Building The Asian Television Network
Building The Asian Television Network
By: Shan Chandrasekar
From: Polyphony Vol.12, 1990 pp. 47-52
© 1991 Multicultural History Society of Ontario
From: Polyphony Vol.12, 1990 pp. 47-52
© 1991 Multicultural History Society of Ontario
The Asian Television Network is an important communications
link among the South Asian communities of Ontario, and between
them and Ontarians generally. Its founder has also established an
important new link that connects Toronto with an international
South Asian communications network. It is a business, a kinship
connection, and a contribution to the development of multicultural
understanding in Ontario.
My father, K. Subrahmanyam, gave up a law career to become a film
maker, and in 1936, he became the first South Indian to make a
motion picture with sound. Over the next twenty years he became a
major figure in the Indian film industry, producing some three
hundred feature films as well as short films and documentaries. He
achieved enormous success but had his share of failures as well,
and our very large family experienced both great affluence and
extreme deprivation. We learned to appreciate whatever we acquired
and to cope with adversity.
Like so many others who lived through and participated in this
dynamic period of social reform and freedom struggle in India, my
father sacrificed an easy life for the challenge of leadership. He
made one of the first anti-caste films, attracting controversy and
criticism even within our family. His subsequent work dealing with
the remarriage of widows and child marriage entrenched his
reputation as a rebel and an enemy of traditional social values.
His film "Tyaga Boomi" (Land of Sacrifice) was a contribution to
the nationalist movement and was banned by the British government.
He was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, and this was reflected in his
film "Gita Gandhi", which was also banned. The negatives were
seized and he was kept for a time under house arrest; for almost
eight months he was not allowed to make films.
Although much of this happened before I was born, my father's
achievements and the film business dominated my childhood years.
After independence in 1947, he worked with the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and was one of the first to lead an
Indian film delegation to the United States. It was there that he
met Walt Disney and took animation back to India. He founded one
of the major Indian film studios, Madras United Artists
Corporation, later to be called Gemini. The two boys with bugles
in the emblem of the company were my brothers.
In the last period of his career he moved away from commercial
films to concentrate on children's films, and documentaries, and
educational films. He became chairman of the International Film
and Television Council in Geneva and was honorary chairman when he
passed away in 1971. We were therefore exposed, not only to
film-making techniques through my father's example, but to the
idea of service and social purpose.
I was nine years old when my brothers and I experimented with
leftover film from Russian Imo cameras. We all looked toward my
father as a model, but my mother was not at all keen on any of us
getting into the film industry. She was determined that each of us
would move into a different profession. I was to be an engineer.
In our family, such parental guidance was not easily rejected. I
was sent to college, and although I was not fond of the work or
the career prospect, I took a degree in mathematics. Postgraduate
studies in electrical engineering followed, but this had only
lasted three and a half months when a break occurred in our
traditional family determination in such career decisions. My
eldest brother, who had become a lawyer, quit law and joined my
father in producing documentary films. My second brother who was a
chartered accountant, also quit his profession and joined my
father. My third brother had gone to Columbia University and was
pursuing a Ph.D. in communications.
I was determined to leave engineering but reluctant to follow my
two brothers into film making. My family agreed that I should
pursue a career that would satisfy my own interests, and I chose
social work. I completed a master's degree in India and met a
Canadian professor who encouraged me to continue my studies in
Canada. I applied for admission to American and Canadian
universities and in 1967 went to Montreal as part of the staff of
the Indian pavilion at Expo '67. When McGill University accepted
me, I decided to stay. I was given credit for my Indian training
and finished the two-year degree in nine months. I was also
permitted to write my thesis at McGill's Instructional
Communication Centre. This allowed me to bring together the two
streams of film making and service, which was the legacy I had
received from my father. My thesis topic was instructional
television.
After graduation, I worked for the John Howard Society as a parole
officer and social worker and continued my studies by commuting to
Buffalo to take courses in communications at the State University
of New York. Subsequently I joined the postgraduate program at
Marshall McLuhan's Centre for Culture and Technology in the
University of Toronto. I held a number of positions during these
years, first with Big Brothers and then the Children's Aid Society
and the Catholic Children's Aid, where I was in charge of the
foster care division. Since I was neither a Catholic nor a
Christian, I was very honoured by the appointment-one of the many
multicultural experiences that have enlivened my life.
There remained, however, the desire for a more active involvement
in communications. I was convinced that if we used social work,
community service, and a knowledge of media and show business-put
them all together-we would have the right commodity, something to
which the general community would respond. I felt that good news,
if promoted properly with an aura of show business, could be sold.
Since I had been trained in television, it became the obvious
outlet and the core of my professional goals. It was clear I could
not move into Canadian programming overnight, but there was a
vacuum to be filled and a constituency not well served: the
multicultural aspect of mass media.
