10

Mythic Viewing

Reality in Indian Audiencehood

Vamsee Juluri

Introduction

The primary aim of this chapter is to examine the ways in which media audiences conceive of and think about reality. In an age when media producers and programmers are claiming that they produce authentic forms of “reality,” whether it is the globally ubiquitous genre of reality television or the growth in publishing genres like memoir and non-fiction writing, the question of how audiences assume something to be “real” in the context of popular reception becomes an important and urgent project of inquiry for scholars in media studies. Such concerns have been addressed somewhat obliquely in audience research, especially in those studies informed by critical cultural studies approaches. However, in the wake of, on the one hand, the exceedingly vocal claims to the manufacturing of reality that were put out by media industries and, on the other, the somewhat evasive turn in responses to concerns about reality and truth that was brought about by uncritical postmodernism in the academy, it is important for audience researchers to take up the issue of how audiences bestow the all-important category of meaning, which declares that something is real.

How audiences do this is especially instructive in the Indian context for a variety of empirical and philosophical reasons. Since policies of economic liberalization were initiated in 1991, Indian media have expanded exponentially, plunging millions of people into a vibrant and pervasive mediascape consisting of dozens of global, national, regional, and local satellite television channels. India's massive film industry, consisting of several centers of production in various languages like pan-Indian Hindi and other regional languages, did not find itself overwhelmed by the sudden influx of foreign-owned media; it has emerged instead as a major cultural force in India and in the Indian diaspora and as a significant influence on global popular culture. News and print media also continued to thrive in a market with a growing middle class. Given the massive increase in the quantity of media programming and consumption all around, the question of what audiences might believe to be real is indeed a complex one.

More recently, self-styled “reality shows” have become widespread on Indian television and have generated debate about a host of issues, ranging from the public display of private secrets (the show Sach Ka Samna) to the exploitation of children (the Zee Telugu dance contest show Aata, which was criticized by the state's Human Rights Commissioner in April 2010). However, the question of what audiences think is real goes far beyond the confines of the reality genre alone, for the “reality” tag sometimes works as a signal to savvy viewers that it is all contrived anyway. Making judgments about the veracity of media is perhaps as pervasive as media consumption itself, as audiences decide to believe or disbelieve everything, from breaking news sagas about boys trapped in wells to infomercials about weight-loss and complexion-enhancing products. Even if specific media representations are believed or disbelieved, audiences also enact, in their reception practices, deeper beliefs about things like identity and nation, about why things are the way they are, and about everything that passes under the quiet certainty of commonsense. In the case of Indian audiences, there is another level of belief that is pervasively at work, especially in the consumption of mythological media. Movies and TV shows about the gods are not viewed in the Western manner of treating mythology as just stories; instead they draw on more complex religious sensibilities as well. To underscore all these examples, we may note one more iconic trope in popular media narratives about reality: the well-signaled and staged “moment of truth,” which has become a fixed feature in numerous genres. In reality shows, this moment is often signified in the exit interview of the losing contestants or in private confessionals. In Indian soap operas, the moment of truth takes place in a scene of bright lighting, loud music, and costumes that are louder still, and expressive close-ups as family members assemble in a great hall to discover the truth about some betrayal or the other. Reality in many ways is a pleasure of popular media consumption that cuts across genres. The question to be examined is how audiences imagine it, and at what cost.

Three Trysts with Audience Realities: Family, World, God

The first reception study I discuss in this chapter is Juluri's (1999) study of Hum Aapke Hain Koun (henceforth HAHK; Who Am I to You?), a popular, commercially successful Hindi-language film released in 1994, just three years after India began a sweeping policy of economic liberalization that brought in its wake a massive everyday influx of consumer goods, foreign and domestic, and a public culture of rabid consumerism as well. The context is important to the understanding of the film's reception, because in some ways HAHK was the first major popular cultural phenomenon that captured the imagination of the nation since the dawn of globalization in India. At a moment when the media culture in India seemed awash with global images like the iconic red-costumed lifeguards of Baywatch (and Indian cinema seemed to have gone literally underground with its tales about crime and other sordid subjects), HAHK came down into the cinema halls and hearts of India like an angelic light, descending from the sweeping staircase of a grand, traditional Indian mansion from the movies of the mid-twentieth century.

The story of HAHK was simple enough. Two families talk about, and then arrange, a marriage between their children. The siblings of the bride and groom then slowly fall in love; along the way, some brief conflict ensues, but in the end everything is wonderful. Unlike many other Hindi movies of the time, HAHK had no violence, no profanity, and was greeted as a family movie in the sense that it was about family life, and also in the sense that it was a movie that the whole family could watch together. Its cheeriness was infectious; but it was also derided by critics for being “unrealistic.” With its painfully detailed depictions of wedding customs, festivities, and inanities, it was even described as a “glorified wedding video.” But at the same time the movie was at the heart of a massive outpouring of adulation, not only for its promise of sustainable happiness in a time of rapid social change, but also because of its ideological renewal of faith in a sense of Indianness that was much fought over in the political culture of the time.

