Posted:
11 years ago
The truth is, the female characters in
the nightly soap operas that tens of
millions of people across India watch
every night have not had the time to
be intimate with anyone, what with all
the scheming, plotting, disparaging
and fighting that typically goes on
among the large casts that portray
typical Indian joint families.
That all changed last month though,
when the first scene depicting
intimacy between a husband and wife
hit television screens on Sony TV's
popular show Bade Ache Lagte Hain,
which debuted last year and follows a
couple who fall in love after they
marry. The scene has made Indian TV
history, although by western
standards, it was very tame.
The situation takes place after the
character Priya (Sakshi Tamwar)
emerges from a breast cancer scare.
Soon, her portly, double-chinned
husband Ram (Ram Kapoor) pulls his
wife of several months towards him
and they kiss. The pair is next shown
in a candlelit bedroom, a slushy
Bollywood track playing in the
background.
A middle-aged married
couple having consensual
sex in their bedroom
without any nudity or
explicit shots is not exactly
trailblazing, but for
conservative India, it was
sensational. The country
buzzed with talk of the
scene, which attracted
279,775 hits on YouTube.
Yet, besides two or three
complaints, the
Broadcasting Content
Complaints Council was not
bombarded with angry
protests. It shows that
Indian television soap
producers such as Ekta Kapoor,
known as the "Queen of Television",
are pushing into new territory by
portraying emotions and situations
never before shown on TV - and
finding acceptance. The reason seems
to be that the timing is right; that
Indian audiences are now ready to
experience this new approach.
Kapoor and others who have caught a
whiff of this new zeitgeist are trying to
embrace the social change India is
currently undergoing. The earlier
serials were one-of-a-kind: Walt
Disney-style sets with baroque palaces
as homes played shelter to overly
made-up women in heavy silk saris
and enough shiny jewellery to light up
a small town, and who would
viciously interact with evil in-laws while
untuned violins screamed in the
background.
These days, soaps tackle new themes
such as child marriage,
homosexuality, female foeticide and
colour discrimination. But perhaps
the biggest new theme is the nuclear
family unit - its intimacy and the
emotions and lives of its members, as
opposed to the dramas of a large
joint family spanning different
generations and who all live under
one roof.
"There is a whole new movement
towards looking at couples, their
emotions and intimacies, at conjugal
sex and at individual relationships,"
says the television critic Shailaja Bajpai.
"This reflects what is happening in
society, how people are living in
nuclear families now rather than joint
ones."
The findings of a census last month
showed a dramatic change from just
a generation ago when the joint family
was the norm. Seventy per cent of
households in India consist of only
one couple.
Remarriage is another taboo subject
that, due to divorce being on the rise
in India, is beginning to be featured
on a serial called Punar Vivah on Zee
TV.
The protagonists are a divorcee and a
widower who each decide to remarry
for the sake of their children. The
soap then examines how they each
deal with the complexities of their
situation as they go through life.
Having acknowledged these attempts
by television producers to explore
new subjects, Bajpai adds a caveat:
"Yes, some of it is very experimental
but in a very middle-class sort of way,"
she says. "So the setting is invariably
marital, never premarital or to do with
infidelity, and the characters are
always respectable middle-class
people."
This is perhaps inevitable, given that
the vast majority of Indian serial
viewers are middle-class and lower-
middle-class women. However, the
sensibilities of this demographic are
also changing dramatically.
"Viewers are prepared to have fixed
ideas challenged and to be shocked,
largely as a result of hugely popular
reality shows which have pushed the
limits of what is acceptable," says the
media analyst Satish Jacob.
On these programmes, boyfriends
"set up" their girlfriends to see if they
are cheating on them in Emotional
Atyachar (based on the American
show Cheaters); people misbehave
with abandon on Big Boss; and very
ordinary folk confess to corruption,
embezzlement, adultery, threesomes
with prostitutes, neglect of their
children and parents and the betrayal
of relatives and friends on Sach Ka
Saamna (based on the American
show Moment of Truth).
"I think the popularity of reality shows
and these new soaps is a backlash
against the immature, juvenile stuff
that Bollywood dishes out, as though
we can't cope with the dark,
complicated things that happen in real
life," said a New Delhi soap addict and
schoolteacher named Jyoti Anand.
"People recognise themselves in these
shows and that makes it gripping."
