Imagi-nations and Borderless Television: Media, Culture and Politics across Asia By Amos Owen Thomas, Sage, Rs 680

The arrival of the satellite television in Asia in the Nineties radically changed the media scene. The limited availability of TV bytes for advertising amid rapid economic growth and the demand for more varied entertainment fuelled the advent of transnational TV via satellite and cable.

Imagi-nations and Borderless Television probes the advent and evolution of transnational TV in Asia and investigates how some governments sought to restrict access to it. The author analyses not just government-level response to the phenomenon but also responses of media owners, cable operators, satellite providers, and advertisement agencies.

Amos Owen Thomas argues that the Asian countries most concerned about the advent of transnational TV were those that had the strongest ideological commitment to national cultural integration and to centralized socio-economic planning. He uses a six-fold typology to analyse government policies of various countries in south, southeast and north Asia. Shared histories and cultures did not prevent them from responding differently to transnational TV. Thus, while Pakistan moved from ?complacent inaction? to ?controlled access?, Sri Lanka had minimal debate on the threat of a cultural invasion, and Bhutan had ?active suppression?.

Again, in Thailand, which has always practised ?liberal access?, the appeal of transnational TV was confined to an educated and affluent minority of expatriates because of language constraints. Similarly, its effect on households in Japan has been minimal. The Japanese have access to seven free-to-air domestic channels in metropolitan areas and up to 30 cable channels in the larger cities.

Thomas says that transnational TV has had to metamorphose into ?regional, subregional and quasi-national television?. While such TV initially opened up new worlds, channels quickly realized that in order to penetrate deeper, they had to thoroughly localize their programming and emphasize subregional ?ethnic? programming. Thus TV has now become a medium for highlighting those very identity claims that it earlier sought to paper over.

While the CNN coverage of the Kuwait War opened up south Asia to the possibilities of satellite TV, and Star TV was the real pioneer of satellite TV in the subcontinent, it was Zee TV that made the phenomenon pan-Indian. Prior to the arrival of Zee, transnational TV was an urban elite phenomenon in the subcontinent with a quarter of Star TV households in affluent metros.

The chapter on TV in the subcontinent highlights how the TV market in Asia was transformed over just one decade from single dominant public broadcasters having virtual monopolies of each nation-state to one in which there are over 100 transnational and regional channels available across borders. Public broadcast television in India originated as a socio-economic education project for villagers in 1959, Thomas writes, and over the Seventies and Eighties, Doordarshan?s agenda was to try to meld rural and urban India into one nation. He calls the period 1982-1991 Doordarshan?s ?Commercial Entertainment Phase?, and 1993-1997 its ?Ethnic Diversification Phase?.The first saw DD switch from educational to commercial-entertainment programming, and the second saw it venture into satellite broadcasting and reorganize itself as transnational TV began to dominate urban areas. The strategy of Doordarshan was to allow the cannibalization of DD1 audiences by its own DD2 to DD 15 channels rather than lose them to other transnational and regional channels.

Thomas?s study shows how localization and globalization have gone hand in hand in satellite TV programming in Asia. The globalization of the cultural industry involves not homogenizing Westernization but postmodern hybridization. He argues convincingly about how transnational TV opened up diasporic markets and gave a fillip to regional and ?ethnic? markets for TV programming and revenue.