Balaji
Tele films’ soap opera Kyunki Saas Bhi
Kabhi Bahu Thi (Because the Mother-in-Law was Also Once a Daughter-in-Law,
hereafter Kyunki) had its debut on
Star Plus, a struggling Indian television channel in 2000. Weaving the narrative around the Virani family,
Kyunki used melodrama as a mode to
use the multiple plots and serial form to foreground idealized femininity
embodied in the figure of the daughter-in law Tulsi Virani. The trials and
tribulations of Tulsi as she traverses the expectations and responsibilities in
a joint familial set-up was seen as emblematic of the contradictions of
tradition and modernity that foreclosed any neat resolution.
The success
of Kyunki soon triggered off a series
of soap operas that were labelled as saas-bahu(mother-in-law-daughter-in-law
sagas) transforming the production house and television channel and making
their leading stars into household names. The title songs, opening montage and
aspirational lifestyle that marked Kyunki
were starkly different from the serials that were telecast till then,
especially by the State broadcaster Doordarshan.
The domestic success was replicated in other Asian countries such as Srilanka
and Afghanistan where Kyunki was
telecast as part of the dubbed foreign programmes in Sinhala channel Sirasa TV
and Dari language channel Tolo TV.
The
popularity of the Kyunki was such
that the onscreen death of the male character was mourned by the viewers andfan protests marches were organized forcing the production company to rescript
and incorporate the character back into the narrative. Kyunki was telecast till 2008, a closure that was contested by the
producer, leading to legal adjudication between the producer and the channel. Melodrama
seemed to have been an intrinsic factor that played out even in the production
of Kyunki when one of the actors
filed a defamation suit against the producer Ekta kapur and the production
house for non-payment of dues and disallowing him to take up other projects.
The actress who enacted the role of
Tulsi Virani was Smriti Irani, a model who rose to prominence after Kyunki. Her rise to fame was such that
Bharatiya Janatha Party, a Hindu Right wing political party nominated her to
the Indian Parliament in 2014 and she is currently the Minister of Human
Resources Development. While entry of actors from film and television was not
new in Indian politics, what was in fact new about Smriti Irani’s political
entry is the way it was mediated through her role as Tulsi Virani. For
instance, being an elected democracy, the educational qualifications of the
ministers were not always a point of contestation in India. But with Smriti
Irani taking oath as the Minister, one of the first questions raised against
her was her lack of educational qualifications. Irani’s reply to the press that
she had a degree from Yale University led to a flurry of memes and twitter
responses, linking her to Tulsi Virani, especially when it was proven that it
was a leadership programme that she had attended in Yale along with a few other
parliamentarians.
The
allegation of exaggeration and excess was linked to the form of soap opera and
the mode of melodrama that it employs. In fact, in all controversies that
Smriti Irani was later implicated in, the social media were quick to link her
television persona to be the reason why she cannot perceive the reality. For
instance, following the suicide of a research scholar in 2016, after his
rustication from the University for organizing events that questioned the
ideology of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, Smriti Irani gave a statement in
the Indian Parliament.
Irani’s speech seemed to draw on melodrama’s
familial focus as she went onto call the dead scholar “her child." She even defended
herself as a “mother” who could not harm her children and declared that she would rather behead herself than be sullied by such allegations.While her speech clearly
lacked focus on the issue at hand, and even deliberately misled the audiences,
what was striking in this instance was the way that melodrama’s “degraded”
status was soon pulled into the debates within the political sphere. This was in this meme that soon became viral over
social media. The larger takeaway from this however, is that melodrama is not
merely an industrial form but a mode of
imagining everday life, and its familial can be conveniently slotted even in
spheres such as electoral politics and protest movements.
No comments:
Post a Comment