Fashioning a cosmopolitan Tamil identity: game shows, commodities and cultural identity Sujata Moorti OLD DOMINION UNIVERSITY

The unexpected worldwide success of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? leads one to the easy conclusion that national and cultural borders have become porous under the onslaught of global flows.1 The popularity of this programme reiterates now-accepted ideas of the resilience and malleability of particular televisual genres as they cross national and cultural borders (Allen, 1995; Ang, 1985; Liebes and Katz, 1993). Not only has Millionaire’s success led to copycat shows in prime-time schedules around the world, it has also drawn fresh attention to the devalued and often denigrated genre of the game show and provided fresh stimulus to theories of globalization, often understood unidimensionally as the hegemony of American culture. India has been no exception to this trend and has proved a fertile terrain for the migrating game show. The Hindi version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, Kaun Banega Crorepati, has not only significantly altered the landscape of television programming it has reinvigorated cable and satellite delivery systems (Pandit, 2001).2 In this article I do not comment on the merits of the show or speculate on the reasons for its cross-cultural popularity, but I do want to capture the energy of this moment to redirect attention to a neglected aspect of television programming in India: through an examination of the proliferation of quiz/ game shows on regional-language channels, I underscore the transnational circulation of television programming and the declensions of this phenomenon.3 The emergence of game shows as a staple on regional-language cable channels has led to a range of new formations, some of which I highlight in this article. I argue, primarily, that the motility of this television genre permits the formation of a cosmopolitan sensibility even as it facilitates the reinscription of vernacular nationalisms. In particular, the Media, Culture & Society © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 26(4): 549–567 [ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443704044217]

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commodity culture that underpins game shows permits a reconfiguration of national politics. Telescoping the global and the regional, commodity culture helps rewrite existing political scripts. Indeed, commodities become the access route for the expression of vernacular nationalisms, bypassing national discourses of Indian-ness and its compositional characteristics. Long before the success of Millionaire, the economics of game show production and its ability to draw audiences by engendering unique forms of identification permitted this genre to become a staple in the burgeoning regional-language cable channel arena as well as in national programming. Their enduring presence on television schedules reveals the forms of cultural citizenship that are being made available to South Asian audiences. Unlike state-run programming, television now solicits viewers both as citizens and consumers. In this article I read the quiz/game show as a site where questions of consumption, cultural citizenship and national identity are worked out. These shows provide the space for a productive intervention into questions central to an examination of the transnational circulation of cultural products. They permit an understanding of the complex relationships between centre and periphery, metropolitan and regional within a nation. I argue that it is the denigrated status of not just quiz/game shows but also of regional-language channels that permits these programmes to successfully inscribe a brand of identity politics that bypasses the national. By renegotiating the boundaries of the global and the regional, these programmes are able to hail the viewer simultaneously as a cosmopolitan and a vernacular subject. Some clarifications of the terms I use are in order before I analyse the programmes. I use the terms ‘vernacular’ and ‘regional identity’ interchangeably to reference a sub-national identity that is often at odds with the pan-Indian identity promoted by national programming. Often these regional identities have long histories of separatist tendencies, as is the case with the Tamil identity asserted in South India. I highlight salient aspects of these identity politics throughout the article. Similarly, the terms ‘quiz’ and ‘game show’ are used interchangeably. Even in the US the features that distinguish the quiz show genre from that of the game show are difficult to isolate since the two genres borrow elements from each other; most quiz shows incorporate some elements of the game show in an effort to capture a larger audience share (Goedkoop, 1985). In India, the adaptation of these formats has blurred even more the lines distinguishing quiz shows from game shows; while there exist a few shows that exclusively test factual knowledge, the majority combine elements from the two forms of programming. Since features characteristic of game shows predominate, hereafter I designate these programmes as game shows.

