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National Texts and Gendered Lives: An Ethnography of Television Viewers in a North Indian City Author(s): Purnima Mankekar Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Aug., 1993), pp. 543-563 Published by: on behalf of the Wiley American Anthropological Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/646641 Accessed: 08-05-2015 21:11 UTC

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national texts and gendered lives: an ethnography of television viewers in a North Indian city

PURNIMA MANKEKAR-Stanford University

Recent trends in anthropology reflect an increasing acknowledgment of the significance of mass media to processes of identity formation (see, for instance, Appadurai and Breckenridge 1988; Ivy 1988; Russell 1991; Traube 1989). In this article I analyze the ways in which men and women in New Delhi actively engage with and interpret Indian television, and I explore the place of their interpretations in their constitution as national and gendered subjects. Given the tendency of some scholars to depict audiences of mass media as passive consumers and, in the case of women who live in the "Third World," as helpless victims of a total izing patriarchal "system," my approach to popular culture and subjectivity represents important theoretical and

political gains. Studies attempting to link television with the construction of identity have tended to focus on

the effects of populartexts upon the lives of those who interactwith them. For instance, Modleski stresses the centrality of the pleasures of television's texts to the construction of femininity (1979, 1983). Similarly, Colin MacCabe has emphasized the various ways in which the "terrain of the

political is being redefined" by television in the establishment of "enormous machineries of desire" (1986, cited in Caughie 1986:165). Such studies have far-reaching implications for those of us concerned with the relations of power that suffuse everyday life and the constitution of

subjectivities. For when mass media such as television are treated as part of a whole range of cultural products, as texts to be "read" according to interpretive strategies, we see that literary conventions and forms have greater sociocultural significance than we might first suspect: analyses of mass media thus enable us to see how we are fashioned by our interactions with what we read, watch, and listen to.1

However, in the analysis that follows I extend these propositions by ethnographically examining viewers' variable and active interpretations of televisual texts. I hence highlight the fact that meaning is unstable and is frequently contested by viewers, historical subjects, living in particular discursive formations, rather than positioned by any single text.2 I go beyond approaches that focus exclusively on the implications of specific viewing conditions (for

example, Brunsdon 1984; Modleski 1979, 1983), on the construction of subject positions by televisual and cinematic texts (as in Lakshmi 1988; Mulvey 1989; Thomas 1985; Vasudevan 1989),3 or on the relationship between texts and the sociopolitical conjunctures in which they are embedded (Krishnan and Dighe 1990; Punwani 1988; Taylor 1989). The questions I raise in this article emerge from my understanding of the gaps in primarily textual or sociological

Recent anthropological research highlights the significance of mass media in the construction of identities. This article focuses on the ways in which men and women, located in specific sociocultural contexts, interpret entertainment serials shown on Indian television. It then proceeds to explore the place of the viewers' active engagement with television in terms of their constitution as national and

gendered subjects. [television audiences, subjectivity, gender, nationalism, India]

American Ethnologist 20(3):543-563. Copyright ? 1993, American Anthropological Association.

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analyses. What is the place of television in the construction of viewers as national and gendered subjects? How do audiences, themselves historically and spatially located, simultaneously "submit" to and "resist" the texts produced by a hegemonic state apparatus such as Indian television?4 By examining viewers' active interaction with television's texts, we can envision popular culture as a site of struggle and not simply of domination, as an "arena of consent and resistance... partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured" (Hall 1981:239).5

My analysis of television enables me to situate viewers in particular sociohistorical contexts, to demonstrate that subject positions vary according to the conjunctures in which viewers are interpellated,6 and to show how class, community, gender, age, and household position mediate people's interactions with televisual texts.7 Thus, while previous research on Indian television has dwelt on the political and cultural effects of texts (see, for instance, Krishnan 1990; Singhal and Rogers 1989), I have focused on the ways in which viewers interpret specific themes and images. Because I am interested in tracing connections between responses to television and the continuous constitution of national and gendered subjectivities, I situate viewers' interpretations in the context of life-narratives that those viewers constructed in conversations with me. I am concerned with relationships between the narratives of television and those that viewers weave of themselves, between popular culture and the viewers' perceptions of themselves as Indian men and women.

In what follows, I analyze the manner in which men and women living in New Delhi interpret serials on Indian television, in particular those reflecting and reconstructing discourses of gender and nationhood. This constellation of discourses is of crucial significance because the Indian state has attempted to use television to construct a pan-Indian culture (Krishnan 1990:Women's Studies supplement [WS]103). In particular, I examine the consequences of the state's projects of national integration and development for the reconstitution of notions of "Indian Woman- hood" predominant in popular discourse.8 "Indian Womanhood" is an indigenous symbolic construct that predates the contemporary nation-state. Although it became a major site of contention in colonial and nationalist discourses, in which women were often represented as icons or "carriers" of tradition (Mani 1987) and nation (Chakravarti 1989; Sangari and Vaid 1989), notions of Indian Womanhood, modified in the postcolonial context, continue to have profound significance for the construction of identity.

the historical and political context

In this section I outline the contexts in which television's discourses were produced and received by the people I worked with. I do so by delineating the historical and political specificity of television as a medium of mass communication and by analyzing the implications of the state's programming policies for the production of culture in postcolonial India. The notion of ethnographic context, usually conceived in terms of a "thick description" of "local communities," is hence expanded to include the broader political-economic conjuncture.9 Next, I sociologically locate the core of Indian television's target audience, the expanding middle class, and attempt to describe the immediate context in which the viewers I worked with interpreted their favorite serials: the city and neighborhoods in which they lived, their class

positions, and the household politics that framed their understandings. Television neither simply "reflects" nor "reinforces" discourses: it is, in and of itself, a "cultural

form" (Williams 1974) and must be analyzed as part of a larger discursive field.10 Outlining the

history of television in India enables us to better understand the politics of representation underlying constructions of gender and nationhood in a postcolonial context. Indian television

(officially and popularly known as Doordarshan) is state-owned and state-controlled. It was first introduced in September 1959 as an experimental service for schools and rural audiences ("rural" meaning villages in the immediate vicinity of New Delhi). The only station was the

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Delhi Kendra (Center), which broadcast programs for a couple of hours a day on one channel. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (under whose aegis television continues to function) next began expanding the reach of television: centers were set up in Bombay (1972), Srinagar (1973), Amritsar (1973), Calcutta (1975), Madras (1975), and Lucknow (1975). Concurrently, transmission times were lengthened, and the telecasting of entertainment pro- grams increased. But for the most part television was, and continues to be, primarily geared to what the Indian nation-state clearly sees as a major objective of mass media: the project of nation building (Joshi 1989). Thus, the majorthemes in mosttelevision today include communal

harmony and national integration (as in serials such as "Tamas" and "Sanjha Choola"), national

development (exemplified by the countless public information spots promoting family planning or public health education), the reconstruction of anticolonial movements (as with serials like "Kahan Gaye Woh Log"), and the need to improve the status of women (illustrated in serials like "Yugantar").

