Defending the culture industry

On Shoma Munshi’s Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television

In 2000, the liberalisation process had firmly set in and the phase of opening the economy to transnational capital was nearing a decade of completion. The frugality and moderation that had forever dominated middle-class lives was gradually making way for a conspicuous culture of consumption. In this dynamic period of transition, industrial modernity was beginning to make inroads, creating in turn the demarcated concept of ‘free time’ and, subsequently, conditions for ‘culture’ to be industrially produced and supplied. In other words, the time was ripe for the constitution of a culture industry.

It was against this backdrop that a little-known company, Balaji Telefilms, began a soap opera in July of that year. This soap opera, Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi, along with another one by the same company, Kahaani Ghar Ghar Kii (introduced in October 2000) would become the longest running shows in the history of Indian television, continuing for eight years and dramatically altering the landscape of their medium by the time they ended. Shoma Munshi, an academic presently with the American University of Kuwait, closely examines the abovementioned soaps along with three others (Kasautii Zindagi Kay, Saat Phere and Bidaai) as a prism to view contemporary social issues and practices in her book, Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television.

Munshi contends that “most studies on television tend to privilege the act of consumption”, and through this book, she takes up the anthropological ‘other’ to explore how meanings take shape in the act of production. To her credit, Munshi’s fieldwork is extensive and rigorous, as she meets diverse people working in the industry, including production heads, actors and fashion designers.

Yet, even as you admire the hours of visible labour that make up the early sections, the shortcomings of the text also become glaringly apparent. The arguments lean too heavily on those she interviews, such as Ekta Kapoor and her mother Shobha, without being accompanied by cultural critique to complement them. In the introduction to the book, Munshi confesses she is a fan, and often in the book, she continues to write as one. A banal paragraph describing the expenses involved in producing the soap operas is one of the many examples which illustrate this fact:

The cost of each indoor set ranges from 2-4 crore. Costumes are also expensive affairs. Shobha Kapoor told me that “there are times when we spend anything upto Rs 1 crore on saris and lehengas for one show alone”. The jewelry and clothes worn by characters in all soaps are the most expensive designer ones in the market today… Each camera costs upto Rs 20 lakh and usually three or four cameras are used for shooting. The Jimmy Jib camera crane costs Rs 15 lakh. Recording equipment can cost anything between Rs 7-9 lakh. Shobha Kapoor also told me…

Munshi heaps detail upon detail, without any assessment of the sociological consequences of this phenomenon. Along with further fuelling consumerist tendencies, this exhibition of wealth also ends up creating a mimicking slave class – the tailors across the country who are ordered to imitate the designer wear on these soap operas cannot but create poor second-hand versions. These efforts, to appropriate and partially acquire, symbols of opulence in a desperately poor country are a poignant reminder of the distance of soap operas from social reality. Yet, Munshi elsewhere notes that the expensive sets and decor “are not only pleasurable to see but contributes to a sense of ‘Indian-ness’ (sic).”

For someone who has clearly spent long hours in the studios watching the processes of production unfold, it is a matter of great surprise that the text is densely populated with facile observations. This malaise reaches its apogee in a sub-section titled Differences with the West, which details the features that separate Indian soap productions from production houses abroad.

Second is the belief that Indians have in astrology, numerology and vaastu when it comes to their professional and personal lives…Third is a belief in the strength of prayers and visibility of statues and deities in all the offices of production houses. All the offices have statues of Hindu deities with offerings of fresh flowers and burning incense sticks…Fourth is the incredibly long working hours that production houses keep. I cannot speak with a 100 per cent certainty for production houses in the West, but…Fifth is the manner television soaps are watched in India…

At the crux of Munshi’s book is the refutation of the “general tendency” to dismiss constructions of femininity in soap operas as regressive. An entire chapter, Women and their Representations, is dedicated to this.  But the relationship between representation of these women and its relationship with patriarchal structures is never fully explored. Munshi rightly points out that “the scheming and manipulation (of negative female characters) constantly threatens the patriarchal status quo”, but fails to see that the predatory relationship between women is itself a product of oppression by patriarchal structures. In his essay Woman Versus Womanliness in India, Ashis Nandy has written, “The classic instance of the psychological of turning against the self by identifying with the aggressive male draws attention to the way some social institutions have made her a participant in her self-repudiation and intra-aggression.”

