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Contributions from
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Focus
Soccer enthusiasts in Latin America
Soccer World Cup: Togo’s top athletes
Why African museums struggle
„Mosambicans love plays“
Visual media and sports in India
06/2006
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Colourful images from all over the world
India is not a football nation – but the World Cup will be followed attentively. South of the Himalayas, visual media play a tremendous role, with television reaching a growing number of villages. However, the screen is used almost exclusively for entertainment – visual media hardly serve education.
[ By Martin Kämpchen ]
I vividly recall the Football World Cup of 2002. Late in the evening, boys from the Adivasi village Ghosaldanga ran to their better-off neighbouring village to watch TV broadcasts of the games. Village people are hospitable and let children join them. But of course there was not enough room in front of the TV set for the children from an entire village, so the rest pushed and shoved at the windows, happy to catch a glimpse of the screen, and shouting “hooray” whenever the others shouted. When Germany became World Cup runner-up, the boys came along beaming with joy to congratulate me: “You won!… Well, until the final…”
Indians are visual people. To touch an object with one’s glances means to participate in the energy and characteristics of that object. Anyone observing how attentively children and adults on the streets follow something that Europeans would deem ordinary and unexciting , will get a sense of the power of images. Day-to-day life, especially in the villages, is uneventful and monotonous. Therefore, a mere crow fallen from a roof will cause a cluster of people to gather and discuss the “event”.
No link to real life
Imagine a TV set placed in the uneventfulness of everyday life in an Indian village. Suddenly, images appear on the screen, which are completely different from that village’s reality. Women wear makeup, men drive powerful, roaring motorbikes or cars, and there are high-rise buildings and airplanes. Do people live in these boxes stacked on top of one another? Do they have to somehow climb down to take a bath in the pond, or to relieve themselves behind a bush? The images show a lot, but they do not establish any link to the life world of village people, and much less to their lives proper. Often, the images on the screen remain a provocative visual landscape. Only persons with some school education, particularly if they have been to the next big city, are capable of making sense of the television pictures.
Consider any Indian village. Before the arrival of the power grid, the community gathers in a hut from time to time to put on battery-powered video shows. That is done primarily in the months after harvest, when the farmers have some spare money. A screen, a video player and a generator are hired in town and brought to the village by rickshaw or taxi. A handful of Bollywood films are rented as well. Then young and old, men and women (with sleeping babies in their arms) sit in the village square from nine o’clock in the evening until the crack of dawn and watch one film after another. The hunger for images beats any fatigue. Even though the plots are primitive enough, most viewers hardly understand them. But there is plenty of action on the screen, including colourful dances, fantastic battles and car chases in landscapes of supernatural appearance. Such pictures are enough to catch the undemanding people’s attention for a whole night.
Once villages get access to the power grid, television is the next thing to follow. The first TV set usually transforms the social behaviour of the entire community. Often, the inhabitants put money together to jointly afford a TV set, which is then set up in the community house (the “club house”) or on a veranda. From then on, it will blare every evening. Gone are the gatherings with singing or card games, where people laughed and danced. No longer do farmers sing religious litanies for hours on end. School homework becomes neglected – if the children and adolescents go to school at all.
I know a village that is quite well-off. It has a school, several heads of families have jobs in government, and a dozen families own enough fields to employ day labourers from poor villages in the area. Most houses are built from bricks, not mud huts with straw or corrugated iron roofs. One might consider this village wealthy, even though there is no doctor, only a few houses have a toilet and, in the rainy season, the roads are muddy. Moreover, many young men are unemployed.
In this village, many families own TV sets. That is what they spend their evenings with. Some families even got together to buy a satellite antenna. For them, that was progress. Additional – foreign – channels were what mattered to them, rather than a doctor, hygiene or good roads.
One cannot call it anything but tragic that one Indian government after the other failed to recognise the tremendous potential visual media hold for the education of the people. Their failing reflects that of the educated middle classes, who have shaped India’s public opinion since time immemorial. After all, its half-illiterate population has nothing but the images and the stories these media relentlessly generate as a means to learn. For decades, the government held a monopoly on television – and used it as a political instrument, rather than an educational one. Much more could have been taught to India’s picture-hungry masses, had the government decided to run educational programmes.
Masala movies and art
The genre of films that India produces for the cinema is even further removed from education and enlightenment than its television. The collective term Bollywood film has become well-known throughout the world. These movies are produced in Hindi in the studios around Bombay. It is said that around one thousand films are shot every year – Bombay’s is the largest film production in the world. In South India too, especially in Madras, Bangalore and Hyderabad, numerous films are made in South Indian languages. The bulk of them are so-called Masala films – they follow a stereotypical pattern, the most important elements of which are erotically-suggestive dancing, sentimental songs and violence. Both male and female stars typically stem from the world of beauty pageants, fashion shows and advertising. They start as models, learn how to dance and sing and then act in films, with some of them becoming stars. In other words, they come from the realm of body worship, not from the performing arts, which emphasise the spoken word and convincing gestures. Only few of the well-known film stars are capable of impersonating complex characters.
