Discussions, commentaries and critical analyses of women’s representation in Indian cinema are variously undertaken, underscoring the peripheral and rather problematic portrayal of women on the silver screen and the social impact that it engenders consequently. While cinematic representations and narratives have the enormous ‘mana’ to shape and impact the mass society, what is less discussed is the role and impact of television dramas or what is colloquially termed as ‘daily soaps’ in India.
There can be potential debates about the increased dissipation of the TV serials from the realm of sociality and social impact as OTT platforms are capturing the market and producing somewhat responsible (albeit inclusive) content, to negate the dependence of a large proportion of Indian society on TV dramas for entertainment or for the sheer pulling through of the everyday life will be a stance taken too soon.
Discussions, commentaries and critical analyses of women’s representation in Indian cinema are variously undertaken, underscoring the peripheral and rather problematic portrayal of women on the silver screen and the social impact that it engenders consequently. While cinematic representations and narratives have the enormous ‘mana’ to shape and impact the mass society, what is less discussed is the role and impact of television dramas or what is colloquially termed as ‘daily soaps’ in India.
For many of us, it is not new to be part of family gatherings where mothers and aunties, in their semi-veiled, semi-private spheres, discuss the serials they watch, rather, are invested in and why. While one could say that there is a generational dimension to TV viewership, limited only to our previous generation, there are many young adults whom I have encountered who seem to take an interest in TV (along with OTT platforms, of course!).
Most of these young adults have grown up in the period of TV supremacy, and the negation of the impact of the platform is something which is yet to occur. I spent the previous three months at home, in Kolkata, given the long summer break my university provides, and I could not keep myself away from the big part of my parents’ and relatives’ everyday lives; TV, which led me to intricately examine the problematics of representation on television. While I will be focusing on the Bengali television dramas in this article, I am quite sure my analyses will be applicable to pan-Indian daily soaps.
While this trope is popularised as being the societal norm, the angle which is promoted is the angle of class. The female protagonist must not only undergo the process of becoming an ideal woman, an entity accepted by the household and its social standards, but also undertake the process of becoming a woman from a particular social class, a process which is never complete.
It does not take long for one to understand that Indian TV dramas, across all channels, follow a similar, if not the same, trope. This very familiar trope, which has been manufactured since the beginning of the 2000s, seems to be incessantly repackaged, with only minor changes in the title.
The plot is that of a Hindu household, based on either an ideal homemaker, with the woman being endowed with every possible responsibility that she can take and beyond, or the story of star-crossed lovers, wherein the plot eventually develops into the woman being married into a household and the journey of her shaping into an ideal woman, albeit into an ideal homemaker.
The repackaging of this old and un-fine wine into the present-day is dressed in rather problematic portrayals. In the context of the Bengali serials, what is disseminated wholesale is the plot of an ambitious woman who would eventually be moulded into the ideal wife. This moulding is a ‘rite of passage’ that the female protagonist must go through, and is the starting point of this problematic representation.
The rite of passage is marked by a process whereby the female protagonist must eschew her ambition, her identity and everything that she can remotely call her own to ‘prove’ her worth and belonging to the new household, its members and most importantly, her husband.
While this trope is popularised as being the societal norm, the angle which is promoted is the angle of class. The female protagonist must not only undergo the process of becoming an ideal woman, an entity accepted by the household and its social standards, but also undertake the process of becoming a woman from a particular social class, a process which is never complete.
The common trope of these serials is that of an upper-class household, which unwelcomingly brings in a new member, a lower-class girl, around whose trials, tribulations and transformation the story must revolve. The problem is thus not just limited to the normalisation of gender marginalisation through representation, but the normalisation of the marginalisation of women from a certain class, which is dramatised further through the normalisation of the hegemonic narrative of pitting two women against each other, patriarchal bargain and so on.
The upper-class male protagonist is represented in all his glory by virtue of his class, wherein social class equals his good upbringing, education and all the components which make him the ideal breadwinner, even if it translates into the causal misogyny and sexism which is normalised in his interaction with his female counterpart.
When it comes to the portrayal of upper-class women, the value chart is reversed, in the sense that her education, ambitions and her thirst for independence and identity are represented through negative symbolisms of carelessness and selfishness, which must be moulded into family values.
The representation of class-gender dynamics of the female and male protagonists are strikingly glaring and are normalised and emphasised in the name of the family. Feminist anthropology and feminist scholarship have argued and underscored how the trope of the family becomes instrumental in perpetuating hierarchies of class, caste, religion, and nation and how women’s bodies and sexualities are controlled to mark the frontiers of these markers.
The intersection of gender and class in the television’s representation of ‘Indian’ women is a striking illumination of the same. While class discourses are significantly underscored in representation, the discourses on caste and its intersection with social class and its correlates remain hidden in the representational narratives, wherein the male protagonists are shown to belong predominantly to upper caste households.
Moreover, in a country like India, where Indian secularism has become and is increasingly becoming a sensitive issue, the idea of an ‘Indian woman’ always correlates to the idea or image of an ideal ‘Hindu woman’, which is promoted as the hegemonic narrative and social norm.
Also read: Analysing Television Serials Through The Feminist Lens Of Simone De Beauvoir
So why are viewers so deeply invested in such narratives? What power do such representations hold, which draws so many eyes and minds to the stories that it becomes a part of the viewers’ everyday lives, creating a sociality of their own? While some young adults mostly get hooked on these tropes for the romantic angle, a justification which defended the problematic trope of films like Kabir Singh, the responses of the previous generation are an interesting aspect of understanding the social impact of these dramas.
When I asked my mother (and some other relatives) the reason behind being emotionally invested in these serials, they reasoned with me that these stories are not very different from reality. There is a sense of empathy and relatability that most women feel with these narratives, wherein their journeys feel closer to home.
As for the men, their responses seem to reassert the representation of the male protagonists, normalising the gender binaries, casual sexism and economic and social division of labour as a fact of reality. This, in my opinion, is everything TV serials in the present day are doing wrong. Visual representation has enormous power to shape and/or break social thinking.
Rather than using this instrumental tool, which becomes a part of everyday lives, to disseminate strong narratives of gender equality and inclusion, TV serials tend to perpetuate the glamorised marginalisation of women, wrapped in the superficial clothing of self-dependent women, hidden under which is the problematic representation of class. And this furthers and legitimises the symbolic violence in the viewing of women from a particular social class.
Also read: Beintehaa And Qubool Hai Resort To Tired Stereotypes Of Muslim Women
Featured image source: Adweek
