A response to "Is this empowerment?"

BY Sheetal Vyas| IN Media Practice | 06/04/2010

I found myself laughing a little over Sevanti Ninan’s bewilderment in the piece (Is this empowerment?) reprinted from The Hindu.  As someone who bestrides what seems to be a chasm, I am tempted to respond. I am a modern woman --I am intelligent, I have a media degree, I’m a mediaperson (of sorts), I’m feminist (I like to paint in my own shades but the broad umbrella will do). Also I watch serials avidly --it started because I like the TV on and I prefer glittery clothes to the news. But lately, because it fascinates me.

As the writer  says, there is a world of difference in perception. The casual disinterested viewer ­• or more particularly, the casual, contemptuous journalist/activist • is appalled at the goings-on in serials; the regular viewer cannot be persuaded to move her eyes from the screen enough to feed her squalling children. For a very long time now, media-watchers and analysts have berated the average viewer for her tastes, shuddered and averted their eyes from the gaudy colours, the campy vamps and the bizarre plotlines, and tried rather desperately to uplift everyone’s frame of mind.

They have not succeeded. The serials have gone on being made and, more importantly, they have gone on been consumed. If Balaji Telefilms is no longer the market leader, it doesn’t matter any more. They have handed on the torch of that particular stamp of television --it has grown many more heads.

Why these serials thrive is an interesting question. The easy, lazy answer is that these hordes of nameless women across the country (and in neighbouring Pakistan) are fools. That they don’t know any better. That they could be watching... oh, I don’t know what but certainly something more educative.

However, I don’t think that is true. I think our middle class is peopled with sensitive, intelligent, attentive women capable of nuanced thinking --I have several TV fanatics myself among my family and friends; I even adore a large number of them. In which case, we must go by Holmes: when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. We must consider that women are gaining something from this; that they are not merely swallowing whole every broad stroke of apparent regressiveness; that they are entertained; that they are sifting, sorting and picking nuggets that fit in with their current social constructs -- and even moving ahead in desirable directions with whatever subtle manoeuvres are available to them. That in spite of the disastrous-seeming package it comes in, Indian TV serials MUST be doing something right.

I was delighted to learn from this article that even so far back as 2001-2003--the very initial years of the saas-bahu sub-genre--the serials had such a positive impact. It also bears out my own persistent feeling that there is a great deal of difference between what appears to be the message and what is actually absorbed--because there is no other way to explain why they fascinate this huge mass of audience, why they have continually done so this entire decade.

Is it merely that these serials engage in women’s concerns? Kitchen politics, in the broad scheme of things, may be insignificant. But perhaps to the woman trapped in it, it helps to have someone examine her situation? TV serials, after all, are not primarily for the outgoing modern woman with various exciting options for her evening’s entertainment. They are watched (we assume) by women who have just finished their household chores; the woman who comes, at the end of the day, to her place in front of the television, where the rest of family resignedly relinquishes the remote. Even that, to my mind, is no small victory. It is understood across Indian households now that primetime television is the woman’s right --in spite of scoffing malefolk in the background, she is entitled to watch her serials; moreover it is understood, by and large, that she is not to be disturbed as she does it.

Coming now in particular to Pratigya, which Ninan quotes. I’m not arguing for a minute that the plotline isn’t utterly shocking, or that there is something right about marrying a harasser. But to see the "power of women", or the charm of "Pratigya character", the devil is in the details.

It is a piquant situation. There are two families that are contrasted here: Pratigya’s refined, educated family with its genteel manners, and Krishna’s rowdy, coarse, wealthy but unlettered folk, as ready with their fists as they are with abuses. Pratigya, for Krishna, is the aspiratonal goal. He wants her, he has got her. Now he needs her approval, he needs to measure up to her and is doing everything possible to please her, to be worthy of her. Through her eyes he now sees his family. A household in which his mother is kicked and punched the minute she steps out of line, where the older bahu is slapped down fairly regularly. I imagine it would curl quite a few stomachs (it did mine) to hear the maid servant inform her mistress with coy triumph that the bahu has already been ‘worshipped’ for the day--she means the daily beating, of course. It is appalling. But as a study of how women buy into and participate in the suppression of their own kind, it shows a mirror.  