The freedom of the media in North America had impressed me from my
first day in Canada. I watched talk shows in which presidents and
prime ministers were criticized and satirized. It was fascinating
but a bit alarming too to someone who was brought up to be
respectful of our leaders. I began building bridges in my mind
between the Indian perspective I had brought with me to this new
home and the mainstream media in Canada that attracted my
attention and in which I hoped to build a career. It was at that
time that I met Ted Rogers.
In 1971, together with a group of friends-all Indians, bachelors,
and professionals in various fields-we formed a music group. I had
been part of such a group in India, where we generally sang
Western music-the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Judy Collins.
But in Canada we sang Indian music. We cut some records and
eventually launched a television show. It was purely a hobby for
all of us, but it was to become for me the beginning of a new
career. The show was put together in black and white at the Light
Studio in downtown Toronto. There was no colour there at the time.
When colour became available on Scarborough Cable, we went there
to do one show in colour. Ours was one of the first serious,
ongoing Indian television programs in North America.
The show became very popular and we gave it more and more of our
time. Everything was totally self-financed; there were no
government grants, no support from other companies and no
advertising revenue. We began to broker time at City TV and in
1975 became the first Asian program produced as a series for a
North American television station. It was a great success.
Although we were scheduled during "dark time" rather than prime
time, the audience was there. I showed movies at midnight on
Tuesday nights. Indian movies are very long and they would usually
run until three o'clock in the morning. We apparently created a
serious social problem in the community. On Wednesdays many people
had difficulty getting up in the morning. At City TV, Moses
Znaimer took a gamble with us: he was amused by this new and
exotic enterprise but he was also proud of what we accomplished at
that time.
From this beginning we grew with the population and also
collaborated with others who were involved in television
programming for their own communities. Under the leadership of
Danny Iannuzzi, who had been involved in Italian television, I
provided the Indian component of a group representing the
Portuguese, Jewish, German, Macedonian, and Greek communities. We
decided to float an application for the world's first
multicultural television station. We were rejected by the CRTC and
had to go back many times before receiving its approval.
In 1979 we launched Channel 47. It was no longer necessary to
broker programming time elsewhere: we had our own station. It was
not easy. We were a group of visionaries with inadequate
financing. We were also inexperienced businessmen and there was
little confidence in the market for this unknown and multicultural
product. Conventional national advertisers paid little attention
to us. We had moved ahead of our abilities to deliver on our
promises to ourselves and others, but hard work, long hours, and
sacrifices by a lot of people turned things around. Rogers, who
saw some potential in our efforts, provided basic operational
funding. Today, the station is fully self-sufficient and although
there is still much to be done, there is optimism that we will
achieve our goal to become a major competitive participant in the
market within the next three to five years.
As the Indian population grew and changed, we responded with new
programming. Beginning with songs and dances, we went through
various phases-feature films, serials, dramas, and then
discussions and reporting of issues. We are becoming a Canadian
program. We carry views from India and the countries of South
Asia, but we are also increasingly concerned with the question of
how regional events affect us in our Canadian lives. We now
discuss Canadian issues, such as Meech Lake, on our show. We have
also responded to the growing multilingual reality of the South
Asian community in Canada by launching programs in Hindi, Punjabi,
Gujarati, and in the near future Tamil. Our main program attempts
to deal with broad-based South Asian issues and to involve the
general Canadian community as well. We have a mandate to enhance
the knowledge of South Asian people and culture among all
Canadians.
We need to describe the positive contribution being made by our
community and the outstanding people who have become leaders in
many fields. We want people to know that our community did not
come here only to receive benefits. We are making a contribution
as well, and we are also here to share in all aspects and
responsibilities of Canadian life.
We have used our facilities to promote charity fund-raising. The
South Asian community made a large contribution to the United Way
by bringing the popular Indian playback singer Lata Mangeshkar to
Toronto. She sang at Maple Leaf Gardens, and $350,000 was raised.
Similarly the Indian-organized cricket match at the SkyDome last
year was a community-wide effort in which we played our part.
We are also beginning to give attention to a range of issues and
social problems confronting our community: parent-child conflict,
changing teenage values, family violence, linguistic and cultural
retention. In addition we have dealt with the growth pattern in
the community and future immigration trends. Family reunification
is a priority in official immigration policy. At the local
community level, this policy has complex effects on existing
families. We are looking at the issue of parents being sponsored
by their adult children who have already established themselves in
Canada.
We have a large viewer base, but a diverse one. In addition to
people who have migrated to Canada directly from South Asia,
others are part of a second or third migration and come from East
and South Africa, the West Indies, Guyana, Surinam, Fiji, and
Britain. We also attract viewers among other communities. Greeks
and Macedonians watch our show; they like the music. Our program
also benefits from a good time slot when many other stations are
running evangelical programs that have a different audience.