The Asian Games of 1982, when teams from different nations assembled in New Delhi for

sports events, functioned as a major public relations exercise for the Indian state, both within and outside the country. They marked a turning point in the history of Indian television. As Pendakur has pointed out, the state wanted to capitalize on the pomp and pageantry of the Games; to enable wide reception, it relaxed import restrictions not just on television sets for individuals but, more important, on television technology kits for manufacturers (1989a:182). Television sets appeared in countless homes across the country, and the skylines of Indian cities were soon filled with the scraggly silhouettes of antennas.

The setting up of low-power transmitters in various parts of the country to relay programs beamed from metropolitan centers by satellite dramatically increased both the reach of television and the hours of transmission. Today, over 75 percent of the population is "covered" by television.1' Further, whereas audiences in the early years could watch television for two hours in the evening, audiences in many parts of the country can now watch from 7:30 to 9:00 a.m., 2:00 to 3:00 p.m., and 5:30 to 11:00 p.m. on weekdays and from 9:00 a.m. to noon on Sundays on Channel 1, and from 7:30 to 10:00 p.m. on Channel 2.

Until the advent of commercial sponsorship in 1980, most programs were produced by employees of government-owned television centers. Media critics, producers, and indeed television officials often contended that the introduction of private production and sponsorship promoted artistic "freedom" and generated the financial resources required for the production of entertainment serials. At the same time, public discourse on television repeatedly emphasized that a poor country like India could not afford the luxury of "pure" entertainment, that what it needed, instead, were programs such as soap operas harnessed to the (modernist) project of national development (see, for example, Government of India 1985). In keeping with the Indian government's anti-West, pro-Third World stance, the source of Indian soaps was said to be not the United States but Mexico, where telenovelas supposedly entertain as well as educate people about the benefits of family planning, modern education, and the rights of women as citizens.12 From this paradigm of "social change through entertainment" was born the new, hybridized form of the Indian television serial.

Today, despite the fact that many serials are privately produced, state-appointed selection and screening committees play a powerful role in the formulation of television's discourses.13 Discourses about nation building and national integration are directly incorporated into and, in fact, underlie the structuring of transmissions. Prime-time segments (from 8:40 to 11:00 every evening and from 9:00 to noon on Sunday mornings) are all part of what is known as the "National Programme." The National Programme is beamed by satellite to small towns, district headquarters, and villages with electricity. About three-fourths of its programs are in Hindi; the remainder are in English. Variations exist only where regional protests have been vociferous: for example, in Tamil Nadu there is no Hindi news, and because attempts to dub Hindi serials

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in Tamil have failed, a relatively large number of locally produced serials are shown during prime-time. Very few entertainment programs (a maximum of two or three per week) are imported. Some local programs produced in metropolitan centers are in regional languages. But all programs seen during prime-time-when people are home from work-and an over- whelming majority of the serials are part of the National Programme. The National Programme is a major component of the effort to construct a pan-Indian "national culture," and at present, when relations between the national and the state governments are particularly turbulent, it is part of the center's attempt to exert hegemonic control over the regional governments.14

In this article I focus on teleserials shown during prime-time-that is, as part of the National Programme-from July 1990 through March 1991. A cross between American soap operas and popular Hindi films, they speak the "metalanguage" of the popular Hindi film (evident, for instance, in the types of sets, dialogue, costumes, and music used [Krishnan 1990:WS 104]), while they resemble soaps in terms of audience engagement and narrative structure: multiple plots, the deferment of narrative closure, and the build-up of suspense are important aspects of their narrative tone and texture. Further, like the audiences of American soaps, those of Indian serials deeply identify with characters on the screen; unlike their more distant (although still passionate) attachment to film heroes and heroines, viewers' regular and relatively extended interactions with television characters foster familiar, even intimate, relationships.15 However, because most serials are telecast in the evenings rather than the afternoons, they are targeted not exclusively at women or at people who stay at home but at families. The family, then, is the basic viewing unit, a fact evident from the design of advertisements and confirmed by my observations and by what I inferred from conversations with television officials and the directors of serials.16

Serials have ranged in genre from the mythological ("Ramayana" and "Mahabharata") and the epic ("The Sword of Tipu Sultan") to the comic ("Yeh Jo Hai Zindagi"). Many serials, such as "Hum Log" and "Buniyaad," resemble the Hindi film genre known as "the social" in their use of melodrama and social realism (cf. Chakravarty 1989; Vasudevan 1989), and in their focus on the destinies of families, neighborhoods, and communities as well as those of individuals.17 Most serials on Indian television have explicit "social messages," with themes related to family planning, national integration, and the status of women woven into the narratives. And at any given moment, more than half of the eight to ten serials shown per week during prime-time deal explicitly or implicitly with nationalist themes. Although the social messages woven into the narratives have varied according to political contingencies (such as particular national crises or the needs of a ruling party), an astonishing number continue to deal centrally with women's issues. More important, even where gender is not an overt theme, it features prominently as a critical subtext. In nationalist serials the nationalist metanarrative is reinforced by its appropria- tion of discourses on gender. In "Param Veer Chakra" and "The Sword of Tipu Sultan," for example, the male protagonists' relationships with women are constantly posed against their devotion to their country, and the female characters' attitudes and behavior complement or serve as a foil to the men's heroic patriotism.

From 1990 to 1992 I conducted numerous interviews with viewers living in two neighbor- hoods in New Delhi: Vikas Nagar and Basti.18 Working with urban women in multiethnic neighborhoods enabled me to see how reactions to nationalist discourses were mediated by the ways people negotiate and construct their identities in such contexts.19 Moreover, New Delhi was a particularly appropriate setting for the study of nationalism: the presence of the state is more overwhelming there than in any other Indian city I have known. The state is a major employer in New Delhi. The city's landscape is dotted with government buildings, government housing colonies, ministerial bungalows, and other reminders of the nation-state. And, like Washington, DC, New Delhi does not belong to a regional state; it therefore has no

regional roots of its own and its population is composed largely of migrants. People from Old

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Delhi characterize themselves as laid-back, courteous, and cultured in comparison with the

allegedly brash, rude, aggressive residents of New Delhi. Old Delhi, they say, has "tradition"; New Delhi is a place where everything is in disarray. New Delhi's identity ultimately issues from its role as the capital of the postcolonial nation-state. For all these reasons, it has the ambience of a quintessentially "national" city.

Nationalism has been characterized as a middle-class phenomenon (Chatterjee 1989), and the relationship between "middle-classness" and nationalism is a fundamental one.20 Personal observations and conversations with Doordarshan officials and media critics have led me to believe that the middle and lower middle classes form the core of the target audience for Indian television (as opposed to, say, popular Hindi films, which are aimed at all classes).21 The past two decades have witnessed a dramatic expansion of the Indian middle classes: they now constitute over 20 percent of the population. This demographic change has created an enormous market for consumer goods. The new middle classes that once invested in bicycles, transistor radios, scooters, and refrigerators now want to buy color television sets (Pendakur 1989a:186). Indeed, owning a color television is itself a mark of being middle class.

