It was 6 August 1999. On his birthday, Cyrus Sahukar set out for what would be his first day at work as a video jockey (VJ) for MTV India in Mumbai. What he did not anticipate was getting kidnapped. A few rough-looking men carrying hockey sticks grabbed him as he stepped out of his Juhu hotel. He was shoved into a waiting van and whisked away. A few bystanders called the authorities and by the time the vehicle reached Mahim, it had been intercepted by the police.
What the police—and Sahukar—found out much later was that the “kidnapping” was a prank, played by Sahukar’s namesake and colleague-to-be Cyrus Broacha for the latter’s nutty show Bakra.
Sahukar’s narration of the incident—and Broacha’s recollection of it—a quarter of a century later is as ridiculously wild as it sounds. It also sums up, in one of many examples, the maverick nature of MTV India’s workings in the late 1990s and early 2000s when it, along with rival Channel [V], dominated cable television time, created trends, turned kids-next-door into VJ stars, gave life to independent music and provided unimaginable freedom to imagination and creativity.
MTV announced last month that it will close five channels in the UK by the end of this year after nearly 40 years (Channel [V] shut down eight years ago). Similar measures are expected in other regions, including Asia. Paramount, the movie studio giant which owns MTV among other channels, merged with media company Skydance in an $8-billion deal in August. The closure move comes as the merged company’s leaders seek to cut costs and as a consequence of how music is consumed now—on YouTube and streaming devices—rather than on television.
MTV in India (currently licensed to JioStar) moved away from music in the late 2000s to focus on youth-oriented reality shows like Roadies and Splitsvilla as well as serialised fiction shows, retaining only some music programmes like MTV Unplugged. But the move in UK signals the beginning of the end of a youth symbol that had a deep impact in India a generation ago.
The influence of MTV and Channel [V] spread wide, their VJs shaping fashion, language, attitudes. Comedy and spoof, as is seen in today’s stand-up, owes in some part to the precedent set by MTV and Channel [V]’s promos (besides Jaspal Bhatti). Movie song picturisation in the 1990s started to borrow from music videos, Indian and international (besides Mani Ratnam, who brought his own grammar to the speciality, and Yash Chopra). Movie choreography borrowed liberally from the west, with Prabhudeva’s tributes to Michael Jackson, Shiamak Davar’s choices in Dil To Pagal Hai, and others like Rangeela.
If MTV was the expression of music and the youth followed that music, today the medium for both, music and youth icons, has changed. “Because they were so focused on younger people, the choice of music remained more contemporary. Taylor Swift today, frankly, does not need MTV. MTV needs Taylor Swift,” says Sunil Lulla, the former general manager and country head of MTV India.
ROOTED IN INDIAN SENSIBILITY
Viacom’s (later Paramount) MTV entered India with Star TV in 1991, in its Americanised avatar, showing programmes like Beavis and Butt-head that were fairly alien to an Indian audience (even Doordarshan for some time carried a segment from MTV). But its music, the flamboyant videos by the likes of Michael Jackson, found resonance with the urban youth.
The joint venture between Star and MTV ended in 1994 and Star quickly created an India-specific music channel. Channel [V] became a 50:50 joint venture between News Corp., which had bought Star, and four music companies, according to Vanita Kohli-Khandekar’s 2019 book The Making of Star India.
With a push towards Hinglish, promoting Hindi pop, unifying on-ground events and shows with what it did on air “in the media-barren landscape of 1994, Channel [V] was a spectacular overnight success,” writes Kohli-Khandekar. It showed a young, casual, irreverent India that was confident and could laugh at itself, a quality that was missing in most mass media entertainment. MTV got a dedicated Indian feed in October 1996, and went about figuring out how to compete with Channel [V].
The channel needed to play its second innings well. Lulla was a director of client services with J Walter Thomson based in Taiwan when he joined the relaunched MTV. He had worked previously with HMV, which gave him some insights into the world of music. He flew into Mumbai to “overnight” build a team and to conjure a new philosophy. The product then was too international; so Beavis and Butt-head went off air as did the more “westernised” VJs like Danny and Kamal Sidhu, among others.
