Thakur
Banned
- Joined
- 30 Aug 2013
- Messages
- 14,856
- Reaction score
- 8,575
More and more, I find myself watching DD
Bharati. My television viewing is random: since
I work at home, I have the option of exploring
what in Britain is derisively called ‘daytime
television’. I often exercise it. After eleven o’
clock in the morning, I need caffeine to keep
myself from drifting off to sleep or to protect
myself from migraine. Of course, daytime TV
— comprising quiz shows, lunchtime
discussions, and all the other stuff meant for
infants and the unemployed — is largely
irrelevant, as a notion, in India, where we have
cable or dish-antennae television, which makes
no distinction between night and day, and on
which programmes keep repeating themselves
every twelve hours. At quarter or half-past
eleven, I stir the coffee and guiltily switch on
the TV: my daughter is at school, my wife at
work, and I am at home, watching the news.
This is a weekday routine: Saturdays and
Sundays are quite different — there’s a pent-
up restiveness in me that won’t let me stay at
home. Weekdays, after eleven, I allow myself
20 minutes of television as I let the caffeine
swim into my bloodstream. We have 26
‘favourites’ selected from channels that are too
numerous to keep track of. DD Bharati is one
of them.
I can’t recall the exact moment at which I
actually became aware of this channel.
Preceding my discovery, I ranged casually and
dementedly over seven or eight alternatives.
There were, naturally, the channels that show
Hollywood movies, and repeat Pirates of the
Caribbean and National Treasure infinitely.
Years passed, and I gradually concluded that
these channels — HBO, Star Movies — needed
to be bypassed unless I had an inexhaustible
need for National Treasure . In this cocktail of
movie channels are some — less glossy ones,
such as Sony Pix — that occasionally throw up
a movie that isn’t only a decent piece of
entertainment, but a ‘good film’: maybe even a
‘good film’ you haven’t seen. I make this
distinction to clarify that I’m on the prowl, as I
cruise the channels, not for aesthetic
satisfaction but for escapist fare. Nevertheless,
when you do, by happenstance, light on
something that’s artistically interesting, you
may recognize it for what it is instantly, or its
quality may dawn on you after ten minutes;
but the order and category of the response is
unsettling, and disrupts the general métier of
TV-watching. For the channel-hopper, it is
almost impossible to catch a programme or a
film from the start, and the rule is that you
descend upon it midway, or some way after
it’s begun. You then make a simple assessment:
is this boring, or is it entertainment? Very
intermittently, the channel-hopper will be
confronted with another kind of question as he
or she watches: is this of value in some way?
Why is it giving me a particular kind of
pleasure?
The free market brings to you a wealth of
consumable rubbish, but inadvertently it will
give you an artefact or gem without
explanation. Very little information is
provided: you, like a critic or connoisseur, will
have to decide if what you’re watching has
significance. I recall glimpsing a film many
times on Sony Pix. It was set in London; the
actors and the quality of the colour — noticed
in a flash — suggested it was made in the
1970s. Each time, it drew me in. I’d never
seen it before. It had Glenda Jackson in it. The
London it was portraying seemed to be south
of the Thames, antediluvian, industrialized,
with pockets of gardens and deep, Victorian,
middle-class houses. Its central figure was a
bisexual artist (Murray Head), a young man
desired both by a Jewish doctor (Peter Finch)
and a bored housewife (Glenda Jackson). The
film’s world seemed to be located somewhere
between the Pasolini of Teorema , the
Antonioni of Blow-Up (also mostly set in South
East London), and the English tradition of vital
social realism, such as Saturday Night, Sunday
Morning — except the characters in this movie
were middle- and not working-class.
Consulting the information box on the Tatasky
menu, I was told the film was called Sunday
Bloody Sunday . Turning to Google, I found it
was a much-lauded film in its time (1971),
made by John Schlesinger, all of whose early
films are terrific, but largely forgotten, as is
the specific and very creative English
filmmaking tradition they belong to. What was
Sunday Bloody Sunday doing on Sony Pix and
Tatasky, alongside Pirates of the Caribbean ?
There was no explanation for the film, let
alone its repeated showings. Changing
channels, I would miss the beginning each
time, and each time find myself absorbed in its
South London.