As mentioned above, the relaxation of restrictions on the import of television technology around the time of the Asian Games of 1982 promoted an enormous rise in the production and

purchase of television sets. This change in policy reflected a major shift in the allocation of financial and technical resources, from community-owned television sets in rural areas to those owned by urban middle-class and lower-middle-class households (Pendakur 1989a). Program- ming priorities changed accordingly, from the dissemination of development information to entertainment (although, as noted, sustained efforts are still made to weave social messages into serials). The expansion of television thus indicated the power of the growing middle classes (Krishnan 1990; Pendakur 1989b), a power also evidenced by the launching of color television in 1982, the introduction of advertisements and commercial sponsorship (whereby private companies finance the production of entertainment programs), and the subsequent estab- lishment of a second channel.22 Television's discourses are designed to draw these upwardly mobile classes-"captured" simultaneously as a market for consumer goods advertised by the sponsors of programs and as an audience for nationalistic serials-into the project of construct- ing a national culture.23

The interpretations provided by the lower middle and upwardly mobile working classes are also significant because of those groups' interstitial, comparatively fluid location. The people I worked with felt they were struggling to cross the threshold of "middle-classness." They were acutely aware of their vulnerable position, and the various ways in which that awareness surfaced in their self-presentation made it clear to me that financial insecurity was a major part of their discursive consciousness.24

Vikas Nagar is a lower-middle-class government "colony" that houses junior clerks and stenographers occupying the lowest rungs of the state bureaucracy. Each flat in Vikas Nagar consists of an 8' by 10' room, which functions as a living room by day and a bedroom by night, and an even tinier kitchen. Residents share common latrines and bathrooms. Basti was a village until the city of New Delhi engulfed it from all sides. Like many other "urban villages" forced to coexist with middle-class neighborhoods, Basti has "developed" unevenly. Pressure on land and housing has resulted in the sale of about one-fourth of the plots to middle-class people who have gone on to build new, relatively fancy homes with modern plumbing and other trappings of upward mobility. All the people I worked with lived in older, ramshackle houses. Much poorer than their middle-class neighbors, they all sublet tiny rooms within larger units. Yet most of them were somewhat upwardly mobile: while many of the older generation were employed as household help in adjacent upper-middle-class neighborhoods, most of the younger men and women worked on assembly lines in factories or as clerks in private corporations. Unlike upper-middle-class viewing groups, in which servants watch television with the rest of the

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household, these lower-middle-class and upwardly mobile working-class viewing groups, just a generation away from poverty, were fairly homogeneous in terms of class composition.

I see the household (loosely defined to include not just the extended family but, in many cases, neighbors and their children) as a politically, hence emotionally, charged context in which people watch television. Although I noticed few conflicts over which show should be watched (as mentioned above, most of the serials were telecast on one channel as part of the National Programme), age and gender influenced people's preferences. Women particularly enjoyed the serials, and even though all the men I met also watched the serials with great relish (and usually made no bones about it), they told me that they made it a point to watch the news. Indeed, watching the news was considered an adult, usually male, activity. Most schoolchildren I met would try to watch as many television programs as the demands of homework and the reprimands of parents would permit. Parents often tried to censor the films their children, particularly their young daughters, watched: they made sure the youngsters were asleep before the weekly late-night film, usually an imported one with relatively explicit "love scenes," came on.25

In general, gender, household position, and age were the crucial factors influencing viewers' styles of interaction with what they watched. Power relations within families were sometimes reflected in how people arranged themselves around the television set: the older generation (usually men but sometimes older women as well) would be seated on the few chairs; the children would squat on the floor. Very seldom did I see women, especially daughters-in-law, sitting with the rest of the family: not only was it considered inappropriate for them to sit with the men (particularly in North Indian families), but more important, they were the ones responsible for the housework.26 The men of the household were usually the most avid viewers because they could afford not to be distracted by household tasks, which kept the women busy in the evenings when dinner was being prepared and served or on Sunday mornings when the house had to be cleaned, clothes washed, and water buckets filled. Whi le the men and children

kept up a running commentary on the show, the women were usually silent, instead discussing it among themselves the next day.

One woman told me that she made up for all the evening hours she was unable to sit in front of the television set by insisting on watching the Sunday morning shows undisturbed. Another woman, much to the irritation of the rest of her family, kept her television set at its loudest so she could listen to the soundtrack over the din of her housework. These women were relatively successful in their attempts to gain some control of their time. But not all the women I worked with were in a position to be openly assertive: very often, the youngerwomen (daughters-in-law, in particular) would keep up with their favorite shows by listening to the soundtrack and by getting fleeting glimpses from the kitchen as they cooked or from the veranda as they washed clothes. But despite the fact that most of the women half-watched, half-listened while cooking, serving food, doing dishes, or sweeping the floor, they were nonetheless able to engage intimately with what they "viewed."

Most women I worked with did not have the luxury of sitting "glued to the television set"; the

following analyses are therefore predicated on the premise that notions of "viewing" have to

encompass more than the visual act of watching television. Further, the cultural and political significance of viewing has to be seen in terms of its restructuring of social relations within the

family. As Morley has pointed out, viewing has to be conceptualized simultaneously as a "ritual whose function is to structure domestic life and to provide a symbolic mode of participation in the national community" and as an "active mode of consumption" (1991:5). The processes of

engagement that I describe were, therefore, necessarily inflected by the fields of power in which

people watched television, for they watched not only in the setting of the household-that is, in the immediate context of the politics of the family27-but also in settings embedded in the

larger sociopolitical conjunctures of community and nation.

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What role did the viewers' intense engagement with television play in their constitution as national and gendered subjects? I spent a fair amount of time trying to get a sense of how they related what they watched to their own lives, and of how they identified with characters as their favorite narratives unfolded before their eyes. I will now address the viewers' interpretations of representations of "Indian Womanhood," the slippery presence of"oppositional" readings, and the significance of interpretive processes to the conceptualization of popular culture.

notions of Indian Womanhood

Discussions with viewers helped me obtain a glimpse of their engagement with the ideologies of nationalism and gender inscribed in everydaydiscourses on "appropriate behavior" for Indian women: on women's place in the family, their relationship with men, and, most powerfully, their duties to the nation.28 Creating a sort of double bind, the convergence of discourses of cultural nationalism and gender sometimes fostered particularly oppressive subject positions for women. It raised the expectations women had of themselves and, equally important, those their men had of them. This double bind was most obvious when their "womanhood" was seen to both contribute to and detract from their role as patriotic citizens.

Selapan and his wife, Padmini, came from Tamil Nadu. Selapan worked as a junior clerk with an army intelligence organization. Tall and broad-shouldered, he sported a bushy, somewhat theatrical, military moustache. He loved to talk and was one of the warmest, most articulate people I met. Like many South Indians raised in the North, Selapan spoke very filmi Hindustani (a somewhat melodramatic Hindustani imbibed from Hindi films).29 He often distressed me by passing rude comments about his wife in her presence. Yet I knew that he spent days and nights nursing her when she was sick (which was quite often). Padmini was tall and skinny. She was usually silent when her husband held forth, but when she and I were alone together, she unhesitatingly contradicted and sometimes belittled him. Selapan's favorite serial was "Param Veer Chakra": he felt it showed "real stories" of men who died for their country. Hence, he said, viewers could see what "real patriotism" (sacchi deshbhaktl) and sacrifice were all about.30 He continued: "Young people who see this program can know that instead of frittering their energies, they can do things that will prove they are worthy of the wombs of their mothers."