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Rewriting the global This article deploys the regional-language game show to problematize some assumptions of the growing field of globalization studies. It argues against theories that postulate that the transnational circulation of people, ideas, labour and economies have facilitated the creation of a homogeneous global culture, one that is dominated by the West, particularly the US. Nor is this intended to be a celebration of ‘local’ resistance. Rather than dismiss the economic structures that facilitate the dominance of industrialized nations over the rest of the world, this article argues that these conditions do not map easily onto the field of culture. I illustrate the way that the transnational logic of capital stimulates, within the realm of culture, a discourse of differentiation, one that is rarely presented overtly as resistance to globalization. As the following analysis of game shows reveals, difference is articulated from within the interstices of global cultural traffic. Indeed, difference is most often enunciated in the globally legible scripts of heritage politics; media audiences can thus assert local loyalties and still partake in global lifestyles. In the wake of the transnational circulation of media products, regionallanguage channels have developed their signature styles to capture niche audiences. Their programming tends to assert sharply fragmented identities that effect an affiliation with a local space and help produce and reassert a regional identity. Nevertheless, these channels have often turned to Western television programmes to emulate successful formulas or have imported programmes in the interests of profit making (Segrave, 1998).4 The emergence of regional-language cable channels has, thus, facilitated the articulation simultaneously of a cosmopolitan and a vernacular sensibility, and thereby permitted the inscription of a particular regional identity. Rather than produce a homogeneous culture, my analysis reveals that the transnational circulation of cultural products clears the space and necessitates the articulation of very specific cultural and ethnic concerns, the particular. My analysis concurs with Robertson’s (1995) assertion that, in contemporary contexts, particularity has obtained a global value. The article underscores the complex processes through which the transnational circulation of television genres valorizes the invention of locality, of home. Of the various genres available in transnational televisual space I have selected game shows because they reveal the modalities through which commodity logic intervenes in the arena of identity politics. Commodities play a very specific role in this formation facilitating new lines of affiliation and affinity. Indeed, I argue that contemporary game shows and the commodity logic that underpins them rework the age-old binary of tradition and modernity. Commodity functions as a bridge between tradition and modernity. Within the visual regimes of commodity logic the transnational and the vernacular are not conceived of as antithetical or

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radically incommensurate, rather they are perceived as homologous or, at the very least, representationally compatible. In game show grammar both the transnational and the vernacular appear as glossy, seductive images that are sutured to produce a vernacular globalism or a global vernacularism. Commodity logic permits infinitesimal differentiation and helps formulate rhizomatic structures of affinity between the regional and the global. It helps produce a revived brand of identitarian politics, one that bypasses the national and instead aligns the parochial with the global. This of course has immediate consequences on the nature of politics practised in India. The analysis that follows is based on the proliferation of game shows on various Tamil cable channels. While most of the programming is directed specifically at the residents of the southern state of Tamil Nadu, some of the channels, such as Sun TV, envisage a transnational, dispersed audience of Tamil-speakers.5 The local and historical conditions of Tamil politics within India and the century-long quest for a separate Dravidian nation find easy expression in the regional-language programming I examine (Arooran, 1980; Joseph, 1972; Palanithurai and Thandavan, 1992). While the claims I make about the articulation of a vernacular identity are quite explicit in Tamil channels, a similar manoeuvring of the interstices of global cultural formations to assert ethnic identity is prevalent in other regional-language channels as well. My analysis serves to highlight Chatterjee’s (1993) assertion that conditions of globality increase rather than diminish the importance of negotiating national and sub-national contradictions, contradictions that centre around the resiliency of community as a locus of affiliation and action, as a means of resistance to the homogenizing impetus of capital, as a site of historic memory and as a resource for alternative futures.

Dravidian politics In what follows I first outline the generic features of game shows and establish the context of the Indian television industry within which the genre has found such a salubrious home. Next, I outline some of the dominant modalities through which regional-language game shows are able to traffic in the global currency of the genre to engender in their participants and audiences cosmopolitan and vernacular affiliations. A brief note on the specificity of Tamil nationalism is imperative though. Formally called the Dravidian Movement, this sub-national identitarian politics can be traced to the turn of the 20th century when it claimed a broader identity, including speakers of all four major South Indian language groups. The identity claims of Dravidian nationalism were made by a series of small movements and organizations which contended that South Indians, with the exception of Brahmins, formed a racial and cultural

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entity distinct from that of northern India. According to this view, Brahmin immigrants from the North had imposed the Sanskritic language, religion and heritage on the South. The movement gained momentum between 1930 and 1950 among Tamil speakers when separatist demands were articulated clearly. Very broadly, the ‘self-respect’ demands of the Dravidian movement could be encapsulated as being three-pronged: the establishment of an equal rights movement to dismantle Brahmin hegemony; the abolition of Sanskrit and the revitalization of a pure Tamil language; and social reform through the abolition of existing caste systems, religious practices and recasting women’s position in society. By the late 1960s, political parties espousing Dravidian ideology had gained power within the state of Tamil Nadu. As numerous scholars documenting the shifts in focus of the Dravidian Movement – from secessionism to cultural nationalism – have pointed out, separatist politics has given way to a more flaccid celebration of Tamil identity and the ‘uplift’ of the poor (Palanithurai, 1989; Sivathamby, 1995; Vasudevan, 1997). For instance, Swamy (1996) has outlined how participation in the arena of electoral politics has necessarily altered the content of the Dravidian Movement, from one seeking autonomy and independence from India to one interested in maintaining the integrity of Tamil consciousness. Today, Tamil politics is understood primarily as a resistance to Hindi, the primary North Indian language, the concomitant espousal of Tamil, and welfare efforts directed at the rural poor, particularly women. Vestiges of these identity politics, particularly the celebration of a pure Tamil language and the celebration of Tamil heritage, can be seen in the game shows I analyse in this article.

