Women,Then and Now

Savi and Priya are a far cry from the female leads on television in 2012,for whom the husband and the family,or as veteran television writer-director Vinta Nanda puts it,“sindoor and mangalsutra” come first. “The women characters on television today are willing to sacrifice everything for their husbands. They are painted either in black or white. In such a scenario,a Savi or Tara will never fit in,” says Nanda,who wrote the script for popular shows like Tara and Miilee,both of which had strong women in the lead.

With a predominantly joint family set-up,contemporary shows have taken the focus away from individualistic female leads who marked the early years of satellite television in India. If Ekta Kapoor and her Balaji Telefilms firmly planted the household and the housewives who ran it at the core of soap operas,politics,says Nanda,played a crucial role in influencing television content. “The entry of satellite television coincided with the economic liberalisation in the country. A large number of women took up jobs and became independent. It also changed the way politics functioned in the country. Vote bank politics divided voters on the basis of ethnicity,focusing on what is considered ‘tradition’ in each culture. Television picked that up,” she says. After a successful five-year run,Tara,the story of a woman in love with a married man,began getting negative feedback for the first time in 1997. The changing trends,says Nanda,also led to the under-representation of Muslims,a sizeable part of the Indian population,in Indian television. Apart from the iconic Gul Gulshan Gulfam on Doordarshan and Heena on Sony Television,very few serials have had Muslim protagonists.

Actors such as Navneet Nishan (Tara),Mandira Bedi (Shanti),Sandhya Mridul (Hu Bahu),who have played strong female leads in the earlier decades,admit that they don’t fit in the current television context. “In Hu Bahu (a serial that was aired on Sony in 2002),I played the role of twin sisters — one a housewife and mother and the other a successful single working professional in Bangkok — who swap their lives and loves. A show like that would be considered blasphemous today,” says Mridul,who believes that despite its lukewarm reception,Hu Bahu pushed the creative envelope.

Deeya Singh,who co-owns DJ’s Creative — a successful production house that made Banegi Apni Baat in the 1990s and has since produced Jassi Jaissi Koi Nahin,Left Right Left and Choti Bahu,has another take on the changing content on television. She believes that the foray of satellite television into small towns and villages changed the DNA of storytelling on TV. “Themes are now chosen accordingly and shows are made to keep everyone — from the grandmother to the bahu to the youngster of a household — engaged,” she says.

Target Rating Points (TRPs) too have contributed to the change. Driven by audience reaction,even serials which begin progressively,change tack and adopt tried-and-tested formulas. The one show which has unanimously impressed old-timers as well as the current crop of TV viewers is Balika Vadhu on Colors. “The show has largely remained true to its theme — the empowerment of the girl child. Human emotions drive the show and not TRPs,” Nanda says.