Which is to say — in the free-market world of
satellite and cable TV, it isn’t enough to be
well-informed or discriminating to access the
interesting fare on television: you need to be
lucky. You will not be guided towards the best
things on offer, as we are long liberated from
an educated dispensation reigning over culture;
so you must depend on chance. Perhaps this
was always the case with our cultural
discoveries; but it appears to be the rule now.
I spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in
England, catching British TV at a time when it
was an institution that most British people
were proud of, when part of it was, indeed,
governed by a patrimony of taste. In the
1990s came the great change wrought by
Thatcher’s legacy, leading the novelist, Iain
Sinclair, to bewail the destruction capitalism
had visited not just on high but on popular
culture and television. But in the early 1980s,
under the benign, adventurous dispensation
that had created BBC2, I recall watching M.S.
Sathyu’s Garam Hawa , Mani Kaul’s Duvidha ,
and Abel Gance’s hours-long silent epic,
Napoléon, on British TV. About such
memories, you’re never certain what’s most
extraordinary — the astonishing films
themselves, or the fact that you were watching
them on a Saturday afternoon, at a time
reserved for football and horse-racing. I also
recall terrific sitcoms like Rising Damp co-
existing with late-night interviews with Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak, figures then hardly
widely-known in England.
That time — whatever its intellectual hegemony
might have been, socialist or bourgeois —
when TV, from time to time, showcased culture
and fostered taste, consciously introducing its
viewers to the wonders available to it, is long
gone now. But that doesn’t mean those
moments — those discoveries — don’t happen
to us any more. The homogenizing, samey
weave of the free market appears to entangle
everything; but, given that the market is
informed by periodic boom and bust, the
weave is also constantly unravelling in places.
We have to take advantage of those tears and
rents in the fabric. It’s there — in the tear —
that you might see, like a full moon or a rare
bird, Sunday Bloody Sunday or DD Bharati.
I came upon DD Bharati around the time I’d
grown resigned to never seeing classical music
concerts on TV again. Or interviews with
writers, for that matter. Such a generous
display of channels, I thought, giving us
variations of the same. It seemed that Indian
TV couldn’t even make room for something like
the US’s anodyne Public Broadcasting Service.
How I then became conscious of DD Bharati
I’m not, as I confessed before, certain: had it
in been in existence for a while already, or did
I discover it soon after its inception? Typically,
there was nothing to flag it up. Like all things
that come with the nomer DD or Doordarshan,
it seemed to be one of the many anomalous
vestiges of Congress-era programming,
cocooned in a State-sponsored dullness. But
the notion of the ‘State-sponsored’ itself
doesn’t fit in a scenario that is now so
cynically entrepreneurial. The very dullness of
DD Bharati, once you notice its programmes, is
alluring. You begin to understand how, in
Indian television, the soporific is often an
agent of the transformative. I recall seeing a
documentary on this channel on chhau dancers
that looked, at first, like any common-or-
garden offering until I saw the filmmaker was
accentuating the dullness of his fare by
showing us how much time the lead dancer,
when he wasn’t performing the chhau, spent
doing nothing, or sleeping, on a string cot. As I
entered the film’s rhythms, I realized that
something extraordinary about the world of
chhau was being given to me, partly through
these lacklustre records of the dancer’s
indolence. The filmmaker (I looked for the
name in the credits) was Ranjan Palit.
I could say the same of DD Bharati: that it
opens up in the midst of the unimpressive and
the lacklustre. What archives Doordarshan
possesses! From old recordings of Kumar
Gandharva and Amir Khan performing (the
latter pedantic and dignified, like a Jewish
intellectual), to the birdcall in the soundtrack
in interviews with writers like Qurratulain
Hyder, O.V. Vijayan, and Nirmal Verma, to the
pilgrimage-stops in the odd but lovely
travelogue-films made by the genteel, prissily
correct Hugh and Colleen Gantzer, to the late
Arvind N. Das, a myopic presenter of
passionate meticulousness, to temples,
mosques, temples: there’s much here related to
the languages inhabiting our consciousness, to
the still-cherishable features of our culture, to
the vestiges of our childhood and our half-
conscious awareness of the unfolding of lives.