Migrant shows Game shows have emerged on Indian television only over the last decade however, quiz shows with their emphasis on testing factual knowledge have existed much longer.6 Most of the Indian quiz shows use the British show Mastermind as their prototype. These shows continue to exist in the Indian television landscape but have recently been dominated by the proliferation of game shows.7 Spectacular and less pedantic, Americanstyle game shows foreground commodities, blur the distinctions between themselves and the commodities embedded in them, and the rewards that they offer are those of the commodity system (Fiske, 1987; Holbrook, 1993). One could argue that commodities are the stars of the show. In the rest of the article I illustrate how this centrality of commodities makes possible unexpected linkages, such as that between the vernacular and cosmopolitan identities, and ruptures others, such as that between local and national.

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Two concomitant and interrelated factors led to the emergence of these game shows. First, the satellite revolution that began in 1991 vastly expanded viewing possibilities. From five satellite channels that aired staples from British and American schedules, by the mid-1990s audiences had access to over hundred channels (Kumar, 1998; Melkote et al., 1998). Significantly, the major part of this explosion of channels occurred in regional-language programming. In their desire to secure a niche audience these channels turned to game shows, which are cheap to produce and can easily incorporate local social and cultural features. By highlighting the specificity of local identity, these channels thus fragmented the monolithic pan-Indian identity that the state-run Doordarshan had assiduously constructed over two decades.8 I elaborate on the specific modalities through which this regional-local identity is constructed. Second, the liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s permitted foreign ownership of television stations. There ensued a well-oiled system of cross-national programme flows. Soap operas, prime-time serials, daytime talk shows, such as Oprah, and game shows found their way to the South Asian subcontinent. Many of the migrant game shows are either imitations of their Western prototypes because patent regulations require close adherence to the original, or they are adaptations that mimic and borrow elements of successful game shows. For instance, the many local Indian versions of Wheel of Fortune remain faithful to their American prototype. Stylistically they maintain a remarkable fidelity: the stage set-up, the question-and-answer format, the easy banter between host and contestants, the stance adapted by the host, all closely resemble American shows, only with poorer production values. At first glance, these shows serve to reiterate Matellart’s (1994) assertion that these are just international programmes with national labels attached to them. I argue against such a reading of cultural imperialism. While the formal features of the shows rarely change, the movement across borders always entails changes in the kinds of indigenous knowledge the shows test, the character of prizes and so on. As Moran (1998: 79) points out, the game show is ‘in many ways an unyielding form and national colourings in particular adaptations have to be sought in the interstices of adaptations’. In my analysis I focus on the seemingly commonsensical changes undertaken in the content where I argue a sub-national consciousness is encoded, often as the antithesis of a metropolitan identity. Noticeably, all imported programmes – talk shows, cartoons, soap operas, game shows – are ‘Indianized’, which entails dubbing and local hosting (Chatterjee, 1998). Further, the production practices are localized to articulate very specific concerns and identities. These practices complicate theories of globalization that emphasize homogenization. Through my analysis of game shows I seek to highlight how the migration of peoples in conjunction with a mobile media help to produce particular brands of

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vernacular identities and how local concerns also help to rewrite global products.9

Vernacular game shows In the following analysis I am not singling out one game show but outline trends that recur across programmes. Furthermore, the examples I cite are descriptive and should not be taken as representative of all Tamil-language programming. There are two main issues I isolate in my examination of regional-language game shows. I highlight how the shows confound the global/local binary. I foreground as well the manner in which they recuperate a vernacular cultural identity even as they assert a cosmopolitan sensibility by asserting the foreign origins of the genre. Both these factors show the ways in which discourses of differentiation and similitude are mobilized to establish a global-vernacular identity. Unlike their Western counterparts, the majority of regional-language game shows occupy prime-time spots. The shows are devised to address the male viewer and only marginally the female viewer; the majority of the studio audience and two-thirds of the contestants are men. Although middle-class women in India are increasingly participating in the economy of paid labour, television producers continue to solicit primarily the male viewer during prime time and recognize him as the primary consumer (Joshi, 2001).10 This change in the gender of the ideal viewer alters significantly some of the received knowledge about game shows that is prevalent in the West. In this ariticle, however, I do not delve into these aspects. Regional-language game shows confound a range of boundaries; they reveal that centre–periphery explanatory models fail to elucidate the conditions of globality that facilitate such cultural products. In this section I will focus on the modalities through which game shows rework the global/local dichotomy and are able to hail simultaneously subjects who can express affinities with a vernacular identity and a cosmopolitan sensibility. The programmes I examined elicit a schizophrenic structure, looking inward to articulate the specificity of a sub-national identity and looking outward to assert the global currency of the programme. Here I refer repeatedly to Super Kutumbam, Super Families, a show that partially resembles Family Feud. I oscillate between the global and the local to illustrate how the show gives voice to a local-vernacular identity and the strategies through which it lays claim to a cosmopolitan-global sensibility. This shuttling between global and local foci is not just an analytical device but captures the manner in which the show repeatedly destabilizes the global/local binary. I also highlight the language deployed and the nature of questions posed to reveal the subtle contestations, cultural assertions and