The second study I discuss in this chapter is Juluri's (2003) reception study of music television conducted in the late 1990s. Despite initial concerns about cultural imperialism and Westernization, global satellite channels like Music Television (MTV) followed a programming strategy of localization in India that led to an intensely hybrid cultural environment, built largely on Indian film songs presented as part of a rather global look, full of video jockeys (VJs) with American accents and extraordinarily exotic promos. My study focused on two broad issues. One concern addressed the proliferation of music countdown shows, with their attendant promises about representing the public through vox pop media interviews, and also through the instrument of the top-ten chart. A second concern was the emergence of a popular nationalism suited for a global context, as represented most vividly in the hit song “Made in India.” I discuss both these issues in the present chapter, focusing on the different ways in which audiences made claims about what they believed to be reality – whether the reality they were talking about was that of personal and emotional notions or an imagined geopolitical one, like national identities.

The third study I draw upon in this chapter is an ongoing study of the production and reception of mythological cinema (Juluri, in press). Myth, in Indian media and popular culture, is less closely associated with the Western understanding of myth as a story, a fiction, or a lie – in opposition to truth or reality – and more closely associated with popular religious tales from the Puranas (the name given to the ancient epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharatha). Indian cinema began as a largely mythological genre in the early twentieth century, retelling in cinematic form the time-honored tales of the gods that generations had heard as stories or had witnessed as performances in dance, art, and theater. In the 1980s, when Indian national television reinvented itself as a commercial medium, the serials that captured the largest audiences were about the Mahabharatha and the Ramayana. More recently, since the rise of satellite television and digital media forms, the tales of the gods have once again proved to be popular, commercially successful, and quite ubiquitous – in the form of animated TV serials, feature films, interactive compact discs (CDs), and the like. The audience for these myths, in this sense, has spanned generations of experiences in postcolonial modernity ranging from the Gandhian to the more recent Hindu nationalist. Tales of these audiences' awestruck engagement with mythic media abound; prayers and ceremonies for the TV screen, conflation of actors with their divine roles, a deep sense of the miraculous, the sacred, the redemptive. However, as Rachel Dwyer (2007) writes, this important genre has seldom been studied for its own worth (being reduced instead to a corollary of political questions about religion), and my study is an attempt to contribute on that count. In the present chapter I focus mainly on the ways in which audiences invoke the idea of the real in discussing the tales of the gods, and I do so in order to highlight the nuances with which media and other epistemologies operate together in invoking a reality that is at once secular and sacred, human and divine, and ultimately reasoned out and believed in all at once.

Truth and Power in Audience Research

Despite a long-standing tradition of regarding, and being sensitive to, truth as something that distinguishes academic practice from other pursuits, questions of truth have often been subsumed to questions of power in audience research. If the earliest effects researchers were concerned with were largely instrumental notions of media power, critical scholars have been concerned with power in a larger historical and political sense. However, a sense of opposition between power and truth has been implicit in the critical tradition and, to some extent, in cultural studies audience research as well – and that is a relationship worth recognizing here from the outset. Even as cultural studies audience research came out of a moment of intellectual rupture in earlier Marxist approaches to culture (as well as out of an opposition to dominant US social scientific mass communication research), it has maintained a sense of distinction about truth and power. The critique of ideology in Stuart Hall's encoding–decoding model, for instance, suggests that power is something we measure against how much the audience's perception of reality (usually an economic one) is distorted. Even as critical audience researchers have been circumspect about the role of the researcher in claiming unmediated and infallible access to reality, the fact is that reality, or an informed understanding of it, is what we invoke in our critiques of power.

However, as I have discussed in my book (Juluri, 2003), the epistemological concern with reality has also led audience studies in the past into a dead end of sorts: scholars claimed impasses about the project of audience studies precisely at a time when it was about to become a global project, poised to take on the rapid globalization of media and audiences (Murphy & Kraidy, 2003). Global audience studies have thankfully neither disappeared nor dissipated into a plunging vortex of epistemological navel-gazing, and reality has remained an abiding concern not only in what we do as researchers, but also in what we talk about. Justin Lewis (2004) argues, for example, that, even if the audience may seem less than fooled about the claims to transparency of the reality TV genre, it still accepts certain ways of knowing that have become a pervasive part of daily life in media-inundated societies. “It is difficult to consciously draw a line between the logic of the mediascape and the way we make sense of the unmediated world” (p. 299). As a striking example from the Cosby Show study (Jhally & Lewis, 1992) reveals, audience members can feel that a character doesn't look like a lawyer not because they have seen other lawyers or know what a lawyer looks like, but simply because they have seen lawyers on TV and know what a TV lawyer is supposed to look like. Media codes of reality, in other words, are so seamlessly entwined in daily life that even a savvy rejection of specific media representations, or even genres, may not amount to resistance in a political sense. To put it another way, audiences may reject specific media claims to truth, but questions about truth itself are not beyond the politics of media representations today. As for what this means for the traditional concerns of cultural studies like power and resistance, perhaps it is not incorrect to say that power is the default condition of audiencehood, and resistance is, at best, an occasional utterance or a comment made by scholars on that occasional utterance. To celebrate audience resistance might be too optimistic, but to disregard it entirely would be a fallacy too.