No other channel captures so well the reasons
we both ignore and are haunted by ‘India’.
Bharati. My television viewing is random: since
I work at home, I have the option of exploring
what in Britain is derisively called ‘daytime
television’. I often exercise it. After eleven o’
clock in the morning, I need caffeine to keep
myself from drifting off to sleep or to protect
myself from migraine. Of course, daytime TV
— comprising quiz shows, lunchtime
discussions, and all the other stuff meant for
infants and the unemployed — is largely
irrelevant, as a notion, in India, where we have
cable or dish-antennae television, which makes
no distinction between night and day, and on
which programmes keep repeating themselves
every twelve hours. At quarter or half-past
eleven, I stir the coffee and guiltily switch on
the TV: my daughter is at school, my wife at
work, and I am at home, watching the news.
This is a weekday routine: Saturdays and
Sundays are quite different — there’s a pent-
up restiveness in me that won’t let me stay at
home. Weekdays, after eleven, I allow myself
20 minutes of television as I let the caffeine
swim into my bloodstream. We have 26
‘favourites’ selected from channels that are too
numerous to keep track of. DD Bharati is one
of them.
I can’t recall the exact moment at which I
actually became aware of this channel.
Preceding my discovery, I ranged casually and
dementedly over seven or eight alternatives.
There were, naturally, the channels that show
Hollywood movies, and repeat Pirates of the
Caribbean and National Treasure infinitely.
Years passed, and I gradually concluded that
these channels — HBO, Star Movies — needed
to be bypassed unless I had an inexhaustible
need for National Treasure . In this cocktail of
movie channels are some — less glossy ones,
such as Sony Pix — that occasionally throw up
a movie that isn’t only a decent piece of
entertainment, but a ‘good film’: maybe even a
‘good film’ you haven’t seen. I make this
distinction to clarify that I’m on the prowl, as I
cruise the channels, not for aesthetic
satisfaction but for escapist fare. Nevertheless,
when you do, by happenstance, light on
something that’s artistically interesting, you
may recognize it for what it is instantly, or its
quality may dawn on you after ten minutes;
but the order and category of the response is
unsettling, and disrupts the general métier of
TV-watching. For the channel-hopper, it is
almost impossible to catch a programme or a
film from the start, and the rule is that you
descend upon it midway, or some way after
it’s begun. You then make a simple assessment:
is this boring, or is it entertainment? Very
intermittently, the channel-hopper will be
confronted with another kind of question as he
or she watches: is this of value in some way?
Why is it giving me a particular kind of
pleasure?
The free market brings to you a wealth of
consumable rubbish, but inadvertently it will
give you an artefact or gem without
explanation. Very little information is
provided: you, like a critic or connoisseur, will
have to decide if what you’re watching has
significance. I recall glimpsing a film many
times on Sony Pix. It was set in London; the
actors and the quality of the colour — noticed
in a flash — suggested it was made in the
1970s. Each time, it drew me in. I’d never
seen it before. It had Glenda Jackson in it. The
London it was portraying seemed to be south
of the Thames, antediluvian, industrialized,
with pockets of gardens and deep, Victorian,
middle-class houses. Its central figure was a
bisexual artist (Murray Head), a young man
desired both by a Jewish doctor (Peter Finch)
and a bored housewife (Glenda Jackson). The
film’s world seemed to be located somewhere
between the Pasolini of Teorema , the
Antonioni of Blow-Up (also mostly set in South
East London), and the English tradition of vital
social realism, such as Saturday Night, Sunday
Morning — except the characters in this movie
were middle- and not working-class.
Consulting the information box on the Tatasky
menu, I was told the film was called Sunday
Bloody Sunday . Turning to Google, I found it
was a much-lauded film in its time (1971),
made by John Schlesinger, all of whose early
films are terrific, but largely forgotten, as is
the specific and very creative English
filmmaking tradition they belong to. What was
Sunday Bloody Sunday doing on Sony Pix and
Tatasky, alongside Pirates of the Caribbean ?
There was no explanation for the film, let
alone its repeated showings. Changing
channels, I would miss the beginning each
time, and each time find myself absorbed in its
South London.
