Satellites of Belonging

The proliferation of Malayalam satellite television in the Gulf indicates the primacy that Indian nationals from Kerala have attained as a significant televisual demographic. In this paper I locate Malayali diasporic media formations from the late 1990s onward and examine how they contribute to the construction of the ‘Gulf-Malayali’ as a prominent vector for the satellite television industry based in the south Indian state of Kerala. The entertainment industry not only produces content for this demographic, but also works with expatriate Malayali communities on content that empowers them as creators of their own stories. In this paper I examine how stratified audience categories are targeted by satellite television programming. In interrogating the matrices through which regionality, entrepreneurship, ethics and success as migrants are woven into such programming, I track how different agents use varying strategies to showcase heterogenous migrant experiences mediated by class, caste and fluctuations of capital.