Looking in Horror and Fascination

All images and words `impact' on readers and viewers in some way or another. While we know this to be true, we do not precisely know how and why some people engage with images in certain ways while others do in different ways.  The hardest question that media scholars and students have to confront appears deceptively to be a simple one. How does the media impact on people? For those attempting to make interventions in the media, it is important to understand the complexities of spectatorial engagement with media texts. The engagement with this issue comprises some of the most exciting academic work in media, film and cultural studies. 

However, the difficulties involved in addressing this concern often escape the general public. This becomes particularly evident when demands for censorship are made. Censorship demands are made on the assumption that the concerned speech or representation will impact on people in particular ways. More dangerously, it assumes that there is a single and unified interpretation of the text. Both assumptions fail to comprehend the complexities of texts and readings. In this paper, I will reflect on how demands for the restriction of speech are tied closely to notions of media impact and harm.  By interrogating the intersections of these two concerns, I will discuss the many overlapping factors that influence and shape our relationship with texts and images. My attempt here is not to provide a definitive answer to how media impacts on people but to reflect on the impossibility of attempting an easy answer.

The Nineties

Deep anxieties and affirmative engagement simultaneously marked the Indian mediascape of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The liberalization of the economy and the `opening of the skies' catalyzed wide-ranging cultural transformations. Optimism around India partaking of the global community coexisted with anxieties around collapsing certitudes. Frequent reminders that Indian culture and tradition were under threat by various marauding forces accompanied the rise of the Hindu Right during this time. Both fear and optimism greeted the new cultural transformations. Subsequently, waves of moral panics found articulation around representations that were perceived to be threats to `Indian cultural values'. But more often than not, those very cultural products were resoundingly popular.

In an earlier essay ‘The Troubled Existence of Sex and Sexuality’ (Ghosh 1999), I had argued that the nineties debate on censorship reflected primarily a dilemma around sex and sexuality. By studying the images and representations targeted by both the Hindu Right and the Women's Groups, albeit for different reasons, the essays sought to interrogate the moralism underlying both positions. The essay argued that in failing to distinguish between discrimination and desire, coercion and consent, all representations that denote or connote sex came to be damned as degrading thereby erasing the crucial separation between sexual explicitness and sexism.

The nineties also witnessed the sinister rise of the Hindu Right led by their political front the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The cultural interventions of the Hindu Right, riding on public anxieties around the loss of `Indian cultural values', included the enactment of laws restricting speech and expression.  The Information Technology Act: 2000, for example, makes the ‘Publishing of information which is obscene in electronic form’ a punishable offence. Under this clause ‘whoever publishes or transmits or causes to be published in electronic form, any material which is lascivious or appeals to the prurient interest or [is likely] to deprave or and corrupt’ is liable to be punished with imprisonment and hefty fines. Worse, Clause 79 allows police officers and other central government officers to enter and search `any public place' and `arrest without warrant' anyone who is `reasonably suspected of having committed, or of committing or being about to commit any offence under this Act'. Similar restrictions were imposed by the amendment in the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995.

In addition to imposing a highly censorious Programme and Advertising Code, the BJP government introduced pre-exhibition scrutiny and censorship for all TV programmes by bringing it under the Cinematograph Act of 1952. In order to ensure conformity towards its various censorship diktats, the BJP government revived the defunct Central Monitoring Cell in Delhi where TV shows were being monitored for ‘anti-India propaganda’ and other violations (Raman 2000). Originally an army installation, the Central Monitoring Cell became a state panoptican and surveillance machine.

Censorship has been central to the Hindu Right's campaigns and to this end it has used both legal and extra-legal measures. But it is also important to remember that the demand for bans did not come from the Hindu Right alone but also from different women's groups and political parties ideologically opposed to the Hindu Right.  In November 2003, the Left Front government of West Bengal banned Dwikhandita (Split in Two, 2003) by Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin on grounds that ‘it could ignite communal tension’ (Statesman News Service 2003).  The Calcutta police seized all documentary evidence from the bookstores and publishers, including microfilms, floppies and all hard copies of the manuscript. Taslima responded by uploading the entire manuscript on the internet so that interested readers could download the read thereby showing that censorship in the age of internet is largely futile because it serves to make access difficult but not impossible.