The problem of power is doubly compounded when we turn to cultural studies of global audiences for the simple reason that global scholars are frequently placed in a dilemma when they work in and study certain locations. While in some places such as the United States and United Kingdom audience studies assume an unnamed normativity (presenting specific audiences as universal audiences), audiences in other places are often marked as the “other” in the literature. As a student of Indian media audiences, I must acknowledge that, while my arguments pertain to the Indian context, we must also be careful not to essentialize them into representations of otherness. Indian audience studies may share the concerns of British cultural studies, but there are elements of Indian thought that may also inform cultural studies as a global project. One could therefore propose that the truth of Indian audiences may not always be the truth of Indian audiences alone, but perhaps encompass the truth of audiences in general. In the case of some of the specific genres and themes of the Indian mediascape (which is as much global in its ownership, dissemination, and form as it is Indian), we may then assume that what audiences in India believe, how they believe it, and the politics of these practices may to some extent resonate with global scholarship. In the following sections I propose, on the basis of my own audience studies as well as from secondary readings of studies of audiences in India and elsewhere, that the media audience's investment in reality may be examined in three broad categories: reality as something nasty, reality as something nice, and reality as religion. These categories do not pertain to any one genre or theme as such; they are proposed instead as a way of understanding what media texts and media audiences seem to assume as a basis for their beliefs and claims about myriad subjects – be these relationships, politics, identities, work, living, pleasure, violence, or peace. To put it another way, these categories may be seen as the main ones in and through which the media tells a story about reality and the audiences believe it. My aim here is to propose that how audiences make up their minds about what is real is as important to media scholars as what they make up their minds about. This is especially true when we look into the mental world of the audience beyond the notions of news, opinion, and fact. With news and political worldviews, as we have seen in numerous cultivation studies (Shanahan & Morgan, 1999), there is a clear and empirically observable difference between the opinions of an audience and the factual world. However, when we turn to areas of audience beliefs that cannot be easily verified against an empirical reality (such as the belief in the existence of gods, to name one, but also mundane ones, like how audiences view human nature, or society, or people in general), it is useful to explore what audiences turn to when making claims on reality.

Reality as Something Not So Nice

If there is one ideological fulcrum on which the reality television as a genre has come to rest, it is the depiction of human beings as fundamentally unpleasant toward one another. It may not be an exaggeration to say that what makes “reality” TV is the fact that its moment of revelation is often one of nastiness. The assumption of this genre is that, if people are being nice, then they are only displaying a façade, a mask of civility put on perforce by individuals in a world where its absence can be punished by law or through other, less formal means of ostracism and disapproval. The competitive format is especially suited for encouraging an unpleasant outcome. Questions remain, though, as to how and why, the institutional quirks of attention-grabbing, drama, and ratings aside, the media culture has come to equate truth with things unpleasant. Historically, it may be safe to say that this phenomenon did not begin with the present glut of reality shows like Big Brother or Survivor, although the format of these shows may have narratively formalized such propensities. Even in fictional formats, bad behavior sometimes makes characters seem more realistic, as Justin Lewis (2004) suggests in his example of audiences that think of The Simpsons as the most realistic family on television.

While reality shows in India are not entirely given to the premise that the real is “not so nice,” the implications of realism as a media feature in the Indian context are somewhat more complex than in Western cultures, particularly in the case of popular Indian cinema. It may be useful to briefly review the codes of realism in Indian visual culture before turning to the ways these codes have played out in post-globalization forms and their reception. The two most popular media in India, cinema and television, have not had a history of realism in the Western fashion. Movies began as a largely mythological genre in the early twentieth century, and, even in the “socials” (the film industry's term for non-mythological genres, like drama and comedy), melodrama and exaggeration have been the preferred form of expression and of pleasurable consumption. There have been some gestures toward realism in recent movies, largely in the area of logical writing and technical sophistication; but suffice it to note that there is more to the experience of Indian cinema than meets the eye – and the modern eye at that (Juluri, in press). Indian television began, however, with a somewhat more serious, self-appointed vision: it was to be the beacon of the Nehruvian state's tool for development, modernization, and progress. Until commercialization heralded the need for entertainment and fiction in the 1980s, Doordarshan took reality rather seriously, in content and in form. What it showed viewers was not fantasies of dancing lights but documentary-style official-sounding pictures of farms and farmers, and national leaders like Indira Gandhi going about the business of the state. Interestingly, the promise of the real on television became more explicit in the wake of television's commercialization, and especially in fictional serials. Since the 1980s, Indian television has changed to such an extent that reality shows feature today among many genres, and there are shows like MTV India's Roadies, in which the criticism and humiliation of the participants is a touchstone of realism (the promos for the show also advocate something labeled “raw,” which presumably also derives from the broader semiotic stable of TV's “realness”).

Although reality shows and their ritual humiliation of participants were not yet a part of the media universe at the time when I conducted my studies of Indian audiences (and they would prove richly rewarding as a topic for future research), the assumption of reality as revealed by something unpleasant was very much in evidence in them. Interestingly, the belief in reality as a fundamentally unpleasant revelation is not something that comes up in my study of the mythological genre, although issues of realism in general do figure there as well. In the reception of HAHK and of music television, however, the idea of reality as being supported by something “not so nice” does figure. While the ways in which this is demonstrated is a far cry from the “real-is-nasty” claims that are so widespread in more recent reality programs and in soap operas, in order to assess how realistic (or not) a media text is it is useful to see how subtly audience members express their beliefs about what is lacking (morally or socially) in real life.

