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125 6 Teenage Girls and Global Television Performing the “New” Hindi Film Song shikha jhingan The image flickering across the television screen features a teenage girl running among the paddy fields in one of eastern India’s rural corners. Viewers watch the girl playing with a goat and riding her bicycle in a bucolic setting far from media-saturated urban India. A first-person voice-over reveals the obvious: the girl comes from a small village in the state of West Bengal, a world away from the competitive big city. The girl, whose name is Antara, then appears on-screen, facing the camera, and says, “Indian Idol contest is very important for me as I will never get an opportunity to show my talent from this village.” We now cut to a glittering studio space. The audience claps as the girl walks toward the stage. The studio lights are dimmed, and the spotlight is now on Antara. Attired in a bright-red chiffon sari with a spaghetti-strap blouse, dangling earrings, and straightened hair, Antara takes position, pointing the mike toward herself, and jerking her body softly with the beat of the music. As rehearsed, she turns her face meaningfully toward the tracking camera, at the right moment. As one of the Indian Idol’s top four contestants, it is indeed Antara’s big night!1 Antara’s case does not take place in a vacuum: indeed, India is now home to one of the world’s largest television markets, just behind China and the United States, attracting global media corporations to reach out to more than a million television households (Mehta 2008; Kohli-Khandekar 1. I would like to thank Ranjani Mazumdar and Sabeena Gadihoke for their thoughtful comments on the first draft of this chapter. I have also benefited enormously from my discussions with Ira Bhaskar on the performance, practices, and circulation of female voice in Hindi film songs. I deeply appreciate the support given by the editors of this volume, Susan Dewey and Karen Brison, for the editing of this chapter. 126 | mass-mediated modernities 2006). Indian Idol was introduced by Sony Entertainment Television (SET) in 2004, as part of a much larger media phenomenon following the opening of the Indian economy to foreign investment in the early 1990s. Originally based on the British television series Pop Idol, this format was introduced by Fremantle media in South Africa, the United States, and Malaysia before it made its way to India. The promotion of the show before its telecast created a stir with the use of on-air teasers and print and web advertisements. The target audience was an age group of fifteen to thirtyfour . During the voting period from November 2004 to March 2005, the talent show got more than 55 million votes via SMS (Kohli-Khandekar 2006). In 2007, Indian Idol 3 caused a stir as two young men from the northeastern states of India won the contest, provoking debates about the show’s potential role in bringing the youth of the marginalized northeastern states closer to the mainland. The eight states of the Northeast in India include Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur, Tripura, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Meghalaya . Many of these states share their borders with Bangladesh, Myanmar, Nepal, and China. Most of these states are marked by underdevelopment and militant conflicts with the Indian state. The news media rarely report on these states unless they are hit by natural disasters or during the escalation of armed conflicts. As Nalin Mehta writes, “This new 2007 ‘fever’ led to mobilization of a different kind, combining the imagery of television with the democratic process of voting” (Mehta 2008, 3). In the 2008 season , Sorabhee Debbarma, belonging to a tribal community from Tripura, bagged the Indian Idol title, a first for any female contestant or member of a tribal community. Many Tripura-based fan clubs campaigned in rural and urban areas to persuade people to vote for their homegrown contestant (Ali 2009). The chief minister of Tripura even used Sorabhee’s success to urge the youth in Tripura to move away from the path of militant insurgency. The expansion of the format market in television has been seen in light of the proliferation of global television in national markets, enabled by deregulation, privatization, and the advent of new technologies of distribution . The Indian television industry today attracts advertising revenue of approximately 1.4 million US dollars (Sharan and Turakhia 2008), a large chunk of which...

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