THE MTV-IZATION OF URBAN INDIAN YOUTH

THE MTV-IZATION OF URBAN INDIAN YOUTH:
A MULTICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE ON MEDIA GLOCALIZATION

Shashidhar Nanjundaiah

This paper attempts to apply the concept of multicultural communication to the context of post-liberalization India. The paper defines the concepts of culture, multiculturalism and multicultural communication from a perspective that has been discussed but not fully integrated into the scheme of studies on the subject: the idea that cultures, as a collective consciousness of meaning, are ever-expanding from the influence of other cultures. This growth (a term I prefer to “change,” which does not necessarily encompass expansion) ensues through the processes of 1) interpretation, 2) selective borrowing, and 3) internalization. It analyzes how Music Television (MTV) India has been a factor of influence on urban Indian youth. By interviewing a select group of young men and women from four large cities, the research finds that the Indian youth is at the stage of internalizing the elements of American culture through foreign media such as MTV India.

First, the paper synthesizes the definition of culture and popular culture through an analysis of available sociological and anthropological theories, borrowing from Ulf Hannerz the interpretive meaning of culture. Second, it ties together research and discourse available on multiculturalism, and integrates these into a meaning definition of multiculturalism. Third, it applies these definitions to multicultural communication and analyzes how media messages from a foreign culture impact a culture through the diachronic and progressive processes of interpretation, selective borrowing and internalization (mentioned above). The paper follows a discourse pattern in its analysis, rather than the empirical, since the theoretical synthesis is the key here. The critical approach in the paper allows for some theory-forming, and the paper proposes a model whereby culture impacts another in three stages: individual, group, and cultural.

Culture and popular culture in the new world. Culture may be seen as a set of rituals of socialization based on commonality. These constantly changing rituals and common mindsets drive culture to interact, sift, adapt and borrow from outside the culture. The latest catalyst of change has been the media.

Popular culture has been described as a homogenizing force, “compromising a whole set of processes in social life” (Kaarsholm & James, 2000). In the context of several African cultures, for example, popular culture practitioners have “merged into a kind of syncretic blend the mainly oral ‘traditional’ cultures thought of as deriving from the precolonial past and the mainly written élite cultures of the emerging middle classes” (ibid.). Indeed, as Kaarsholm & James (2000) argue, although the media are “central to the definition of popular culture,” the fact that “access to mass media products and discourses is so unevenly distributed means that their impact can never be uniform or hegemonic.”

Postmodern critical theorists have lamented the advent of foreign culture in “native” cultures. Scholars of “reflexive modernism,” such as Beck, et al. (1994) and Tismaneanu (1998) have traced how popular resistance to globalization in these neo-democratic nations has spurred a new sense of nationalism. Several of the studies on Eastern Europe have described the cultural change there from a hybridization perspective (e.g., Nederveen Pieterse, 1995). A few take a nationalism angle (e.g., Tismaneanu, 1998). The dualism of homogeneity/heterogeneity that the new globalized economy has precipitated (Robertson, 1995) should be of particular interest here, although the dynamic interrelationship between homogeneity and heterogeneity in a society needs to be underscored. This dialectic between homogeneity and heterogeneity is termed as Glocalization.

Urban cultural resilience. The above general and encompassing definition is particularly applicable in Indian city cultures. (We shall contain ourselves to urban culture—although, clearly, a similar definition may easily apply to India’s village folk.) While many scholars treat popular culture as semantically similar to the erstwhile “folk culture,” in many ways, popular culture may be linked to urbanity. Primarily, it is in the urban centres that culture—whether as the arts or as a way of life—has endured in all its layers (Featherstone, 1991, p. 95). Secondly, because of their cosmopolitan nature, cities have been preservers of traditional arts as well (e.g., Bhabha, 1994). Thirdly, and most relevantly, cities have been the most receptive to outside cultures, arguably because of their easier accessibility by outside influences. This multicultural meaning to urban culture is important because this paper attempts to show that cultural practice may be seen as roles that people adopt in various situations.