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negotiations that are conducted even as the shows seem to replicate their Western counterparts. The seemingly inconsequential modifications undertaken during the act of mimicry reveal the processes through which televisual space enables the symbolic reproduction of vernacular identity. Super Families consists of two sets of competing families, each comprised of five intergenerational members. The teams participate in four segments each of which requires a different set of skills and knowledge. The winner of each segment receives prizes that are often domestic appliances. The first segment is akin to the American Family Feud: the two groups compete against each other to match answers with the results of a survey of 100 people. The winner is the family that can best gauge what other people are thinking; the winner is the family that is most ordinary. For instance, contestants were asked to identify six words people associate with the word ‘heart’. The respondents came up with generic associations such as love and compassion, but they also correctly provided coconut oil, a regional cooking medium that is linked with high cholesterol. Participants thus had to display both general knowledge but also needed to be conversant with local practices and local habits of the heart. Similarly, the host and participants easily slipped between the use of English and Tamil, even in their responses. The Tamil used in this section of the programme veers erratically between slang, Sanskritized Tamil and the ‘pure’ Tamil I refer to later. This programme, like many of the other game shows, is marked by a linguistic fluidity that blurs distinctions between high and low cultures, global, national and local categories. Even as the segment tests knowledge that is local and grounded, requiring a competency of the here-and-now, it is also suffused with markers of a cosmopolitan sensibility. The global currency of the show is signified through the repeated use of computer graphics, computer display terminals, flashing lights, rapid editing, fast-paced interactions, healthy banter and the wholesome competition generated. These markers of globality are structured by the production values and format espoused by the show. There are a number of other stylistic elements that invoke a cosmopolitan sensibility and mark the participants as espousing modern or Western styles and values. The host is invariably clad in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers, clothes that bespeak a Western identity. He uses American idioms and phrases that are considered modern and trendy. Similarly, the male contestants and studio audience are always clad in clothes that are not considered traditionally Indian. While in the West the clothes that the men wear may signify being very casual, within the Indian context these items serve as markers of distinction.11 They signify a cultural and symbolic capital that is still available to only a limited slice of the population. As in consumer culture, the host and the other men on the show display their cosmopolitan consciousness through their ability to consume products.

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Grounded knowledge The shows are equally effective in enacting complex links between the global and vernacular by testing knowledges that are both transnational and parochial. In addition to displaying the cultural competency I have described earlier, one of the segments of Super Families explicitly puts forward a linguistic chauvinism and parochial sensibility that appears to be at odds with the transnational literacy it also requires. The show requires participants to display their competency in Tamil by playing a game akin to Scrabble. This segment invites knowledge and ease with the regional language, a cultural competency in the here-and-now. Many of the game shows I observed include similar word-game segments. The politics inscribed in such a display of linguistic competency are more explicitly articulated in an hour-long show on Jaya TV called Vay Jalam, Word Play, where the inscription of vernacular identity is deliberate and explicit, constituting the premise of the show.12 This game show requires participants to exhibit their fluency in a pure Tamil, one that is not contaminated by the use of English words. The show is disguised in the format of a one-on-one casual conversation between the host and contestant. The host poses a number of simple questions such as where are you employed. The contestant’s task is not only to respond to all the questions in the correct order but also to use only Tamil words. Consequently, contestants have to formulate new words for terms with no Tamil equivalent such as cable television or electric train. The results are often hilarious and reveal the semantic acrobatic feats contestants have to undertake to circumvent the dominance of English in India. The moment the contestant uses an English word they are disqualified. The host, however, does not hold himself to the linguistic competency he demands from his contestants and often intersperses his questions with English words. The insistence on a pure Tamil draws attention to the Dravidian politics that are the underpinning ideologies of the channel owners and their political affiliations. Although I have not addressed the manner in which gender operates in these shows, it is important to note that regional-language channels are able to solicit a particular class of non-cosmopolitan female participants. The women who appear on these shows are distinctly different from the ‘Westernized’ women who appear on national game shows. Often regional language game shows offer middle-class respectable Tamil women access to the public domain made available by television. Although painfully shy and uncomfortable being on stage they gamely participate and sometimes become very competitive. The banter between the host and contestant reveals the disquiet the women experience as they interact with a nonfamilial male in the public arena: even as they seem to flirt with the host and keep up a conversation they keep their heads covered with their saris

