacred at certain points in time. It privileges the not-so-obvious religion that is otherwise overarching on television and seeks to inquire into how the numinous is associated even with non-religious programming like news and reality shows and their receptions ā an idea that has the potential to bring popular culture and even atheists into the fold of the study of religion.
This book is about how religion is represented on television. It is also about how such representations are negotiated and interpreted by audiences. It looks at significant live broadcasts using religion as an analytical category to understand television better. Following Dayan and Katz (1985), a lineage of scholars have theorized the idea of such significant broadcasts that they called media events. Such events puncture everyday life and transform profane television viewing into a sacred experience, experiences that come probably once in a lifetime and are ever-enduring. This book explores the idea of media events in India, a topical issue that has remained a relatively unchartered and unexplored area in the countryās context.
Drawing from anthropology, concepts like rituals and myths are employed to understand the convergence between a traditional institution such as religion and television that Bignell (2004) considers to be a āpostmodernā (pp. 166ā188) institution. Such analytical tools have been used by communication scholars to stress the integrative ā as well as disintegrative ā functions of mass media, and by anthropologists to highlight the central aspects of political and media events (Osorio, 2005). In fact, scholars in the emerging field of media anthropology emphasize these concepts as qualifiers for the discipline (Coman & Rothenbuhler, 2005). An attempt to extend these concepts to contemporary Indian television is made in this volume in an effort to comprehend the relationship between religion and television.
I engage in an ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2011 and 2014 in Gangtok, a town in Indiaās far east at the foothills of the Himalayas near the India-China border and not far from Nepal and Bhutan. As one of the 600 odd princely states, the transition of Sikkim to a protectorate to an associate state, and finally an integral part of India in 1975, is a fascinating story that continues to appeal to historians and writers to date. Ruled by a theocratic-feudal clique, Sikkimās merger was also fuelled by an internal revolt by the majority Nepali community against the monarchy (Chavan, 2021; Chopra, 2020a, 2020b; Datta-Ray, 1984). This effectively saw the feudalistic monarchy transform into a modern democracy (Phadnis, 1980) as Sikkim became Indiaās 22nd state.2 The stateās capital town Gangtok today displays a high degree of demographic, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious variability, a feature typical of urban centres in the entire country, but possibly more pronounced in certain areas, as in the north-eastern region that shares some 98 per cent of its geographical boundary with international borders.
The arrival of a technological wonder as television in any society has not been without the concomitant withering of conventional forms of cultural practices. The influence it has had on traditional institutions in contemporary society is undeniable. It redefines traditional institutions, reshapes conventional forms of cultural practices, and provides new ways to engage with them. Religion is one such institution that has seen an intimate and thriving relationship with the visual medium ā a relationship that is both complementary and competitive. Thus, through some special broadcasts, television helps viewers derive numinous experience as the profanity of daily viewing transforms itself into sacred and ceremonious occasions. The everyday schedule itself is adjusted to view the television, and audiences get together under what Sumiala (2013) fittingly calls āone roofā (p. 28) in a spirit of solidarity.
While the purists might yet be critical of television as a āvast wastelandā (Minow, 1961) and squarely blame television for its corrupting influences and distorting the texts, television has come to stay in a big way and has discovered convincing ways to reach out to audiences. As a technology and as a form of culture (Williams, 2003/1974), it increasingly performs the role of a socializing agent, adding to or replacing earlier agencies of socialization. Mostly catering to urban aspirations, television, through its programmes, provides a set of modules to adapt to an urban environment. Thus, one can read television messages as a handbook on urbanity. Undoubtedly, then, the influence of television is overarching today, and it significantly constitutes what Castels (1996, c.i. McCullagh, 2002) calls a ācultural epicentreā (p. 1) of contemporary society. In fact, scholars have termed the modern era as āthe age of televisionā (Buonanno, 2008, pp. 11ā12).
Studying television in India has always been an interesting field of inquiry and continues to remain so. Television came to India by accident rather than by planning3 and was introduced as a cultural and political instrument of the state after initial experiments in the 1950s. When Silverstone (1981) wrote The Message of Television, evidently one of the early classics on television and culture from where the first epigraph at the beginning in this chapter is quoted, the public television system had already survived in the West for around 40 years.4 India then was still in its early phase of experimentation with television and was yet to have a national network. 5 During the last three and a half decades since then, television in India has emerged as a significant cultural force, and there is little doubt that Silverstoneās observation on television can be forwarded to India of contemporary times with equal force, perhaps even more.
The chronicle of Indian television has seen great strides with the opening of the skies in the post-satellite phase beginning in 1991. With 885 private television channels, an impressive annual growth of 12 per cent, and worth INR740 billion, the television industry in India today continues to be the most dominant segment in the overall media and entertainment (M&E) sector, according to the FICCI-EY report 2019. However, even as a total of 197 million households today have TV sets in the country, 34 per cent remain outside its reach, implying the considerable potential of its further growth in the untapped Indian market in future. On average, informs the report, Indians spend a little under four hours per day on television.