It is a foregone conclusion that culture is susceptible to influence from outside forces, although the idea is not always welcome in both political as well as scholarly circles. The idea that satellite television is an “invasion from the sky” (Sahay, 1993) holds the essential claim that outside cultures corrupt native ones. Tomlinson (1991), in a deconstruction of cultural imperialism, recognizes four factors embedded in the concept: 1) media imperialism, 2) cultural imperialism and the discourse of nationality, 3) the discourse of the culture of capitalism, and 4) the discourse of modernity, development and cultural fate. Postmodern scholars and popular culturalists see cultural imperialism as restrictive. van Elteren (1998) argues that cultural imperialists have largely ignored the effects of “cultural accommodation,” the continual process of a culture’s borrowing and internalization of elements from other cultures. He contends that cultural imperialism is “insensitive to the process of accommodation taking place, unable to account for the intricate transformation of values and symbols when they appear in a different cultural context.”

The psychogenetic approach, too, contrasts with the notion of cultural imperialism. Featherstone (1995) maintains that rather than looking at the cultural process as a mode of consumption as several critical theorists do, it is possible to view the phenomenon from a “psychogenetic” perspective. This approach argues that individuals have innate cultural “demands” which precede the “supply” of cultural material.

The preceding arguments suggest that as an approach to transnational communication, cultural imperialism has underrated or ignored cultural resilience. Voluntary borrowing and internalizing elements from another culture presented through the media in such a case would present an especially hard-to-explain problem. Cultural imperialism also fails to explain how, despite so many invasions and large-scale migrations, cultures have not been wiped out. The process of selective borrowing and internalization, therefore, may well have played a part in cultures’ survival itself.

Two examples of this phenomenon are the impact of economic globalization on people’s eating habits and musical tastes. Noodles have become a commonly eaten breakfast diet among urban Indians. Lockard (1996) describes how Malaysian popular music has expanded from folk before World War II to a blend of Chinese, Indian, Western and Malay styles. Such reception, although varied in degree among different cultures, is possible only with popular approval and willingness to expand—rather than change. The process of globalization itself is witness to this process. Nation after nation has taught media and other corporations to customize or perish. After the 1993 General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT) summit, the United States strongly resented European Union’s (EU) policy of filtering American cultural entry into the continent. America’s argument was that culture, like any other product, is a consumable. This tug-of-war of culture’s ownership raises the interesting and pervasive practice of cultural protectionism, or even “internal imperialism” (Nanjundaiah, 1995).

Popular culture as flow of meaning. Central to the argument that popular culture is dynamic, and to a redefinition of multiculturalism, is the view of culture as flow of meaning between the participants of a culture. Stemming from Clifford Geertz’s idea that culture is basically a set of meanings, the Swedish scholar Ulf Hannerz treats the nature of culture as primarily a collective matter: internalized meanings that are made public and thus shared and relayed:

“To study culture is to study ideas, experiences, feelings, as well as the external forms that such internalities take as they are made public, available to the senses and thus truly social” (Hannerz, 1992, p. 3).

This “meaning” or “ritual” definition (as opposed to the “message” or “transmission” definition) assumes control in the hands of the receiver of cultural communication. It also helps the student of multicultural communication better understand the cyclical, and hence dynamic, nature of cultures:

“The cultural flow … consists of the externalizations of meaning which individuals produce through arrangements of overt forms, and the interpretations which individuals make of such displays—those of others as well as their own … I find the flow metaphor useful—for one thing, it captures one of the paradoxes of culture … ‘you cannot step into the same river twice,’ for it is always moving, and only in this way does it achieve its durability” (ibid., p. 4, emphasis added).

Hannerz lists three dimensions of culture in its complex form: 1) ideas and modes of thought, 2) forms of externalizations and 3) social distribution, i.e., the distribution of cultural meanings in society, and the relationships between the meanings and the receiving culture.