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in a gesture of respectability and dignity. Sometimes the questions for the women are also geared specifically to their gendered identities. For instance, one woman was questioned about how she would designate her sister-in-law, requiring the contestant to distinguish Tamil terms for a brother’s wife and husband’s sister. Vay Jalam and other shows celebrate a regional chauvinism and wear proudly the badge of linguistic purity, which used to be the hallmark of various regional political movements. Many of the participants, even after having ignobly lapsed into English in their first response, would recite verses in ‘pure’ Tamil praising the programme and Jaya TV, the cable channel on which it was aired. As indicated earlier in the article, Tamil identity politics has shifted focus over the last century from a strident demand for autonomy and secession from India to something that can be broadly classified as cultural nationalism. In the early to mid-20th century, cultural nationalism was parsed as the renaissance of a pure Tamil, which had shed all residues of Sanskrit, and the recovery of Tamil heritage. At this stage, the movement was premised on dismantling the hegemony of the elite class and was therefore perceived as anti-Brahmin. Since then, the celebration of a linguistic heritage has been recast as an opposition to Hindi, the predominant language in North India, and the celebration of Tamil culture and heritage through annual World Tamil Conferences. (The redirected vision of Tamil identity, as opposition to Hindi, has diluted the earlier focus on dismantling caste hierarchies within the region.) Regionallanguage game shows rely on a residual knowledge of these Tamil separatist politics. However, because they solicit a middle-class viewing and studio audience, the corruption of Tamil by English rather than Hindi is the primary concern. These shows reveal the subtle and skilful manner in which they reconcile advertisers’ demand for a middle-class viewing public while negotiating the minefield of language politics and contemporary economic realities. The audiences these game shows solicit highlight the specificity of caste politics in Tamil Nadu. Tamil sub-nationalism has repeatedly drawn attention to Brahmin supremacy and hegemony in both civil society and within the public arena. These shows reveal that economic class formations cannot be mapped onto caste society. Even though Brahmins may be considered the cultural elites in society they are rarely among the economic elite. Commodity culture rarely solicits Brahmins as consumers; it is the non-Brahmins who are solicited as the ideal viewers of these shows.13 The testing of pure Tamil in game shows, which is broadly coded as nonBrahmin Tamil, indicates in the starkest possible terms the ways in which the logic of commodity culture can help keep caste hierarchies in abeyance. These shows rely on a cultural capital that proclaims their non-elite status and reiterate the primacy of a sub-national identitarian politics. These segments reveal how the act of mimicry could be deployed subversively to

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assert a particularity. The game shows reveal as well how the inscription of Tamil cultural identification has become dissociated from the earlier, more radical forms of social change.14 There is little doubt that these assertions of linguistic pride signal alliances and affiliations with the Tamil separatist movement that has been active for over two decades in Sri Lanka. However, no overt effort is made to articulate Tamil heritage and identity with the Sri Lankan brand of incendiary identitarian politics. Indeed, the Dravidian parties have silenced their once public support for the Tamil separatist movement following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by a suicide bomber. Under conditions of such public silence, we get to witness once again how commodity logic sutures, at least temporarily, a range of fissures, and helps produce a new set of identities.

Museum culture and heritage politics Even as the content of game shows underscores the specificity of cultural identity by asserting difference, the genre lays claim to a global identity by demanding a transnational literacy from contestants. These programmes often solicit knowledge of global celebrity culture that testifies to the transnational traffic of media products. One of the segments in Super Families, for instance, requires participants to unmask the identity of a global celebrity, such as Andr´e Agassi, Bruce Lee or Michael Jordan, whose face is slowly revealed. The family that identifies the face the soonest is declared the winner. (Since the majority of the celebrities who have gained international visibility are athletes or Hollywood stars, families often fail this test of transnational literacy and it is left to teenagers in the studio audience to identify the celebrity and win prizes.) Such segments highlight the citational quality the West and Western culture have acquired in Indian televisual space. Further, when combined with the cosmopolitan stylistic markers that are exhibited by the host, contestants and stage setting, this inquiry into global celebrity culture reiterates the foreign origins of the genre. Together these two sensibilities – the assertion of a cosmopolitan style and a vernacular pride for a mythical land – deterritorialize the contents of the game show. Similarly, the advertisements framing these programmes, the commodities displayed and the sponsoring companies straddle global/local definitions. The prizes awarded range from local products, such as saris from an acclaimed local store or regional cuisine helpers, to national goods, such as brand-name domestic appliances and spring water, and global brand names, such as Nescaf´e and Ponds. The sponsors of the programme similarly range from local to national to global companies. Fluidly moving across boundaries, the sponsors of the programmes, like their content, blur