Despite the fact that Western-style “realism” is not a preoccupation of audiences when it comes to Indian cinema, it is instructive that discussions about how real(istic) HAHK was figured to a fair extent in my interviews with viewers. Nevertheless, casual comments about the movie, usually from my mass communication students at the University of Hyderabad, were often critical about the lack of realism in the film, and even about the lack of effort thereof (I still recall one student's comment that the film was so contrived that even the backdrops in some sets were mere paintings). Yet, when I conducted my interviews, it was clear that audiences were invested in HAHK not just as a pleasurable experience, but as something that was real. I have discussed elsewhere four dimensions along which audiences believed in HAHK as real (Juluri, 1999), but in the present chapter what is most useful to consider is what the audiences anchored some of these beliefs on; and in the examples below we shall find that claims of reality are based on an assumption that reality is somehow unpleasant.

One participant in my study, for example, says that the family in HAHK is “too nice and idealistic to be real,” a sentiment echoed in various forms in various interviews. In another context, a participant observes that HAHK's ideal family is appealing because families are facing various difficulties in real life. As middle-class viewers of cinema, their reading of idealism may not be surprising, considering how Indian cinema's characteristic lack of attention to formal realism, or even to narrative realism, figures as a problem in popular reception. However, given the usual reticence with which class issues are discussed in everyday life, it is interesting to find conscious and explicit claims about realism that are based on HAHK's depictions of class relations:

The first comment absolves HAHK from the commonly made charge that Indian popular cinema is usually escapist, and it does this on the grounds that the characters in HAHK all fall in love and get married according to their station in life. The second comment is even more interesting in its use of the word “natural” to describe how romantic or marital relations are conducted in real life – which is mostly along intraclass rather than interclass lines. Both comments thus make the claim that it is precisely by reinforcing class rigidity that HAHK achieves a greater degree of narrative realism than many other movies. The assumption, of course, is that interclass relations, or “driver–daughter romances” (a reference perhaps to the sort of “angry young man” movies that dominated the 1970s and 1980s, which featured a working class hero who worked as a driver for a rich man and fell in love with his daughter, usually following a rather misogynistic taming-of-the-shrew sort of courtship as well as a violent rendering of physical and social justice to the father-in-law to be), are only prevalent in movies and are seldom seen in real life. It may be the case that a middle-class background has something to do with finding reality in such a narrative. HAHK, in retrospect, was perhaps a precursor to a number of popular Hindi films since the 1990s, which marginalized class issues. With its careful etching of characters into their places (older brother, quiet and sober, marries older daughter of proposed family; younger brother, smart-alecky, marries his perky counterpart in his sister-in-law's younger sister; sidekicks marry each other; and so on), HAHK addresses class the way middle-class Indians perhaps see it in their real lives, and it creates for its narrative a certain kind of representational authenticity.

Class also figures in claims to realism in the reception of music television programs, although the use of “reality” in this context seems to lend itself to a more benign form of appropriation in middle-class readings, as I show in the following section. However, what is relevant from this study is the fact that reality is once again seen as being authenticated by the breakdown of something; in this case, the breakdown of the ideal of accuracy. One participant, for example, feels that music countdown shows are realistic precisely because of the evident ignorance of those who participate in them:

This statement, made in the context of a discussion about music countdown shows that featured on-the-street interviews (often called “public” shows at the time), highlights an emerging tension in the ways in which viewers were making sense of new discourses about participation and popularity on commercial television in the late 1990s. When I conducted my interviews, there were nearly three dozen music countdown shows on satellite and cable television, and the genre was underscored by a pervasive play on the idea of the public (one such program was called “Public Demand,” and the interviewee above was speaking in response to the viewing of a clip from this show). In my interviews I found that there was considerable negotiation around the veracity of the countdown format itself – the question was whether the rankings for a song really represented something “real.” Participants were aware of the allegations that were often reported in the press about producers of countdown shows being sometimes subjected to pressures and favors from film and music producers in order to promote the latter's songs in their rankings. One participant questions the veracity of countdowns on the basis of their plurality, wondering how a countdown could be true when so many countdowns say they are true yet feature different ranks for their songs (often the same Bollywood hits). In another context, participants in my study also engaged with questions of realism in the context of the mannerisms (particularly accents) of VJs, many of whom had become celebrities among young people. Underlying all of these, though, was an emerging sense of self-consciousness among audiences, as being part of something called “the public” – which was spawned on the one hand by the pseudo-populism of privatized broadcasting and, on the other, imagined to grow up after globalization (imagined, that is, by the first generation of television viewers in India, in its popular desires). Statements like the one quoted above suggest that, while audiences are not naïve enough to accept at face value claims of reality (which in this case are ensconced in the idea of the public and in the countdown format), they do find and enact competences that enable them to lend meanings, in this case of realism, to what they watch. The questions this poses to researchers are how reality matches up to authenticity in audience readings; whether these readings are associated with anything unpleasant (classism or ignorance in the case examined in my study, or explicit nastiness, betrayal, anger, or aesthetics of dirt in the case of the more recent reality shows); and what the implications are for the meanings audiences give to their world.