On 9 August 1997, Lulla remembers, MTV changed its logo to reflect 50 years of independence. It included in its logo colours of the flag—to the ire of the Indian government—and switched to more Hindi music while changing the tonality of its English content. Its tagline became “MTV Enjoy” as a colloquial addition to reflect its Indianness, while short-form content such as Bakra, Loveline and Style Check made their way in.
What followed was largely unexpected.
“The whole country was watching Semi Girebaal (Sahukar’s spoof on the talk show Rendezvous with Simi Garewal), which was rated higher than the (original) show itself,” says Sahukar with a chuckle.
“We got recognition from everybody because of a combined team effort,” Lulla adds. “I would say it was one of the best media management teams of its era. It was not just the music that hit hard. … No, it was not,” he says. “It was able to mix it up well, package the promotions, create the shows which were interesting and rooted in Indian sensibility.”
UNSCRIPTED, UNFILTERED
Gaurav Kapur was still in his teens when he joined Channel [V] in Mumbai, having worked previously in radio and theatre in Delhi. It was still early days at work when a producer caught hold of him one morning and asked him to do a quick shoot. Kapur, still dressed in slippers and shorts, was packed off to Carter Road to talk to people on the streets about “something random”. Three hours later, the shoot went into edit and then on air.
“The whole idea was improv (improvisation),” says Kapur, now the founder of content company Oaktree Sports, “and let your own personality flourish. Shows were never cast in stone.”
Sahukar adds, “We became hyper good at improv. A lot of it was just like throwing darts, creating some things and hoping it works. There was culture of improv because there were only 10-12 people running a 24-hour network.”
Spontaneity prevailed in front of the camera and off it too. Broacha remembers being on a break with the office smokers, including camera people, outside their office building when he decided to flag down a taxi. The cabbie looked expectantly at Broacha who, feigning innocence, asked, “Bhaiya, time kya hai (what’s the time)?” The taxi driver’s expression of incredulity and annoyance was such that the camera people decided to shoot it with other drivers.
“It wasn’t candid camera in that sense,” Broacha says of his later show MTV Bakra that was mostly about scamming people on camera. “All the initial stuff was against taxi drivers. It was not fully unscripted, you planned your gag. But there were many variables…”
The young bunch of VJs who joined MTV, with limited prior experience and enamoured by the world of glamour it offered, soon started to own their new roles. Rahul Khanna was among the early entrants into this world, anchoring from Singapore, with Broacha and actress Tara Deshpande joining in later in India. MTV roped in Malaika Arora for her oomph, Sahukar for the humour, Nikhil Chinappa brought music knowledge, Mini Mathur stood for intelligence with gravitas, among others.
“Landing MTV was like landing an influencer job (today) on YouTube,” says Sahukar, who auditioned for the role in Delhi as an 18-year-old.
For the urban youth, the VJs represented something that movie stars could not—relatable, yet starry. They introduced Hinglish to international channels, “bro-dified” colloquial lingo and engaged with their audience instead of talking at them. “They (the VJs) were cool people, not people with pink hair or some such,” says Mathur, who was already known for her work as an actress before she joined MTV through a talent hunt with Sahukar. “They had an easy pulse about them.”
She has played Michael Jackson with flour on her face as well as Kajol. “Nothing was embarrassing. It was empowering. You could go on to the road with a microphone and people spoke to you. You had to be ready for everything—Cyrus (Broacha) was not someone who would stick to a script,” says Mathur. “It had a wonderful sense of belonging without a sense of ownership.”
While what was projected on the screen may have been fun and games, life in these channels was brutal. VJs lived out of suitcases, working 15-18 hours a day. While the work environment may have been egalitarian—with “no ‘sir’ culture,” as Sahukar says—it was still highly competitive.
Artists and producers of the rival stations knew each other and shared the same social circles but some of the senior management would instruct them not to mingle. “For a lot of people, the two channels merged into one. It was a duopoly. These were two big circus tents; we were the clowns. Even if you replaced people in tents, no one would have cared,” says Kapur.
Seher Bedi, a producer on MTV between 1995-2001, and Kapur, Channel [V], remember being in Taiwan for a music event when the latter, on his maiden international tour, and a trifle lonely, would reach out to her and Goretti. “We would be like, go away Gaurav. We are not supposed to be seeing each other,” says Bedi, laughing.
