There is no stronger contender for being booked under the Domestic Violence Act than satellite television and its errant serial producers who have been dishing out raw torture to hapless, many a time stunned, audiences.
And the quantum of torture that the new heroines of the post-saas bahu serials are suffering leaves you too shell shocked to even flip the channel with your remote. Why are Indian women being battered on the soap dish, that too with all punches pulled, is bewildering, especially after the perceived end of a highly regressive phase in Ekta’s time.
But nothing really has changed. It has only worsened through so called socially relevant shows. So, we have an Anandi who does well as a child bride and then gets dumped by her husband for another woman who he marries as Anandi waits with vacant eyes for an unknown number of episodes. Now, her husband’s other wife is pregnant but he is back trying to get close to Anandi! For now, the perpetual tears have been shifted into the eyes of the poor little pregnant lady!
But all these complications fade into insignificance once you have tryst with Life Ok’sSaubhagyawati Bhava. It is an unbelievable serial in the soap dish and if one were to institute a telly award for extreme torture, this one would win hands down.
Come to think of it, the wife who is married to an insane man is not human, so much she prefers to suffer! That too, in an age when all you need to do is get up and walk away. But no, she will not do this. Not even when she is being belted, beaten up, dragged by the hair, battered and raped. Not just that, he also burns her maternal house down and does pheras around it, making her swear she will always worship the ground he walks on! She does that too, before, of course, he hauls her over his shoulder and carries her away, again to the bedroom one presumes by her repeated shrieks!
This has been carrying on uninterrupted since December when the show and the channel were launched together. Sample this: Viraj picks up a cockroach from his wife’s shoulder, crushes it, puts it into his glass of milk and gulps it down. If this insane act was not bad enough, the dialogue that follows numbs you with its audacity: He tells his wife (incidentally this is the suhag raat) “jo bhi meri biwi ke badan ko chhooyega main use kha jaaoonga” (I will devour anybody who as much as inadvertently touches my wife)!
Apparently, TV monitors in the Ministry have told the producer of this serial to tone down the torture. But fact is, it has only gotten acute with impunity. You keep wondering why this kolaveri di in your living room but the answer evades you completely.
Actually the emotional atyachaar is all pervasive and no one can beat Iccha of Uttaran in this arena. The character is played to near perfection by Tina Dutta. She has been bearing the brunt both physically and mentally for the entire 832 episodes aired thus far. According to some bloggers there has been not a single episode when she has not deluged the screen with copious tears. Even when she is happy, they make her cry!
As for her tumultuous journey, sample this: First, her father was killed in a road accident when Iccha was hardly eight. Then she had to put up with all the atrocities meted out to her by the other lead Tapasya and her scheming nani. From replacing her in the mandap and getting married to her beau surreptitiously, to hiring a goon to kill Iccha, Tapasya has been in full form. Iccha survives the incident but there is no stopping the pains she has to bear. She was harassed into marrying Vir’s (her love interest and only solace in the serial) drug addict and possessive brother Vansh who used to beat her, tried to rape and smother her. When they finally fell in love, enter Tapasya who killed Vansh and Iccha suddenly became a widow. After having to lead the life of a widow for some 30 odd episodes all the while pining for her lost love, she was united with Vir and the audience heaved a sigh of relief.
But the producers were not done yet. She had to live with another woman who was bearing Vir’s child and the trauma only multiplied when she was asked to leave the house. By this time even the audience had lost patience and after 25 episodes, Iccha was reunited with Vir. This time the protagonists swear they will never get separated. But the producer had a different plan. Iccha has a baby. Nani steals it. What follows is endless rona-dhona, domestic violence and some outsider posing to be her first husband Vansh, who also tries to rape her and gets killed in the process! Hapless viewers were wondering what next? So the director has the last spin — Iccha in jail. A leap of 20 years. And a daughter who speaks her mind and is a complete antithesis of her masochistic mother Ichha. Thank God for small mercies!
Source: The Sunday Pioneer, 20 March, 2012
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