One morning soon after an episode of "Param Veer Chakra" had ended, I asked Selapan what he thought of the heroine's courage in persuading her reluctant husband to go to the battlefront on the morning after their wedding night. Selapan had been impressed by her. "But," he went on to say, "Indian women are not all like that. If all women were like that, no one would be able to look disrespectfully at India [koi bhi aankh utha kar dekh nahi payega] ." His statements reveal an elision, an imperceptible slide from "mother" to "motherland": women are "subjec- tified" as mothers and held responsible for inspiring their children to safeguard India's honor; at the same time, India is feminized as the mother and made the object of protectionist discourse.

How did these notions affect Selapan's behavior toward his wife? I found that he seemed to apply similarly exacting standards to her. In one episode of "Param Veer Chakra," the mother of the hero, Abdul Hamid, persuades his father to get him married by saying, "Put a ring through the bull's nose. That will prevent him from roaming around." I had been deeply offended by this metaphor and, while the episode was still on, asked both Selapan and Padmini (Padmini was sitting quietly after serving us tea) what they thought of it. Selapan replied that he agreed with Hamid's mother: "Women these days cling to their husbands' feet and don't allow them to go anywhere. My wife even stops me from going by bus these days, let alone allows me to go to war."31

I silently turned to Padmini, willing her to reply. She did not contradict her husband directly. Instead she pointed out that Hamid's wife, despite all her fears, had run after him to bid him

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farewell. "When he was so keen to go, what could she do? She had to submit to his wishes," she replied, her voice heavy with resignation. But both Abdul Hamid's mother and Selapan saw women (more specifically, wives) as sources of constraint: while she had implied that they helped rein in the restlessness of young men, Selapan seemed to feel that men had to curb their "courageous" impulses because of women's cowardly fears for their safety. In both cases, women were conceived as obstacles to masculine heroism.

Selapan felt that "Param Veer Chakra" might have a beneficial effect on women because after watching it, they might also become "brave" (bahadur) and encourage their husbands to fight and sacrifice for the country. "Don't you think there are already women who are brave, women who themselves do brave things?" I persisted. He replied that there were, only they were very rare. He gave an example of a soldier's wife in South Arcot whose husband had died in

Operation Bluestar (the Indian government's 1984 raid on the Golden Temple in Punjab). When the government organized a function to honor him and presented herwith a check, she returned it, saying that the glory her husband had earned defending his country was compensation enough for her. And what was more, he continued, she had insisted on wearing her mangalsutra (the necklace worn by some Hindu women that signifies their married, as opposed to single or widowed, status). According to Selapan, she had said, "My husband is not dead, he is a martyr [shaheed]." Selapan was so moved by this sentiment that he repeated the sentence at least three times. Then, after keeping quiet for a few seconds, he shook his head and said in a low voice, "Indian women are great."

I asked him if he blamed women for worrying about their husbands and sons going to war. When he replied that he would be proud to admit his son into the army, I turned to his wife and asked her what she thought of that. She smiled ruefully, put her son's head against her chest (he was sitting between his parents on the bed), and started to stroke his hair. For a minute she was silent. Then after pausing awhile, she turned to me and said: "He is my only child. How can I put him in the army?"

Selapan burst out laughing. "See!" he exclaimed genially. "See how cowardly [buzdil I she is! If all mothers start getting scared like this, who will protect the country?"

I felt horrible that I had exposed Padmini to her husband's derision. It was all right for men, whose position in society was relatively secure, to be "brave," I protested, but how could he blame women, who were so socially vulnerable, for being worried? Referring particularly to the plight of women whose husbands die in war, I asked if their fear was unfounded given the low status of widows in Indian society. In any case, I continued, was militant nationalism the

only context in which women could be courageous? Ignoring my second question, he replied that while it was true that widows had a hard time in India, if one conducted herself "properly" (sahi tarah), even criminals (goondas) would fold their hands and call her "sister" (behenji). Obviously the onus was on the widow to prove that she deserved respect!

I then asked him what he thought of television's depiction of Indian women in general. His answer, an anecdote, was only apparently off-track. He said that one day, while going somewhere by bus, he had seen a girl wearing a "very short" skirt. She was being teased by some men. "Now, how can you blame boys for teasing her?" he asked, continuing:

Being modern is all right, but there are some rules [niyam] in this culture. This is not the way Indian women should dress. ... Look at what happens with foreign women. They divorce five, six times. What is the meaning of marriage then? What happens to the children, to the family, then? If there is no family, where is society? Indian women have different rules.

He insisted that the most important "duty" (kartavya) of an Indian woman to her country was to protect her family and "see that it never falls apart."

"But what happens if the man is bad, if he ill-treats her?" I asked. "Should she still stay with him?"

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"Everything is in the wife's hands," he replied. "If she wants, she can save him, she can put him on the right path [sahi raaste parl. It is her responsibility to do so."

In Selapan's view, clearly, women's place in the nation is analogous to their place in the

family: it is their duty to protect and to sacrifice for the family. As with the family, so with the nation. But in this scheme women do more than play a supporting role: it falls to them to protect the integrity of family and nation and to do so by inspiring and, if necessary, inciting their men to fight for the motherland. And women alone have the strength (the shakti) to do so.32 Indeed, this is why only heroic sons can be "worthy of the wombs" of their mother/motherland.

This response has to be seen in light of the "mythicizing" of motherhood in nationalist

ideologies. Its continuing potency is evident in the prevalence in popular discourse of the notion of Bharat Mata (Mother India), which, being rooted in the Hindu concept of the Mother-God- dess, has created a space for notions of women's energy as active and heroic (Bagchi 1990:WS 69). Politicized by Hindu nationalists like Bankim Chandra, who thus forged one of the most

powerful icons of the nationalist struggle, this concept has been appropriated by mainstream nationalist ideology.33

The conception of Indian Womanhood in terms of heroic motherhood is evident both in

Selapan's discourse and in that of "Param Veer Chakra," which dwells on the motif of women

inspiring their sons to fight for the motherland. Nationalists during colonial rule spoke of how the mother(land) was ravished by the British, but Selapan and many other viewers I talked with

appeared to have picked up a major theme of "Param Veer Chakra," that of the mother(land) threatened by hostile neighbors. The purported heroism of the ideal Indian Woman (the bhartiya naari) is thus measured by her capacity to incite or inspire her chi Idren to fight for their country, and not simply by her ability to bear patriotic sons.