There is now substantial and continuous involvement of the
community in our activities. Our show is important to them. They
view it with a sense of pride. It took some time before it was
recognized that we were both a commercial and a community
operation, and that it was necessary to produce a professional
product and attract advertising revenue. It is often assumed
because we are a part of multicultural television, that we are
subsidized by the government, but in fact, we operate like any
other business. We-the program and the community-have grown and
developed together, and our expectations of each other have become
complementary.
In 1975 most of our advertising came from corner grocery shops and
businesses generally characterized as ethnic. But mainstream
advertisers now recognize the large potential in the non-English
and non-French communities. We now have a combination of
advertising dollars from both sources. We have also invested a lot
of time in upgrading the quality of so-called ethnic advertising
and marketing. We always knew what was good-quality programming,
but we did not have the funds to produce it. We are still short of
development capital, but we are getting closer to our goal. The
main lesson I have learned-especially working with Rogers Cable-is
the need for professionalism in quality. We have to be very good
to attract an audience outside our traditional viewing
constituency, and we need to do this if we are to grow and play
the larger role we have envisioned for ourselves.
The invention of remote control has provided a great opportunity.
Many of those viewers who traditionally watched only CBC or CTV
now sit in their chairs and flip through the channels. Some will
pause at one of our programs and will stay with us. We are
confident that if we deliver quality, we will attract that larger
audience. We do some of our shows in English and others in a
bilingual format: English and Hindi, English and Punjabi, English
and Gujarati. Many of our films and dramas, and occasionally our
news programs, are subtitled. Most are done at the source, but we
have done some in our own studio. The English language was the
link that facilitated my journey to Canada; it remains the link
that allows multicultural broadcasting to be shared among new and
old Canadians.
We have established a company, the Asian Television Network, to
produce and operate in this field. The name expresses a vision
that still remains in the future: we seek to build a Canada-wide
service. At this time, however, only Toronto has multicultural
commercial television. In the rest of the country, such
programming appears on cable television. We do try to collaborate
as much as possible. We have a small show on British Columbia TV,
produced there but partly prepared in Toronto. We experimented
with the development of a relationship with Cathay International
Television, also in British Columbia, but this did not work out,
although we did learn a lot from the Chinese activities there.
They have twelve thousand subscribers and therefore, a very
substantial income. We watched also the birth and growth of
Tele-Latino across Canada, as well as China-Vision. There is an
extraordinary amount of activity going on in this field. We have
collaborated with other multicultural media across
Canada-newspapers and radio as well as television, in a variety of
ways. We are doing some cable TV shows on local stations and
exchange programs with larger centres. In addition, we are
participating in the Vista Television network with the result that
our programs now have a national audience and market. We have
provided technical assistance to a range of communities, not only
South Asian, in the production of religious programs for Vista. We
use our own studio as well as our remote crews who go out to film
events for future broadcasts.
In 1977 we joined with others to get a licence from the CTRC for
the establishment of Channel 47 because we could not obtain
adequate studio time for our own productions. Our success brought
us a fine Toronto broadcast facility, but because it has had to
serve twenty-four international communities, the problem of
shortage of studio time re-emerged very quickly. To provide some
additional space for Asian programming, I established a small
studio on John Street in Thornhill. It was just a simple
two-camera shoot facility, however, and we quickly outgrew it.
There was, in addition, the problem of establishing a high-quality
standard. Much of the ethnic programming was technically weak,
having been produced with home video equipment. My dream was to
establish a large studio with state-of-the-art technology that
would compete in quality, if not quantity, with the product of the
mainstream industry. And with Jaya, my wife and my partner, the
dream has come true. She has shared in the personal financial
sacrifices required to make this investment. She has been willing
to risk a secure life in order to respond to this challenge. And
she has been primarily responsible for the quality and sensitivity
of all our productions. While I am the part of the team more often
seen on camera; she is behind me and the whole operation, ensuring
good technical and production standards.
In 1990 Jaya and I opened our new studios in Newmarket. We are
still relatively small, but there is production space to meet
current needs and room to grow. We have, as well, installed the
latest technology. We can produce an excellent product, and this
has attracted the respect of colleagues in the large networks. Our
two main programs, "Asian Horizons" and "Sounds of the East" have
approximately 1.2 million viewers. We believe in multiculturalism
and have surely benefited from the generosity of spirit that has
informed this policy. In the long term, however, multiculturalism
must grow into a new and broad-based Canadian culture. We seek to
play a role in achieving this goal by producing South Asian
programs for mainstream television, by making multicultural
programs part of the ordinary activity of the entertainment and
information industry. In doing so, we intend to compete with CBC
and CTV for attention and audiences. It is just a question of
time.
