Nuanced family dramas from across the border break the monotony of Indian soap operas on television



What would John Oliver, the British comedian, make of Indian television soaps? Indian news channels, he observed, are “not the most relaxing way to watch television”, pointing out that, “The only thing this is good for is potentially putting your elderly viewers in the hospital.” Certainly, our soaps can put many of us in hospital too. Consider a scene last week from Beintehaa, a Muslim social that airs on Colors at prime-time. Nafisa, a young woman, discovers her husband’s adulterous relationship, the camera zooms in for a tight close-up of her face, and then starts circling and whirling around her like a dervish. The background music sounds like a noisy group of children clanging pots and pans in the pantry. As she vows revenge, her voice echoes and reverberates and echoes and reverberates. The scene lasted only a few minutes, but it was enough to nearly give this viewer a nervous breakdown.

For a decade-and-a-half since Ekta Kapoor’s game-changing Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi aired on Star Plus in 2000, Indian television soaps have relied on two tropes for depicting women: the pious lady, and her arch-enemy, the vamp. If you channel surf idly through Hindi General Entertainment Channels (GECs) on any day at any time slot, you will find she who stands in for the middle-class Indian woman— as scripted by these two archetypes— has not changed in the least. Not in her relationships, not in her dilemmas, nor even in her wardrobe. When these soaps first started, there was an effort to analyse their popularity despite their outlandish storytelling, tacky production, reductive depictions of women and the sheer drivel that it all amounted to. For some years now, lulled by inertia and used to top-notch foreign television and the pleasures of piracy, we have stopped asking this question: why can’t we have better television in India?

The question has resurfaced in the last few weeks, since the Zee network launched Zindagi, a channel that runs syndicated shows from Pakistan; and where else but on social media can we catch the pulse of this satellite invasion? On Quora last week, a user posted, ‘Why can’t Indians create intelligent and realistic TV series like Pakistan’s Zindagi Gulzar Hai?’ This refrain was echoed on Twitter: ‘Feeling so ashamed and disgusted after watching the class of shows in Indian television. Pakistan hats off’; ‘Pakistani TV soaps > Indian TV crap’. It wouldn’t be going too far to say we’ve got a bad case of neighbour envy. Our disbelief is as clear as our admiration. How do Pakistan show-makers get it right? Like Indian television, family dramas are their mainstay, but the treatment, storytelling and acting are vastly superior and far more progressive. This is not to say that all Pakistani shows are works of art. As is the nature of the medium, they have as many trashy shows teeming with stereotypes as any television industry anywhere in the world. At the same time, shows like Zindagi Gulzar Hai and Aunn Zara, which have found a huge fan following here through word-of-mouth, demonstrate that homegrown television made of authentic lives, language and idioms can be nuanced, thought provoking and pleasurable to watch.

Shailja Kejriwal is the programming head of Zee and the creative mind behind the idea of bringing Pakistani shows to India. She has spent many years steering the content of Indian television as the former creative head of Star Plus, and is in many ways the woman behind the genre of saas-bahu sagas. She now seems to have a Frankenstein relationship with the genre she helped spawn. “For the past few years, I have been questioning the shows we’re making and the negativity they underline. Someone always has to play the part of a home-wrecker, or create a misunderstanding, or eavesdrop, or plan a conspiracy. This is not what real lives are about.” She started viewing foreign content to see what others are doing with the medium; and while trawling through hours of Turkish, Korean, South African and Brazilian shows, she stumbled upon dramas from Pakistan, the easiest for Indians to connect with culturally.

There is also nostalgia. Most of us who have grown up in the 1980s and 90s and were exposed to fine drama from Pakistan like Dhoop Kinare, Ankahi and Tanhaiyyaan, to name just the cult classics, have a fond place in our hearts for such TV programmes.

Pakistan’s drama industry has had its share of hits and misses. Its renaissance period was the 1980s, followed by a listless decade. Around the time that Star Plus started in India, Pakistani audiences started obsessing with Indian TV soaps. Its drama industry all but gave up making shows of its own. Yet, there were many in Pakistan who fought for a revival of indigenous drama, and over the last five years, that industry has seen a reversal of fortunes.

It is useful to delve into how and why Pakistani show-makers get it right. Kejriwal points out two major differences between their culture and ours. The most important, according to her, is the Bollywood Bogey. “In Pakistan, the best talent of the country is drawn towards television, [since] the film industry has long been in a slump. In India, the writing talent all goes to the movies. Then, we make soaps with 1,000 episodes, so people must die and come back and all absurd things must happen; after all, writers do not have much choice. Pakistan is making finite dramas which are mostly adapted from Urdu novels.”

Television in India is a young medium that draws high revenues, but this also makes the industry risk-averse, churning out assembly-line shows that cater to mass audiences, inspired by the same ideals—of conforming to rather than subverting tradition, of perpetuating age-old notions of duty. An anonymous comment left on a website by someone who has worked in the industry offers an insight into what happens behind the scenes of TV shows in India. ‘The shows are produced at breakneck speed. I know at least 8 shows that air for an hour a day, 6 days a week, each of which is written the night before, shot in the morning, edited in the afternoon, and then aired that night. 6 days a week. For months on end. It’s intense.’ This may be a little exaggerated, most networks keep a buffer of two weeks in production, but it gives a sense of the factory-like environment that Indian television operates in. In comparison, drama shows in Pakistan go through rounds of rehearsals and readings for each actor, and months of preparation.

In an ironic reversal, mass audiences in Pakistan tend to spurn their own local dramas in favour of Indian soaps. Perhaps their own industry’s fare is a little too subtle for their appreciation. “The drama industry in Pakistan is greatly driven by the elite and intelligentsia who have travelled the world and are exposed to ideas, and cater to a minority audience,” explains Kerjiwal, “They see it as an expression of art and not [as a means of] making money.”

Samina Peerzada, a veteran actress from Pakistan who plays the mother of three daughters whose husband walks out on her for a male heir in Zindagi Gulzar Hai, talks to Open from Karachi and confirms Kejriwal’s assessment. “We have always specialised in slice-of- life drama,” she says, “The onslaught of Indian soaps veered us off course for a while, but there was a need to go back to our original stories that are backed by great writing, direction and acting.”

Peerzada’s character in that serial makes for an interesting study. She is a government school teacher who raises her well-educated daughters to be fiercely independent, but remains the peaceful conciliator between her children and the father who’d abandoned them in childhood. “I did not at first agree with the director [Sultana Siddiqui, the doyenne of Pakistan’s TV industry and founder of Hum TV]. I wanted my character to be bitter, angry. But she convinced me that there is a form of feminism in her forgiving her husband, in her resolve that her daughters will be brought up as important members of society. It’s an ode to the many women who stand by their families and are not counted for.” Without making much of a fuss, the show dwells on difficult themes like women’s rights and their place in society, and on class differences, all of it woven well into its plot.

Noman Ijaz, another senior actor who features in the show Noorpur Ki Rani, which has just started airing in India, says that these dramas are a window to Pakistani culture. “They show our daily lives, our happiness and sorrows. We have long been fascinated by life in India. Perhaps you will be [just] as welcoming of us.”

Other explanations abound of why Pakistan does better TV. In a country where going out to malls and movie theatres, pubs and bars, is not always a safe option, and where many people stay home, television is sure to be taken seriously. Also, hint some, out of conflict is born good art. But that’s just speculation. More to the point is the question of whether Indian soap-makers will take inspiration from Pakistan’s creativity and break out of the mould. Indian television audiences may welcome it.