Reality as Something Nice

Despite the overwhelming equation of reality with nastiness in media discourses, there are instances, in the moment of reception (and its subsequent study) rather than in the media discourses themselves, when audiences make claims to realism not on the basis of a breakdown in niceness, but on the basis of a belief in the decency of people and things. While it may be tempting to ascribe this to a heartening faith in human nature among Indian audiences, one could also make the argument that the moment of revelation of goodness in media narratives is far older in the Indian popular experience than in the reality show. Indian cinema has long been associated with a narrative tradition of moral recognition as a moment of closure. It may be said that what has made Indian movies “real” to their audiences is not so much a code of realism in a modern or technical sense as the emotional experience of involvement with the plight of the characters, culminating in a revelatory climax that involves a moral restoration of truth and dignity for previously misconstrued and mistreated characters (Juluri, in press). One might say that what we are speaking of here is nothing more than a “happy ending,” so typical of money-driven cinema, be it Hollywood or Bollywood, and it is easy to criticize such tales as nothing more than escapism or ideological deception. But the niceness assumption in popular Indian media and its reception deserve some inquiry into their role in audience reality-making.

Despite the occasional comment – such as the one discussed in the previous section, which measures the realism of a film by contrasting the niceness of its characters with people in real life – the reception of HAHK very much involved the deployment of belief in the niceness of things; people, families, and broader imagined communities, like those of nations and faiths. It is instructive that most participants in my study did not just view the exuberantly joyous and immaculately decent family in HAHK as just an “ideal” family, by contrast to a less than happy and decent “real” family. Instead, they saw the family in the movie as representative of how families really were. One participant (the same person who coined the colorful “driver–daughter romance,” the touchstone of realism discussed earlier) took issue with me during an interview when I used the word“utopian” to describe the family environment of HAHK. He insisted that it was not “utopian,” because utopia implies an object of fantasy, something that is not real. HAHK, and presumably the busily cheerful domestic heaven it depicted, were no Shangri-La for him. Instead he argued that what HAHK depicted was the “golden age” of the family: “Our families may have been like this [. . .] [HAHK] represents the Golden Age of the family, not necessarily a ‘dream’ but a golden age.” It may be easy to dismiss such views as middle-class nostalgia, or even as fantasy; but to do so would be an inaccuracy, given the fact that participants such as this one claimed to live in extended family households during their own childhoods, decades ago. Nor was such a perception confined to middle-class or privileged participants in my study. Working-class participants, some of whom were recent migrants to the city, also identified with the family members of HAHK, although their reference was not necessarily a distant past, but a more recent one: the life they had left behind in their villages. Class, age, and urban experience all seem to have played a role in this sort of interpretation. Younger participants who had experienced nothing but an urban, nuclear household environment their entire lives also seemed to see HAHK's happy family as not necessarily unrealistic, but as something that they had missed out on in their generation.

The question of what exactly in HAHK made so many viewers feel invested in the reality of its depiction of happy family life is an important one, and it lends itself to numerous ideological analyses. I turn to some of these issues in the final section of this chapter; but suffice it to note now that the perception of reality that is at work here is not only a textual property of the film; it also reflects cultural competencies that are based on the life experiences of the audience. Such an interplay of seemingly unanticipated readings of reality, stemming from cultural competencies and from ideologically loaded texts, was also evident in my study of music television audiences. The two themes I examined in the reception of music television, the representation of the public on the one hand and the representation of national identity in an emerging global context on the other, indicated belief in a positive sort of reality, expressed in various ways. In general, reality was often ascribed to public shows and music countdowns on the basis of their interclass composition. Although my own view was that such representations tended to orientalize working-class figures for the consumption of largely middle-class urban music television audiences, the zeal with which numerous middle-class viewers sought to claim an egalitarian sensibility suggests that they saw the public as something that spanned everyone, almost as if talking about class was somehow not polite. In the case of national themes, a subtler reality claim came into play, one that I did not anticipate on the basis of my textual readings.

If HAHK was the definitive post-liberalization Indian cinema, then Alisha China's Made in India was perhaps the definitive music video of the 1990s. Made in India was the first music album to achieve sales on a par with film music albums (cassettes and CDs of songs from Hindi and other Indian language movies), and its video achieved extensive airplay on MTV, Channel V, and various other music television channels. Coming as it did in the wake of years of rapid and intense globalization, its repetitive pop nationalism and its lyrics, its narrative, and its imagery about Indians finding success in a world full of other countries seemed to tell an important story about how Indians were thinking about themselves in a new media and social environment. The video features a fairy tale setting: it tells the story of a princess who is being wooed by princely suitors from different countries; she turns them all down and very nearly loses hope of finding a perfect match, when finally a successful suitor arrives in a box labeled “Made in India,” and they all live happily every after. Bright, colorful, exotic, and festive, Made in India would seem to media students to be a classic example of present-day orientalism (although I prefer to call it “self-orientalism”), with its snake-charmers, tigers, soothsayers, and other fantasy elements often seen as typical Western stereotypes of India. Despite the obviously fantastical aspect of its visual experience, audiences seemed to derive a sense of deep meaning from it. Made in India was seen by some participants in my study as not just any song, but a song that genuinely represented who they were. This authenticity was also seen as being different from a suggestion I had made, that perhaps Made in India was appealing because it had patriotic sentiments. It was not patriotic, these participants insisted, because patriotism is usually what one is forced to feel, usually by authorities. Made in India, on the other hand, was just who they were; as human beings, as husbands and wives, as Indians.