I understand the writer’s horror at Krishna’s popularity. The context, however, is that he comes of such stock. He has a brother against whom he is measured--the brother (Shakti) is completely a product of his background, while Krishna questions it. Shakti buys into the male hegemony; Krishna is willing to see other sources of power. Krishna is ordered, pressured, mocked into abandoning his support of his wife on the grounds that such devotion makes him very unmanly--he has (so far) resisted attempts with commendable firmness.

Krishna’s own (very crude) sister is now married into Pratigya’s mild family-- their unkindness is of a rather different kind. They sniff at her, they ignore her, they will have no truck with her--curiously, for someone used to being hurled abuses at and pushed around, she still finds their reception of her unbearably hostile. Her abrasive manner only thinly masks her hurt at the rejection. The families are deadlocked in a rather interesting situation, for each has a daughter hostage in the enemy camp.

The social milieu in Pratigya and recent developments in the show throw up a few note-worthy points:

Neither family wants to continue to stay in the situation it finds itself in. Most of the characters would rather retrieve their girl and break relations (the situation is being held in place by Krishna, who still desperately wants a good marriage with Pratigya and hopes to bring her around.) Marriage, apparently, is no longer a lifelong commitment. Interestingly, neither family makes any concerned noises at all about their daughter’s future, should such a break happen. It makes a contrast from even a decade ago when we were told repeatedly that once a woman’s ‘doli’ had entered a portal, only her ‘arthi’ could leave it.

The Thakur family, in spite of its violent habits, does not actually have the stereotyped silent, suppressed women. They talk back, they argue, they fight. When they are abused, they exhibit no very great weakness --if it is an indignity, they do not permit it to touch them deeply. They brush it off, get up again and contrive to have their voices heard.

Only last week, Pratigya refused to have her name changed in her sasural; refused to have her identity taken away and be demeaned by having another name foisted on her.

Krishna’s mother hates her daughter in law Pratigya because her son backs her to the hilt. It is a hate born of deep envy. It brings home to her the inadequacies of her own life, a glimpse what she might have had, viz., a husband who respects her.

Pratigya’s father has now managed to negotiate for his daughter an environment that contains books. The Thakur family is feeling backfooted because they cannot read, while their bahu can.

Incidentally I have bad news for some viewers-- in the week to come, Pratigya is about to be raped by her hitherto forbearing husband. Doubtless the twist is led by the TRP race but there is also no doubt that it will trigger a rather invisible, subterranean debate on marital rape.

I’ve been rather long winded about this--but the point, I suppose, is that these serials do occasionally shine the light on what exists; and that depiction doesn’t always amount to ratification. Unfortunately, there has been a rather dismissive attitude to popular culture--as if low-brow material must necessarily lack sensibility. To draw a small lesson from Bollywood, not all the cinema and literary work before it managed to make homosexuality as acceptable to middle-class India as Dostana (2008) did. The movie took the idea, wrapped it up affectionately and placed it before the masses, who, to their credit, considered it and accepted it. It was a gentle transaction.

The stories streaming into our drawing rooms may not preach in an ‘acceptable’ way. It is possible that they just show, allowing for people see themselves, recognise themselves and wherever possible, identify with this or the other character? They do this to the accompaniment of high melodrama. The saas-bahu genre is now heavily stylised, with its own vocabulary, make-up (what are the bindis and hair-dos but equivalents of the white hat/black hat or Kathakali costumes for positive and negative stereotypes), and a distinct style of editing involving many white flashes.

In spite of the presentation, merely the fact that television serials deal with a long line of female protagonists is encouraging. The female life is being rather thoroughly examined --the child bride, the new bride, the wife, the mistress, the mother, the businesswoman, the ruler, the matriarch. Not even Bollywood has paid us that compliment.