Glocalization, hybridization and multiculturalism. Joel Khan (1997) traces the advent of “glocal” back to the sixteenth century. Though he does not use the neologism “glocal”, he is actually saying that “local”, if it ever existed, has long since surrendered to the dictates of the “global”, and now exists only as a “glocal” shadow of itself (Thornton, 2000). The term “Glocalization” has its roots in Japanese commercial strategy (Robertson, 1995, p. 28; Robertson, 1992b, p. 173; Featherstone, 1995, p. 118). It erases the dividing line between universalism and particularism, modernity and tradition. The resulting hybrid demythologizes locality as an independent sphere of values and undermines the classic Tonniesian antithesis of benign culture versus malign civilization (Robertson, 1995, p. 29).

There are varied views on how foreign cultures impact local cultures. Traditionalists argue that the entry of other cultures marks a loss of local culture, some others view it as an inevitable process of cultural hybridization. Ulrich Beck (1994) maintains that the result is “reflexive modernization,” a new, transformative reaction to Westernization, in which “progress can turn into self-destruction, in which one kind of modernization undercuts and charges another” (p. 2). Welsch (1994) says that this “ethnic consolidation” or “nationalism” has resulted in much violence and cultural backlash (pp. 201-3). Jonathan Friedman (1999), on the other hand, argues that “hybridity as an objectified concept eliminates the tension and the real contradictions that might be said to exist … in situations of social transformation” (p. 251).

The exact definition of multiculturalism has eluded many a scholar. As Cawelti (1996) says, multiculturalism was initially connected with powerful thrusts toward separatism among African Americans. Yet, Cawelti contends that as a complex and multifaceted concept today, it is difficult, if not impossible, to define multiculturalism in clear terms. In the more well-developed field of sociolinguistics, a distinction is made between “individual multilingualism” — the faculty within a person to learn several languages—and “communal multilingualism”—the existence of several linguistic communities within one society (Hudson, 1980, pp. 8-11). Even in the absence of such a clearly wedged-out distinction, multiculturalism has been viewed from two complementary frameworks: the social-structural view, and as a relationship between the individual and the culture(s). Some scholars (e.g., Bennett, 1995) have seen multiculturalism as a situation that “fosters cultural pluralism”. As a sociological, macro-level concept, culture has been defined by scholars like Franz Boas (1966) as a homogenizing force with several isomorphic points, an integrated whole (Boas, 1966, p. 257). Many American scholars have seen multiculturalism as an ideal society where different cultures co-exist in harmony.

Cultural protectionism in India. The 1991 economic liberalization in India brought with it the promise of showcasing many foreign cultures through products and media messages. Although Hollywood and Hong Kong movies have been present and selectively popular, television has been arguably the most powerful catalyst of cultural hybridity in that country. Particularly, music as a genre among channels heralded a new pattern among audiences. Examples of growth of hybridity in Indian popular, urban cultures may be seen in, for example, New Delhi’s discotheques, parties and gatherings, where it is common to find a blend of music. People dance to Bhangra (Punjabi folk) tunes by Daler Mehndi, “Indi-pop” numbers by Alisha Chinai and pop songs by Britney Spears alike. Massification of music hybidization has spread to far-flung rural areas. Hence, if we look at the popular reaction to hybridity among urban Indian youth, it is possible to extend Wittgenstein’s principle that the basic task of culture is “not to be conceived as an understanding of foreign cultures, but as an interaction with foreignness” (in Welsch, 1994, pp. 202-3). The process is not only desired by the receiving culture, but one that occurs as a corollary of globalization. It is possible from the above perspective, even warranted, to extend the definition of multicultural communication as a deliberate and voluntary processes of cultural borrowing.

