Drawing room drama

TULSI is a bahu. Little known in the South, which has remained cold to her debut, but the new darling of television audiences in Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Delhi, and Mumbai. Her role is played with considerable finesse by newcomer Smriti Malhotra, who is so tall that she dwarfs Tulsi's namby-pamby and spineless husband, Mihir. Around her revolves a new serial that is claiming attention for several reasons. It is second only to "Kaun Banega Crorepati" in the television audience rating aggregate for nine cities, it is enabling Star Plus to successfully stretch the evening prime time to 11 p.m., it has wiped out all competition in this band, and it marks the instant success of an experiment with daily serials at night on this channel.

Why is "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi", with its programme ID of a bunch of household keys being passed from one set of female hands to another, such a hit? Its large joint family of wives, husbands and cousins constantly preparing for pujas and weddings reminds you of "Hum Aap Ke Hain Kaun".

It is an odd thing but, in 21st Century India, women - who make up the bulk of TV audiences - are hankering more than ever before for serials which revolve around family weddings, break-ups, and reunions. They want a blend of Indian family values, traditional settings, as well as predictable family conflicts which are successfully negotiated. Contrary to popular perception, satellite TV is not primarily celebrating so-called bold themes and female rebellion a la "Saans". It is turning increasingly to well made, extravagantly costumed family dramas where joint families laugh and cry together, and women draped in silks, sindoor and jewellery connive, suffer, endure and triumph.

The first flush of so-called bold serials - "Tara", "Swabhimaan", "Shanti" - were subconsciously emulating the success of "The Bold and the Beautiful" and "Santa Barbara". But that was five years or more ago and, increasingly, the demand is for something else. "Amaanat" on Zee and "Heena" on Sony have succeeded because the women in these demonstrate resilience and endurance. Earlier this year, Star TV did some qualitative market research. Interviewed in focus group discussions, women viewers said they wanted to see families preserved, not broken up, and the female capacity to endure celebrated, "Saans" notwithstanding. They wanted their husbands and mothers-in-law to watch with them the resolution of conflict in these serials. It also transpired that women control the TV remote in many middle class households.

Heena has just remarried after a tortuous marriage to a man who had not the slightest interest in her. Cashing in on its consistently high ratings, Sony has also begun "Shaheen", the tale of yet another newlywed, confronting the trauma of discovering that her new home is not what she imagined it would be.

Tomorrow Star Plus begins a saga which will air every night just before "Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi". Titled "Kahani Ghar Ghar Ki", this too promises to wallow in the joys and sorrows of a large family. Babuji and Maaji and their seven children from two wives. Later this coming week the same channel will begin "Kalash", woven around two sisters with a traditional family upbringing, a serial that promises more weddings and more break- ups.

One is tempted to ask, isn't this a regressive trend? Are women to do nothing but marry and then negotiate mothers-in-law and family crises? Are no other role models to be in the offing? Star TV's current programming chief hastens to suggest that it is not regressive and, that if you keep watching "Kyunki ..." you will find that it is eventually progressive because, as he puts it, Tulsi, the third generation bahu, sets the whole saas-bahu scenario right in a positive way. By the time that happens we will doubtless be well into the year 2001, but then that is the whole idea. Keep spinning it out while the audiences lap it up. In the intense battle for ratings, if you can follow up "KBC" with two daily crowd pullers, you are doing very well indeed , never mind what values are being propagated.

Last July when Star Plus took the plunge as a 100 per cent Hindi channel it shed Prannoy Roy and company, cast its lot with Amitabh Bachchan and "KBC", and has had reason to celebrate ever since. Its share of audience in cable and satellite homes between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. climbed between the end of June and the beginning of October from a little over one per cent to an average of 40 per cent! The South is succumbing more slowly, though. In Cochin and Chennai "Kyunki..." scores an audience rating of zero, in Bangalore and Hyderabad, it is beginning to get viewers. And while they watch "KBC" in all these four Southern cities, the first two are considerably less hooked on it than the latter two. Perhaps they prefer substitutes on the regional channels.

* * *

You are watching a wildlife documentary, with all the close up detail, and daily sequences of hunting, feeding, mating and nurturing that one has come to expect of these. It has been shot in Montana in the United States. The puzzling thing is - these prancing creatures are dinosaurs. Were there really BBC crews around 65 million years ago?

Last Sunday "Walking with Dinosaurs" on the Discovery Channel explored the mystique of dinosaurs that lived in the volcanic age. It was a documentary imbued with pathos and drama, recording the birth, growing up, mating, battling and death of these ungainly, yet fascinating, creatures. There was raw flesh, blood and gore, and the moving sight of a dead embryo within a broken egg. The drama built up until the deluge caused by a comet crashing into earth wiped out the entire population.

When Steven Spielberg made "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World", he built up an illusion and then sent you home shuddering with memories of it. But documentary film making is different. The BBC builds up an illusion in "Walking with Dinosaurs". And then it strips it down by showing how computers, paleontologists, researchers and animators laboured to create this illusion, in a follow up episode called "The Making of Walking with Dinosaurs". When there is no limit to resources, modern technology, human ingenuity and access to the latest scientific knowledge, you can actually bring dinosaurs to life. And their habitat, as it might have been. By locating it in the lava fields of Chile, a place on earth where there is no grass as was the case when these creatures lived. The first film is fascinating, the second more so. Eight paleontologists worked on these series. Whole teams tried to figure out from their bone structures how these creatures might have moved so that the moving animals are credible. You might say Speilberg did it all before. But nobody is looking for accuracy and veracity in a Hollywood blockbuster. In a documentary produced by the BBC and Discovery, they are.

SEVANTI NINAN

E-mail the writer at sevantininan@vsnl.com

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