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attributed to the relatively small-scale nature—both in terms of finance and
geographic reach—of the many initiatives that were launched in the United
States during the 1980s and early 1990s. While radio programs featuring
Hindi film music, Indian classical music, and other forms, including ghazals
and qawwalis, had been on the air in areas with large concentrations of South
Asian immigrants, it was only toward the mid-1980s that television became
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part of the Desi mediascape. The limited reach of this early phase of South
Asian television programming in the United States was largely a function of
policies and regulatory frameworks that created the opportunity for such
programming in the first place.
On September 9, 1980 the Federal Communications Commission pro-
posed the creation of a “new television broadcast service with low-power
mini-stations” that could meet the needs of Americans in rural areas that did
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not “receive even the basic complement of three or four signals.” In addi-
tion to viewers in rural areas, this policy shift was also seen as a response to
the needs of underserved and underrepresented minority and ethnic groups
in large urban areas. These stations, such as KSCI-TV (Channel 18) in Los
Angeles, would enter into agreements with private producers—often a hus-
band-and-wife team that sometimes expanded to include their extended fam-
ily—who used the equipment and other facilities at the stations to produce
and broadcast their own programs. In return, these producers would pay a
small fee or in some cases, share any revenues generated through advertis-
ing. These programs, such as “Bombay Connection” that aired on KSCI-TV,
would typically be an hour-long mix of song sequences from Hindi-language
Bombay films and coverage of local events relating to South Asian viewers
(festival celebrations, dance competitions, interviews with prominent artists
from South Asia on tour in the United States, and so on).
Without exception, content from the Bombay film industry was vital to
every such local television production. However, given the small scale and
limited reach of these television programs, there were no formal links estab-
lished with industry professionals in Bombay. The only notable exception to
this was a weekly television series (Indigo) produced by a New York-based
company called the Bombay Broadcasting Network (BBN). Established and
managed by a husband-and-wife team (Anita Raj and Giri Raj), BBN claimed
that it reached “7 million South Asian immigrants from coast to coast, in 9
cities across the country.” This program premiered in August 1987 on what
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was then the newly launched Travel Channel, but ended by February 1989
when the company went bankrupt.
Broadly speaking, then, South Asian diasporic media production has
always occupied a space between “national” media capitals, between Bombay