We find that in India, on the one hand the government has permitted the entry of foreign culture through television and other sources of direct and indirect investment—economic and informational. But on the other hand, the government has been protectionist in some interesting ways to preserve its version of Indian culture—sometimes defined in static terms. While consolidation in Eastern Europe post-Communism entry of global culturalism was in the form of a groundswell (Welsch, 1994; Tismaneanu, 1998), in India’s case the reaction did not seem to stem as much from a popular protest as from an afterthought on the part of a right-wing government. With added pressure from the pro-Hindu Shiv Sena, one of the coalition partners of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, and from Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, one of the BJP’s philosophical foundations, the government banned the French television channel Fashion TV in 2000 for displaying semi-nude women. The Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Sushma Swaraj, instructed the channel to conform to Indian values before it could resume its telecast again.

MTV India: A brief profile. Music Television was established in the United States by Viacom in 1980 as the first all-music channel targeting ages 12 to 23. Soon, the genre and the channel became a rage among American youth and a perennial cause for complaint among the parents. In the 1990s, MTV expanded its profile to include up to 30-year-olds. In 1993, the cartoon series “Beavis and Butt-head” raised much controversy. Replete with risqué humour, the series claimed to be a spoof on youth culture—especially the methods, lingo and mannerisms of American teen-agers.

In the 1990s, MTV also expanded to other parts of the world, notably Asia. Television messages are articulators of a culture (Kaarsholm & James, 2000). When Music Television (MTV) started beaming its programming into India in 1994 on Star’s platform, it had a 90 percent foreign content proportion, but in 1998, it had undergone a change in programming strategy. Not only was music de-emphasized in favour of humour, but the content of Indian programming went up. Today, 70 percent of programming on MTV India—an entity that is separate from MTV Asia that is available across Southeast and East Asia—are Indian. In the process, MTV India has in part reflected Indian culture, and in part initiated new elements of culture. For example, it popularized the quality of laughing at ourselves—a popular American sitcom genre.

As a way to celebrate 50 years of Indian independence, the channel used the tricolour Indian flag as its logo, but the government intervened, mandated that it was offensive to the national flag, and threatened to sue Viacom. In September 1998, MTV India reverted to its original logo. Ironically, the MTV India website now uses the lotus, BJP’s official election symbol, as a major element in its logo design.

One of the most popular shows on MTV India is “Bakra,” a three-minute show revolving around a guest and the channel’s most popular anchor/video jockey, Cyrus Broacha. The anchor pokes fun at native Indian cultural elements, and since the sequences are shot on “candid camera,” the people involved are not always aware of the proceedings. In one of the episodes, the anchor is a waiter in a local restaurant (dhaba). The role-playing may be seen as a way of ridicule, or it may be viewed as a humorous reflection of society. The meanings that viewers assign to this humour are critical to whether the humour is considered insulting (because the channel is foreign) to their culture, or whether laughing at themselves is merely an extension of Indian humour itself.

Interviews. This researcher interviewed 72 young men and women from urban India to grasp how foreign culture has impacted them, what foreign television means to them.

Responses indicated that whether or not the respondent borrowed and internalized an element of the culture depended on whether they thought an element was worthy of borrowing and internalization. For example, in response to the question, “Do you find content on MTV India offensive to your culture?” and a related question, “Is the humour on MTV sensitive to Indian culture?” one respondent wrote, “I find the programme ‘MTV Bakra’ a little too insinuating and totally unbecoming of a music channel like MTV … to a certain extent, … programs like [MTV] Bakra [could] be a little less pushy.” This respondent marked that Western music was the element of foreign culture that impacted him the most. Another respondent said that “our culture is rapidly changing anyway, like cultures all over the world … change is inevitable, and [a foreign culture] can’t influence beyond a point.” Another response to the latter question was “… [Our culture and MTV] reflect and influence … each other … [MTV is] following what the entire society is doing.”

