Contact:
Chris Burroughs
(505) 277-1816
March 2, 1998
University of New Mexico Researcher Studies "New" Indian Television
Images of modern women, smoking, drinking, driving cars, working and making their own decisions are bombarding the "new" Indian television and changing forever the way women in that country see themselves.
Indian born Sheena Malhotra, a Ph.D. communication student at the University of New Mexico, is studying the effects of television portrayals of modern women in a culture that is traditionally patriarchal.
"We are talking about a country where arranged marriages are common, child marriage is illegal but still practiced and boy babies are preferred to the point where female fetuses are routinely aborted," Malhotra says.
The change is happening so quickly that it's taken veteran India watchers, like Communication Professor and Malhotra's advisor Everett M. Rogers, who has traveled to the country twice a year for the past 34 years, by surprise.
"I've seen India change more between 1994 and 1996 than it has in the previous 30 years," Rogers says. "It's been a very sudden social change and it's still going on."
Malhotra spent last summer in India interviewing producers of the four leading private television networks in the country to get their views on how and if their programs are revamping society. She also videotaped the ten most popular television shows and had people from her native country, who were familiar with the programs, language and culture, carry out a content analysis to help her obtain a better understanding of the ways women are actually portrayed on the air. She will eventually compile her findings into a paper and various journal articles.
Advising Malhotra were three professors from the Department of Communication and Journalism, including Rogers, Bob Gassaway and Diane Furno-Lamude. They guided her in selecting which television shows to include in her study and which network executives to interview, as well as what questions to ask the executives.
In fact, after the first couple interviews, she discovered that the questions weren't working and e-mailed Furno-Lamude from India for help. The professor promptly wrote back, offering advise on how to revise the questions. While she hasn't had time to fully analyze the results from her summer study, Malhotra anticipates she'll discover what she already knows -- that Indian progamming has changed considerably in recent years with women being portrayed in a stronger light. However, television's long term effects won't be known until today's little girls have become women and the social changes initiated with the programs have run their full course.
As part of her study she interviewed 16 network executives, 30 percent of whom were women. The one aspect that became clear to her was that no policy exists among the networks about how women are to be portrayed on television.
"They are out to get ratings in a competitive market, just like in the United States, and will produce shows that are the most popular," she says.
For example, the top rated show in India between 1994-96 was the night-time soap opera, "Tara," named after the lead character. Tara was a strong modern woman who had a successful career, and her portrayal was opposite of a woman's traditional role in India as being inferior and weak. It only seemed natural for Malhotra, the daughter of an Indian film maker, to become intrigued by the new medium that was taking her country by storm just as she reached young adulthood. Malhotra remembers the 1970s and early 1980s when the sole television network available to Indian viewers was owned and operated by the government. Programming was dull, and only two to five hours of entertainment and prime time shows aired a day.
That all changed in 1991 when Star TV, an entertainment network based in Hong Kong, was introduced to India. Suddenly people had a choice of programs and could watch MTV, CNN, BBC, movie stations and more. By 1994, private satellite networks had 25 percent of the Indian audience, representing more than 250 million people.
Young people were star struck by MTV and Rogers says he heard more than one parent lament, "I don't know what's happened to my kids. All they do is sit around and watch MTV and see Madonna in a spiked bra!"
Adding to the excitement was a revitalized economy brought about by foreign companies building manufacturing plants in India. People were working as executives at these multinational firms and had money to buy televisions and products advertised on the networks.
Seeming to spring out of nowhere were entrepreneurs who went into the "cable" business. They were individuals who bought satellite dishes, set them on the roofs of apartments and for a modest fee allowed the residents of the buildings to hook up to them. It was a lucrative arrangement because the entrepreneurs recouped their investments the first month.
It was prior to this era (1987-91) that Malhotra came to the United States to attend De Pauw University in Indiana. When she returned to India in 1991 with her bachelor's degree, she was struck by the changes that Star TV had brought to her country. "Everything was becoming homogenized. You would go to a disco and couldn't tell if you were in New York or Bombay because everyone was wearing Western clothes and dancing to Western music," she recalls. After a year working as a director's assistant at a film company in Bombay, she realized she wanted to examine television's effects more closely and decided to pursue a master's degree in mass communication at Pepperdine University in southern California, which was as far away from the cold Midwest as she could get. Her master's thesis focused on the changing roles of women due to Star TV.
Malhotra found the television climate even more charged when she came home to India with her master's degree a couple of years later. This time, instead of just the government network and Star TV, several other networks were competing for the viewers' attention. Because of a government regulation that prohibited the broadcasting of shows from India, except for the government run stations, network executives would produce the programs in India and then get on a plane with the tapes and fly to Hong Kong, Moscow or Singapore where they would be transmitted via satellite back to India.
Malhotra took a job with one of these new networks, where everything seemed to be in a constant experimental mode. All three of the principals in the company, which included Malhotra and two others, were under the age of 33. These three young television executives were producing shows seen by some 50 to 100 million people. In her job as executive producer she did everything from scripting to casting to raising money for shows that included sitcoms, dramas and mysteries.
She says it was an intense and exhilarating period of her life, but after two years she was burned out and decided to return to school to get a Ph.D. so she could determine just what effect she and others in the network business have on the Indian population.
Rogers, who has worked closely with Malhotra for the past two years, says that the topic of gender and television in India always fascinated him, but it was not something that he could study, despite his frequent trips to the country.
"It needed an industry insider and had to be a woman. It had to be Sheena," he says.
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