The Promise of Portability: CENDIT and the Infrastructure, Politics, and Practice of Video as Little Media in India 1972–1990

Abstract

Video in the form of “little media” arrived in India in the mid-1970s shortly after Wilbur Schramm proposed the concept in 1973. In this article, I investigate the ways in which the discourse and practices of “little media” were re-formulated in India through specific historical contexts and media formations that assigned it political meanings beyond its initial developmental functions. Taking the case of the important media initiative, Centre for the Development of Instructional Technology (CENDIT), this paper explores the production and circulation of “little media” and the range of context-specific interactive methods the center deployed. The historiographic account of video at this particular juncture contributes to an expansion of Indian screen history. It complicates the dominant understanding of video during this period as a medium for the circulation of commercial cinema with a parallel narrative of purposive and emancipatory video-based initiatives.