MTV in India
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History
A: MTV in India
Avijit.Ghosh, Oct 16, 2025: The Times of India
MTV had impacted India long before the channel came to India. In the 1980s, India was a single-television channel country even though the country briefly sampled the new world of music videos, courtesy DD every week. But this was also the video cassette recorder age, when pirated tapes of foreign films and music videos were readily available countrywide. If you saw shades of Jackson’s moonwalk in a Mithun or Govinda move, you didn’t need to think twice how the song found its way to Bollywood. Thousands even in small-town India were already doing the same.
In 1991, India opened its economy and the skies. Satellite TV brought in soaps such as ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ bringing the forbidden to upwardly mobile middle-class homes. The urban young found a channel that spoke to — not at them — when MTV India happened in 1996, two years after Channel V, another channel of the same variety. The channels gave them vitality and identity. As in the West, the video jockeys were as pivotal as the music. The VJs — their relaxed flounce, their cool couture, their zany humour — seemed hipper than the Bollywood stars in the newly globalised universe. These channels seldom commanded high TRPs but they ranked high as influencers of the “with-it” as well as the “wannabe” urban young.
Both Channel V and MTV eventually went desi, hoping to reach out to a larger audience, enabling the rise of local music talent in Indi-Pop (Silk Route, Alisha Chinoy, Lucky Ali, to name a few) and Bhangra pop (Daler Mehndi). But the times and the tech were a-changin’. Rampant online and offline music piracy caused the fall of record companies, forcing others associated with music to change tracks. Now lifestyle took frontstage.
MTV recast itself with reality shows: the intense Roadies (2003) and the dating show, Splitsvilla (2008), to name two. Rannvijay Singha and Ayushsmann Khurana were two early winners of the show. And while these shows continue to enthuse a small section among the young and the restless, MTV ceased to inhabit the young’s cultural cosmos. As smartphones became an extension of the hand, the world got busy broadcasting itself; everyone making their own reels, short videos and video logs. In the new chaotically democratised world of entertainment, there was no space for an arbiter of hip. It was more than just a mid-life crisis. MTV was a great idea whose time had gone.
B: MTV veterans in 2025
Oct 16, 2025: The Times of India
● On Aug 1, 1981, MTV hit American screens with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles — a tongue-in-cheek (but prophetic) anthem to a new age
● When MTV aired in India on Oct 28, 1996, urban teens finally had a channel that spoke their language
● MTV introduced VJs — charismatic hosts who became celebs in their own right. Their use of “Hinglish” fuelled the rise of Indipop and gave Indians non-Bollywood pop icons
● By early 2000s, it was available in 164 countries, reaching an estimated 1 billion viewers . In India, the late ’90s and early 2000s were the golden era
● MTV faces criticism for shifting from music videos to reality shows (The Real World and Jersey Shore in the US, Roadies and Splitsvilla in India). But the push to reality content led to viewer fatigue
● With streaming services and niche music channels rising, traditional MTV viewership declined. By 2010, some shows’ online viewership surpassed their TV ratings, signalling a digital shift
● Catchphrase “I Want My MTV!” , becomes an ’80s pop-culture staple, voiced, perhaps most famously, in falsetto by Sting in Mark Knopflerled Dire Straits’ ‘Money for Nothing’
● Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’, released in 1982 — and the music videos of its songs — were given enormous airplay on MTV, taking record sales to hitherto unheard-of levels, sealing MTV’s reputation as a new cultural force