Discussions about popular female characters also revealed a fascinating convergence be- tween discourses of gender and those of nationalism. In July 1989 I witnessed a public controversy over the depiction of two mythological heroines on television, Sita of the "Ramay- ana" and Draupadi of the "Mahabharata." Everyone, from vegetable vendors and cab drivers to upper-class intellectuals who usually dismissed television serials, was discussing it. A leading newsmagazine ran a poll to ask which of the two better represented "the modern Indian Woman." Many comparisons and contrasts were drawn between Sita, who symbolizes devotion and patience, and Draupadi, noted for her intelligence and fiery strength. Historically, both Sita and Draupadi have served as symbols of Indian Womanhood (ideal types of the bhartiya naari). For instance, nationalist ideologues have appropriated both Draupadi's rage and Sita's resil- ience to encourage orthodox Hindu women to join anticolonial movements (Mankekar 1990). In 1989 the question on many people's lips was: which of the two is more pertinent to contemporary Indian Womanhood?

And so it came as no surprise when conversations about Sita and Draupadi led to discussions on Indian Womanhood. Many viewers, both men and women, had strong opinions on which of the two better represented Indian Womanhood. My conversations with women of different ages were particularly interesting because they illustrated how notions of Indian Womanhood were being reconstituted (rather than radically transformed) across generations. Uma Chandran lived in Vikas Nagar. Her father was a retired clerk, and her mother, Jayanthi, worked as a stenographer in a government department. Uma had just got a job as a secretary in a private corporation, where she felt out of place because most of the other employees came from much wealthier families. This sense of alienation did nothing to strengthen her fragile self-confidence. While my conversations with all others were in Hindi, she and I spoke English. heavily laced with Hindi.

One Sunday morning a couple of weeks after the "Mahabharata" had come to an end, Uma and I were sitting on her veranda. We had been shooed out of the inner room by her father, who wanted to watch the news. Uma talked of how, as a young woman from a poor family,

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she felt isolated by her wealthier colleagues. She felt she wasn't assertive enough. We soon began talking about the depiction of Sita in the television version of the "Ramayana." Uma had just started comparing Sita with Draupadi when her mother joined our conversation. This excerpt from the exchange between Uma and Jayanthi illustrates the change and continuity inherent in their notions of volition, suffering, and strength, and it clearly shows the intimate relationship between ideologies of cultural nationalism and those of gender:34

Uma: I liked Draupadi better than Sita. Sita was a complete wash-out.... Jayanthi: Why is that?! I liked Sita more. I liked her more because she did not have as much glamour. She was simple. You could see devotion [bhaktil more clearly in Sita. At every step. Uma: But why did she submit at every step [kyon dab jaati hail? Jayanthi: But this was not so in the case of Draupadi.... They did not show her with pativrata dharma [roughly translates, in this context, as "duties of a wife"].35 In this zamana [era] there is no pativrata dharma. There can't be as much as there was in Sita's time. There shouldn't be less. But people don't see the reality of that shakti [strength]. Uma, doubtfully: I don't know. Where will this shakti take us Indian women today? [She turns to me.] Aren't American women where they are today because they are more independent than we are?

According to Jayanthi, Sita was much stronger than Draupadi. Her strength, her "shakti," came from her capacity to suffer for her "pativrata dharma," that is, her duty toward her husband. But Uma disagreed. She felt that modern times required a shakti more akin to Draupadi's rage. And Indian women, she seemed to say, were essentially different from American women, who were more independent. Indeed, another young woman with whom I spoke went so far as to claim that Draupadi seemed "less Indian" than Sita: when I tried to probe her meaning, I discovered that she felt Draupadi was "Westernized" because the heroine questioned and challenged her elders on the propriety of their actions. Explicit contrasts between essential ized "Indian women" and "foreign women" thus reflect the ways in which cultural nationalism, through notions of what constitutes "Indian culture," circumscribes discourses on gender. Ideal Indian Womanhood is constructed in terms of values deemed fundamentally womanly, essentially Indian: modesty, patience, and, above all, a strong sense of duty toward the family, the community, and the nation.

The convergence between cultural nationalism and discourses of gender became clearer when, several months later, Uma compared Indian women with "foreign" or "Western" women. Uma and I usually watched "Phir Wahi Talaash" together. In this serial the heroine is forced into an arranged marriage. After a couple of years of trying to make a go of it, she asks her husband for a divorce so that she can reunite with her lover. Once, just as that episode was

drawing to a close, Uma responded with bewilderment and some outrage: Uma: It's not possible to get a divorce that easily in India. In India a divorce means that it's a very free-wheeling lady, all kinds of things. I don't think there are many women who do that. Okay, the number has increased, but Indian women are still not so keen on divorce. Purnima: Why is that? Uma: I think it's because of our culture. Because marriage means it's for keeps; it's not as if you can get a divorce that easily. The thought doesn't come into our minds. Purnima: You think this is more true of Indian marriages and Indian women? Uma: Very much so, very much so.

Uma firmly believed that the heroine was at fault because she had not tried hard enough to save her marriage:

Uma: I still feel she didn't try to make the marriage a success. In between, she is so curt with him. I didn't Iike that. Why doesn't she make an effort to make a go of the marriage? She's got married, now she should try that the marriage stays safe [sic]. It seems to me that she was very casual about it all. That's not how it happens. Purnima: What do you mean? Uma: Well, you know, it's very unbecoming for an Indian woman.

It was plain that she strongly disapproved of the heroine's actions because she deemed them inappropriate for Indian women and felt that they had no place in what she called "our culture."

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Uma, like some other young women with whom I spoke, seemed to be caught between two sets of beliefs about women's independence. She felt that it was "unbecoming" for Indian women to divorce their husbands-women's independence should never be allowed to break

up an unhappy marriage. Yet in an earlier conversation she had argued that as a young woman she was better off emulating the "independence" of "American women" and that Draupadi's fiery strength was appropriate to contemporary times. Like Selapan, Uma invoked idealized notions of Indian Womanhood in comparing Indian and Western women.

Thus, although heroic motherhood figures as a primary theme in "Param Veer Chakra" and in Selapan's discourse, it represents only one of several constructions of Indian Womanhood in postcolonial India. Indeed, it is important that we acknowledge the proliferation of discourses on Indian Womanhood, some more essentialist than others, all of them reflecting what Foucault has termed the productive aspects of power (1980:119). This "incitement to discourse" (Foucault 1978:18) is reflected in television's preoccupation with "women-dominated serials"-that is, those in which the protagonists are women. The Doordarshan Software Committee, set up by the government to formulate guidelines for television programming, has emphasized the significance of the portrayal of women. Its report, significantly titled An Indian Personality for Television, proposes that "women be shown in terms of the complex roles they play ... as workers and significant contributors to family survival and the national economy" (Government of India 1985:1, 144-145). However, as seen in the responses of Uma and Selapan, attempts to depict positive and progressive images of women are circumscribed by metanarratives of nation and family. In many serials, for instance, women's anger is portrayed as legitimate only when channeled to the nationalist task of social reform (as in the serial "Rajni"). Marriage is portrayed as the most desirable state for women (as in "Sambandh"; cf. Punwani 1988:226). Not surprisingly, women are usually portrayed in the context of the family (as in "Hum Log" and "Param Veer Chakra"); those who work outside the home by choice are represented as callous home-wreckers (as in "Khandaan"; cf. Punwani 1988). In serials and in popular discourse in general, Indian Womanhood is now beginning to be conceived in terms of patriotic citizenship, productive labor, and selfless social activism; in short, the ideal Indian Woman is one whose energies are harnessed to the task of promoting national progress in various and multiple ways.

viewers as critics

As noted above, viewers' interpretations are profoundly influenced by the broader social discourses in which they are interpellated; they are shaped by events in the viewers' lives and by the relationships in which those viewers define themselves. Thus, there is a two-way relationship between viewers' lives and the narratives in serials: what people watch is mediated by and at the same time helps illuminate developments in their lives. I was astonished by how frequently viewers linked their favorite serials with their lives: it seemed to be the easiest way for many of them to discuss not just what they watched but, more significant, their own experiences. Indeed, in many of our conversations the boundaries between texts and lives often blurred so that I found it hard to discern whether we were talking about a television character or about the viewer.