Apart from Bollywood mass-production, there is also an Indian art film culture. But it does not really provide an alternative to Bollywood. At best, these movies attract viewers at film festivals and among the intellectual urban public. The Indian art film does not have a widespread effect on the mainstream yet, even though it has gained tremendously in significance in recent years. More and more of these movies are now produced in English. Unlike Hindi films, they are understood throughout the country, even if only by an elite audience. Moreover, these films can be marketed in Europe and America.
The latest phenomenon to emerge is the so-called cross-over film, which unites Bollywood and the art film. Amir Khan’s “Lagaan” is probably the best-known example. Despite being a Bollywood product – with one of the greatest stars in the lead male role –, Lagaan not only appealed to mass taste, but also to a more sophisticated audience. As one of the few Indian films to break out of the Bollywood aesthetic, Lagaan was also warmly received by the Western public, and nominated for an Oscar as best foreign film.
Lagaan is a historical drama. The movie tells of how a village in Northern India rebels against British colonial rule. Challenged to a cricket match by bored British soldiers, the village boys learn this foreign game within a few weeks. The prize is the cancellation of taxes owed by the village. In the end, the village team wins the match, though only just. More than an hour of the film shows the course of the cricket match, right up to the narrow victory. The film enjoyed unprecedented success in India and abroad.
Cricket was the link that connected viewers in the towns and villages, in the educated and uneducated classes in India. Nowadays, everyone understands cricket – from the shepherd boy in the meadow, to the farmer behind the plough and the rickshaw wallah from the urban slum. This was not always so.
The triumph of cricket
Cricket only obtained its present-day significance a little more than ten years ago. Before, soccer was the unchallenged ruler of the playgrounds. Cricket was a game for the upper class who had enough spare time to spend several days watching from the edge of the field. Cricket goes on and on, you see. It is a cerebral game that is more about strategy and timing and less about speed and the continual interaction. As a German who grew up without cricket, I am inclined to say that “nothing” happens in a cricket match. My Indian friends strongly disagree, of course.
These days, you will see boys with cricket bats and a ball even on the harvested fields of the villages. Important cricket matches go on all day – and so do the live broadcasts on television and radio. If India is playing another important cricket nation, urban life grinds to a halt. TV sets blare in offices. The staff only do any work at their desks during breaks – and perhaps the less exciting phases of the match. Alternatively, one employee will have his radio on and call out results to the surrounding offices with the appropriate expressions of joy, indignation or grief.
Accordingly, little serious work gets done on cricket days. No boss will put pressure on his subordinates. After all, patriotism should be fun. I have even seen cricket fans on the streets, holding radios to their ears, going through milling crowds and lines of cars like sleepwalkers. The newspapers work out how much of the nation’s national product is lost per day of cricket, but no one seems to be overcome with remorse. No politician would be so unwise as to call for an end to all-day cricket matches.
In comparison, football may not exactly lead a shadowy existence, but it certainly does not grab public attention in the same way. Indian cricket is very well organised by a national federation, which wields political power and is endowed with high social prestige. Indians play cricket at local, national and international levels. Football, on the other hand, is only acknowledged locally.
In Calcutta, for example, there are two strong football clubs that have feuded with each other since time immemorial. Emotions run high when they clash in games. The city effectively splits into two camps. Such football games generally take place on the weekend, when they do not disrupt work. Of course, these games are broadcast on television, but they are not big national crowd-pullers as cricket games are.
Indian football was never established on a national scale. This sport does not have a federation that is strong in numbers and wields political power. In the case of cricket, the national team and the major local teams are made up of professional athletes. The top players earn as much as film idols, thanks to their advertising revenues.
But in football, even the players in the most successful clubs are semi-professional at best. They generally have a job and play in their spare time. Large companies sponsor the most successful football players; they give them work and time off to play. The aim of the athletes, first and foremost, is to secure a reliable livelihood. They want a permanent job in the company that sponsors them. Then they’ll be prepared to give their best for the sport. It goes without saying that only a few teams in the country have such generous sponsors. Therefore, football is practically non-existent at the national level. Media coverage remains poor, and interest in national matches is moderate.
Internationally, Indian football has never made a name for itself. You never see the Indian national team portrayed in newspapers and magazines. Unsurprisingly, it did not qualify for the World Cup.
Fingers crossed for the underdogs
That does not mean, however, that the Indian media in general are not interested in international soccer. Commercially-run television has several sports channels that follow the action around the world. Urban Indians with access to cable television can watch the games of the top European clubs or international matches on an almost daily basis. They are thus able of judgement, they know which playing styles and teams they prefer. Although India is not playing, which means TV viewers will not be fired up with patriotism, the people in the villages and cities will follow the games in Germany with well-informed passion, as they did four years ago.
Incidentally, an “extended patriotism” cannot be ruled out. In 2002, the Indian viewers initially stood by the African teams, the underdogs of the World Cup. When these teams were eliminated, Indians need to identify focused on other teams from developing countries. In the end, most Indians were infinitely proud that Brazil, a country of the Third World – their Third World – won the cup.
Dr. Martin Kämpchen
holds degrees in German and comparative religious studies. He is a creative writer as well as a freelance journalist for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . He lives in Santiniketan, a university town in West Bengal. He started a school project in the nearby Adivasi villages Ghosaldanga and Bishnubati. His recent publications include: Santals reach out to the world. In: India International Centre Quarterly (New Delhi), Summer 2006.
m.kaempchen@gmx.de
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