Batting for the flag: cricket, television and globalization in India

Abstract

Much of the existing literature on Indian cricket identifies the game's inherently political dimension and attributes the pre-eminence of cricket in the Indian imagination to a set of complex and contradictory processes that parallel the emergence of an ‘Indian’ nation. Yet until the early 1980s, while cricket was popular, hockey was the ‘national game’ and soccer was equally popular in large parts of the country. From the 1980s onwards cricket assumed centre-stage, not necessarily stemming, as many have written, from some peculiar Indian affiliation for the game, but inextricably linked with the expansion of Indian television and a confluence of other factors: the creation of a large middle class, economic reforms, the politics of identity, the birth of the satellite television industry and broader trends in globalization. This essay maps the growth of Indian television to draw out these linkages and demonstrate the central role of television in making cricket integral to modern notions of Indian identity.

Notes

¹ Personal monitoring of television networks on 24 September 2007.

² The manager and the channel cannot be named for obvious reasons. However, I have permission to quote the conversation, without identifying the source.

³ ESPN-STAR had the T-20 World Cup broadcast rights for India.

⁴ Nalin Mehta, ‘The Great Indian Willow Trick: Cricket, Nationalism and India's TV News Revolution, 1998–2005’.

⁵ Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, 90. For Indian cricket and the nationalist imagination see, for example, Guha, Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of a British Sport; Boria Majumdar, 22 Yards to Freedom: A Social History of Indian Cricket; Nandy, The Tao of Cricket.

⁶ Interview with Lalit Modi, Vice President, BCCI, October 12, 2006. http://content-usa.cricinfo.com/ci/content/story/262512.html.

⁷ Samyabrata Ray Goswami, ‘Man U Model for BCCI’. The Telegraph, December 28, 2005. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1051228/asp/nation/story_5652982.asp.

⁸ India had 34,858,000 TV sets in 1992. Joshi and Trivedi, Mass Media and Cross-Cultural Communication, 16. The National Readership Studies Council 2006 survey estimated a total of 112 million television sets in India. NRS 2006, Key Findings, 4.

⁹ PricewaterhouseCoopers, Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry [hereafter PwC-FICCI], The Indian Entertainment Industry, 36.

¹⁰ NRS 2006, Key Findings, 4, estimated 68 million satellite and cable households.

¹¹ India and China are not very big revenue earners for global corporations yet. For instance, Rupert Murdoch's pan-Asian network, STAR contributed less than 2% of News Corporation's total revenues until early 2005 but in strategic terms, the sheer numbers of China and India mean that these two countries are key focus areas for the corporation over the next decade. Personal Interview with Peter Mukerjea, Chief Executive, STAR India, 1999–2006, Mumbai: January 12, 2005. For Chinese television see, for example, Wang, Liu and Fore, ‘Facing the Challenge: Chinese Television in the New Media Era’; Curtin, Playing to the World's Biggest Audience.

¹² The Union Ministry of Information and Broadcasting has a master list of 290 channels: 207 of these are licensed Indian private channels, 54 are foreign-owned and 27 are run by the state-controlled Doordarshan. http://mib.nic.in/informationb/CODES/frames.htm (November 5, 2005; November 11, 2006). Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Answer to Lok Sabha Unstarred Question No.2056. March 9, 2006. http://164.100.24.208/lsq14/quest.asp?qref = 26637, [hereafter MIB+date]. The actual numbers of channels is much higher because a large number of foreign and local channels are not covered by official data. A good example is the Delhi High Court order of June 17, 2006 that restrained 92 cable operators in 11 states from telecasting the FIFA World Cup through free-to-air satellite channels like TV5, Cambodia TV, CC5 Channel, CCTV1, Super Sports, Multi-choice and Dream Satellite because none of them were registered with the MIB. ‘Delhi High Court Restrains 92 Cable Operators From Unauthorized Telecast of the FIFA World Cup’. June 17, 2006. http://www.indiantelevision.com/headlines/y2k6/june/june240.htm.