Aparna Dasgupta was a middle-aged Bengali woman. She had never been to school, and said that she had learned a lot from observing people. I know she thought that I, for all my "foreign" education, was extremely naive about "what really goes on in families." In spite-or perhaps because-of being a si lent witness to her husband's and son's brutalization of her young daughter-in-law, Aparna insisted on advising me about how to "shield" myself from the alleged "cleverness" of my mother-in-law. (My protestations that I didn't really need her advice served only to make her more protective of me.) Aparna felt that television was powerful because one could learn from it (shiksha milti hal). When she was growing up, she said, women were not

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allowed to go to the cinema. Even though she had been living in Delhi for the past 25 years, she never got to watch films until she started to see them on television. In many ways, she told me, television was her window on the rest of the world. However, she insisted, not everyone could learn from watching television: one had to have a particular "bhaaV' (loosely, "feeling" or "emotion"; neither of these words quite captures the meaning of bhaav) in one's heart. One morning a couple of days after the last episode of her favorite serial, the "Mahabharata," had been aired, I asked her what she thought of it. She replied: "When you read the Gita, you should read it with a certain bhaav in your heart. It's the same thing when you watch something on television."

But what was this "bhaav"? I pressed her. Did it reside in the heart, only to surface when one watched something touching? Or was it a state induced by what one watched, that is, by the experience of seeing something emotional unfold on the screen? If that were the case, wouldn't everyone learn something, the same thing perhaps, from a particular serial? But bhaav, Aparna replied, was not quite so simple. She explained it with reference to her experience of Hindi films:

The first time I watched a Hindi film nothing much happened. But then I saw a second, then a third, then a fourth. Then one day as I watched, bhaav came to me [bhaav aa gaya].... By then I too had a family. I was watching this film called Bhabhi. It was all about how this young woman suffers after she gets married. It was all about how you suffer in the world. How much the bhabhi [brother's wife] suffers! I just couldn't stop crying. I thought, suppose I have to face what she is going through, what will happen?

This encounter taught Aparna how to watch films and television serials. According to her, one had to surrender to the mood of what was being watched; to learn from it, one had to be immersed in that state of being. And one had to be at a point in life where what was watched made sense personally, at a level beyond mere empathy. This mode of watching, indeed of interacting, became clearer when Aparna recounted what had happened to her daughter Sushmita when she saw "Mahabharata" scene in which the female protagonist, Draupadi, is publicly disrobed in her in-laws' court:

My daughter, when she saw [what happened], cried and cried. She cried all morning. Imagine what happened to Draupadi! And in public, in front of her in-laws! A feeling came to my daughter [bhaav aa gaya]: What will happen to me when I get married and go to my in-laws' home? Isn't this what happens?

According to Aparna, we learn about life from the emotions (bhaav) television's discourses arouse in us. However, interpretation operates within a larger set of discursive practices.36 As

Aparna patiently explained to me, one has to acquire the ability to learn from what is watched, and this ability comes from, among other things, frequent exposure. In addition, one must be at a particular point in one's trajectory, in one's development as a person; hence, the fi Im Bhabhi would not have aroused bhaav in her had she watched it before she was married. She also insisted that not just anyone could learn: only those who, in her words, had an ability to "enter the soul" of what they watched could do so.

However, it is important to emphasize that bhaav do not emerge in a vacuum, a result of a text's "impact" on an isolated viewer; we have to foreground the sociocultural bases of these

experiences. Aparna was socially "habituated" to read the Gita and to watch the "Mahabharata" with a particular bhaav in her heart. Her unmarried daughter's tears at Draupadi's disrobing arose from fear about her own future, a fear reinforced when she saw how other daughters-in- law (including the one in her family) were treated. These bhaav, these feelings and emotions, were products of the social relations in which they were embedded. In other words, emotions do not emerge from an "inner essence" distinct from the social world; emotions are "social

practices organized by stories that we both enact and tell," and "persons are constructed in a

particular cultural milieu" of experiences, meanings, relationships, and images, all of which are

socially mediated (Rosaldo 1984:143, 138). I have shown that some experiences, "stories," and

representations involve interactions between viewers, located in particular sociocultural con-

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texts, and the texts of mass media such as television: far from being innate, many emotions are themselves produced by the social practices that television's narratives mediate and, indeed, sometimes create.

But are we to think that everyone who watches serials will automatically assume the subject positions created by the discourses of television? I found that even as they deeply identified with characters on television, even as they experienced profound bhaav, many viewers were

simultaneously able to stand back and criticize what they watched. Neither they nor I saw any contradiction between these two apparently divergent modes of viewing. Viewers loved to

critique the acting ability of the cast or the competence of the director. Similarly, they would often comment that, for example, a particular set was "stagey" or the "photographer" had done a "boring job" (in this case I think the person was saying something about camera angles).37

Many viewers had definite opinions about what television "ought to" depict-that is, about

appropriate or inappropriate subject matter. Surjeet Kaur worked as an unskilled assembly-line employee in a garment factory. An accomplished storyteller, she would narrate the sagas of serials (and of her life) in intricate detail and with great flourish. She had a stormy relationship with her husband, a junior clerk in the Education Ministry, and often said that watching television was one of the few ways in which she could calm herself. But, she complained, some serials encouraged people's "superstitions." She felt that there was no place for "this sort of

thing" (aisi batein) in serials because "superstition" (andh vishwas) was "wrong" (gait). She

thought television producers were sometimes very careless about how they constructed stories: "You know how they make serials-they pull from here, cut from there, try to patch a story together somehow."

Her thoughts on the appropriate subject matter for television were based on a theory of the

relationship between reception and class, a belief that television could lead "certain types" of

people astray. For she went on to say:

People shouldn't believe everything they see on TV, but they often do.... Because people are uneducated they believe everything they hear. People should not be guided [she used the English word]38 in this way. Imagine if village women or women who live in jhuggi-jhopdis [huts in the shantytown some 20 yards from her house] see all this! They will believe every word.... Someone has to guide [Eng.] them, to

explain to them that this is not how things really are.

Herself illiterate and precariously lower middle class, Surjeet Kaur was conscious of what she clearly perceived as the privileges of her class position, which, she felt, gave her a critical awareness that poorer people lacked. Her discourse on the effects of television constructed viewers who lived in slums as the "other," the gullible, ignorant masses who had to be

"guided."39 Further, Surjeet Kaur, like many other women I spoke to, had definite ideas about style and

plot, especially the resolution of narrative tensions and conflicts. What she disliked most were the conclusions of many serials.40 She insisted that they concluded too abruptly, that nothing seemed to be resolved (koi faisla hi nahi hota), that one never got a sense of "what really happened" in the end. She speculated that perhaps most of the time they ended before "the

original story" (that is, the script) had concluded. More important, most people I talked with were acutely conscious that the serials they

watched had been selected, censored, and shaped by the state.41 They often commented that when secessionist movements threatened the integrity of the nation-state, there would be a spate of serials dealing with Punjab and Kashmir. One young woman complained that although she enjoyed the stories, she was getting tired of the same old themes. Some people saw even more direct connections between the plots of serials and the political motivations of the ruling party. When I asked one viewer if he enjoyed watching serials, he replied that he had enjoyed them until a few months ago but that ever since V. P. Singh, then prime minister of India, had come to power, the programs had deteriorated. "All they show now," he complained, "is villagers

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and their problems." The prime minister was then making statements about a need to "bridge the gap" between cities and "the real India," that is, "village India." This viewer, along with countless others who pointed out the same thing, was quite astute in grasping why audiences were suddenly being subjected to a number of hastily produced serials set in villages.

Television watching, I sense, is gradually becoming an opportunity for people to sit around and complain about the power (and, very often, the stupidity: "they must be very stupid [bewaqoof ] to think we're this gullible!") of the government. However, we need to be extremely cautious about concluding that this critical awareness signifies that people are somehow "outside" the reach of the state or that they simply "resist" dominant discourses received through television. Viewers' responses to what they watch cannot be encompassed by categories such as "resistance" and "submission." Oppositional readings, as I hope to demonstrate, are a great deal more complex and slippery.

For instance, the viewers I interviewed would often "submit" to one of the multiple discourses constituting a serial but would appropriate another to criticize the government. One of my conversations with Surjeet Kaur began with her recapitulation of an emotional episode of "The Sword of Tipu Sultan," a controversial depiction of an 18th-century Muslim king. The main theme of that episode, according to not just Surjeet Kaur but also the others present, was the loyalty and kindness of Haider Ali, a central character. Surjeet Kaur used the episode to contrast Haider Ali with present-day politicians who betrayed their supporters. She launched into a detailed description of the joy experienced by Haider and his friend Ramchander when they reunited after several years, and she pointed out that when he became king, Haider remembered his promise to help Ramchander. She exclaimed: "Haider never betrayed his childhood friendship [bachpan ki dosti]; he bridged the huge divide between himself and Ramchander." Surjeet Kaur summarized the story thus: "This story is about a king and his friend, about a poor friend and a king [yeh kahani hai ek dost aur ek raja, ek garib dost aur ek raja ke bare mein]." She continued:

Isn't that the way it should be? Not as it is in our country now. That's not how it is now. Whether it's a raja [king] or a P.M. [Eng.], they're only interested in keeping their seat [Eng.], their treasury. The people can starve to death, but they don't care. Who cares about the people? When it's time for the election, [politicians] come with their hands folded and say, we'll do this for you, we'll do that for you. What will you [they; that is, politicians] do [Kya karoge turn]? You only come to us when you need us. Otherwise who asks about us? Now look, we have to pay Rs. 5 a kilo for onions. Imagine [Bataiye]! How are people like us to manage? It's true that the government has increased pay scales. But it doesn't make any difference. I would rather they kept prices down.42

Padmini and I once watched an episode of her husband's favorite serial, "Param Veer Chakra," while he was away visiting an ailing relative. This was one of the few times I saw Padmini actually sitting down to watch television. She had clearly been looking forward to it: she had finished all her work for the morning and was waiting, bathed and ready, when I arrived at her house one chilly Sunday. The episode was particularly melodramatic: by the time it ended I was having a hard time holding back my tears; Padmini was weeping.43 But was she crying because she was moved by its display of patriotic fervor? I am quite sure she was not. For as soon as the show finished, she turned to me and said, "These men go off. But it's the women who have to suffer because [the men] have gone to fight." It was obvious that she saw the show

entirely from the perspective of the wife who had been left behind, and as far as she was concerned, militant nationalism did not seem to be worth the tragedy of war. This response is

particularly significant in light of her silence when her husband waxed eloquent on the glories of patriotic Indian Womanhood.

Thus, intense emotional involvement occurs simultaneously with a critical awareness that sometimes enables viewers to "see through" the narrative to the state's agenda. "Resistance" and "compliance" are not mutually exclusive categories, and the role of television in the constitution of viewers' subjectivities cannot be conceived in terms of just one or the other.

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With many viewers, one level of engagement slides into the other all the time. The complexity of resistance has been well demonstrated by Abu-Lughod, who talks of how Bedouin women both resist and support existing systems of power (1990:47), and by Radway, who describes how women's resistance is embodied in the act of reading romance novels even as it is sometimes undercut by the content of what they read (1984). This reconception of resistance and compliance helps us see popular culture as a site of struggle between dominant discourses and forces of resistance. Popular culture contains "points of resistance" as well as "moments of supersession"; it forms a "battlefield where no once-for-all victories are obtained but where there are always strategic positions to be won and lost" (Hall 1981:233). Thus, while many of the viewers I met seemed extremely aware of the power of the state, let us not forget Aparna's explication of the role of bhaav: it informed viewers, in a frighteningly fundamental way, about their place in the world. They learned about their position as gendered subjects, and as Indians, from bhaav as it mediated their interpretations of television's discourses.

conclusion

My objectives in this article have been twofold: to analyze the place of television in the constitution of national and gendered subjects and, thus, to arrive at an understanding of how popular texts can be conceptualized. I have tried to argue that nationalism and gender are inherently linked. Discourses on gender seem to crystalize most clearly in discussions centered on the qualities of particular types of women, Indian women. Similarly, as evident in the responses of viewers to serials like "Param Veer Chakra," nationalism is intrinsically both gendered and engendering, creating specific subject positions for men and for women. But, as we have seen, viewers variously interpret, appropriate, resist, and negotiate these subject positions. Discourses of nationhood regulate those of gender and vice versa: I have tried to draw attention both to the multiplicity of interpretations and to the parameters within which those interpretations are made.

Hence, although television plays an unmistakably critical role in the constitution of discursive practices, its cultural and political significance cannot be understood simply in terms of a clear-cut division between the hegemonic text and the passive viewer. By foregrounding viewers' interpretations, we can conceive of popular culture as a site for resistance as well as domination. And by studying the different ways in which viewers actively engage with what they watch, we can break away from theories of popular culture that foreclose the process of interpretation in the production of meaning (for example, Horkheimer and Adorno's "mass culture" hypothesis [1969(1944)], or analyses in which the subject's position is dictated by the text).