Sexual Speech, Harms and Legal Regulations

The right to Freedom of Speech and Expression is protected under Article 19 of the Indian Constitution. But according to the provisions of Article 19 (2), this Fundamental Right is subject to ‘reasonable restrictions’.  In particular, speech can be restricted in the interests of security of state, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, decency or morality, contempt of court, defamation, or incitement to an offence. Considering the broad scope of `reasonable restrictions' the twin provisions of Article 19 would appear to be framed within a paradox. The restrictions on Article 19 (2) constitute the basis for other statutory limitations on speech like that contained in the Indian Penal Code (IPC) 1860, the Indecent Representation of Women Act, 1986 and the Cinematograph Act, 1952.

The legal regulation of sexual speech primarily through the criminal law has been held to be such a `reasonable restriction'. Section 292 of the IPC, 1860, prohibits obscenity which it defines as any visual or written material that is ‘lascivious or appeals to prurient interests’ or which has the effect of depraving or corrupting persons exposed to it. Section 292 is based on an 1868 English decision called the Hicklin case. This decision has been approved and repeatedly applied by the Supreme Court of India.  The test for obscenity in the Hicklin case was to determine

…whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscene is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral instances and into whose hands a publication of this sort might fall…it is quite certain that it would suggest to the minds of the young of either sex or persons of more advanced years, thoughts of a most impure and libidinous nature.

Since terms like ‘obscene’, ‘deprave’, ‘corrupt’, ‘impure and libidinous nature’ have been left undefined, the scope to interpret the same can range from the conservative to the liberal. The Hicklin `test' is very important as Indian courts have adopted this reasoning in all cases relating to obscenity and restriction of freedom of speech and expression on grounds of decency and morality.  The Indecent Representation of Women Act (1986) prohibits ‘indecency’, which it defines as ‘the depiction of the figure of the woman as to have the effect of being indecent or is likely to deprave or corrupt public morality’. Clearly, the objective of regulating sexual speech is closely tied to the regulation of morality which, in turn, is automatically assumed to be pre-given and commonly agreed upon. Predictably, the moral battlefield is the ‘figure of the woman’.

The nineties debate on `harmful images' invites us to interrogate what precisely constitutes harm. Two positions are implied, even when not explicitly stated. That is, the image causes the harm by influencing people to act and behave in certain ways and that the image is the harm in that the image itself could be seen to be ‘degrading’, ‘objectifying’ and/or ‘commodifying’ women. The inevitable question that follows then is what constitutes a harmful image? Who is harmed and when?

The notion that the image causes harm emerged from theories of ‘direct impact’ (the hypodermic needle model or bullet theory) that became popular in the 1940's and were concerned primarily with `negative effects' and the idea that media could lead people to cause `harmful' and `anti-social behaviour'. The Media Effects tradition saw a preoccupation with empirical studies that sought to study social phenomenon in the laboratory and then used similar `scientific' methods to study the same outside the laboratory. The Effects studies spoke with and contributed to moral panics around cultural anxieties and amplified public concern around `harmful images' and their `negative impact'.  These studies also identified a certain group of people as being most vulnerable like women, children, the poor and uneducated.  Public anxieties in India in the nineties seemed to hark back to direct impact theories. To this, I will return later.

Paradoxically, it was the empirical studies of the 1960s that brought about a reversal in thinking. Subsequent cultural and communication studies challenged the methods and contentions of clinical studies in general and the `effects' school in particular. They foregrounded the complexity of the relationship between the image and the spectator and emphasized the larger social reality that helped shape a person's responses to the media.

The feminist debates around the banning of harmful images emerged from the radical feminist interventions on the pornography debate in the West. The anti-porn lobbies, broadly referred to as the ‘radical feminist position’, took inspiration from the writings of Robin Morgan and Susan Brownmiller. Drawing a straight line between pornography and male violence, this position insisted that pornography is material which depicts violence against women and is itself violence against women. In the 1980s and 1990s this position found its strongest support from the works of Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. Insisting that ‘pornography is the theory and rape is the practice’, MacKinnon and Dworkin advocate the use of courts to seek financial redress against producers and distributors of sexually explicit material if they can show that it has ‘caused harm’.

This feminist position implicitly gives credence to the idea that the ‘gaze’ is determined by the biological separation of the ‘sexes’. Theories of the ‘male gaze’ emerged first from the influential works of Marxist cultural theorist John Berger and feminist theorist Laura Mulvey. In his pioneering analysis of the nude in oil painting, Berger (1972) argued that ‘looking is not a neutral activity but deeply gendered and classed and actually carries with it relations of power, access and control’. Laura Mulvey’s (1975) work uses psychoanalysis to show how the ‘unconscious of patriarchal society’ has ‘structured film form’ and is thereby ‘cut to the measure of male desire’. Mulvey contends that the woman is the object of male desire and therefore, in order to derive pleasure from the film, she would have to adopt either a passive, masochistic position or an active, masculinized one. In short, the female spectator could only derive pleasure from such a text if she underwent a certain sadistic masculinization.