It may be easy, once again, to ascribe these perceptions to some textual properties of the video (the lyrics do repeat the word dil (“heart”), which many participants spoke about as an essential aspect of the Indianness this song represented to them), but key here is the assumption that audiences make about their niceness. The self-congratulatory part of their claims may not be surprising, but it must be acknowledged that the reason why participants see themselves as represented in this video, the reason why they find it real is precisely that they do not see it as blindly validating their virtues. As some participants noted, Made in India sets up a competition, fair and square, in the tradition of the swayamvara (a ceremonial practice of a princess choosing from a number of suitors). It is a liberal, open competition, and suitors will not be debarred on the grounds of race or national origin (although one might notice, as is the lot of media students, that the princess rejects the Caucasian suitor with just a wistful look and the African suitor by turning her face away altogether). The implication, as some of my participants observed, is that the video is not exhorting the virtues of Indians per se; it is only advocating the choice of a mate with a “good heart,” and the narrative clearly shows that anyone, not just Indians, can have such a good heart. Finally, of course, the Indian wins – once again, not because he is Indian, but because he meets the standards of the international good heart competition. As naïve as this reasoning may sound to the critical scholar, it may not be far-fetched to note that there is a commendable quality in the effort, in the universal aspiration, as it were, shown by these young Indians to make sense of their nation and self in an emerging global context. If it was the perceived niceness and worthiness of India (even in an imaginary marital marketplace) that made Made in India seem real to them, then that is as instructive to us as the broader media discourses about the real as being something not so nice.

Reality as Religion

Given that audiences seem to assume that what makes a media experience real is its representation of niceness sometimes and of things that are not so nice on other occasions, how does one evaluate the question of what reality means to media audiences in general? I turn in this section to some insights from an ongoing study of mythological cinema, and I shall also take a closer look at examples from the previous studies that illuminate other relevant instances of how, in their own terms, audiences substantiate claims as to what they think to be real in speaking about their media experiences. While traditional religion is indeed a relevant concern in some of these cases (especially that of mythology), I call this section “Reality as Religion” rather than the other way around because I wish to make a point: cordoning off only certain beliefs or subjects as religious (say, in this context, “Hindu”) not only essentializes the borders of what we think religious faith to be (and this becomes doubly problematic in partially secularized contexts like India, where “religion” and “culture” are not easily distinguishable in everyday life), but it ends up privileging the not-religious as somehow “more real” and more important. My point is that “reality” in general may be seen as a religion; everything that audiences believe about themselves, the world, and the media (which permeate the former two) holds water on the basis of some faith (which may be sustained by reason, or it may not); and audience studies can teach us about the promises and perils of such beliefs. When music television audiences say that they think of globalization less as Western culture invading India and more as India going out triumphantly to win the respect of the world, when viewers of HAHK say that HAHK represents what it means to be truly Indian regardless of the class, caste or regional specificities of its characters, and when viewers of mythological cinema say that a certain genre of cinema is more real than another, what do they mean?

It is not unusual to find instances in audience interviews that are quite explicit in showing how participants make up their mind about something. These are instances where audience members do not necessarily make a claim to reality on the basis of an assumption that reality is either nice or not so nice, but they invoke instead reason, evidence, and corroboration in numerous spontaneous and sometimes subtle ways. In the case of music television reception, for example, numerous participants emphasized the “naturalness” of public shows by contrasting how the people on the show were simply there, and these shows “were not like they just get these people together to be a part of it.” In the same vein, another participant says that shows like these may be more representative because there are many people featured on them, as opposed to only one. In this case, it is plurality that is of importance, even if it is an assembled one; and the plurality is invoked to ascribe value to the premise of the program and its attendant pleasures. If the presence of many people (“so many people are liking that song that is why it has to come”) is one common validation given by music television audiences, the epistemological force of visual representation also appears as a justification, albeit in more complex ways. Talking about Made in India as a video that was made largely for non-resident Indian audiences, one participant mentions that there are many Indians who lived abroad, and he validates his claim, rather unconsciously, by noting that he saw it on Antakshari (a popular music game contest) when it was filmed before live audiences residing outside India. Television, in this case, functions as its own cultural capital in representations of reality; one can speak about things one has not directly or physically experienced by invoking its content as evidence.

At the same time, there are also instances when audience members invoke the constructed and possibly distorted nature of television as a mediation of reality: “Whether it is really hit or they are making it hit” (about the producers of music countdown shows), “they should be like a realist in [presenting] [. . .] though it is a preplanned joke it should be presented as if it is spontaneous” (about how VJs should perform). Audiences do not see television as nothing but a transparent window upon reality. They are familiar with the cultural competencies of criticism and expectation, and they express them quite clearly, in order to convey what they think is an appropriate standard of performance for the producers and entertainers of television. VJs, for example, need to appear to be spontaneous, even if what they are saying has already been scripted for them. Along the same lines, there are also instances where similar assumptions about the ontology of television are being applied in a critical manner to performers whose work has not lived up to audience expectations. Some participants criticize VJs for “faking” American accents (although at the time of these interviews I felt that such accents were also somewhat normalized, and some participants would not have noticed them if I had not brought the matter up).