¹³ See for instance, Bandyopadhyay, ‘1911 in Retrospect: A Revisionist Perspective on a Famous Indian Sporting Victory’, 27–47.

¹⁴ Amrit Bazar Patrika, July 31, 1911.

¹⁵ Quoted in Mohun Bagan Platinum Jubilee Souvenir , 25.

¹⁶ Nayak, August 4, 1911.

¹⁷ Swami Vivekanand, quoted in Majumdar and Bandyopadhyay, ‘A Social History of Indian Football’, 17.

¹⁸ Majumdar and Bandyopadhyay, ‘A Social History of Indian Football’, 4.

¹⁹ Bose, A History of Indian Cricket, 16–17.

²⁰ Majumdar, Goalless: The Story of a Unique Footballing Nation.

²¹ Majumdar and Bandyopadhyay, ‘A Social History of Indian Football’, 173.

²² Alarm bells rang in India when Helsinki, in 1949, expressed its unwillingness to host all hockey teams for 1952 because of lack of accommodation. The Indian Hockey Federation immediately proposed to the IOC to host the hockey event separately in Delhi. Eventually Helsinki did host the event but the Indian offer was indicative of how important hockey was to Indian sport. Letter from Dr A.C. Chatterji, Honorary Secretary, Indian Hockey Federation to Mr Demaurex, Honorary Secretary, Switzerland Hockey Federation, May 10, 1949.

²³ De Mello, Portrait of Indian Sport, 3.

²⁴ De Mello, Portrait of Indian Sport, 3

²⁵ De Mello, Portrait of Indian Sport, 3

²⁶ See Guha, Corner of a Foreign Field.

²⁷ See Majumdar, 22 Yards to Freedom.

²⁸ De Mello, Portrait of Indian Sport, 9.

²⁹ Kumar, ‘Whither Indian Hockey-I?’.

³⁰ This oft-repeated expression of Nehru's came to typify the Nehruvian economic model: a socialist model, but unlike the Soviet path, this ‘mixed economy’ model was presaged on a dominant public sector leading the march to development, a strong protectionist bias, a general pessimism over capitalism and a belief in the superiority of socialist planning. The Indian economic model, created by the statistician P.C. Mahalanobis, intellectually stemmed from Paul Baran's thesis, The Political Economy of Growth, which rejected capitalism as a model for development. See for instance Desai, ‘Capitalism, Socialism and the Indian Economy’, 186–90.

³¹ The government required the Indian Broadcasting Company to collect licence fees and its share of import duties on radio equipment on its own. When the company collapsed, it was taken over by the government and renamed as the Indian State Broadcasting Service. The nomenclature of All India Radio was adopted in 1936. Until 1937, it functioned under the Department of Industries and Labour, whereupon it was transferred to the Department of Communication. The new Department of Information and Broadcasting assumed control over it in 1941 and upon independence in 1947, it became a new ministry. Chatterjee, Broadcasting in India, 39–41.

³² Ninan, Through the Magic Window, 18–19.

³³ Doordarshan figures quoted in Bhatt, Satellite Invasion of India, Appendix VII, 281.

³⁴ Page and Crawley, Satellites Over South Asia, 53–6.

³⁵ Chatterjee, Broadcasting in India, 52–3.

³⁶ Fighting widespread opposition to her rule, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi declared an Emergency in 1975. It suspended democratic rights and remained in place until 1977 when she revoked it only to be swept out of power in a landslide verdict against her regime.

³⁷ Page and Crawley, Satellites Over South Asia, 54–6.

³⁸ Ninan, Through the Magic Window, 28–9.

³⁹ Mir Ranjan Negi's Interview with Shekhar Gupta, The Indian Express, September 17, 2007.

⁴⁰ Shekhar Gupta, ‘Hockey Just Isn't Cricket’. The Indian Express, September 7, 2002.

⁴¹ Guha, India After Gandhi, 736–7.