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familiar distinctions and reveal the mobility of consumer products even as the regionally specific products assert the resiliency of local identity. I have thus far highlighted the ways in which game shows confound the global/vernacular literacy binary. Through a turn to the vernacular these shows carefully separate Tamil identity from a pan-Indian national identification. This evacuation of the national, and its substitution by vernacular and cosmopolitan affiliations signals the ways in which Tamil identity is parsed in an era of global flows. Rather than situate itself as a marginalized sub-national identity, or as in opposition to a metropolitan identity, these shows assert Tamil cosmopolitanism as offering access routes to an alternative modernity. In this last section of the analysis I highlight the manner in which commodity culture facilitates a nostalgia without memory and helps recuperate a vernacular identity. The pre-credits segment to Pond’s Big Show, a programme that encompasses question-answer sections, as well as requiring a competency in film music, exemplifies this allegorical turn. Snippets of the visual collage I describe below are repeated before and after every commercial break. Produced in a temple courtyard with a ‘studio’ audience, this show effects a vernacular affiliation through a symbolic reproduction of indigenous culture, one that is set up in contrast to both the national and the regional. The show begins with a montage of images that are supposed to be representative of Tamil heritage: temple architecture, folk dancers, aspects of rural life, religious rituals. These visual vignettes of Tamil identity produce a glossy image of the region. They inscribe the specificity of vernacular identity by tapping into the visual grammar of the global tourist industry. This pastiche uses an iconography that is globally legible as cultural identity. Not only does this visual turn museumize Tamil culture, it also testifies to the limited repertoire of images that are available to signify authentic cultural identity. The segment invents a glossy and mythical past by producing culture and heritage as fetishized images. The reliance on a transnational regime of representation allows the vernacular to be presented as compatible with, not antagonistic to, global culture. The touristic iconography helps reproduce a golden age of Tamil culture that supposedly continues to reside in rural areas. The tradition that is depicted in these regional shows restores aura to cultural objects, those that have become alien and distant, a marginal and threatened fragment of life (Mufti, 2000). A Tamil past is presented as the crucible in which a regional identity can be linked with the global. The visual grammar invoked here is in sharp contrast to the iconography of national identity. Until the mid-1980s, development and modernity in Indian popular and high culture were often represented through images of dams and industries, and the West was presented as antithetical to Indian identity (Thomas, 1989). In the precredits segment I have alluded to, the global is not seen as the other but as complementary to the vernacular; past and present are collapsed in the

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construction of a cultural self-identity. A Tamil past is aligned with the contemporary global through a reliance on heritage representational grammar. As is the case with the emphasis on linguistic purity, the use of temples and other religious iconography to signal Tamil heritage also underscores the changes in Tamil sub-nationalism. While the early movement would have eschewed these symbols as representative of Brahmin hegemony within the context of a global cultural space, such an iconography helps rework Tamil identification within a secular, cosmopolitan zone. The reliance on tourist imagery to represent Tamil heritage indeed helps recode Tamil identity formation. Significantly, the Pond’s Big Game is hosted in Madurai, a city believed to be the erstwhile centre of Tamil civilization. Even as the visuals locate the show in this city, which evokes memories of a golden Tamil past, the host repeatedly asserted that he ‘loves being in Madurai’. Slipping easily between Tamil and English he would point out that he ‘does not miss Chennai (Madras)’ but rather prefers the heartland of Tamil Nadu. These assertions orally replicate the visual grammar, they displace a metropolitan affiliation with a chauvinistic pride displayed in regional specificity. In the banter that characterizes these shows the host is able to produce an amorphous but evocative regional identity. The following conversation signals the way in which this regional identity is produced in contrast to a metropolitan-national identity. Host: How many years have you been a housewife? Contestant: 13 years. Host: How much longer would you like? Contestant: 60 years. Host: Being married to the same man for so long, won’t it be boring? Contestant: You must ask him (the husband). Host: So, is this a Tamil relationship or an Indian relationship? Contestant: A Tamil relationship, a Madurai relationship.

In this exchange neither the host nor the contestant define the differences that mark these marital taxonomies, yet they seem to apprehend their meanings and the differences that are entailed between Indian, Tamil and Madurai marriages. While the host consciously contrasts the regional against the national, the contestant goes a step further to assert not just a regional identity but a vernacular one. While this conversation may affirm

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an amorphous and ambiguous local identity, when combined with the heritage iconography framing the show such idioms permit the formulation of a specific vernacular identity. In these shows, a vernacular affiliation is constituted in deliberate opposition to a national, and sometimes even regional, identity. Through such a battery of intentional and unintentional devices, regional-language game shows reveal how the development model of nation has given way to a sub-national identity governed by the logic of commodity culture, where glossy images resuscitate an imagined past and allegories help invent a unique tradition that is distinctly at variance with the national narratives. Pastiche and montage are the primary idioms through which a vernacular identity is recuperated. This visual grammar reveals how the televisual apparatus is able to annex global forms, such as the game show, to draw viewers into practices that help them assert their local identity. The indigenous referents signify both an authentic culture and an irretrievable past but in an idiom inflected by global scripts; they permit the forging of retrospective affiliations and enable the inscription of a heritage politics. These modes of image production reveal the strategies through which metropolitan languages are indigenized.

