Presentation. How Local Texts Move: A Miniature Case Study

First off: apologies for the length here. Hopefully it’s skimming-friendly.

Second:

 

This presentation attempts a “small scale stud[y] of micro-process(es) in the analysis of [some of the] macro-issues,” (Morley 1), that comprise the field of global tv. I am convinced by Morley’s argument for specificity and attention to context as a corrective for large-scale theorizing that traffics in the general statement – and, at the same time, provoked by Kumar’s appraisal of the inherent pitfalls of comparative studies. Kumar writes, “one always starts…from an initial philosophical position, or stance, influenced by the images and the myths of one’s own culture and location. Thus, even in the most careful of hands, a comparative approach to global television and television studies will be flawed,” (Kumar 146). What enables such a statement, so dismissive of the advances of entire disciplinary projects such as anthropology, which have been grappling steadily with precisely this task? A slew of ethnographies bear witness to the fact that sensitive and insightful comparison is amply possible – not only when conducted by ‘privileged’ academics studying ‘disempowered’ locals, but even in the case of so-called ‘insider’ ethnography (when the researcher belongs to the very social group under study). Why should it be any different for global tv studies?

Taking my cue from this provocation, in the following I attempt a very small case study with the hope of tracing some of the ‘larger’ lessons it might hold. 

A playwright, a TV station, and 3-minute clip

Through the 1980s, Pakistani playwright Haseena Moeen wrote a number of hit television shows that were popular not only in their ‘local’ context (the Urdu-speaking, TV-watching majority of the Pakistani public) but also in neighboring India. Today these shows (all of which were social dramas incorporating different degrees of humor) continue to be included in IPTV products which package ‘local’ content for diasporic audiences, a testament to the enthusiastic reception and enduring cultural acclaim of Moeen’s work. There are a number of striking things about this flow of a local TV text into global contexts: the institutional position of Pakistani TV on which Moeen’s work first aired; the fact of its popularity in India despite acrimonious relations between the two countries; the consistently progressive nature of the shows themselves, and so on. A global perspective – global in the sense of exceeding the boundedness of the singular nation-state to take into account ‘larger’ forces – is necessary to fully make sense of all of these factors, to fully understand how and why Haseena Moeen’s television shows occupied the position they did in national and transnational imaginaries.

Pakistan Television Corporation – or PTV, as it’s called – is a state-owned broadcast network that for 25 years, 1964-1989, was the only broadcast channel available, before the relaxation of regulation that allowed for the creation of independent broadcast and, eventually, cable[1]. It thus enjoyed a complete monopoly of the airwaves for a considerable period of time, including the decade in which Moeen’s tv dramas first aired. Given the lack of available competition, the popularity of these shows is unsurprising. Less expected, however, is the tone of these texts given the state of media control and political conservativeness that obtained in Pakistan in the 80s. Consider for instance Ankahi (Unsaid), a serialized comedy-drama that aired in 1982. Revolving around the travails of a rambunctious female protagonist (Sana) as she tries to make ends meet in a middle-class household while plotting to eventually become rich, Ankahi attends to multiple planes of social experience: the domestic and the workplace, ‘traditional’ family values and ‘modern’ ambition, the fluctuating roles of daughter and breadwinner, among others. The male characters that surround Sana are cast as endearingly financially non-productive. Her uncle is content to live with Sana and her mother without financial contribution. The neighbor’s son, a friend of Sana’s, is a bumbling, unemployed shut-in. Ankahi marks its men as financial dependents but does not do so cruelly; they aren’t censured for the dependency but are positioned as beloved friends and family members. Likewise, Sana’s forays in the working world are figured in the mode of young ambition and adventure, not as a burden unduly imposed on her in the absence of a male breadwinner. This is in line with Moeen’s oeuvre, with its progressive social politics and feminist investment. Consider the following clip from the show's fourth episode, in which Sana arrives at the neighbor’s house to ask the time (all the clocks at home having mysteriously stopped working).

