Looking back on the 'K' women
8 March 2010
The unprecedented success of Ekta Kapoor's magnum opus set a new trend. Outspoken, unapologetic, unmarried, ruthless and rich, she is the modern-day businesswoman who is nothing like the characters she so mercilessly inflicted upon us. Smriti Irani, who played the lead role, has not done too badly. Her pious screen persona gave her an easy and natural entry into the boys' club world of politics. The story of these two women is a peculiar poser for the ideology of feminism, writes shoma a chatterji
IN the 21st century, one would have expected women characters to be more progressively depicted than they used to be, 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 born out of wedlock, illicit relationships at times bordering on incest, not to forget the focus on beauty, tons of gold and stone-crusted jewellery, faces made up so heavily that all the women begin to look similar, creating what Uma Chakrabarti terms "the homogenous woman".
Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi that began in 2000 turned the clock back on time and tradition. It introduced women characters within a large extended family. The women were pretty, wore gorgeous outfits and allowed the men in the family to take on their battles. Tulsi, the daughter-in-law of the family who took a strong stand, including shooting down her own son (Mother India?) had a meek daughter unprepared to fight her own battles. This serial played the adoption ticket. Tulsi gave away her first son to the brother-in-law when the little boy was a year old. But after the adoptive parents, Arati and Kiran, take the child legally with them, Tulsi promptly files a case of kidnapping against the very couple she gave her son away to.
Audience-identification with Tulsi was so strong that soon after the serial began the TV channel was flooded with letters saying that the character of Tulsi, Mihir's wife in the serial, was too docile. She was reinvented as the modern bahu who spoke up for her rights. When Tulsi "died" in June 2007, seven years after she began her long journey, a middle-aged housewife of an relatively affluent Patna family, with three growing children, committed suicide the night the episode showing Tulsi's "death" was telecast! It was later discovered that like her husband Mihir, Tulsi had not really "died" but was resurrected for the sake of the script and replaced by Gautami Ram after "plastic surgery".
Tulsi, aka Smriti Irani, leveraged her image to become a political leader and gave up the serial to set up her own production house. The concept of Kyonki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi is of a strong lady coming into a family where most of its members do not take to this rise in her status quo. She wins them over. She withstands her husband's infidelity and builds the family. The serial is a classic experiment with the time machine, with double the time having passed by a full generation in the space between one episode and the next. The house remained the same (both inside and out), the ladies looked as beautiful as ever, the cars did not change, and they never discussed anything political or global that you could identify as having changed over this long span. The grandmother became a great-granny setting new records for longevity.
The unprecedented success of the serial set a new trend. Every channel flooded the small screen with serials whose names were giveaways of this fanatic obsession for the ideal Indian bahu. Kalash, Shagun, Dulhan, Bahuraniyan, Mehendi Tere Naam Ki, Shehnai, Kabhi Sautan Kabhi Saheli, Ghar Ek Mandir, Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki, were some. This underscores a conscious resurgence and upholding of the sati-savitri mode perpetuated by mainstream cinema. The alphabet "K" was no longer the logo for serials projecting reactionary and patriarchal stereotypes of women where the deviant female is evil and the conforming woman is ideal. The "evil" woman was as much a stereotype as the good one. There were hardly any gray areas between these polarities.
Humiliation and rape featured in almost every soap succeeding the "K" variety. In Betiyaan, the father treated his daughters like dirt while he pampered his son. In Kasamh Se, the sister spiked her brother-in-law's drink, went to bed with him, got pregnant and tried to drive his wife (who was her sister) out of his life so that she could move in with him. In Karam Apna Apna, the rich family schemed to get their son married to a poor friend's daughter instead of the woman he loved because a guru said that the son's first wife would die in a few months. So, a poor girl was placed on death row on an astrologer's advice rooted neither in science nor in logic. In one soap after another, men, married or not, were chasing several women. Extramarital affairs were so common that they became more acceptable than aberrations. In Saat Phere, one character was so fond of his maid that he began an affair with her when his wife got pregnant.
"This kind of content is not suitable for family viewing," says Pratibha Naithani, a lecturer in a Mumbai college. She filed a Public Interest Litigation in Bombay High Court in 2004. In response to her petition, the court began an inquiry into the details on the self-regulatory rules that channels follow and how effective they have been in curbing the menace of adult content on television. In August 2006, the court directed all channels to air only universally certified films, film trailers and music videos. However, Nathani insists that channels continue to telecast uncensored content. Most shows on general entertainment channels, insists Nathani, have adult themes and/or are meant for adult viewing. Therefore, under the Cinematograph Act and the Information and Broadcasting Ministry's programming and advertising code, they should seek the Censor Board's certification before they are aired. The court has asked the Censor Board to look into the matter and set up a body to regulate television content.
