The Hindu Business Line : Business soaps

The TV serials of today are more exciting and more opulent than they were two decades ago, depicting stories about people who are extraordinarily rich and successful, say Mukesh Williams and Rohit Wanchoo in Representing India ( www.oup.com). “It is interesting that the greatest expansion in the size of the Indian middle class - rising from 100 million to nearly 250 million people - has actually created this inordinate fascination with the life of millionaire business families.”

They note that, as a result, business families from different parts of the country provide on the small screen ‘the cultural context’ for ‘ritual practices, dance forms, and artistic preferences’ like ‘the Garba dance, the karva chauth ceremony, bhangra, Durga puja,’ and so on. “Modern enterprise and the family, the family enterprise and the joint family form the subject matter of these fairly successful serials,” write Williams and Wanchoo. “Although the daughter of a former matinee idol is responsible for producing many of these serials she can hardly be praised or blamed for this because she is probably producing them based on a business model and audience preferences.”

Diverse research well-presented.

D. Murali

http://BookPeek.blogspot.com

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