Nalin Mehta, a Commonwealth scholar, is founding Joint Editor of the international journal South Asian History and Culture, and Honorary Fellow at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He is the author of the award-winning India on Television (Asian Publishing Award 2009) and has co-authored the critically acclaimedOlympics: The India Story. His edited books include Television in India and The Changing Face of Cricket. A weekly columnist for Mumbai Mirror, he has over ten years of experience as a journalist, working with several television networks including NDTV, Zee News, and Times Now.
'Excellent...an incisive and much needed study of how television is changing India.' - Rajdeep Sardesai, Managing Editor, CNN-IBN and IBN-7 More than fifty 24-hour news networks, operating in eleven different languages, emerged in India between 1992 and 2006. This book traces the evolution of satellite television and how it effected major changes in political culture, the state, and expressions of Indian nationhood. Explaining how television, a medium that developed in the industrial West, was adapted to suit Indian conditions, the book focuses specifically on the emergence of satellite news channels. It shows how live television used new forms of technology to plug into existing nodes of communication, which in turn led to the creation of a new visual language - national, regional and local - that altered politics and forms of identity formation in significant ways. Satellite television came to India as the representative of global capitalism in the early 1990s and crushed the governmental monopoly over broadcasting that had existed since independence. As such, the story of satellite news is also the story of India's encounter with the forces of globalisation. 'Accumulated with an insider's knowledge...a genuine contribution to the literature, bringing together valuable material that deserves a wide audience.' - Prof. Arvind Rajagopal, author of Politics After Television.
