D Jayasree Kalathil without sponsorship which effectively denigrates and demeans women. Since these Commercials are the norm, and feminist texts are rare, it is likely that the message of the text is processed as aberrant, and that of the commercial validated.6 By and large, studies which explored the interaction between women and television have tended to concentrate mainly on how women are represented on the medium and to demand a change in this representation. Thus in SITE to INSAT (a book which came out of a seminar held in Ahmedabad in November 1984, which assembled those who had worked on the production, research and planning aspects of SITE to move towards a blueprint for a programme matrix for women and children in the INSAT ambit) what is recommended after an evaluation of the existing programme is to concentrate more on the education of the girl child and to show women how to "devote their time in the best possible way for bringing up their children; daughters [should be] given as much education as sons so that when the time comes they prove [to be] good mothers to their children/' DD is called upon to remember that no society has flourished without a certain degree of female participation, and hence recommends that "(a)!! women's talks—family health, food, nutrition and home management needs should get supplemented through well devised programmes so that it is easy for women to adopt modern behaviour and attitude towards life which constantly keeps on changing with the times."7 Th^ concerns voiced here seem very similar to the modernizing agendas set for women in thje early 20th century discussions of the "women's question," where modernity for women did not necessarily mean attaining subjecthood but was envisaged as enough education to make them better mothers and wives. Feminist critiques have appraised the programmes on DD to make visible questions concerning the ideological construction of femininity and womanhood.8 It has been observed that DD projects the family and private space as the realm of women and that housework is privileged over and above all other kinds of work that women may be involved in. These observations are important and valid in questioning the bias of the medium. But textual analyses of serials, telefilms or advertisements, though they expose ways in which the feminine and the masculine are constructed as polar opposites, have ceased, it seems to me, to provide additional momentum to feminist interventions in the media. What I am attempting here is to suggest that we need to take DD as an institution as the object of our analysis and not just individual programmes as texts. It would be interesting to see how DD envisages a female audience, how it visualizes its needs, and what kind of strategies it uses to reach this audience. My contention is that starting off by "imagining" a certain kind of audience, DD then uses particular strategies .to "make" this audience a reality. There is a sense in which TV offers itself as "factual" or "real" as opposed to cinema. This reality effect is due to many factors, the most important of which is the fact that it is a domestic phenomenon. TV brings into our homes "actual" happenings outside. The TV cameras are seen as faithful recorders of events and we get to see "actual" people that we know exist. In watch-Numbers 32-33