In a podcast that Bedi shot with some of the VJs recently—they meet often, referring to themselves as the OGs—Chinappa says that MTV opened up a world of possibilities for kids across India because they were the first people who made “talking shit cool”. He recalls how he got into the channel, saying, “I was watching MTV on DD (Doordarshan) and saw this guy (Broacha) in khakhi shorts. I was doing radio in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) at the time. I looked at him and thought, if he can do it, why can’t I?”
Broacha, who now hosts the podcast Cyrus Says, warns of the dangers of nostalgia, taking the example of fans. “It’s a little too flattering, but it’s emotional when people say ‘I grew up on you...’ If I tell you all that, you’ll start building your own myth after some time. I get scared of the pressure,” he says at his office in Kala Ghoda. “We were just doing some stupid shows on a stupid channel.”
BEHIND THE SCENES
The channel had the right mix of young people, chasing dreams rather than perfection, which worked for an audience that was of a similar demographic. “Young people did not have a voice of their own on TV prior to this,” says Cyrus Oshidar, who joined as creative head at MTV in 1994. “VJs were spokespersons, who reflected their mindsets. Humour played a big part in it.”
Widely credited as one of the key players who made MTV “desi cool”, Oshidar once encountered a Parsi man in his colony who had swung his hand, hit Oshidar’s car and sworn at him. His fake teeth almost fell into Oshidar’s lap during the process.
When Oshidar later met a man named Karnik, who had misshapen teeth, the idea of the lift operator was born. The lift operator would feature in short snippets, dissing MTV or its programming, becoming a symbol of dissonance between generations. If MTV had its cantankerous liftman, Channel [V] had Quick Gun Murugan (QGM), the Tamilian cowboy with his green shirt, orange pants and pink cravat.
Rajesh Devraj had sketches of this QGM character on his pinboard when he worked in advertising. Many of the music channels’ creative teams came from the world of advertising, as people who could make attention-grabbing, contemporary and quirky content. When Devraj joined Channel [V] as a writer, he and then creative head Shashanka Ghosh decided to bring the character to life. The short skits, in which Murugan would say quirky things in a Tamilian accent, became a rage, leading to a full-length feature film later.
“Both channels had promo departments with more budget,” says Devraj. “Half of programming was music videos, links with VJs shot in studios. That’s low cost. The differentiator was the branding work around the channel. The promo department was the creative centre, the heart of it all.”
“The whole thing,” Oshidar says about the two channels competing, “was a symptom of a time, one feeding off another. One seeing a promo and saying let’s do better. We were the first to congratulate (each other)—Quick Gun Murugan is one of the best things (to emerge) from Indian TV.”
Over time, some of the eccentricities of programming died out as the channels became more corporate. The country’s political landscape changed, which affected content. Numbers and TRPs came into play while the internet and social media made content more platform agnostic.
“Ultimately, it (MTV) started off as an experiment and ended as a business. As it became a business, it lost its soul. The usual diktats of business, like numbers, jump in,” adds Oshidar.
MONEY FOR NOTHING
Uday Benegal had heard that VJ Nonie had mentioned getting mails from fans asking for Rock Machine (later known as Indus Creed) to be played on MTV. This was a time when the MTV feed into India came from Hong Kong, had VJs from there, and was fully anglicised. The band, remembers Benegal who was their lead singer, then had only one music video, made by Mahesh Mathai. MTV accepted the video, but encouraged them to do better. Getting into MTV opened further doors, sponsorships, which led five years later to Pretty Child, the group’s biggest hit single. Made by Subir Chatterjee and Namita Roy Ghose, the black-and-white video played in the channel on loop and won the MTV India Video Music Award.
“To be supported by them, in the pre-streaming days, pre-Spotify days… That is where young people got western music,” Benegal adds.
Indian rock was till then mostly restricted to college festivals, a few clubs and pubs in major cities, besides the Independence Rock event and the Live Aid concert that was held in Mumbai’s Brabourne Stadium in 1985. Bands such as Parikrma, Pentagram, whose Vishal Dadlani went on to have an independent career, metal bands such as Demonic Resurrection among others had their following through these festivals. But the two music channels gave wings to further creativity.
