SOCIAL SCIENTIST This paper will begin by relating the experiences of a survey of households conducted by myself and a former student in the suburb of Ranaghat1. This was part of a larger survey conducted all over West Bengal, but this particular area offered us some intriguing insights into the implications of the entry of television programming, especially cable and satellite programming, into the homes of people who are having to re-negotiate their relationship with the new formations of community that are linked with the new constructions of modernity. Rapaghat is a district headquarter and a burgeoning town with a population of approximately one lakh. There are several cloth mills on the outskirts of the town which offer one section of the population a good livelihood. It is also an important centre for the wholesale marketing of agricultural goods. It is reasonably close to Calcutta and weekly compiuters are not unusual. In many ways Ranaghat is a relatively newly affluent town which is in the throes of change from a sleepy overgrown village to a modern urban centre. One of the first things that we realised as we began our survey was that television played a very central role in the lives of the viewers. Almost all the members of the households we entered responded enthusiastically to the chance of talking about their own experiences and in the process we gained some startling and disturbing impressions.4 The women especially were very animated while offering their observations and opinions. One of the reasons for the centrality of television in the lives of the people and especially women in this area was the marked lack of other forms of entertainment, especially of the "organised" and commodified forms. Very few of the women we spoke to were employed outside the home, and their interactions with the outer world were to a large extent extremely limited because of the remnants of the traditional joint family which still regulated their movements. In fact one of the changes that is taking place in this particular society is the gradual disintegration of the joint family structure. Of the 24 households we spoke to, the nuclear family was found only in six and many still followed the traditional models of large families living together in large houses and in some families 10 or 12 adults lived together. However, this feature seems to being in the process of dying out, but what was interesting for us was the fact that in many cases the television set seemed to be providing a centre around which arguments were articulated which were really about other things. Some of these conflicts were inter-generational. Dissatisfactions with the power structure within these families were articulated by