⁴² Ninan, Through the Magic Window, 30.

⁴³ Page and Crawley, Satellites Over South Asia, 56.

⁴⁴ Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 98.

⁴⁵ See, for example, Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics; Rajagopal, Politics After Television.

⁴⁶ Quoted in Mazzarella, Shoveling Smoke, 74–5.

⁴⁷ Vir Sanghvi, ‘A New Middle Class Fidelity?’ The Hindustan Times (New Delhi), May 20, 2006. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1702508,00300001.htm.

⁴⁸ Shalimar Mary, Letter to Editor. Indian Express, October 5, 1986. Quoted in Nandy, The Tao of Cricket, 1–2.

⁴⁹ Harsha Bhogle, ‘India Needs to Rediscover Another Sport’. The Week, July 27, 2003.

⁵⁰ Harsha Bhogle, ‘India Needs to Rediscover Another Sport’. The Week, July 27, 2003

⁵¹ See for instance the interview by Dhanraj Pillai, India's most successful hockey player of the 1990s, ‘They Don't Give a Damn’. Tehelka http://www.tehelka.com/story_main31.asp?filename = hub160607They_dont.asp.

⁵² Rohit Brijnath, ‘The Lopsidedness in Indian Sports’. Sportstar, June 5–11, 2004.

⁵³ Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought a controlling stake in Sky in 1983 and re-launched as Sky Television in 1989, but it made heavy losses until 1992 when BSkyB (Sky and BSB merged in 1990) acquired the rights to broadcast Premier League Soccer games for US$465 million. Almost a million subscribers signed up immediately and by 1993 BSkyB reached financial stability. Anand and Attea, News Corporation, 8. For a concise history of Sky Television and News Corporation's television operations, see also Ghemawat, British Satellite Broadcasting Versus Sky Television.

⁵⁴ In 1999, for instance, News Corporation owned the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball club and had shares in the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers basketball clubs, and the New York Rangers. In September 1998, BSkyB launched a take over bid for Manchester United, the world's richest football club, which was blocked by the British Mergers and Monopolies Commission on grounds that it was ‘anti-competitive’ in broadcasting. Rowe, ‘To Serve and To Sell: Media Sport and Cultural Citizenship’, 186.

⁵⁵ Emphasis is mine. Rupert Murdoch to his shareholders in Adelaide, October 15, 1996. Quoted in S. Millar, ‘Courtship Ends as Soccer and TV are United’. The Guardian, September 7, 1998.

⁵⁶ Majumdar, Twenty-Two Yards to Freedom, 176. ESPN is part of ESPN-STAR which is jointly owned by News Corporation and Walt Disney.

⁵⁷ Majumdar, The Illustrated History of Indian Cricket, 198.

⁵⁸ Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995, The Secretary Information & Broadcasting, Government of India & Others vs. Cricket Association of Bengal & Others, with Writ Petition (Civil) No.836 of 1993, Cricket Association of Bengal vs. Union of India and Others (decided on February 9, 1995).

⁵⁹ The Indian Telegraph Act , Act XIII of 1885, pt. II.

⁶⁰ Section 7 of Act 47 of 1957, an amendment to the 1885 Act. There were five amendments to this Act from 1957 to 1974. Ninan, ‘History of Indian Broadcasting Reform’, 1–2.

⁶¹ The five nations that eventually participated in the Hero Cup were India, South Africa, West Indies, Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe.

⁶² Doordarshan put in a bid of Rs10 million (roughly US$318, 471 at 1993 exchange rates), as against TWI's vastly superior minimum guarantee of US$550,000. It was specified that if TWI received any sum in excess of the guaranteed sum, it would be split in a 70:30 ratio in favour of CAB. Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995.

⁶³ Majumdar, ‘Cricket, Television, Globalization: Defining India in the 1990s’, 2.

⁶⁴ VSNL was created as a public-sector undertaking in 1986. The Government of India first disinvested some stake in 1999 but remained a majority stakeholder till 2002. It is now managed by the Tatas.

⁶⁵ Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995.

⁶⁶ A senior Ministry official quoted in Majumdar, ‘Cricket, Television, Globalization: Defining India in the 1990s’, 7.

⁶⁷ Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995.

⁶⁸ C.R. Irani, ‘Someone is Remembering Sanjay Gandhi’. The Statesman, November 13, 1993.

⁶⁹ Majumdar, ‘Cricket, Television, Globalization: Defining India in the 1990s’, 8.

⁷⁰ Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995.

⁷¹ Majumdar, ‘Cricket, Television, Globalization: Defining India in the 1990s’, 9–10.

⁷² Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995.

⁷³ Meenal Baghel, ‘Doordarshan Jams VSNL Plans to Uplink’. The Asian Age, September 19, 1994.

⁷⁴ B.P.J. Reddy concurring, Supreme Court Case 161 before Justices, P.B. Sawant, S. Mohan and B.P. Jeevan Reddy, Civil Appeals Nos. 1429–30 of 1995.

⁷⁵ Ten Sports estimated its initial damages to be worth Rs2.8 billion. ‘DD to get Ten Sports Feed for all Matches’. The Hindu Business Line, March, 18, 2004.

⁷⁶ Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Policy Guidelines for Downlinking of Television Channels.

⁷⁷ ‘Supreme Court Restrains DD from Interfering with Rights of Ten Sports’. The Hindu, May 10, 2006.

⁷⁸ ‘Don't Interfere with Ten Sports’ Rights: Court'. The Hindu, August 5, 2006.

⁷⁹ UNI, ‘SC Allows ESPN-STAR to Approach it if Coerced by the Centre’. January 8, 2007. http://www.indlawnews.com/2C829C337F2DBD858EAC77A54263988C.

⁸⁰ PTI, ‘Telecast India-WI Series with Delay: HC’. January 23, 2007. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/1403569.cms.

⁸¹ The government contended that about 9–10% of Doordarshan's 25% share would pay for its expenditure in the broadcast while the remaining revenue would be ploughed back into national sports. Rajya Sabha, Synopsis of Debates (Proceedings other than Questions and Answers), Statutory Resolution Seeking Disapproval of the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Ordinance, 2007 and the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Bill, 2007.

⁸² The government contended that about 9–10% of Doordarshan's 25% share would pay for its expenditure in the broadcast while the remaining revenue would be ploughed back into national sports. Rajya Sabha, Synopsis of Debates (Proceedings other than Questions and Answers), Statutory Resolution Seeking Disapproval of the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Ordinance, 2007 and the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Bill, 2007

⁸³ The government contended that about 9–10% of Doordarshan's 25% share would pay for its expenditure in the broadcast while the remaining revenue would be ploughed back into national sports. Rajya Sabha, Synopsis of Debates (Proceedings other than Questions and Answers), Statutory Resolution Seeking Disapproval of the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Ordinance, 2007 and the Sports Broadcasting Signals (Mandatory Sharing with Prasar Bharati) Bill, 2007

⁸⁴ The BCCI agreed to share half of the losses. PTI, ‘BCCI to Share Nimbus Losses’. March 23, 2007. http://www.indianexpress.com/story/26365.html.

⁸⁵ In the Rajya Sabha, for instance, only two speakers dissented. http://www.rajyasabha.nic.in/rsdebate/synopsis/210/09032007.htm.

⁸⁶ Purnendu Bose, COO, SaharaOne, quoted in Latha Venkatraman and Ajita Shashidhar, ‘Taking Refuge in Cricket’. Business Line, March 9, 2006.

⁸⁷ When Kerry Packer's Channel 9 failed to win the broadcast rights to Australian cricket, he set up World Series Cricket as an independent cricket attraction. Channel 9's WSC signed up the world's top international players and introduced day-night one-day games, coloured clothing and aggressive marketing tactics to re-invent cricket as a television game. For details see Haigh, The Cricket War.