Indian Feminity of 21st Century Through Soap Operas

Discourse of  “feminity” throguh mass media brought forth the “feminine mystique” in the 50s and 60s America. Similar trend is observable in the history of television in India has proved that the woman — as girl, woman and aged person, is trapped within an anonymity that reflects the anonymity she encounters in real life. Television’s image of woman, either as a patriarchal construct, or as a socio-historically differentiated product, is almost always made subservient to voyeuristic and fetishistic impulses. A woman’s character is predominantly constructed as totally non-contradictory, homogenous and unchanging.

Hum Log (1983) was India’s first long-running soap opera for development. It was produced by the government to raise women’s status and reduce their maltreatment. The idea was the brainchild of the then Information and Broadcasting Minister, Mr Vasant Sathe, who during a visit to Mexico in 1982, was impressed by the authorities’ use of soap operas to spread developmental messages. After the trip, the idea for Hum Log (People like Us) was developed in collaboration with writer Manohar Shyam Joshi and filmmaker P. Kumar Vasudev. The soap attacked the dowry system, encouraged women to decide on the number of children they would have and promoted gender equality in the workplace. In an entertaining manner, Hum Log promoted equal status for women, family harmony and the small-family norm. An average of 50 million people watched each of the 156 episodes during the 17-month run in 1984 and 1985. It was the largest audience ever for a television programme in India. Hum Log was evaluated by researchers from the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California. Research on the opera’s effects on Indian television viewers indicated that ethnicity, geographical residence, gender and Hindi language fluency were significant determinants of beliefs about gender equality.

After Hum Log came Rajani (1985-1986) where the crusader was presented first as a person and then as a woman. Why was the crusader presented as a woman? The reasons may be (a) a woman offered more attractive visuals than a man; (b) women viewers would find easy identification; (c) the basic message Rajani spread among women viewers was that they could solve their own problems if only they pushed themselves to it; and (d) sponsors would be able to use the same actress’ image to advertise their consumer goods, which they did.

Udaan set forth Doordarshan’s discourses on the New Indian Woman. Doordarshan created new stereotypes of women who rise above adversity, achieve success in fulfilling their individual goals, and channelise their energies towards selfless social activism. Udaan had a tremendous impact on the viewers. They were deeply impressed with Kalyani’s idealism and self-confidence , and they admired her courage to fight corruption from within the system. Kalyani became a household name. It was one of the first serials to showcase the empowerment of women against all kinds of gender discrimination and their struggles on the home front, on the societal front and on the professional front.

When small screen entertainment was privatised and many channels came into existence, women characters approximating reality began to fade away in serials like Khandaan, Junoon, Swabhimaan and Tara, defining an alternative woman, who was sexually aggressive and promiscuous, conscious of her claims to the family business and property, yet martyred in the end as the ‘poor, victimised’ woman. Tara specially had an admirable female following whose approving comments usually centered on the phrase ‘woman power’. What this ‘power’ actually was raises its own question because the stereotypes offered by such soap operas such as Swabhimaan and Tara still focussed on sexuality and sex appeal.

In the 21st century, one would have expected women characters to be more progressively depicted than before. But this has not happened. We have been preview to regressive women, a return to the extended feudal family with property and inheritance disputes, illicit children, illegitimate relationships at times bordering on incest, and the focus on beauty, tonnes of gold and stone-crusted jewellery, faces made up so heavily that all women characters begin to look similar, creating ‘the homogenous woman’.

Thankfully, the focus in 2008-2009 has shifted from the Tulsis and the Parvatis of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki to Balika Badhu. And there has been an instant positive offshoot. Saas-bahu soaps are passe. Every other daily soap being aired on various channels upholds a specific cause for the social and legal uplift of the girl child. Na Aana Is Desh Meri Laado is about infanticide. Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Hi Kijo is about how low-caste poor families sell their young girls to ward off poverty. Girl-brides are killed with impunity and their murder is passed off as suicide. Laali’s angry questions about the sudden death of her best friend just before her gauna are hushed up. Not only the characters but even the locales shown in most soaps are quite authentic. Agle Janam… is being shot in Godewadi, a village that stands a kilometre away from Wai, very similar in its physical ambience to a Bihar village. Protagonist Laali, the eldest of three siblings, lives with her poor parents. Her father is a rat-catcher. In Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, there are still zamindars who hire them and pay them in lieu of the number of rats killed. Ratan Rajput, the girl who plays Laali, belongs to Patna, Bihar.

Balika Vadhu is about child marriage and also touches upon the heart-rending tragedy of child-widows and on the complete subservience of women in extended, feudal families. But its message — of fighting child marriage, gets diffused in the maze of the patriarchal backdrop. The social cause takes a bad beating when the content is closely reviewed. At times, the titles, the setting, social relationships and ambience of these serials are so ambiguous that they make one question the integrity of the very cause they promote. They are rooted in the total submissiveness of women in the family. One wonders when and where the final awareness will come.

Bandini is another serial which is about a young girl married off to a man much older than her. Of late, a number of TV serials are focussing on issues linked to the girl child in an interesting manner. Viewership is huge and , therefore, they serve as an excellent medium not only to send out the intended message, but also to influence the audience to support girls.

The shifting of focus from bejewelled, zardozi-clad politicking saas-bahu serials to girl centric serials has come at the right time. Data gathered by ActionAid from interviews with a representative sample of more than 6,000 households shows that sex ratios have dropped. In Punjab among the upper caste Jat Sikh community, the ratio was merely 500 girls for every 1000 boys in the rural areas. In urban Punjab among Brahmins the ratio is a shocking 300. In Himachal Pradesh and Punjab, researchers recorded a growing preference for having just one child. Squeeze on family size is fuelling the trend of ‘disappearing’ daughters. For households wanting only one child, they want to make sure it is a son.

In some ways, though television has fostered the spread of the liberation movement through its vast amount of coverage of women through seemingly ‘progressive’ talk shows, discussions, debate and detailed news reports. But at the same time, it has done more harm than good to women’s potential as individuals by putting female conformity to convention and tradition on the forefront. Women and girls are subject to communication strategies that try to convince them to “role model” themselves after characters in scripts, rather than encourage them to see broader systems of gender dynamics or to engage in collective acts of resistance, to consumer culture, or to oppressive political systems. The very structure of many of these programmes involves the “partnership” of private industry with development institutions ostensibly acting in the public interest. This “partnership” limits the potential for communication messages to engage in more controversial subjects and strategies. The integration of commercial products, in the name of the “public good” in these projects, draws attention away from potentially more environmentally-sound and politically-responsive solutions.