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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
become 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.
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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 fundraising. 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 broadcast.
In
1977 we joined with others to get a licence from the CRTC 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-camerashoot 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.
Shan
Chandrasekar is the President of the Asian Television Network.
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