Double vision The visual regime of game shows solicits an internal and external gaze. In India, the logic of commodity culture necessitates that an internal identity can be asserted only through recourse to an external representational grammar of authenticity. The self-referentiality of such a practice of representation underscores the role television culture plays in the construction, reiteration and production of particular identity politics. Rather than leading to a global homogenized culture, game shows become an exemplary site to put forward a vernacular sensibility. Game shows consciously mobilize cultural difference. They permit an aestheticized consumption of a repertoire of images marked as culture and unconnected to daily life. The politics of past-ness these programmes invoke permits the inscription of a regional identity. Significantly, an authentic cultural identity is claimed without any reference to national identity. In these shows identity is parsed in the idiom of heritage politics and tourist iconography. Regional-language game shows reveal a range of invented traditions and the forging of retrospective affiliations. The scopic regime of global culture makes visible only a heritage politics and a museum culture of authenticity (Surin, 1997).15 I have argued in this article that local politics deploys these spectacles to facilitate a familiar and grounded brand of identity politics, one that dramatically rewrites conventional binaries along new axes of desire and identification.

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Apart from the assertion of a vernacular identity, regional-language game shows deploy global culture as their other referent. A cosmopolitan sensibility is signified through particular fashion statements, the game-show format itself and the use of specific idioms. If the local culture is produced as a glossy, picturesque, exotic commodity, global culture is signified through banality: symbols of everyday use are appropriated to signify a sensibility rather than as a grounded identity. Participation in game shows provides viewers and audience members access routes to a globalized economy in an irreducibly culturally specific register. The seemingly innocent entertainment provided by regionallanguage game shows conceals the important cultural work undertaken. The shows reveal the openness and malleability of the commodity form. One cannot transpose onto these shows theories that have been formulated in the West. Commodity logic does not offer a single, determinate and closed structure whose meanings are always-already known; rather it is its radical indeterminacy that permits it to reconcile so many complex social formations within its logic. Game shows forge complex links between the global and the vernacular. Through the commodity form the genre helps recuperate ethnic identity and forge retrospective affiliations. Not only do these formations complicate theories of globalization, within the Indian context they enable a special brand of regional politics. The transnational traffic of cultural products has enabled commodity culture to facilitate an identity politics that serves as a bridge between tradition and modernity. Sub-national affiliations, as elicited by games shows, thus appear more authentic and contemporary than a pan-Indian national identity.

Notes 1. The one exception to this trend is Japan where the show failed (Schaefer, 2000). 2. The success of Kaun Banega Crorepati has catapulted Murdoch’s Star Plus channel into a viable competitor. Its advertising rates have soared and viewership for the channel as a whole has increased substantially. Kaun Banega Crorepati also has led to the proliferation of similar cash-award programming on different cable channels. Zee TV raised the stakes tenfold with its show Sawaal Das Crore Ka while Sony TV aired Jeeto Chappar Phaad Ke, both of them failed to secure a viable audience. 3. Ong’s (1999) distinction between transnational and global is relevant here. She believes that most scholarship uses the term ‘global’ to refer to political and economic processes and the term ‘local’ to refer to cultural issues. Such a model does not capture the horizontal and relational nature of contemporary economic, social and cultural processes. Ong prefers usage of the term ‘transnational’ because it denotes:

