Gandhi Meets Primetime: Globalization and Nationalism in Indian Television

2. At Home, In the World: The Viiewing Practices of Indian Television

  2฀ At฀Home,฀In฀the฀World:฀The฀Viewing฀฀ ฀ Practices฀of฀Indian฀Television in฀provincializing฀europe, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues that Benedict Anderson ’s influential notion of nations as imagined communities is a useful reminder that imagination is a very real and productive phenomenon in everyday life, and therefore should not be understood as something that is false or unreal.1 Although the central argument of Imagined฀Communities cautions us against reading imagination to mean false,Chakrabarty finds thatAnderson takes its meaning to be self-evident. Yet in European thought—which is Anderson ’s starting point in the history of imagined communities—the meaning of the word “imagination” has a long and complex genealogy. For Chakrabarty , the historic debate over the status of imagination in European thought can be encapsulated in terms of the following question asked of the Spinozan tradition by Coleridge in his Biographia฀Literaria (1815–17):“Was God a subject endowed with a (mental) faculty called ‘imagination,’ or did God exist simply in the ways of the world without being gathered into anything in the nature of a subject?”2 Chakrabarty contends that in the modern history of Western thought— from Coleridge to Anderson—the notion of imagination remains a subjectcentered activity of representation through the human act of seeing. The Spinozan tradition of imagination as a nonsubjectivist vision of the divine and the nonhuman, on the other hand, has been relegated to the margins of Western thought. In the Indian context, however, there is a “family of viewing practices” that permeates the mainstream imagination, and that has always been able to reconcile the (Western) split between subjectivist 02.55-92.Kumar.indd฀฀฀55 10/18/05฀฀฀11:32:54฀AM 56฀ gandhi฀meets฀primetime and nonsubjectivist dimensions of imagination. One such family of viewing practices is darshan. A polysemic Sanskrit term that has been borrowed into many north and south Indian languages, darshan can be read to mean both (human) seeing and (divine or nonhuman) vision. In articulating the double meaning of imagination as a representation of subjectivist sight and a nonrepresentational , nonsubjectivist vision, Chakrabarty suggests that darshan “refers to the exchange of human sight with the divine that supposedly happens inside a temple or in the presence of an image in which the deity has become manifest (murati)”3 Chakrabarty’s insightful discussion of imagination (darshan) is restricted to viewing practices of literature in Bengali prose and poetry in colonial discourse.Yet I find it particularly relevant to discuss the multiple meanings of imagination in relation to the family of viewing practices engendered by television in postcolonial discourse. As I have shown in chapter 1, the development of the Indian national network, Doordarshan, has been one of the most imaginative attempts to articulate a family of viewing practices that reconciles the schism between the public and the private, the inside and the outside, the material and the spiritual, the human and the nonhuman in postcolonial nationalism. However, before extending Chakrabarty’s discussion of the polysemic notion of darshan to the viewing practices of Doordarshan in Indian television , it may be necessary to distinguish the electronic dimensions of televisual imagination from its meanings in print-mediated literatures. While technologies of print-communication, such as literary prose and poetry, enable a family of viewing practices for the mediated exchange of human sight with divine vision (darshan), I argue that the technologies of telecommunication , such as broadcasting and cable television, engender an electronic family of televiewing practices for the immediate exchange of human sight with nonhuman vision (door-darshan). Here, I draw attention to the prefix door (meaning tele or distant) in the term door-darshan, which, quite literally, refers to electronic dimensions of the immediate exchange of (human) sight with (nonhuman) vision. As a technology of telecommunications, the television set thus transforms from being an idiot-box in the corner to a secular temple of electronic images in which human imaginations and divine visions become manifest (murati). In making manifest the dual notion of human seeing and nonhuman vision, television thus engenders an electronic family of viewing practices that transforms the private space of the home into the public stage of the world. 02.55-92.Kumar.indd฀฀฀56 10/18/05฀฀฀11:32:55฀AM At฀Home,฀In฀the฀World฀ 57 In this chapter, I address the question “Is there an Indian community of television?” by deconstructing the viewing practices of door-darshan through...