Nivedita Basu: Women characters on TV have always been progressive!

While there is a general perception that women characters on TV are regressive, producer Nivedita Basu disagrees. She says that right since she started working for the small screen, she has seen powerful women characters.

“I think women's roles on TV started evolving since when I started working in television in 2000. I still remember how progressive Tulsi and Parvati used to be. In fact, I used to face problem with the male actors who thought they were not doing much in shows,” she says.

She adds, “Women have been progressive since time immemorial. It’s just that now women are walking out of marriages and are having a life of their own, and this is now slowly growing to be accepted by the audience, like we saw in Anupamaa. A man can go and do wrong and a woman still accepts and makes the family work; this was unfair earlier and now it is showed in a positive light.”

Ask her which TV show glorifies women empowerment the most today, and she says, “For me even Tulsi, Parvati and Prerana were progressive but in today’s day and time, I see Anupamaa and Bhabiji Ghar Par Hai being progressive shows, where women have gone ahead. There are a lot of Sony TV shows where women are shown to be powerful like women becoming an athlete, a police officer. So gone are the days when women were subjected to household torture and had to live a life of simplicity and not having an ambition.”

She adds, “Having made those landmarks in 2000 and now that we see some TV shows doing well, it feels great that television hasn’t gone. People said that TV was short lived as OTT has come but that hasn’t happened.”