Following Berger and Mulvey, several feminists identified ‘the look’ or the ‘male gaze’ as the cornerstone of ‘patriarchy’. Representing the dominant thinking of the first phase of feminist engagement with ‘the look’, Sussanne Kappeler wrote that 

The fundamental pattern at the root of men’s behavior in the world, including sexual assault, rape, wife battery, sexual harassment, keeping women in the home and in unequal opportunities and conditions, treating them as objects for conquest and protection—the root problem of men’s relations with women, is the way men see women, is seeing (Kappeler 1986: 61).

Subsequent feminist scholarship strongly challenged Mulvey's position on spectatorship by addressing issues central to power and resistance. Representations were seen to ‘mobilize’ viewing positions and identifications through a variety of means but the diversity of socio-historical contexts, multiply constituted identities along with collective and personal histories of the viewer allowed for a multitude of interpretive possibilities. Mulvey's notion of a gendered, bifurcated gaze was further challenged by queer studies on spectatorship. In the words of Sue Ellen Case (1995), ‘Not all men are gazing erotically at women, some women are gazing erotically at women, some women who are gazed upon look like women, some men gazed upon by men look like women.’ The anti-censorship feminist position, including my own, challenges the universalist notions of the gaze and argues against a uniform reading of sexually explicit material.  We argue that all sexually explicit material may not be sexist or misogynist. Similarly, we remind that sexism and misogyny may reside in images that are neither sexual in content nor sexually explicit. Feminists against censorship have frequently pointed out how the anti-porn position often diverts attention from sexism and misogyny at work in ‘respectable’ institutions like family, religion and the judiciary. This position also rejects ‘image-blaming’ by drawing attention to the data that fails to draw causal links between pornography and violence.

Drawing support from `image blaming' positions, MacKinnon and Dworkin, in the bill known as the Minneapolis Ordinance, demanded that victims who believe that they have been harmed by sexually explicit material could recover financial damages from the producers, distributors and retailers of the material. In India, the image argument effectively led to several mitigations of sentences. A judgement delivered by the renowned Justice Krishna Iyer reads:

A philanderer of 22, overpowered by sex stress in excess, hoisted himself into his cousin's house next door and in broad daylight overpowered this temptingly lovely prosecutrix of 24, Pushpa, raped her in hurried heat and made an urgent exit having fulfilled his erotic sortie.

The judgement reduced the sentence of a rapist partly on grounds that ‘modern Indian conditions’ are drifting into societal permissiveness ‘what with proness [sic] to pornos…sex explosion in celluloid and bookstalls, etc.’ Similarly, in Reepik Ravinder vs the State of Andhra Pradesh (1991 Cr. J 595), the sentence of a five year old girl's rapist was mitigated on grounds that he had ‘seen too many blue films’. Other cases leading to mitigation of sentences include Gauri Shankar vs. State of Tamil Nadu (JT 1994, 3SC54) better known as the Auto Shankar case.  Here, the defence counsel argued for a mitigation of sentence on grounds that he watched too many films ‘depicting sex and violence and illicit business and got misguided and ended up as a criminal and therefore, makers of such films are vicariously responsible’. In practice therefore, image-blaming arguments have only served to turn the perpetrator of crime into a hapless victim who is ultimately absolved of responsibilities for his/her actions.

TV Violence and Public Anxieties

Urban India of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries also witnessed intermittent public outbursts around the impact of TV violence on audiences, particularly children. This debate, however, lacked the outrage and moral intensity attached to the debates on sexuality. Much like the debates on obscenity and vulgarity, uncomplicated responses to ‘television violence’ failed to take cognizance of the media's diverse and increasingly complex engagement with violence.  Though the nineties, the popular press was replete with articles, opinions, and views that unproblematically linked media violence to real violence.  Writing about the rise of what he calls the ‘cult of violence’, a noted educationist stated:

Cinema and television have made a substantial contribution to the creation of an unkind, volatile ethos. Bombay films have glamorized certain kinds of violence; certain other kinds of violence have been trivialized.... Television has enabled cinema to reach our living spaces, making horror and brutality a homely affair. Watching scenes of cold blooded murder and rape since an early age allow children to develop a kind of derangement which lets them cope with the deep anxieties they carry (Kumar 2000).

