Cable and satellite television blur boundaries between colonizer and colonized and contest the hegemonic presence of state-sponsored television in India, namely, the Doordarshan network. Shanti Kumar discusses the creation of hybrid vernacular spaces by the transnational Star TV network and what he calls translocal networks such as Zee TV, Sun TV and ETV that feed global and national ambitions and entrench the regional affiliations of Indian media elites. The book is a valuable resource in its rich detail on the emergence of satellite television in India, its ideological analyses of early Indian television advertisements, and its elegant treatment of the place of television in contemporary Indian life.

Kumar approaches the question, "Is there an Indian community of television?" with the analytical fervor of a true deconstructionist, tackling it in five different ways, emphasizing each key word separately. Informed by the work of, most notably, Bhabha, Derrida, and P. Chatterjee, Kumar ably and accessibly dissects and historicizes television’s trajectory in India. The drawback is that in so doing, Kumar’s engagement with Indian television is in its representation, not reception. The question of whether there is a community of Indian television is sidestepped to examine the author of the national community, Mahatma Gandhi. Through a discussion of auteur theory, Kumar speculates whether Gandhi is a spectral author or rewritten beyond recognition in contemporary India. Who the viewing community is and what exactly it is doing with and in the world of television and politics remains ungrounded.

Like Mitra (1993), Rajagopal (2001), and Mankekar’s (1999) accounts of Indian television history, Kumar also balances factual detail with critical journeys into the function of televised epics. He concludes with them that such narratives provide the ground upon which postcolonial dreams unravel; they point to idealized constructions of the national citizen and his moral obligations; they construct the New Indian Woman as selfless and efficient in her work to support the national family (p. 41). He journeys onward into Bhabha’s placement of literary texts in the margins of the nation, embodying hybrid configurations of identity and difference with-in and with-out the nation. He argues that the "middle vision" (p. 51), the hybrid, nationalist, and techno-aggressive voice of Doordarshan is always present in postcolonial India, in the "imagiNation," his preferred term (p. 54).

Kumar’s delineation of the non-subjectivist darshan of Indian television viewing as opposed to the subject-centered imagination of European thought (p. 56) works to illustrate that television simultaneously articulates nationalist and electronic capitalist desires in India. Ideological analyses of early television advertisements in Chapter 2 demonstrate the mimetic confusions of the medium itself, projecting an image of reality, recognizing that the image is never reality and then urging the consumer to come see for himself or herself, the magic of imagining reality. As is the consequence with infinite deconstruction, Kumar balances precariously on the last turtle. He assumes Indian audiences are floating with television’s signifiers, flitting between reality and representation like the medium itself, and as marked by its ambivalent postcolonial and nationalist struggles (see p. 81, for example). In doing so, he repeatedly resorts to a bifocal analysis (p. 90), playing with the inside-outside vision of television and its endless dribbling between global and local, foreign and domestic, national patriotism and postcolonial techno-capitalism. Television then, Kumar concludes at the end of Chapter 2, creates a "synthetic sense of reality" (p. 92). The question that leaves this last turtle in suspension is, how is the synthetic sense accommodated, resisted, and lived by audiences?

Critiques of expanding capitalism from Marxist theorists are exquisitely discussed in Chapter 3, giving the reader a sense of the theoretical and political ferment of the 1970s, when newly independent nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America battled and appropriated socialist, Marxist, and capitalist philosophies for their own development. Gandhi emerged as an embodiment of both a struggle for independent India and a perplexing detachment from the free state. He was a relentless supporter of peasants, women, and other subalterns, and a denouncer of sexuality itself, resulting in the equation of idealism with hypermasculinity and failure with femininity. The "dressing up" of Gandhi to meet the imperatives of consumerism and liberalization is addressed in Chapter 4, Gandhi Meets Pepsi. Although Kumar provides ample evidence of When the Nation Writes Back (p. 128) in terms of various political and popular protests to TNCs in the Indian market, he does not adequately develop the place of such protests in an expanding capitalist environment. The criticisms to The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989) that the section title echoes, hold good here. Quite simply, is the pen really mightier than the sword? What specifically is transformed by such resistance? What persists relatively unscathed?

An example of a television text that represents global local run-ins is the controversial Nikki Tonight talk show of mid1990s Star TV, a show that was cancelled after a guest called Gandhi a "bastard bania" (a Gujarati trader, or more colloquially, a miser). In Chapter 5, Kumar provides an intriguing account, made more vivid through personal interviews with key players in the controversy, of the battle over the sanctity of Gandhi’s memory and the validity of his legacy. The show itself is discussed as an example of glocalization, not so much global and local as global plus local.

Kumar concludes that instead of an imagined community of television, in India exist unimaginable communities, "at once based on identity/difference" (p. 182). He writes, "…it is the paradoxical nature of the unimaginable community that at the very moment that it avows its identity, it loses all claims to legitimacy, and gives voice to irreducible differences." In short, the moment of coming together is precisely the moment of falling apart. In response to the question posed at the beginning of the book, Kumar contends that there isn’t an Indian community of television in the 21^st century. In the age of satellite television, there are heterogeneous communities and the evidence of an "Indian way" implies an Indian community is possible. Arguments exist for and against an actual community itself. Television plays an active role in representing various imaginations of the national community. Kumar only hints at audience agency at the very end of the book when he mentions the "regulated free agency" where audiences "are free to be at home with their television sets even as they are regulated by the ideological constraints of electronic capitalism" (p. 200). Further development of this concept would certainly round out the analysis. Ultimately, the book makes an important contribution to our understanding of the ideological function of television in the world’s largest democracy and its management of nationalist struggles and postcolonial desires into necessary and desired consumption.

References

Ashcroft, B., Griffiths, G. and Tiffin, H. (1989). The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London and New York: Routledge.

Mankekar, P. (1999). Screening culture, viewing politics: An ethnography of television, womanhood, and nation in postcolonial India. Durham: Duke University Press.

Mitra, A. (1993). Television in India: A study of the Mahabharatha. Thousand Oaks: Sage.

Rajagopal, A. (2001). Politics after television: Hindu nationalism and the reshaping of the public in India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.