Engendering Familial Citizens: Serial-Viewing Among Middle- Class Women in Urban India
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WestminsterResearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch Engendering familial citizens: Serial-viewing among middle- class women in urban India Mahalakshmi Mahadevan School of Media, Arts and Design This is an electronic version of a PhD thesis awarded by the University of Westminster. © The Author, 2010. This is an exact reproduction of the paper copy held by the University of Westminster library. The WestminsterResearch online digital archive at the University of Westminster aims to make the research output of the University available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. Users are permitted to download and/or print one copy for non-commercial private study or research. Further distribution and any use of material from within this archive for profit-making enterprises or for commercial gain is strictly forbidden. Whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the URL of WestminsterResearch: (http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). In case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail [email protected] UNIVERSITY OF WESTMINSTER Engendering familial citizens Serial-viewing among middle-class women in urban India MAHALAKSHMI MAHADEVAN 7/12/2010 Submitted to the University of Westminster in partial fulfillment of the academic requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media and Communication. II ABSTRACT This thesis is a study of serial viewing among women in middle-families in two Indian cities carried out in 2007. It explores women’s engagement with a new brand of serial narratives that centralizes the traditional Hindu joint family and places women at the centre of the family as nurturer and custodian of traditional values. This return to the traditional, the thesis proposes, marks a new conjunctural moment in the evolution of Indian television. This new conjunctural moment, characterized by competitive attempts among private and transnational cable and satellite television to Indianize content, the unprecedented growth of vernacular television and consequently the national circulation of traditionally inflected serials, has come to represent the feminisation of television in India. The manner in which differentially located women engage with these narratives of idealized family and womanhood suggests certain specific gendered ways in which television mediates women’s discursive access to and performance within both family and civic space. This thesis argues that the feminisation of television in India helps extend the ideal of a familial womanhood on to the civic space, limiting women’s access to alternative, oppositional forms of civic belonging and citizenship. III ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis has been the result of the wisdom, belief and guidance of some outstanding faculty, intelligent peer and the love and support of family. This work began long before I embarked on the arduous and challenging task of ethnographically representing a people and a culture that I apparently already represent. It began with the staunch and tireless faith of one of the most erudite people I have known, my Late father N.B. Mahadevan Pillai. Without him and the memory of his powerful words, I would not have embarked on this challenging journey at a time of great personal loss. The passing of my father in 2005, in many ways, led me to explore the writing and research of a subject that was a defining part of my experiences of growing up in India. My urge to explore and understand the phenomenon of serial viewing wouldn’t have been possible without the generous PhD grant offered by the University of Westminster. My sincere gratitude to the University and to the examining panel for helping make this extraordinary academic journey possible. Most importantly, without the brilliant advice, friendship and extremely perspicacious critique of my supervisor Prof. David Gauntlett, it would have been impossible to complete this exploration. His qualities of kindness, understanding and above all, his ethic of hard work, were infectious and inspiring on many of those testing occasions when it seemed impossible to think through the complex life world of the open, honest people I worked with. My gratitude to my informants, the strong, intelligent mothers and wives, striving tirelessly to make life easy for their families and loved ones, is immeasurable. Their many ways of showing acceptance and love will hopefully reveal itself in the pages of this thesis – arguably the best way to respect their thoughts, beliefs and world view. IV CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................................. II Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... III Contents ......................................................................................................................................... IV 1. Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 1 2. Exploring gender through media consumption: Theory in context ................................ 7 Melodramatic pleasure and gendered spectatorship ............................................................ 10 Gender and hegemony……………………………………………………….…………………………………………….20 Indian Womanhood: A historical overview………………………………………………………….…………….37 3. The Feminisation of Television in India………………………………………………………………………53 Doordarshan and the rise of women-oriented programming……………………..………………55 The regionalization of serials: The case of Kerala……………………….……………….................59 The k-serial brand and the national presence of familial womanhood………………………..64 The shift to ‘romantic’ stories………………………………………………………………….….................68 The ‘romantic’ narrative on Malayalam satellite television………………………….................70 Brands and mergers: where the nation meets the region……………………………................71 Feminisation of television and pornographic desire: Locating the male audience……….74 4. Representing women on Indian television: Continuities and Disjunctures…………….…80 Sati as colonial female subject………………………………………………………………………………………….80 Nationalism, reform and representation of Hindu womanhood in cinema……………………….82 Womanhood, on national television……………………………………………………………………..............88 The liberal make-over and after……………………………………………………………………………………….92 K-serials and the hinduisation of femininity……………………………………………………………………..95 5. Talking television with middle-class families: Notes from the field…………………………104 Field as home, home as field…………………………………………………………………………………….104 The research frame…………………………………………………………………………...........................108 Class as constructing the field…………………………………………………………...........................110 Contextual narratives, contingent identities: ethnography in process………………………113 Multi-sited fieldwork as ethnographic triangulation………………………………………………….122 6. The Realism of melodrama: Re-imagining the family………………………………………………128 Melodrama and the location of the sacred………………………………………………………................129 Reclaiming the sacred: the role of the extra-marital plot…………………………………................131 The ‘real’ family………………………………………………………………………………………………………………134 V The moral ecology of melodrama……………………………………………………………………………………140 Melodrama and consumption…………………………………………………………………………………..…….145 The maternal plot……………………………………………………………………………………………………………149 7. The pedagogy and performance of serial-viewing…………………………………………………..155 Invisible pedagogies: serial texts and middle-class lives…………………………………………….157 Learning middle-class womanhood…………………………………………………………………………..163 Embodying disorder and order: kitty parties and karva chauths……………………………….182 8. Imagined daughters of Kerala………………………………………………………………………………….189 Television and the ideology of ‘modern gender’……………………………………………………………..192 Manasaputri: imagined daughters of Kerala……………………………………………………………………209 9. Conclusion: Serial-viewing and the constitution of familial citizens……………..………...225 BIBLIOGRAPHY……………………………………………………………………………………………..…………………237 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION SERIAL-VIEWING AMONG MIDDLE-CLASS WOMEN IN URBAN INDIA Soap Operas have never been so popular in the Indian sub-continent. From Afghanistan to Sri Lanka and China, soap operas produced for the Indian market are avidly watched in their many dubbed versions – in Sinhalese, Dari or Mandarin - a fact widely documented in the Indian media as the spread of India‘s ‗soft power‘1. For a decade since the latter half of the 1990s private and transnational broadcasting has flourished in India and programmes catering to women have been the principal drivers of a channel‘s popularity. Despite the recent spike in the popularity of reality shows based on music both nationally and in vernacular television, soap operas continue to re-invent their themes and retain mass appeal. When in late 2007, I set out for ethnographic fieldwork among middle class families in the capital city of Delhi in North India and in my home city of Kollam in the South Indian state of Kerala, I was hoping to trace new trajectories and sub-plots in what was already a well-established discursive link – the significant role that State sponsored television had played in the rise of Hindu nationalism in India through the broadcast of the mythological melodramas, Ramayan and Mahabharat. The open skies broadcast policy