                                                                                           (turn on subtitles)

A light-hearted sketch of a young woman’s nerves on her first day at her first job, this moment from the show playfully establishes key facts about character dynamics and the concerns of the show. Although she has flouted rules of propriety by showing up at her male neighbor’s house late at night (or very early in the morning, as she thinks) Sana appears blithely unconcerned about any potential scandal her actions might cause, even when Timmy spells these out for her. She cares only about the time, not wanting to be late to work, and successfully recruits the household to help her get ready. Her uncle irons her clothes and checks her paperwork while her mother solicitously sets the table, caught up in Sana’s nervous enthusiasm even as they fail to understand what it is that she’ll be doing at her new job. Timmy’s remark at the breakfast table smoothly connects these individual energies to the show’s place in a national imaginary, its position as a text that aired on the state’s first (and, for a long time, the country’s only) television channel. Sana is figured as a model of the nation’s industry, an emblem of the kind of economic application that is needed to get the country “running.” This little lesson is embedded in a scene marked by a failure of clocks and watches and a reversion to pre-modern ways of time-keeping. Modernity’s “homogenous, empty time” has failed these characters – has failed Sana before she has worked even her first day of economic labor – just as the Pakistani nation-state kept uneven pace with ‘modern’ sociality. These are local concerns, the concerns of a young nation that had lost its Eastern ‘wing’ (present-day Bangladesh) in a brutal war in the previous decade.

Ankahi (like the rest of Moeen’s work) enjoyed its success in part because of, and in part despite, its progressive social politics and overt critiques of local systems. The effects of at least one ‘global’ force made it possible for subversive texts to flourish on state TV: the crippling of the Pakistani film industry in the face of Bollywood competition, with a resulting migration of talent towards TV production. I find Curtin’s notion of media capital useful here. Curtin uses the concept of media capital to explain such phenomena as the clustering of media talent in particular cities; it can also be used to explain why television might thrive in the twinned shadow of a weak local film industry and booming transnational film industry in a geographical adjacency. If this were a longer paper I would call upon film production figures to illustrate the claim that by the 1980s Pakistan’s film industry was well into decline; for now, however, I will simply claim this as anecdotal knowledge. The absence of film industrial infrastructure coupled with the state’s need for content for its television station set up a strong incentive for screenwriters to turn their attention to the television screen, which is exactly what Haseena Moeen did.

Therefore...

 

It would be worth speculating as to the factors that enabled Ankahi – and the rest of Moeen’s work – to flow onto, and flourish in, Indian TV as well. The significances of such a flow to an understanding of global tv are many. Perhaps most importantly, the ‘larger’ lesson to be drawn this mini case study is that global flows do not signal the homogenization that many have decried. Morley characterizes this position as the view that the flow of content across global lines leads to “cultural homogenization” and an effacing of the local, (Morley 7). Ankahi shows us that this need not be the case, that we should not be so quick to equate the global movement of media texts with the eclipsing of a sense of the local. The Pak-India border, never entirely peaceful, was as acrimonious as ever in 1982 (in the lingering aftermath of a war in 1971 and the stirrings of a war-to-come in 1984). Media texts flow across the Pak-India border despite the cultural premium on difference, on upholding the very national borders that were under political fray. Ankahi, with its investment in feminist politics and an overt critique of Pakistan’s lag in ‘modern’ temporality, is through and through a ‘local’ text, shaped by preoccupations endemic to the nation and very much of its time and place. Its reception in other contexts, including contexts of political hostility, demonstrates that global televisual flows are subtended by a complex matrix of social processes which cannot be simply equated with a shrinking of differences and local particularities. Highly local texts can, rather, become successful global travelers – and the mechanics of these movements are best discovered separately for each instance, with precisely the kind of fine-grained comparison that anthropology perfects.

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WORKS CITED

Banerjee, Indrajit and Logan, Stephen (Eds.) Asian Communications Handbook 2008.

Curtin, Michael. "Thinking Globally: From Media Imperialism to Media Capital" 

Kumar, Shanti. "Is There Anything Called Global Television Studies?"

Morley, David. "Where the Global Meets the Local: Notes from the Sitting Room"

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[1] Asian Communications Handbook 2008