Commonly expressed opinions such as these failed to address the intricacies of spectatorial positioning, issues of affect, desires, and apprehensions.  Instead they concentrated almost entirely on ‘negative effects', recalling repeatedly ‘direct impact' and ‘copycat’ theories.

Two highly publicized documents, the Media Advocacy Group (MAG) report titled People's Perceptions: Obscenity and Violence on the Small Screen (1994); and the UNICEF-Delhi report Killing Screen: Violence on Television and its Impact on Children (1999) carry the fallacies of effects studies that have now been substantively challenged by serious research.[i] Methodologically elusive, both studies indict a wide range of screen activities as ‘acts of violence’ and assume that exposure must necessarily result in violent or aggressive behavior. Similar arguments are made in The Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR) ‘findings’ of a ‘Five City Study’ titled Media Violence and its Impact on Children.[ii]  All three reports dispense with any literature review or description of the methodologies used. Instead, the report lists a series of observations that are not backed by any evidence. For instance, the CFAR study states that `Recent tragic events in the USA have only further emphasized the nexus between reel and real violence' and that without providing any details about the veracity of such a claim.  Similarly, the report goes onto state that ‘there is enough scientific evidence based on scientific research in the West to indicate a linkage between media violence and impact on children’ or that  ‘since 1998, there is a growing body of data in India, which has, to some extent quantified the concerns and raised qualitative concerns’.

Reading between the lines, one could conclude that the ‘growing body of data since 1998’ refers to the Delhi-UNESCO report on media violence (1999) and its highly publicized dubious parent the UNESCO Global Study on Media Violence (1998).[iii]  Inspired by direct impact and social learning theories, the supposedly ‘unique’ methodology of the UNESCO study had 5,000, twelve year olds in 23 countries respond to ‘exactly the same standardized 60-items questionnaire’ translated into languages as diverse as  ‘Japanese, English, Russian, French, Arabian [sic], etc’.he report declares that the questions were not ‘culture bound, as otherwise a direct comparison of the data would have been impossible’ but related to the respondents ‘media behaviour, their habits, preferences and social environment’.  It is indeed curious that UN agencies with their cross-cultural mandate should believe that media habits, behaviour, preferences and social environment should be free from mediation by ‘culture’. The study proceeds to elicit responses from countries as culturally diverse as Angola, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Costa Rica, Croatia, Egypt, Fiji, Germany, India, Japan, Mauritius, The Netherlands, Peru, Philippines, Qatar, South Africa, Spain, Tajikistan, Togo, Trinidad & Tobago, and Ukraine.[iv] Predictably, the conclusion pronounces that ‘Media violence is universal’. 

Two underlying propositions in the methodologically suspect UNESCO study are worth considering. First, by evacuating culture and social relations, the study suggests that viewer-text relations are universal and media is the primary influence in a child's life. Such an idea is echoed in a CFAR publication where the editorial states:

Children represent the most vulnerable TV audience segment, given their youth and inexperience…. Our findings indicate that media influences every aspect of children's lives…. Their hopes and aspirations for the future, their attitudes to relationships—familial, parental, romantic, sexual, etc. are all inextricably linked with what they see, hear and learn from TV.

In his now classic study titled The Nationwide Audience (1980), David Morley introduced the importance of social relations of television watching, marking a critical shift by proposing a more complex model of the interaction between text and spectator dependent on a discursive context of reading (Morley 1980). Decoding texts was therefore a struggle over meaning in which the viewer/reader actively participated. The complexities of viewer-text-context relationships and the methodology required to study the same had been debated extensively by the Surgeon General's Workshop on Pornography in 1986. Listed among the methodological limitations was the inability to isolate specific effects of the variable being considered (that is, exposure to pornography) from other potentially influential variables. It was also observed that clinical studies of convicted sex offenders cannot separate their use of pornography from other highly significant factors that promote violence such as drug or alcohol abuse, poverty and abusive childhood. Against the backdrop of the enormous volume of work done on spectatorship, it is curious that CFAR publications should make the unproblematic claim that ‘children imitate things without realizing their impact. A seven-year-old boy after watching Tom and Jerry would trip others in a school bus’.