Audiences may negotiate the reality of television and of the world it represents, in ways that belie simplistic assumptions – either about their cooptation into a linear “seeing is believing” sort of hegemony, or about a resistance to hegemony born out of audience members' ability to question television's transparency as a medium. As the codes of television (and media) audiencehood become widespread and naturalized over time, we can find instances of both tendencies in the findings of contemporary research. What is important for an understanding of the nature of reality, however, is the way mediatized and other realities have melted into one another in the landscape of daily life in many globalizing societies. As Justin Lewis (2004) writes, media do not just litter the landscape anymore, they are the landscape. By extension, one might also say that one is not just an occasional audience member anymore; it might instead be more useful to talk about audiencehood as a part of the global condition, with its mediations, memories, myths, and more, all making engagement with the media a reality, regardless of how one lives it or what one makes of it. Television's role as a center of new imagined locations emerges even when its authenticity is in question. As one participant in my music television study said, the reason why Indian VJs affect an accent is that they are “catering to a global audience,” and people in the Philippines or Singapore may not understand an Indian accent. Globality itself is given the status of a reality here.

What then, is the nature of the reality that is ascribed to the gods, who have been such a pervasive feature of the Indian mediascape from the earliest days of cinema until the present? It may be fair to say that tales of the gods have been so pervasive and persistent that to cordon them off as sectarian religious media may not be entirely accurate (sectarian media do exist, too – for instance in the multimedia and literature brought out by religious organizations). To believers, as we might call them, movies and TV serials about Krishna or Rama are not just works of fiction, in the same manner as, say, a serial about Spiderman or Superman: although some confusion might be around the corner for a new generation of Indian children, reared on a new cultural diet that reinvents the gods in such a pop-cultural idiom. At the same time, viewers of such media forms do not necessarily see movies or serials about the gods as non-fiction, like the documentary or history – although that attitude began to change a great deal since the 1980s, when the TV epics Ramayan and Mahabharath reimagined popular religion as a form of national self-discovery (Mankekar, 1999; Rajagopal, 2001). In some ways the question itself is an awkward one, importing as it does epistemological and ontological dichotomies that have not not occurred to the Hindu mind, but have indeed been avoided historically as an exigency of postcolonial survival (Nandy, 1983). I take the view of religion as being both time-honored and reimagined from generation to generation. The words, images, and practices that comprise Hinduism may be ancient, but their relevance, meanings, and implications have been neither essentially unchanging nor entirely fluid and meaningless. Since the first encounters with colonial modernity – and, specifically, with its technologies of mass communication (the printing press, the cinema) – the popular experience of Hinduism, and its tales of the gods, have been retold in ways that deserve analysis rather than a reductive accusation of false ideology. Film scholars (Das Gupta, 1989; Dwyer, 2007) describe the piety with which India's first film audiences encountered the miracles of their gods in Phalke's movies in the early twentieth century. More recently, tales of domestic piety and ceremony also surrounded the reception of Doordarshan's 1980s serials. Did audiences really believe that the gods were before them? What sort of reality was that? And did it single-handedly cause the phenomena of Hindu chauvinism, extremism, and nationalism?

Thus far, my limited study of audience interpretations of mythology suggests that what viewers experience and articulate in their viewing of such films is something that is not peculiar to religion (and this is, in any case, not easily separable, as mentioned earlier) but is constructed as a negotiation of a particular nuance of media experience. Mythological audiences talk about mythological cinema as they would talk about media in general; as a form of mediation, of its constructedness, of its aesthetic choices, and the like. But at the same time there is also an evocation of something far beyond just media. To begin with, what is particularly relevant to the concerns of this chapter is the use of the term “realistic” in talking about mythological media. Like the discussion of public shows in my music television study, the audience discussion of “realism” occurred without my prompting. Participants employed the notion of the real seamlessly in talking about mythology. While this may not be evidence that compels us to accept that these audience members literally believe what these movies are depicting, the viewer's response does point out that ontological claims are not irrelevant. As one participant writes: “Mythological movies of the black and white era appear to be more realistic than the color ones. Introduction of color and technology diminish some of the mysticism that one associates with the mythological stories.” Does the term “realistic” here refer to a comparison with a physical reality? Or to a comparison with other texts? Or to an expectation about how the divine is represented in secular entertainment contexts, as opposed to ritually consecrated ones – like temples? Tellingly, such a contrast was made almost unanimously by participants, who valued the older, black and white mythological movies of the 1950s (which are often accorded a hallowed status as classics by generations of Telugu film audiences) over the big budget color films that began to be made from the 1970s. The older movies are described by participants as “sincere,” “genuine,” “technically better,” and full of “charm” and “simplicity,” while the color films are described (largely accurately, if I may introduce my own aesthetic judgment here) as “theatrical, affected, gaudier, and louder” – and as “kitsch.” However, as much as these terms seem to relate to formal qualities of the texts in question, one can also find instances where a seemingly formal reading of the text blends into evaluations about what we might call the referent. In one comment about the Hindi TV serials of the 1980s, one participant rather summarily declares: “Hindi gods don't look like god!” Although this participant acknowledges a possible bias implicit in being a native Telugu speaker, the spontaneity with which one evaluates what a god is supposed to look like is important. Once again, we might ask whether the expectation of what a god is supposed to look like is merely a cultural competency, acquired from the naturalization of certain codes of representation disseminated over decades by calendar art and cinema, or whether there a greater value to that sensibility too. Is the aesthetic of secularized sacred representation only a capitalist exigency, or are there other epistemic possibilities too? When audiences assume a certain kind of reality around such texts, is it the same as anything else in the media? Is it good or bad?

