‘We Are Like That Only’: Prime Time Family Melodramas on Indian Television

Abstract

This chapter focuses on prime time family melodramas on Indian television that draw on several sources, both foreign and indigenous. The chapter primarily will examine what is distinctively and uniquely Indianized about these melodramas. They have the largest audience share among all genres of programming, and their popularity — despite their ‘indulgence of strong emotionalism, moral polarization and schematization; extreme states of being, situations, action; overt villainy, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue; inflated and extravagant expression; dark plottings, suspense, breathtaking peripety ….’ (Brooks, 1976, pp. 11–12) — baffles their critics. When no answer seems suitable to explain their continuing popularity, one has only to look at their uniquely Indian flavor to know why, and respond because ‘we are like that only …’. I will begin with a brief history of Indian television, in order to set the context, and then move on to a discussion of India as currently one of the largest and most complex television markets the world. The analysis that follows delineates and explores the particularly Indian qualities in Indian prime time family melodramas in the new millennium.