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. . . both moving through space or across lines, as well as changing the nature of something. Besides suggesting new relations between nation-states and capital, transnationality also alludes to the transversal, the transactional, the translational, and the transgressive aspects of contemporary behavior and imagination that are incited, enabled, and regulated by the changing logics of states and capitalism. It refers to the condition of cultural interconnectedness and mobility across space. Ong recommends ‘transnationalism’ for referring to the cultural specificities of global processes tracing the multiplicity of the uses and conceptions of culture, and uses ‘globalization’ to refer to corporate strategies. I use the term ‘transnational’ in a similar way to address the mobility and flow of cultural products across national and cultural borders. 4. Until 1992, Indian operators paid $800 per hour for a US series, but with the emergence of Murdoch’s Star TV the rate increased to $1800. These figures compare very favourably with costs of indigenous production. 5. Sun TV claims credit for the Indian satellite revolution. It was established in 1993 and is geared toward a global Tamil-speaking audience. 6. Fiske (1987) divides the genre into four subcategories based on the type of knowledge they privilege. There are those that require factual, academic knowledge such as Mastermind. The second has a more popular inflection of general knowledge such as Jeopardy!, where the focus remains on the contest. Fiske believes these two types of shows emphasize masculine knowledge. Other shows such as Wheel of Fortune and The Price is Right require the exhibition of everyday, commonsensical knowledge, the kind of information that is obtained through common social interaction and experience. Fiske believes feminine knowledge is tested in shows such as Family Feud, which require a human knowledge of people in general, a human social knowledge. Finally there are shows like Newlywed Game that require knowledge of a specific individual. 7. Quiz Time is the longest-running and perhaps most popular show in this genre. SAARC (a show named after the regional South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) is a transnational programme, one that is produced for simultaneous screening in the seven nations of the subcontinent. This is a quiz show and has few spectacular elements to it. Both of these are English-language programmes, other shows include Akshar Mela, in Hindi and Super Quiz in English. Indians have long been faithful followers of knowledge-based competitions (Marquand, 2000; Padmanabhan, 2001). This penchant for quizzes is connected to a broader appreciation of competitive, rule-bound games such as cricket. The knowledge tested in quizzes, their format, the class status of contestants, and the pleasures derived from participating in or witnessing these games reveal the tenacious hold of British colonial formations on contemporary Indian cultural space. Although I do not pursue this thread in this article, television game shows could be conceptualized as revealing the complicated way in which Indian popular culture relies on and references a British sensibility that tugs ephemerally at the past and simultaneously asserts an American affiliation firmly grounded in the present. The complex manner in which British colonial epistemes and ‘America’ are conjugated in the contemporary Indian imaginary make it impossible to designate the popularity of television game shows as primarily a mimicry of US popular culture. I am indebted to Rina Banerjee for this insight. 8. Television analysts in India believe that the proliferation of regional channels and programming is indicative of a coming together of the modern and the traditional, or what some Chief Executive Officers call ‘back to the roots’

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television. These regional channels present themselves as showcasing the rich heritage of the state. 9. In India the linkage between commodity promotion and game shows are heightened. Programmes such as Whirlpool Mera Magin, Mera Home are sponsored by brand names and the prizes are home appliances made by Whirlpool. The show is aimed at the ‘home-maker’ and is aired on Zee TV. Brand programming aims to facilitate a new form of commodity recognition, the shows attempt to register the brand name, not just individual products, within the popular imagination. 10. Surveys and audience research have revealed that women are the primary viewers of prime-time programming but the industry continues to solicit the male viewer. Interestingly, television has responded to this trend with a proliferation of shows about joint families that centre around the figure of the mother-in-law. 11. The women who appear on these shows invariably are clad only in Indian attire. The married women are invariably clad in the traditional sari, while younger, college students appear in the salwar kameez. This sartorial choice for women reflects regional values. Women appearing in many of the national programmes and especially on music-related shows are very fashionably and scantily clad. 12. The two primary Tamil cable channels, Jaya TV and Sun TV, have close affiliations with rival political parties, the AIADMK and DMK respectively. The televisual apparatus’s imbrication in politics was laid bare in July 2001 when the newly elected regional government, headed by Jayalalitha Jayaraman, arrested the former head of state, M. Karunanidhi. Cable stations owned by the allies of the two rival leaders, Jaya TV and Sun TV respectively, provided radically different accounts of the event and revealed the overt ways in which the political shapes the content of programming. 13. As numerous scholars have noted since its inception, the Dravidian Movement has drawn attention to caste structures in South India (Palanithurai, 1989; Sivathamby, 1995). While non-Brahmins have historically been economically more successful than Brahmins they have lacked the cultural and symbolic capital that could provide them access to jobs and education. It was these opportunities the early movement sought for non-Brahmins. 14. Ironically, a Brahmin was elected and continues to be the leader of one of the political parties that espouses Dravidian ideologies. 15. Foucault has unravelled the particular ways in which an apparatus (dispositif) or regime provides ‘rules’ that govern the generation and perception of concepts. In The Order of Things he revealed how something as taken for granted as visibility is itself created by a scopic regime, one that provides the rules that demarcate the visible from the invisible and in turn brings a whole range of objects into visibility while others are partially or wholly hidden. The conditions of visibility thus are always political.

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Sujata Moorti is the author of Color of Rape (SUNY Press, 2002). Her research focuses on the transnational circulation of media products and the politics they enable. She has published articles in journals such as the International Journal of Cultural Studies and Social Text. Currently, she is completing a book on the global travels of Bollywood music. Address: College of Arts and Letters, Old Dominion University, Norfolk VA 23529, USA. [email: [email protected]]