Second, the UNESCO study, while prioritizing the influence of the media over every other experience in everyday life, also targets some people to be more vulnerable to ‘negative effects’ than others.  The study states, for instance, that ‘one third of the children in our sample live in a high aggression environment or problematic neighborhood [sic]. This ranks from high crime areas over recent war zones and (refugee) camps to economically poor environments [where] more than twice as many people seem to die of being killed by others than in the low problem areas’. The study then claims that violent content catalyzes a new frame of reference for children whereby chances of ‘problematic predispositions’ getting ‘channeled into destructive behaviour increases tremendously’.

There are at least two problems with this assumption. First, it assumes that everybody living in a violent environment is likely to behave violently. Second, it reiterates the elitist fantasy that the disprivileged and deprived are more vulnerable to media effects than those who are not.  Therefore, it is the ‘great unwashed’, not the educated elite, that is more likely to be ‘impacted’ by violence (or sex) in the media.

Morley's study reiterates that the ‘television zombies' of the effects model of audience analysis are always ‘other people'. Graham Murdoch (1997) suggests that ‘the dominant effects’ of tradition have proved so resilient partly because it chimes with a deeply rooted formation of social fear which presents the vulnerable, suggestible, and dangerous as living outside the stockade of maturity and reasonableness that the ‘rest of us’ take for granted.  ‘They’ are the ‘others’, the ones ‘we’ must shield or protect ourselves against’.

Further, the study problematically asserts that TV violence provides boys with a ‘frame [sic] of reference for attractive role models’. Apart from validating the essentialist position that sex determines gender which, in turn, determines ways of looking, it fails to understand the complexities of identity and identification or the role that fantasy plays in viewers' engagement with images. 

Between the early and the late 1990s, the public debates on media and violence in India shifted largely to an exclusive concern around children.  In June 2000, Common Cause, a popular consumers' forum, filed a public-interest litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court asking the Government to develop a strict code around the depiction of violence on TV (Shourie 2000). The PIL drew heavily from the UNESCO report, which in turn addressed the anxieties raised by the controversy around the popular TV series Shaktiman.

Ironically, the children's TV show Shaktiman (The Powerful) is telecast not on any satellite channel but on the state-owned network, Doordarshan. Launched in September 1997, Shaktimaan had an uninterrupted and successful run till March 1998 when, responding to a public controversy, Doordarshan discontinued its telecast.  The controversy followed the publication of reports filed by the United News of India (UNI) alleging that the serial was responsible for the death and injury of several children who tried either to imitate the superhero or endangered themselves in order to be rescued by him.  In February 1999, Doordarshan took the serial off the air whereby producer and actor Mukesh Khanna challenged the order in the Delhi High Court and filed a civil suit against UNI for filing unverified reports.  UNI eventually admitted to a ‘bona fide mistake’ and tendered an ‘apology’.  The Delhi High Court also appointed a committee that urged the resumption of Shaktimaan's telecast.

The Shaktimaan controversy provides useful insights into how ‘image-blaming’ gets popular currency through anecdotal evidence, which in this particular case turns out to be totally unverified.  Consider for instance, the following commentary (Bajpai 1999) in a national newspaper:

Shaktimaan is not universally injurious to children's health; but it is influencing them. At the end of each episode, Khanna would hector (that's the only word for it) the audience: do this, don't do that. Children were listening; he has the letters to prove it. But children are copycats: they not only do as he says but as he does, too. Hence their imitation of his stunts, his acts. Khanna appearing as Khanna on TV, has at length explained that the stunts are computer-generated animation; but they do create the illusion of life. So children will imitate Shaktimaan.

The construction of children as copycats and passive victims of media violence displaces any complicated analysis of how they might actually engage with television. Having assumed that all children are ‘copycats’, image-blamers need only establish the quantity of exposure both in terms of duration and the range of expressions that can be seen to constitute ‘acts of violence’.  Perhaps what is most instructive in the entire debate is how the image-blaming position discursively negotiates reality and representation.  To this end, I will return to another section of the above commentary:

This is the story of man and superman. Of double roles. Of the thin line, which was supposed, to separate fantasy from reality but which all too frequently strays from one into the other. In other words, Shaktimaan alias Mukesh Khanna. In the public mind the two are inseparable.… Indeed, wherever he goes, Khanna is greeted as Shaktimaan; so much so that when he was interviewed on STAR Newshour last week, the bemused anchor addressed him as Mr. Shaktimaan! This confusion of identities lies at the root and heart of Mr. Khanna's current difficulties; more critically, it has focussed attention on the inability of many children to distinguish between fact and fiction and the need to do something about it.... The difference between the American superhero and Shaktimaan is that Superman began as a comic book whereas Shaktimaan was first a ‘real’ man on the TV screen and only subsequently transformed into a comic book character. It's a critical difference: because children see Shaktimaan not as an animated being but a blood and guts human being—just like them. If he can fly, why can't they? Ay, that's the confusion.