The ever-expanding nature of the medium in the country has been attracting the perspicacious attention of scholars who have tried to capture the growth trajectories of television in India and examine some of the manifestations and growing influences of the medium in the post-satellite phase (Shah, 2019; Athique, 2012; Mehta, 2008; Das, 2007; Ohm, 2007; Page & Crawley, 2001; Butcher, 2003; Das, 2003; Rajagopal, 2001; Johnson, 1999; Mankekar, 1999; Brosius & Butcher, 1999; Lutgendorf, 1997; Mitra, 1993). Other studies include Shahās (1997) work on television fiction and middle-class morality, Jaluriās (2004) work on television music and youth culture, Ninanās (1995) work on televisionās transformative role in its early years, and Kholiās (2003) take on television in India as an economic entity.
The arrival of 24-hour news channels on Indian television prompted some scholars to attend to various dimensions of TV news (Bhushan, 2019; Batabyal, 2010; Mehta, 2008; Thusu, 2007). Similarly, the expansion of cable and satellite television in the country appealed to scholars to probe into issues around TV ownership and distribution (Parthasarathi & Srinivas, 2019). While all these works provide insightful accounts of Indian television during different periods of its prodigious growth, the area of television and religion per se in the country has been largely left unattended. This is despite the fact that religious nationalism has been an area of much scholarly focus during the last few decades, particularly since the 1990s.
Even as scholars vouch that the country is witnessing a rising tide of religiosity amidst secularization (Nanda, 2009) and the news media report on growing spirituality in the country, particularly among the youth (Uppal, 2008), inquiries into the contribution of television to this phenomenon still remain heavily marginalized. Thomasās (2010, 2008) examination of the political economy of Christian evangelism on television in south India, and Rajagopalās thesis on the connection between economic liberalization, along with the growth of Hindu nationalism and the broadcast of the teleserial Ramayan on Indian television, however, remain bright spots on the vast dark canvas. Though readers continue to be informed about television in India ā note the contributions on Indian television in 2019, listed above ā revelations on televisionās association with religion have nevertheless not been very forthcoming. This is so even though, one might argue, there is a great deal of explicit religion on daily Indian television today.
This book is not, however, about religion on television as such. Instead, as the title of the book suggests, it is about televising religion. Before I proceed further, it is pertinent here to draw a critical distinction between the two. In attempting to do so, I borrow the original idea from Helland (2013), who, in a slightly different context of Internet-religion, introduced an elegant way of exploring the distinction between āreligion onlineā and āonline religionā (c.i. Hoover & Park, 2005, p. 248). Interpreting the Helladian taxonomy, Hoover and Park (2005) argue that religion online is the āself-conscious use of the on-line context by religious organizations or movements for the purpose of publicity, education, outreach proselytization, and so onā (ibid.). By contrast, āonline religion is the far more interesting issue of the online context becoming or being used as a locus of religious, spiritual or other similar practiceā (ibid.).
One can draw similar parallels in the context of television. As with religion online, religion on television is the easier side of the study: its sources, intentions, and resources are easier to see and account for; televangelism, for example, fits into this category. Televised religion, like online religion, by contrast, is far more complex and elusive and has come into force as a result of the emergence of modernity. Televised religion, thus, can be comprehended not only by hulling TV contents and looking out for the hidden meanings but also by looking at the very engagement of audiences with the medium and its contents. Hence this book is also about studying ātelevision in itselfā rather than looking at it as only a āsymptom of somethingā else (Fiske & Hartley, 2003, p. xi). Studying the medium has drawn some traction within television studies, notably since cultural theorist Raymond Williams (2003/1974) wrote his classic Television: Technology and Cultural Form, but it has not received much purchase in India.
Television and religion: the Siamese twins?
The association between media of communication and religion, as Soukup (2002) claims, can be traced to the āearliest telling of myths and the sketching of cave paintingsā (p. 3). Religious content has played a key role in media history and continues to do so today in various forms, even as new use of communication media and its outputs permeate much beyond religious purposes. That the first print media output was the Gutenberg Bible and the first radio broadcast was a religious service programme (on Christmas eve, 1906) only serve to strengthen the connection between media and religion (ibid.).
Drawing upon the historical accounts that situate the relation between communication and religion, Stout and Buddenbaum (2002) posit that religion has played a salient role in communication history, while Saussy (2001) even argued that the history of religion is, in fact, the history of the media. On the contrary, we could argue that in contemporary times, the history of media is often the history of religion, and one can discover its particular relevance in the context o...