Which is to say — in the free-market world of
satellite and cable TV, it isn’t enough to be
well-informed or discriminating to access the
interesting fare on television: you need to be
lucky. You will not be guided towards the best
things on offer, as we are long liberated from
an educated dispensation reigning over culture;
so you must depend on chance. Perhaps this
was always the case with our cultural
discoveries; but it appears to be the rule now.
I spent most of the 1980s and 1990s in
England, catching British TV at a time when it
was an institution that most British people
were proud of, when part of it was, indeed,
governed by a patrimony of taste. In the
1990s came the great change wrought by
Thatcher’s legacy, leading the novelist, Iain
Sinclair, to bewail the destruction capitalism
had visited not just on high but on popular
culture and television. But in the early 1980s,
under the benign, adventurous dispensation
that had created BBC2, I recall watching M.S.
Sathyu’s Garam Hawa , Mani Kaul’s Duvidha ,
and Abel Gance’s hours-long silent epic,
Napoléon, on British TV. About such
memories, you’re never certain what’s most
extraordinary — the astonishing films
themselves, or the fact that you were watching
them on a Saturday afternoon, at a time
reserved for football and horse-racing. I also
recall terrific sitcoms like Rising Damp co-
existing with late-night interviews with Edward
Said and Gayatri Spivak, figures then hardly
widely-known in England.
That time — whatever its intellectual hegemony
might have been, socialist or bourgeois —
when TV, from time to time, showcased culture
and fostered taste, consciously introducing its
viewers to the wonders available to it, is long
gone now. But that doesn’t mean those
moments — those discoveries — don’t happen
to us any more. The homogenizing, samey
weave of the free market appears to entangle
everything; but, given that the market is
informed by periodic boom and bust, the
weave is also constantly unravelling in places.
We have to take advantage of those tears and
rents in the fabric. It’s there — in the tear —
that you might see, like a full moon or a rare
bird, Sunday Bloody Sunday or DD Bharati.
I came upon DD Bharati around the time I’d
grown resigned to never seeing classical music
concerts on TV again. Or interviews with
writers, for that matter. Such a generous
display of channels, I thought, giving us
variations of the same. It seemed that Indian
TV couldn’t even make room for something like
the US’s anodyne Public Broadcasting Service.
How I then became conscious of DD Bharati
I’m not, as I confessed before, certain: had it
in been in existence for a while already, or did
I discover it soon after its inception? Typically,
there was nothing to flag it up. Like all things
that come with the nomer DD or Doordarshan,
it seemed to be one of the many anomalous
vestiges of Congress-era programming,
cocooned in a State-sponsored dullness. But
the notion of the ‘State-sponsored’ itself
doesn’t fit in a scenario that is now so
cynically entrepreneurial. The very dullness of
DD Bharati, once you notice its programmes, is
alluring. You begin to understand how, in
Indian television, the soporific is often an
agent of the transformative. I recall seeing a
documentary on this channel on chhau dancers
that looked, at first, like any common-or-
garden offering until I saw the filmmaker was
accentuating the dullness of his fare by
showing us how much time the lead dancer,
when he wasn’t performing the chhau, spent
doing nothing, or sleeping, on a string cot. As I
entered the film’s rhythms, I realized that
something extraordinary about the world of
chhau was being given to me, partly through
these lacklustre records of the dancer’s
indolence. The filmmaker (I looked for the
name in the credits) was Ranjan Palit.
I could say the same of DD Bharati: that it
opens up in the midst of the unimpressive and
the lacklustre. What archives Doordarshan
possesses! From old recordings of Kumar
Gandharva and Amir Khan performing (the
latter pedantic and dignified, like a Jewish
intellectual), to the birdcall in the soundtrack
in interviews with writers like Qurratulain
Hyder, O.V. Vijayan, and Nirmal Verma, to the
pilgrimage-stops in the odd but lovely
travelogue-films made by the genteel, prissily
correct Hugh and Colleen Gantzer, to the late
Arvind N. Das, a myopic presenter of
passionate meticulousness, to temples,
mosques, temples: there’s much here related to
the languages inhabiting our consciousness, to
the still-cherishable features of our culture, to
the vestiges of our childhood and our half-
conscious awareness of the unfolding of lives.
No other channel captures so well the reasons
we both ignore and are haunted by ‘India’.
