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As Indian TV serials finally get away from kitchen politics to tell stories set in real social milieus, Gajra Kottary, writer of the hugely popular Balika Vadhu, points out what it takes to make a serial about a serious social issue like child marriage click with rural and urban audiences
When Astiva – Ek Prem Kahani wound up in 2005 after a three-and-a-half-year run marked by both critical and audience acclaim, my co-writer Purnendu Shekhar and I wondered if we would ever get an opportunity to explore another such unusual subject in a way that portrayed the subtleties and nuances of the human drama. Astitva’s main character was a woman of 34 whose career as a doctor took precedence over her personal life and who eventually married a man 10 years younger than her. Fortunately for us, the opportunity did come again when the nascent channel Colors approved Purnendu’s concept for Balika Vadhu in 2007. Both the subject and later its treatment were very different from the prevailing trend of serials focusing on petty kitchen politics with characters who were starkly black or white and far removed from relatable emotions and drama. To be honest, when I began working on fleshing out the story and readying the actual episodic scripts for the July 2008 launch of both the channel as well as the serial, I did not anticipate that Balika Vadhu would create the kind of history it did. The huge wave of positive audience reaction brought with it the daunting realisation that in every episode and virtually every day up to the time the serial lasted, we would have to live up to the quality of drama and emotion that people had come to expect from us. Being responsible for the serial’s story development, I also realised that I could view the success and appeal of the show as a wonderful and ready platform to take ethical and moral positions on certain issues that were both specifically rural, since that was the milieu of the serial, and universal. We didn’t start out by thinking that ‘we must speak out on this issue’; our job as storytellers is to get the message across in an entertaining way and let the audience draw the right conclusions. Child marriages are not the norm, not even in rural India, but even if you don’t get your child married off early, there are certain other biases against the girl-child, and in the serial many of these biases have been addressed. Only the audience has to read between the lines about the intent, which they have been loyally and intelligently doing. I think that by now the serial has long since gone beyond its 12-year-old protagonist pulling at audience heartstrings with her innocent smiles and her heart-wrenching tears. The child-bride is now in a household where there is a story and an issue to be dealt with in every nook and corner. There is an old matriarch who, for want of any option, finds the safest directions for life in blindly holding on to tradition and gender biases. Then there is a teenage bride who is married to a man old enough to be her father, and who she is slowly and painfully trying to humanise despite her hurt with her parents and society at large for having been sold due to poverty. There is the ever submissive oldest bahu, who despite being directly in the line of fire from the old crone, does not take out her frustration on her child-like daughter-in-law, but chooses to be her mother figure instead. And then there is a teenaged widow, singed by both tragedy and scandal, who is trying to pick up the pieces of her life again. But beyond the stories of this household, today Balika Vadhu has also gone on to capture the life and times of contemporary rural India in an entertaining manner which would have been unheard of on Indian television before this serial. In rural areas I think this is the reason for its success -- the fact that finally someone is making a serial on their lives. The characters in the serial resonate with a rural audience. We have recently portrayed in the story the angle of farmer debts and the stranglehold of moneylenders. At the same time we have also touched upon universal themes like the vulnerability of the teenage child to bad company and subsequently to vices like stealing, gambling, smoking etc. Balika Vadhu’s success in urban areas I would attribute to audience fatigue with the pointless serials of the past few years that are high on melodrama and low on real emotions. After Balika Vadhu, a whole rash of social message serials happened. I do tend to agree with criticism that many serials on various serious social issues such as trafficking, autism, foeticide etc “go through so many hoops that you would be hard put to recognise the original intent”, as one critic put it. In that sense, I think it is better to make pointless dramas with conviction than pretend to do something meaningful without really believing in it. When social messaging is just a convenient take-off point people ultimately see through that and reject the serial. I can vouch for the fact that Balika Vadhu is not like that. Balika Vadhu is an extremely well-packaged and good-looking show, and no apologies for the same. So what if some people want to watch it for the clothes and jewellery that the women are wearing? That’s a part of life too. As for those who have recently accused us of glorifying child marriage, I would like them to give us one example of anyone who has married off their child after being influenced by the serial. On the contrary, I can give scores of examples of people living in the urban slums of Delhi, who after watching Balika Vadhu have postponed sending away their young daughters to their sasuraal, though they obviously can’t undo the child-weddings that have taken place. Colors has done several roadshows in the interiors of Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Haryana to get audience reactions. Viewers have also written in to us. Many have said that they have postponed the gauna of their children (the gauna is the ceremony in which a married daughter is sent to her in-laws’ home) after seeing Balika Vadhu. I don’t think any of those who have actually watched Balika Vadhu and felt Anandi’s pain at not being allowed to study, being humiliated for her parents’ poverty and been discriminated against at every twist and turn in her sasuraal, would want to put their daughters through the same fate just because Avika as Anandi happens to look cute and appealing as a child-bride. So I think that we have highlighted rather than glorified the evil of child marriage and a robbed childhood -- only we have done so in an extremely colourful and entertaining manner. That, I dare say, is the very reason why although the subject of child marriage has been dealt with in serials and documentaries earlier, none of them have been as popular and watched as this serial. At the end of the day we at Balika Vadhu are telling a story in a very visual and a highly competitive medium, so we have to be extremely entertaining and we are not apologetic about that. Every single member of the writing team of Balika Vadhu -- beyond the story department too – has their heart in the right place, from our screenplay writer Rajesh Dubey to our dialogue writers Usha Dixit and Raghuveer Shekhavat. The channel Colors is initiating many serials based on social issues, and I think it is making a conscious effort to stimulate audiences to think and not switch off their minds when they switch off their television sets. The success of Balika Vadhu has emboldened them to do so; having seen the positive response, they have decided to give audiences more of the same. Apart from taking the right stand on various issues, we at Balika Vadhu are conscious of the fact that we are not making a documentary film nor publishing a research piece on the social evils of India. We are telling stories about them that must keep people entertained even while they are being educated. InfoChange News & Features, August 2009 |