In a response to the question, “Do you feel MTV gives you a moral license to at out your dreams?” one interviewee wrote, “No, [but] it does open your mind to certain realities … [I]t could never influence me [enough] to break away the parameters fixed in my mind and act out my dreams …” Another respondent said, “No! Morality is an individual trait, and cannot be dictated by any TV channel …”

Overwhelmingly, respondents felt that hybridization does not affect their culture adversely. Only one respondent felt that “patriotic songs should be kept in their original form, tune and presentation.” One of the stronger responses that argued against it said, “Let there be room for improvisation. Let everyone sing the tunes … that will only happen when it appeals to all [listeners].”

An interpretive model for multiculturalism. Just as it is impossible for two individuals to be exactly alike in habits and practices, it is extremely unlikely that two families should follow exactly the same cultural patterns. Therefore, to that extent, each individual and each family adopt different aspects of the same culture that they belong to. This pattern is similar to cultures as well. Hence, meanings are interpreted uniquely from messages at individual, group or cultural levels. The same message may hold different sets of meanings to an individual, a family, and culture. This variance in interpretation may be attributed to layering of information, from the “lowest common level” (LCL) level to the “highest common level” (HCL) level. This is illustrated through the patterns of listening to music. At an individual level, a person may listen to a range of music that is wide. At a family level, the range may consist of only music that is acceptable to all (dominant) members of the family. Similarly, at a cultural level, the common range becomes even narrower. At a multicultural level, it may be limited to “selective borrowing” (defined earlier) of musical numbers from another culture. In turn, this borrowing may vary from individual to cultural levels.

Therefore, the set of meanings assigned by individuals is, theoretically, the largest, and smallest at a multicultural level. Mapping this model onto media messages is perhaps among its most straightforward applications. In the case of Music Television, for example, it is easy to see how it works. From the profile of MTV India, we have seen that the channel repositioned itself to include more than 70 percent of indigenous programming in 1998. This broadening of meanings resulted in an increase of ratings.

It is possible to adopt the sociolinguistic concepts of multilingualism explained in the preceding section, to our study of multiculturalism, by synthesizing them with the concept of culture as flow of meaning, and propose a model:

In other words, there exists a common set of meanings in a culture. When a majority of individuals borrow similar meanings from another culture, what results is a multicultural communication process. It is evident, therefore, that individual sets of meanings are at the largest—or the most diffuse—“lowest common” level, whereas multicultural communication may be mapped onto the smallest—or at least the most restricted—“highest common” level. As more people internalize meanings from another culture’s messages, that is, as HCL grows in size, so does multiculturalism. Put in another way, a multicultural individual integrates all the levels (LCL through HCL) of meaning. This process of multiculturalism, or, more precisely, multicultural communication, is therefore galvanized by messages from another culture and how, in turn, they are adapted to suit the receiving culture.

Stemming from the foregoing arguments, multicultural communication may be defined as the highest common set of meanings that individuals, groups and cultures selectively derive from elements of another culture.

Conclusion. This paper has argued against the concept of globalization as uniformization or a centrifugal phenomenon. It has contended that glocalization is more of a process of cultural choice. Returning to the “meanings” view of multicultural communication, it must be remembered that in multicultural communication, the receiver rather than the sender of messages is vital. In time, as the adopted culture loses the “otherness” about the borrowed elements of another culture, the boundaries of the culture expand to accommodate those elements as its own. Critics of postmodernism, of course, argue that the wearing out of “otherness” may precipitate in a return to traditional values. Featherstone (ibid.) says, “an increased familiarity with ‘the other’ … may result in a retreat from the threat of cultural disorder into the security of ethnicity, traditionalism or fundamentalism” (p. 91). In a post-postmodern world, however, we are witnessing a synthesis. Because the adoption of cultural elements is voluntary, as I have argued, the sense of “nativeness” toward the foreign culture is a progressive process. Therefore, we can revisit multicultural communication from the receiver’s perspective and analyze the process of selective adoption of elements of the sender’s culture.


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