According to this account, ‘copy cat’ children are unable to differentiate between ‘fact and fiction’.  Clearly, this is an untenable argument as both popular film and TV is replete with instances of superhuman antics by various protagonists. This contention is particularly absurd in the context of India where male protagonists of popular films have been performing seemingly superhuman stunts for many decades now.  The Committee report reiterates this point stating that the two most successful teleserials, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, were ‘replete’ with ‘extraordinary physical and psychic powers’.  The ability of children to have a complicated relationship to the world of representation and that of lived experience was amply demonstrated on a live show titled Hello DD which featured a phone-in interview with Mukesh Khanna.[v] The phone calls by children provided interesting insights into the diverse and complex ways they perceived the persona of Shaktimaan.  During a particularly insightful moment, one child caller said: ‘Shaktimaan uncle, I want to be like you when I grow up.  I want to be an actor.’

Conclusions

I have discussed the Shaktimaan controversy to show how common-sense notions around `media effects' can oversimplify text–spectator interactions and spectator–fantasy negotiations. One of the unfortunate consequences of not having a rigorous and competing tradition of media studies in the Indian academia has been that issues of theory and methodology have not been critically interrogated or substantively challenged. The lack of academic intervention in public debates around issues of spectatorship have resulted in the construction of spectatorship through anecdotal experiences and `studies' that reveal a striking absence of theory and methodology.

Contemporary work on spectatorship has conclusively challenged singular and unitary notions of the spectator thereby dismantling the certitude of the ‘gaze’ theory by emphasizing the plurality and paradoxes of what Linda Williams (1995) calls the many different historically distinct viewing positions (Williams 1995: 1-20). The challenge for future work lies in attempting to theorize spectatorship without succumbing to either a unitary notion of ‘looking' or an ‘anything goes’ pluralism. This returns us to the troubling question that we began with. Who has the power to determine meaning? Is it the viewer who makes of the image what s/he will or is it the image that determines certain readings from the viewer?  A useful idea suggested by Christine Gledhill (1988) is that of ‘negotiation’. Negotiation implies the holding together of opposite sides in an ongoing process of give-and-take where cultural exchange occurs at the intersection of the processes of production/address and reception. Gledhill explains that ‘meanings are not fixed entities to be deployed at the will of a communicator, but products of textual interactions shaped by a range of economic, aesthetic and ideological factors that often operate unconsciously, are unpredictable and difficult to control’. As some other scholars have also suggested, media spectatorship forms a ‘trialogue’ between texts, readers and communities thereby making it a negotiable site. Judith Mayne (1993) has cautioned us against assuming that all negotiations are inherently oppositional and reiterates Geldhill's idea that spectatorial positioning can be contradictory and changing. Identity, she notes, is essential for spectatorship, but it encompasses mobile and multiple positionalities (Mayne 1995: 155-83).

It is important to remember that the experiences and processes of spectatorship transform with larger cultural transformations. The Indian mediascape of the 1990s, for instance, saw the emergence and proliferation of the new and old media that allowed for a multiplicity of images, channels and time shifting.  Interactivity and virtuality have transformed people's engagement with cultural products thereby unfixing forever the original moment of cinema exhibition (Friedberg 1993).[vi] The ubiquitous presence of the TV, VCR, DVD, VCD's and re-writers has blurred the distinctions between different experiences of spectatorship. The spectator no longer just ‘looks' but also edits, creates and authors. Against this ever-changing backdrop spectatorships imbibe a mobile, shifting and fluid character whereby older notions of memory, recall and history stand transformed.

Therefore, media has `consequences'. It does influence, inflect and mediate but it does so in ways that are unpredictable and non-determinate. Media consequences are contingent and itself mediated through a variety of factors. Any study or theory of spectatorship, to quote Williams (1995), must be ‘historically specific, grounded in specific spectatorial practices, the specific narratives and the specific attractions of the mobilized and embodied gaze of the viewers’.

Like the process of spectatorship, the study of it is also an adventure. It is impossible to predict with accuracy what lies ahead till we reach our destination. That is, if we ever reach our destination. 

Shohini Ghosh is a film-maker, teacher and researcher

Acknowledgements: