Ishita Tiwary's book shows how video cassettes changed our visual culture

Video Culture in India: The Analog Era

by Ishita Tiwary

Published by Oxford University Press

226 pages ₹1,395

 

What’s paranoia for one is pronoia for another. For example, Sony’s Betamax VCR, which debuted in 1975, transformed the movie-making business radically. Bookend this development with the present-day Netflix-and-chill reality. In short, it would be no exaggeration to say that making sense of the evolution of the media industry is challenging given the sheer scale and the short span of its transformation. 

Nevertheless, the Oxford University Press series titled Media Dynamics in South Asia, edited by Adrian Athique, Vibodh Parthasarathi, and S V Srinivas, is attempting to address this challenge. Ishita Tiwary’s first book, Video Culture in India: The Analog Era, is a part of this series. 

Ms Tiwary is assistant professor, Cinema, at Concordia University. She begins the book with a 1989 issue of TV and Video World, which declared the 1980s the “Video Decade” because of the way videos “transformed India’s social landscape”. To be sure, videos weren’t as radical for the Indian masses but it certainly impacted elite culture. 

The author has meticulously contextualised the discourse around video cultures. She was “struck” by the “shrill moral panic and paranoia” triggered by the advent of the video. Coming to India in 1982 with the Asian Games, videos provided an opportunity “to project the image of a modern India to an international audience in the post-Emergency era.” 

The first chapter, “Screening Conjugality: The Affective Infrastructure of the Marriage Video”, begins with the descriptions of Vishal Punjabi-directed Heartbeats (2013), centralising the introduction of videos to memorialise a marital ceremony. Ms Tiwary notes the “temporal ‘liveness’” that helped in the “emergence of a new form of intimate spectatorship that transformed the experience of familial and conjugal spaces”. Invoking arguably the most popular hit among the middle class population of the Hindi heartland, the Sooraj Barjatya-directed Hum Aapke Hain Koun (1994), the author notes how a unique “performativity” entered the production of marriage videos. 

Discussions with the heir of the Delhi-based Prem Studios inform this chapter, offering an insight into videos as the “close-up” medium. What Ms Tiwary also highlights is the gaze that manufactures an illusion of beauty, an “idealised portrait of heterosexual romance”. The caveat, as she points out, is that the clients control not only what gets captured but also how everything is put together. 

Throughout the book, there’s a lament for limited access to the transitional phase that has shaped contemporary visual culture. The second chapter attempts to fill this gap by offering a biography of Hiba Films. Its owner, Nari Hira, also owned Magna Publications, and released the magazine Stardust, which Hira treated “as a promotional tool for his advertising business”.

Hira was a game changer who brought cinema to the living room. He shook the industry, provoking debates on distribution, piracy, broadcasting and censorship laws. While only “a handful of Hiba Films survive today”, Ms Tiwary writes, the production house’s legacy survives — from its portrayal of “self-assured and intelligent women” to “the otherness of video as a medium of intimacy” that it signalled. 

Like Hiba Films, Newstrack  is also a crucial, if less critically remembered, development. It changed the “everyday understandings of newsworthiness, ‘liveness’, and the ‘event’,” Ms Tiwary notes. However, in the chapter “Unsettling News”, one also learns the importance of archival management. One case in point is the story of how, while finding the Babri tape, the researcher in search of a “missing archive” becomes “a source of archival information herself”. 

Ms Tiwary articulates the intensity of the debates that followed because of the “video event” Newstrack helped inspire  —what’s permissible to show so as to not incite the public and disrupt law and order, and most importantly, who should shoulder the responsibility. She also underlines how Newstrack emerged as a reaction to the state broadcaster Doordarshan’s policies in the late 1980s. Given how the “material infrastructure of Newstrack helped craft a visual grammar that was distinct from state television”, it was equally important to thoughtfully engage with how media nexuses and nepotism informed video culture in India. 

One of the most interesting chapters in this volume is “The Afterlives of the Video Pravachana: The Cult of Rajneeshees”. To work on this part, Ms Tiwary had to join Osho ashrams. Reading this chapter, one realises that Rajneesh understood the mechanics of communicating and projecting an image via the visual medium. He knew far better than anybody else that he couldn’t sell sex as meditation and enlightenment as entertainment without  creating an aura. There would, thus, be no Sadhguru without Rajneesh’s flamboyance. 

 

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and culture critic.  

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