The Time of Television: Broadcasting, Daily Life, and the New Indian Middle Class

Abstract

This article develops a temporal framework for analyzing television’s role in shaping the formation of a new and powerful urban middle class in 1980s India. Focusing on the first sitcom produced in India, Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi [Such Is Life], we argue that the unique temporal affordances of broadcast television facilitated a broader shift in the national imaginary. Not only did broadcast television, via the vehicle of such neglected genres as sitcoms, synchronize the rhythms of daily life to its schedules, but sitcoms also recast the daily lives and experiences of the middle classes as ordinary, relatable, and achievable. Casting the 1980s as the time of television illuminates a critical period and medium of communication in Indian cultural history.