Audience-centered discourses in communication and social change: the ‘Voicebook’ of Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon, an entertainment-education initiative in India

ABSTRACT

In a world where development is unequal and dominant discourses are strident, communication strategies that both listen and speak to the needs and aspirations of the marginalized are few and far between. In this article, we investigated Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon (MKBKSH), an entertainment-education initiative in India that strategically utilized storytelling on television, radio and digital platforms to question and challenge hegemonic patriarchal discourses. In so doing, MKBKSH not only garnered a staggering audience of 400 million, it pioneered the use of an interactive voice response (IVR) system to invite feedback from diverse audience members and to track their engagement with the programme in real time. Our analysis documents 1.7 million calls from over 390,000 unique phone numbers. Given the high penetration of mobile telephony in India, and its uniquely invitational nature, the IVR system enabled women, youth and the less privileged, to access curated content, answer questions and share personal opinions and actions inspired by MKBKSH. The IVR’s simple user interface and purposive use – akin to the ‘voicebook’ of the have-nots – hold important implications for the design, implementation and evaluation of large-scale, real-time communication and social change interventions.

KEYWORDS:

• Entertainment-education
• gender equality
• interactive voice response system
• communication for development and social change
• ICT4D

Acknowledgements

This research owes a debt of gratitude to many individuals and institutions, including colleagues at the Population Foundation of India: Poonam Muttreja, Alok Vajpeyi, Abhijit Mali, Sanghamitra Singh and Tanushree Sengupta; Feroz Abbas Khan, the creative genius and soul of Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon; colleagues at Gram Vaani: Aaditeshwar Seth, Sangeeta Saini, Sayonee Chatterjee, Kapil Dadheech and Rohit Jain; The Change Designers: Anu Sachdev, Pallavi Jain and their team of research assistants; Sixiao Liu at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York; and colleagues at Lady Irwin College: Sarita Anand, Anshul Singhal, Neha Sharma and Sunaina Batra Dua. The content of this article is solely the responsibility of the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hua Wang is an Associate Professor of Communication and Affiliated Faculty of Community Health and Health Behavior at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. Her research focuses on leveraging digital and interactive media for health promotion and social change, and has been published in prestigious journals such as the American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Medical Internet Research, Communication Research, American Behavioral Scientist and Computers in Human Behavior. Since 2007, she has been collaborating with Arvind Singhal on research and writings such as the reformulation of the definition of entertainment-education (Wang and Singhal 2009), recent developments in entertainment-education (Singhal, Wang, and Rogers 2013), and entertainment-education through transmedia storytelling (Wang and Singhal 2016). The Wang and Singhal (2016) article in the American Journal of Public Health won Editor’s Choice Award in 2017 and the International Communication Association’s Outstanding Article Award in 2018.

Arvind Singhal is the Samuel Shirley and Edna Holt Marston Endowed Professor of Communication and the Director of Social Justice Initiative at The University of Texas at El Paso and appointed as the William J. Clinton Distinguished Fellow at the Clinton School of Public Service in Little Rock, AR and Professor 2 in the Faculty of Business Administration at Inland University of Applied Sciences in Norway. He is the author of several seminal scholarly texts on entertainment-education (Lacayo and Singhal 2008; Singhal et al. 2004; Singhal and Rogers 1999), and winner of the first Everett M. Rogers Award for Outstanding Contributions to Entertainment-Education in 2005. He has advised and carried out research on entertainment-education projects in several dozen countries, including pioneering work in India, starting with the hit television serial Hum Log in the mid-1980s (Singhal and Rogers 1988, 2001) and the presently ongoing (since 2013) multi-media initiative, Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon – the subject of this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Season 3 of MKBKSH is in production in 2018.

2. Farhan Akhtar’s Foundation, MARD – in association with Population Foundation of India and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – presented a ‘Lalkaar’ (‘Challenge’) concert in Mumbai in November, 2017 to emphasize the message – ‘Enough is Enough’ – with respect to intimate partner violence, calling for immediate action to end domestic violence. The live concert was attended by Bollywood Superstar Shah Rukh Khan and several thousands of fans, and its Facebook feed was subscribed by millions. Here we see the value of MKBKSH’s partnership with celebrities like Farhan Akhtar who, in their own right, are strong advocates for challenging dominant discourses of patriarchy. MKBKSH’s celebrity advocates included, among others, Bollywood personalities such as Sharmila Tagore, Shabana Azmi, Javed Akhtar and Soha Ali Khan.