“Without MTV and Channel [V],” says Palash Sen about his band, “there would have been no Euphoria.”
Sen got hooked to music with Live Aid, a cross-continental concert that had a huge impact on music. When he saw Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits, he wanted to “play the guitar on the MTV” (the lyrics of Dire Straits’ Money for Nothing). When Sen saw bands like Indus Creed and Shiva on MTV, he realised that Indian rock had made the leap.
“When we (Euphoria) debuted on MTV on 10 October 1998, they played (our song) Dhoom Pichuk Dhoom for the first time,” Sen recalls. “It made Euphoria the people’s band. Because MTV promoted us, we became an independent indigenous band. We didn’t have to pay for that.”
Prior to these channels, popular music came from the movies—especially Hindi songs propagated by Doordarshan’s Chhayageet and Chitrahaar shows. There weren’t too many independent artists releasing albums or making music videos. Channel [V] and MTV broke that hegemony for a couple of decades, before both prioritised reality shows over music, and Bollywood slowly sneaked back in as the primary source of music.
“The last pop star who came from that era was Rabbi Shergill,” adds Sen. “We are all pop stars because of MTV. The singers’ phase is now gone, unless a smart singer can promote himself.”
As Benegal says, the channels aided an improvement in the quality of music videos in India, which also got inspiration from British and American musicians. Silk Route’s Dooba Dooba, Lucky Ali’s O Sanam, Euphoria’s Dhoom Pichuk Dhoom, Indus Creed’s Pretty Child were among a set of videos that would play as many as 15 times in a 24-hour cycle.
“Exposure to music and videos of a certain quality … Small-town children got the best of it. They picked up the guitar and started playing. That is what MTV brought to India,” says Benegal. “We all started out by wanting to be British or American. But in the process, found our own voice. Today, all bands write their own songs. That recognition, of people’s talent, came from these channels.”
A NEW VOICE
When Vamsee Juluri, a professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco, US, began audience research for his book Becoming a Global Audience: Longing and Belonging in Music Television published more than a decade ago, he started as a “typically pessimistic academic in the social sciences”. But doing in-depth interviews with young viewers helped him understand that the stories being constructed around the phenomenon of music television were more nuanced than that.
In the chapter on Alisha Chinai’s song Made in India, Juluri wrote that young people were constructing a sense of being Indian in an increasingly global economy and society. “While all media behemoths tend to be top-down and influential over minds and cultures, there was in retrospect a sense that the creative people at MTV India were not just preaching to their audiences but actually listening and trying to resonate with them too,” Juluri says over an email. Due to an overlap between consumerism and nationalism, a broader trend across Asia was what sociologists called “rebelling in”—young people were not rebelling out against elders, capitalism, etc., like in the west. They were more pro-globalisation, which may have played a role in getting MTV accepted widely, he adds.
The success of the two music channels was owed to their disruption and innovation. The MTV office, for instance, was an open plan one, before open plan offices became a norm. Beer would be served during Friday afternoon meetings. When Deepak Dhar went to MTV for his first job in 1998, Lulla interviewed him wearing orange socks, a T-shirt and cargo shorts. “To me disruption and innovation is how I still look at content,” says Dhar, now founder and group CEO of Banijay Asia and Endemol Shine Asia. “That (MTV) made a significant mark in the way I saw and still see content. If it fits a box, I don’t find a liking to it.”
None of the former MTV employees are surprised by the eventual turn of events, a consequence of changing times and technology. MTV in India did not keep up with what may have been the right way to be relevant to India today, believes Lulla. “It’s fine to do reality. It’s fine to retain music. But you need to have conversation with younger people.”
Mathur brings up The Buggles’ song, which was aired on the launch of MTV in 1981 in the US. “Video killed the radio star, now Insta killed the video star,” says Mathur. “An era is coming to an end, when we invested in people, we felt like we belonged. We are officially done.”
“And welcome the new world.”
Arun Janardhan is a Mumbai-based journalist who covers sports, business leaders and lifestyle. He posts @iArunJ.