Durga Bhat, second from right, knows all about
deference to mothers-in-law. (She lives with her own.) Such
relationships reign in soaps, like “Pavitra Rishta,” which the Bhats
watch together.
They are the law.
Soap operas dominate prime time here and the mother-in-law reigns in
almost all of them. However plucky the heroine or serpentine the plot,
every love story seems to circle back to marriage and the many relatives
who come with the words “I do.”
The extended family is still the bedrock of Indian society, where
modernization meets its match. Soap operas here are outlandish — some so
stylized and wildly melodramatic they verge on camp. But they are also
oddly prosaic; expressions of duty, deference and parental obligation
that inform everyday lives.
Television isn’t an insurrectionist force in India. It’s a relatively
young medium struggling to adapt to a vast viewing audience that
respects tradition and suspects change. Like many an Indian bride,
television here occasionally tests the boundaries but mostly finds its
way by following the rules and not making too many waves.
The rules can seem confounding to outsiders: India is a country where
female infanticide can be a soap opera plot point in prime time but
scenes of casual dating are taboo. In this realm it is the mother-in-law
who is the metronome of Indian family values, issuing orders, giving
advice and setting the rhythm of acceptable change.
Speed-clicking the remote after 8 p.m. is like watching a PowerPoint
display of passion in hot pink, glimmering tears and the occasional
stinging slap across the face. Sweet, noble Sandhya dreams of entering
the Civil Service on “The Light and the Lamp Are We,” one of the
top-rated shows in India, and her handsome husband, a humble candy shop
owner, is all for it. But there’s an obstacle that drives the narrative:
Her mother-in-law is adamantly opposed.
The basic plot of “Child Bride” is evident from its title, and this soap
about an under-age wife is also a top-rated show — under-age marriage
is still prevalent enough to wedge its way into the family hour. More
shocking, perhaps, is that in more recent episodes the in-laws accept
the young heroine as their own and — brace for it — encourage her to
leave her husband (he’s a philanderer) and find a better match.
That may be a fantasy, but matriarchal interference (call it guidance)
is marriage Indian-style. When Indian women discuss the need to “adjust”
to matrimony, they don’t just mean adapting to a new husband. They mean
moving in with his parents, grandparents and siblings, a custom that is
still the norm, even in prosperous families. In a country with 1.2
billion people, about 148 million households have television and that
amounts to as many as 600 million viewers. In the slums of Mumbai even
sections without running water sport satellite dishes on corrugated
roofs. Almost everywhere, Indians gather in front of the family
television and the mother-in-law controls the remote.
“Women like to see their favorite characters express their own feelings,
so the mother-in-law identifies with the mother-in-law, the
daughter-in-law with the daughter-in-law,” is how Ekta Kapoor explains
soap opera transference. Ms. Kapoor, a 37-year-old television and film
producer who currently has five shows on the air, became queen of the
Indian soap world with her breakthrough series, “The Mother-in-Law Was
Once a Daughter-in-Law, Too,”one of the all-time hits of Indian
television that ran from 2000 to 2008.
Male children are favored in Indian society, and wives join the
husband’s family at the low end of the pecking order, often relegated to
kitchen drudge work while the mother-in-law rules over the
grandchildren. “We live with our parents until we are married, then we
live with someone else’s parents,” Ms. Kapoor said. “There is pressure
to give everything to the son. It’s a source of conflict in so many
homes.” (Ms. Kapoor, the daughter of well-known actors, is single and
owns her own house but lives with her parents in their home anyway.)
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