The National, Article On Punar Vivah:

Indian TV braches out with raunchy subject matter

"There is a whole new movement towards looking at couples, their emotions and intimacies, at conjugal sex and at individual relationships," says the television critic Shailaja Bajpai. "This reflects what is happening in society, how people are living in nuclear families now rather than joint ones."

The findings of a census last month showed a dramatic change from just a generation ago when the joint family was the norm. Seventy per cent of households in India consist of only one couple.

Remarriage is another taboo subject that, due to divorce being on the rise in India, is beginning to be featured on a serial called Punar Vivah on Zee TV.

The protagonists are a divorcee and a widower who each decide to remarry for the sake of their children. The soap then examines how they each deal with the complexities of their situation as they go through life.

Having acknowledged these attempts by television producers to explore new subjects, Bajpai adds a caveat: "Yes, some of it is very experimental but in a very middle-class sort of way," she says. "So the setting is invariably marital, never premarital or to do with infidelity, and the characters are always respectable middle-class people."

This is perhaps inevitable, given that the vast majority of Indian serial viewers are middle-class and lower-middle-class women. However, the sensibilities of this demographic are also changing dramatically.

"Viewers are prepared to have fixed ideas challenged and to be shocked, largely as a result of hugely popular reality shows which have pushed the limits of what is acceptable," says the media analyst Satish Jacob.

On these programmes, boyfriends "set up" their girlfriends to see if they are cheating on them in Emotional Atyachar (based on the American show Cheaters); people misbehave with abandon on Big Boss; and very ordinary folk confess to corruption, embezzlement, adultery, threesomes with prostitutes, neglect of their children and parents and the betrayal of relatives and friends on Sach Ka Saamna (based on the American show Moment of Truth).

"I think the popularity of reality shows and these new soaps is a backlash against the immature, juvenile stuff that Bollywood dishes out, as though we can't cope with the dark, complicated things that happen in real life," said a New Delhi soap addict and schoolteacher named Jyoti Anand. "People recognise themselves in these shows and that makes it gripping."

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