Women in Indian Television Soap Operas: A Continued Captivity in Stereotypes

The first decade of the twenty-first century saw on Indian television an unprecedented emergence of soap operas with various social underpinnings focusing on women. We argue that these ostensible changes in the status of women on Indian television rarely, if ever, move beyond mere tokenism. The inherently patriarchal representations of gender roles and projected value orientations still dominate Indian television. The purpose of the present study was to explore if these representations resonate with how Indian women conceptualize gender and the issues surrounding it, and investigate the variegated ramifications of these projected images. To this end, interviews were conducted with female viewers (N=20; young adults=10,middle adults=10). Using thematic analysis certain pervasive themes were delineated from the data; these include: prototypical depiction of women as 'good' versus 'bad', women as the subordinate sex, a virtual absence of proclivity for education and ambition, a working woman paradox, and skewed couple dynamics. The ways in which television contributes to the maintenance and reinforcement of these images were also probed. We posit that television as the most widely exploited means of entertainment subliminally imposes in the viewers' minds these regressive images of women. Since television and society mirror each other, increasing insight of the limitations of one is likely to facilitate desirable changes in the other.