Nathani's contention is that when there is a law, it should be enforced. "The law is very clear. Be it films, music videos, trailers, promos or drama (serials), they can be beamed on television only if they are suitable for universal viewing. Since pre-censorship for soaps and serials is not possible, I feel that if I am offended by certain content there should be a body I can approach to lodge my complaint and the body should have punitive powers to take action against the erring entity." K-serials and their clones wearied a large section of its viewers. But there were a dozen more to replace them. Single women are conspicuous by their absence except as gold-digging divorcees or old dames. Professional women are given lip service but are made to fall in love to either marginalise or forget their career aspirations.
In the creation of the archaic K serials, a modern-day businesswoman has been born who is nothing like the characters she so mercilessly inflicted upon us. Ekta Kapoor is outspoken, unapologetic, unmarried, ruthless and rich. She is impeccably dressed in business suits and has never been seen in a sari, unlike her serial women. Kapoor's Balaji Films is valued at a solid Rs 230 crore. It trades on the stock market and remains one of entertainment television's most wooed content houses. Smriti Irani who played Tulsi has not done too badly. Her pious screen persona gave her an easy and natural entry into the boys' club world of politics.
The story of these two women is a peculiar poser for the ideology of feminism. A retrograde role model has made their personal empowerment possible. It is a pointer to the frightening extremes that define all women in our popular culture. The Tulsi phenomenon of freedom applies even to women who seek their "liberation" through personalities that are the exact opposite of her sari-clad conservatism. These K-women, their descendants and distanced cousins, are asexual, angelic, self-sacrificing and stoic. They slither across the small screen with their sexuality. They are mostly crass, loud and unabashedly ambitious.
Saas-bahu soaps are pass. Reality shows like Aap Ki Kacheri are banking on awareness of women's rights and offering simple solutions to complex domestic problems. Each serial is rooted in a specific cause towards the social and legal uplift of the girl-child. Na Aana Is Desh Laado is about infanticide. Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Hi Kijo is about Lali, who belongs to a family that is low caste and desperately poor and kills rats for a living. Balika Vadhu is about child marriage which touches upon the heart-rending tragedy of child-widows and on the complete subservience of women in extended, feudal families. The message – of fighting child marriage — gets diffused in the maze of the extremely patriarchal backdrop where the cause takes a bad beating when one looks closely at the content. The tide seems to have changed. But the titles, the setting, the social relationships and the ambience of these serials are so ambiguous that they make one question the integrity of the very causes they promote. They are rooted in the total submissiveness of females in the family. One wonders where the final awareness will come and when. In Agle Janam Mohe Bitiya Hi Kijo, girl-brides are killed with impunity, the murders passed off as suicides. Lali's angry questions about the sudden death of her best friend just before her gauna are hushed up.
Our notions of gender equality and modernity are so confused that we treat both Tulsi and Rakhi Sawant with overawed fascination. In televised depictions, we embrace puritanical virtue and sensuality with the same confused enthusiasm. The question is: how long do we have to wait for television to hold up a mirror to us instead of forcing us to look at unrealistic and exaggerated images of a conformist and convenient brand of "femininity" being spouted forth every day, reinforcing and perpetuating stereotypical, onscreen images of women created by real and successful women?
Setting the trend
EKTA Kapoor changed the storylines dramatically. She revolutionised(?) television with Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii, Kasautii Zindagi Kay's spinning around one female protagonist, which went on and on. Her serials drew high TRP ratings. Others toed her line. Sinndoor Tere Naam Ka, Ghar Ki Laxmi Betiyaan, Saat Phere, Mamta, and Banoo Mein Teri Dulhan are examples. It was a personal choice in an ambience of the remote control when one could easily surf another channel if one did not like what one was watching. But a large segment of urban women found these regressive. When the saas-bahu sagas declined in ratings, Kapoor rolled out new recipes; Cinderella stories interspersed with Mills & Boon romance — Kahiin To Hoga, Kyaa Hoga Nimmo Ka, Karam Apna Apna, Kasamh Se and so on.
Dropping ratios
ACCORDING to data gathered by Action Aid from interviews with a representative sample of over 6,000 households, sex ratios have dropped in four out of five districts since the 2001 census. In Punjab, among the upper caste Jat Sikh community, just 500 girls were found for every 1,000 boys in 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. "The squeeze on family size is fuelling the trend of 'disappearing' daughters. For households expressing preference for one child only, they want to make sure this is a son," says ActionAid researcher Jyoti Sapru.
The study was supported by the International Development Research Centre, Canada. The advisory board comprised sociologists and demographers from Jawaharlal University, Delhi University and the Centre for Women Development Studies.
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