Conclusion

What audiences assume when deciding what makes a media representation of a god realistic may be far too ambitious a question to take on in the conclusion of a chapter. Even so, it is through this question that we may begin to understand where audience researchers could advance a project of critical scholarship, particularly in India and its diaspora. Indian media audiences may experience many meanings when they consume mythological texts; for some it may be a story, for others a lesson in history, and for others still a story that transcends the limitations of secular experience. However, the expectation of what a god is supposed to be like, especially in the context of a media representation, is best understood both as an aesthetic issue and as an ethical one. One of the participants in my study, for example, was quite aware that what gods are supposed to look like reflects a norm established in Raja Ravi Varma's paintings. But what sets apart an interpretation of, say, Krishna as a “character” and as a “god” is in how a movie or cartoon may depict his actions, as much as his appearance. In the popular devotional context in which mythology is consumed, the righteousness of a god's actions, be they social or interpersonal, becomes a crucial touchstone. It is not appropriate to take narrative liberties on this count, as one participant notes:

A similar view was also in evidence in my interviews with some of the makers of mythological cinema. Writers, directors, producers, and actors (with very few exceptions) seem to approach the subject of mythology as if it represented not just a story, but moral instruction, even though this may be expressed as art, even popular art. What makes the gods real, in this sense, is not whether they look a certain way (although this is relevant), or whether there is historical evidence for their existence (although this has become a broader political debate since the 1980s), or whether their deeds are miraculous (although miracles are an important aspect of mythology and indeed piety). When viewers talk about the realism of mythology or the faithfulness a new movie shows towards the “original,” they do not make so much a scriptural evaluation as a narrative one, placing particular weight upon ethical choices. Brooding gods beset with doubts and angst and all-too-human rage, of the sort depicted in the US comic books India Authentic and Ramayana 3000 presented by Deepak Chopra and Shekar Kapoor, do not make for popular reception, on the scale achieved by mythological movies or the revered Indian comic book series Amar Chitra Katha.

Despite the moral imperative that informs the production and consumption of mythological texts, there is no denying that this imperative has been compromised by the historic ascendancy of political and commercial interests. While the appropriation of popular religion by one group of right-wing political parties in India is now well understood in cultural studies, there has also been a fair degree of change in the way in which the tales of the gods are now told, especially in the newer media, like satellite television. Many of the animated mythological cartoons that have been made since the 1990s, for example, fail to weave the mood of enchantment and instruction that characterizes some of their predecessors. The gods are now cartoon superheroes, combining their traditional tales of miracles and adventures with new activities, like surfing and high-fiving. At the same time there is a belabored attempt towards pedagogy, as if a litany of “facts” about the gods would help parents inject cultural heritage into their children as this generation grows up in a far more globalized world than that of their parents. The conscious creation of a cultural identity seems ominously poised to subsume the pleasures and delights that once came with such an identity. Pleasures and delights may still ensue from the consumption of mythological media, but these may in the future find themselves anchored less in moral guidelines and more in slogans. Future audiences may find a sense of reality not in the wisdom of mythology but in its possession, in every sense of that word.

However, the layering of mythology with a discourse of identity is still not the only factor at work in the broader experience of media audiencehood in India. As this chapter has hopefully shown, there are numerous ways in which audiences negotiate a sense of reality in their reception of media. Sometimes a media representation appears to be realistic because of a breakdown in goodness. Sometimes the converse happens. In any case, one may also speak of the reality that audiences imagine as a sort of religion, premised on the possession of ontological beliefs rooted in epistemological practices that may or may not be drawn from media discourses. However, as we witness the historic descent of millions of people into conditions of audiencehood that are ever more intense, narrow, privatized, and self-directed, we must take seriously the perils posed by this broader cultural trajectory. Audiences are surrounded by more media than ever before, but what happens when all that the media do is reflect each other and their claim for reality offers nothing more than each other's epistemic bases? Indian audiences once found a movie to be realistic regardless of its aesthetics, if goodness was narratively recognized. Now realism requires mastery of a new set of cultural competencies, which cynicism may even expose, but the culture cannot extinguish. Reality now issues forth when a text represents the worst of human behavior and the most disgusting of aesthetics, such as the sepia-tinted sewage scenes of Slumdog Millionaire (another film that was lauded by many for its “realism”). What happens when audiences believe that human nature is essentially nasty and all else is only a pretense? At the time of my studies there were clearly exceptions to this and signs of hope, as audiences negotiated the discursive and the modern on the one hand, the non-discursive and the non-modern on the other. Audience researchers, and cultural studies scholars in general, would do well to recognize both these elements. The media industries have taken to calling “reality” their particular view of human nature, and they have been enormously successful. Critical media scholars have fallen short, by remaining confined, in their critiques, to the positions and politics of identity and by failing to advance their critiques into popular beliefs about human nature. If it is reality itself that is at stake, we need to speak its language too, and the best way to learn its vocabulary is by taking it from the audiences who believe in it. Future audience researchers, especially those preparing to address the growing global genre of “reality television,” will do well to open up their own paradigmatic horizons and to build a stake in taking their findings and critiques into the broader discourse beyond academia as well.

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