Nandy’s view reaches out at the source of perennial conflict that acts as engines of longevity and sustenance in soap operas. In this context, the male characters may seem peripheral or weak, but even in their absence; male authority defines the limit of play. This is amply clear as Munshi quotes the instance where two ‘strong’ lead characters, Tulsi and Parvati, are thrown out of the house by their husbands for perceived transgressions. In The Schema of Mass Culture, Theodor Adorno wrote about the effect of the ‘disruptions’ that Munshi suggests are sites of contestation. Adorno had written, “There are no longer any real conflicts to be seen. They are replaced by a surrogate of shocks and sensations which seem to erupt from without and generally have no real consequences, smoothly insinuating themselves into the episodic action.”  Munshi constantly speaks of the lead characters as “strong women” but does not engage with the fundamental reality that no conflict within these soaps is truly subversive, as it never succeeds in changing the male-dominated power structure.

Another argument running through the book is the social significance of the soaps representing dark-skinned women. Munshi’s argument is an essentialist one (and there are many others throughout the text) when she says that soaps such as Bidaai “convey the important message that dark skin is of little importance faced with the greater truth of true beauty and love in simple, elegant ways threaded through the soap’s narrative”.

It is no secret that soap productions often exacerbate the dark-skinned theme to create a binary opposition, one that is not supported by empirical evidence. A small fact, within the book, backs the analysis that the focus on the dark-skinned girl is an attempt to ‘otherize’ her existence. Parul Chauhan, who plays the dark-skinned girl in Bidaai admits that her “skin-colour is darkened to make her look three times as darker as she is in real life”. Munshi fails to see how, in many ways, soap operas end up perpetuating trends in society that they claim to reform.

Formalistic construction may be considered peripheral to academic discourses such as this book, but it is important in adding cohesion and potency to any argument. Munshi’s book, on the other hand, is marred by over-repetition of established facts and clogged with unnecessary detail. Information about how a director changed the role of a particular character in Bidaai is mentioned on page 88, and repeated on page 90; a lead character’s refashioning by Manish Malhotra in another soap is mentioned first on page 127, and again on page 128. Many more examples can be employed to illustrate this; the effect is of an inconsistent, muddled and erratic thesis.

But the larger failure of this book is that the arguments expounded in its pages are rarely taken beyond their narrow sphere and situated in the wider socio-political currents of the time. Munshi notes the absence of Muslims from these soaps; it is an observation that is frittered away, without linking it to the social trends towards majoritarianism under a right-wing, Hindu nationalist regime. Similarly, the point that tales in these soaps are predominantly about business empires is not taken further as a subtle legitimatisation of liberalisation, by giving industrial empires a benign, gentle face and shutting out space for thinking about alternative economic and political structures.

It is ludicrous that, in a book focused on production, Munshi never tracks the shift from relatively autonomous conditions under which serials spanning diverse themes such as Hum Log, Buniyaad and Nukkad were produced to the frenetic, detailed organisation under which production houses such as Balaji Telefilms function, creating what Adorno called ‘the magical repetition of industrial procedure in which the selfsame is reproduced through time’. This effect is felt not only in production, but also in consumption; in the standardization of culture and propagation of conformist tendencies, an aspect which Munshi ignores.

It may come as a disappointment that Prime Time Soap Operas is judged more on its omissions, but that is because Munshi fails to engage with the questions that are fundamental in charting a bold, new treatise. This insular approach has rather more in common with the soap operas she seeks to defend; as a cultural critique, Prime Time Soap Operas is deeply unconvincing and poorly argued.

This review appeared in the latest edition of Biblio: A Review of Books.

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