ABSTRACT
This chapter employs a qualitative approach to understand the sociolinguistics of the origin and development of Hindi language television in India. The chapter also deals with the concerns of a declining share of Urdu in the cultural mix of Hindi–Urdu. The Hindi television market share, the largest in India obviously, has its own challenges. This has led to competition between the states among the Hindi-speaking markets (HSMs) and among the Hindi- and other regional language-speaking markets. If Hindi is considered a regional language, then the channels of this languages are at the forefront of this competition. The concept of regional language channels was devised by the visionary businessman Mr Ramoji Rao, who owned the Eenadu Group in Hyderabad. He started a network of south Indian language channels first, then for Odisha, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan. Soon, other players joined the business of regional channels. The TV channels of Eenadu Group are now part of the TV18 Group. Apart from this, the regional channels of Doordarshan, Zee, Sahara, ABP, TV9, India News, and News Nation Group also share the regional market. The biggest challenge with regional Hindi channels is that it loses in defining its concerns regionally. Sometimes these channels are unable to fulfil their responsibilities due to political or business reasons. Barring Doordarshan, every Hindi language television, particularly the news channels, has similar content in their bulletin. The morselization of the content is such that even the topics of the shows on discussion are similar. This monotonous content signifies the implication of political hegemony by the common audience. Hindi language channels definitely have a bright future but due to the emergence of social media platforms they will have to change their strategy to make the content more interesting and promising.