I wish to highlight the fact that the viewer is positioned not simply by the text but also by a whole range of other discourses, with those of gender and nationalism being dominant in Indian television. Viewers are reconstituted as subjects not just by the form and content of serials but by the manner in which these texts resonate with the viewers' experiences of dominant social discourses. Viewers' deep emotional engagement with television, the bhaav that a text arouses in them, spurs them to introspection about themselves and their lives. For better or for worse, they learn through bhaav about their place in the world. Uma's apparently confused views on women's independence, Selapan's ambivalence about women's ability to be "patriotic citi- zens," and Surjeet Kaur's "submission" to and appropriation of "The Sword of Tipu Sultan" to criticize the contemporary Indian state indicate that television often offers people contradictory subject positions. Foregrounding viewers' active, intimate engagement with television's texts enables us to explore the place of spectatorship in the construction of selves, specifically in the constitution of gender and national identities.

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Further, I wish to highlight the importance of delineating the specific contexts in which viewers engage with the texts of television. Morley has described "the average sitting room" as a

site of some very important political conflicts-it is, among other things, one of the principal sites of the politics of gender and age.... The sitting room is exactly where we need to start from if we finally want to understand the constitutive dynamic of abstractions such as "the community" or "the nation." [1 991:1 2]

I argue that we must examine the viewing subject's position in particular networks of power within the family as well as in the broader political conjuncture.

Focusing on specific contexts also helps us comprehend television's role in the construction of gender identity, especially that of women. To assume that all women are positioned and

"manipulated" by the patriarchal discourses of television is to fall into the trap of universal notions of oppression, as well as to underrate women's abilities to "resist, challenge and subvert" relations of inequality (Mohanty 1984:345). The depiction of women viewers as active subjects is especially important in light of the tendency to depict "Third World" women as passive victims. Hence, instead of perceiving television's role in the construction of gender identities as unvarying, we need to analyze the construction of gendered subjectivities in particular political and social contexts. It is therefore important that we also consider the location of men in specific asymmetrical power networks, and that we examine men's interactions with women in varying relations of domination and interdependence.

notes

Acknowledgments. Fieldwork for this article was supported by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Award (1990-91) and an American Institute for Indian Studies grant (1992). Val Daniel sensitized me to the craft of ethnography, and Jane Collier's kindness motivated me to write the article. Questions raised by Suzy Sawyer and Bill Maurer sharpened its conceptualization, and incisive comments from Lorna Rhodes and Edgar V. Winans helped refine its arguments. I am also grateful to anonymous reviewers for pointing out key issues that needed to be clarified. But neither the fieldwork nor this article would have been possible without moral support, detailed comments, and constant feedback from Akhil Gupta. Above all, I would like to thank the families in Vikas Nagar and Basti, New Delhi, who welcomed me into their homes and generously gave of their time, support, and affection.

1. For example, feminists have pointed to the significance of representations of romantic love in cultural constructions of gender (Johnson 1 986:59).

2. My positioning of viewers as subjects is based on the premise that "ideologies do not operate through single ideas; they operate in discursive chains, in clusters, in semantic fields, in discursive formations" (Hall 1985:104; see also Althusser 1971).

3. Feuer (1983) and Modleski (1 983) have described some of the factors that distinguish the television experience from that of film: the technological features of the medium itself (for example, the way images are produced and presented); the different texts (commentaries, commercials); the significance of the ties between programs and their commercial sponsors; and the impact of the sites of reception (whether the cinema hall or the living room). Also important are questions of enunciation: Whose voices are being represented in the texts? Who do the texts address? And how are the discourses of television, embedded in

specific capitalist relations of production, ideologically charged? 4. Notable exceptions to the preoccupation with textual and sociological analyses are offered by Bobo

(1988), Gillespie (1989), Morley (1980), Radway (1984), and Seiter, Borchers, Kreutzner, and Warth (1989). 5. According to the framework used in this article, popular culture includes folk traditions that may have

metropolitan or elite roots, as well as elements of mass culture incorporated into the everyday lives of ordinary people. The concept of "mass culture" formulated by theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno (1969[1944]) is modified by the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony.

6. Drawing on Lacan (1977[1966]), Althusser describes "interpellation" in terms of the relationship between ideology and subjectivity: "ideology 'acts' or 'functions' in such a way that it 'recruits' subjects among the individuals ... or 'transforms' the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing.... The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing" (1971:163). Hall explains interpel- lation further as the point of recognition between subjects and ideological or signifying chains (1985:102).

7. In demonstrating television's place in the discursive construction of subjectivities, I draw on Trinh Minh-ha's notion of plural, nonunitary subjects (1989:22). I conceive of subjects as in medias res, constantly being formed, never coming wholly to fruition. I thus reject the notion of a unitary consciousness, arguing

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that each person can be a contradictory subject, "traversed" by a variety of discursive practices (Alarcon 1990:357, 365).

8. Notions of Indian Womanhood have as much currency and are as central to discourses of cultural nationalism in India as the ideology of the "American Dream" in the United States.

9. See Appadurai (1986) for an excellent critique of the preoccupation with "local" and "face-to-face" communities.

10. Hence, overstressing the dichotomy between television producers and viewers can be extremely problematic.

11. In many parts of the country, "coverage" does not necessarily enable regular viewership. Additional critical factors are ownership of or access to television sets, a reasonably regular supply of electricity, and other infrastructural facilities.

12. In an interview on January 23, 1992, the secretary to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, S. S. Gill, confirmed that Indian teleserials were inspired by telenovelas.

13. Selection Committee members Akshay Kumar ain and Razia Ismail provided this information during interviews in November 1990.

14. I would like to thank one of my anonymous reviewers for emphasizing this point. 15. According to Punwani (1988:224), the serial "Hum Log" aroused such "intense viewer identification"

that producers received regular mail advising them on how the story should develop. 16. This conception of audiences acquires particular significance in light of the fact that audiences do

not exist a priori but are constructed by discursive and marketing practices. For excellent discussions of this aspect of audience formation, see Ang (1990) and Radway (1988).

17. See Mukherjee (1985) on the unresolved tension between "indigenous" concepts of personhood and notions of the individual in modern Indian fiction.

18. I use pseudonyms to protect the identities of the people I worked with. 19. As an Indian student of anthropology in the United States, I have frequently been startled by how

often the typical anthropological discourse on South Asia, craving authenticity, has obsessively attempted to represent "village India" as "the true India" and has stubbornly resisted acknowledging the presence of dynamic, cosmopolitan cultural formations in postcolonial India (scholarship such as that of Appadurai and Breckenridge [1988] is an exception). Hence, my insistence on focusing on urban women is, at least in part, a result of my awareness of the silences in the anthropology of South Asia.

20. The larger project of which this article is a part details the links between "middle-classness," gender, and notions of national citizenship (Mankekar 1993a).

21. In January 1992, I interviewed both S. S. Gill, the official responsible for the production of the first teleserial ("Hum Log"), and R. Srinivasan, the marketing correspondent of the Times of India, a major national daily.

22. Pendakur points out that the state and the middle classes, along with advertising agencies and the growing consumer industries, are highly influential in shaping television policy (1989a:186). The state competes with producers of television serials (many of whom hail from the Bombay Hindi film industry), private corporations, and advertising agencies for the power to influence cultural production.

23. This point was corroborated by television critic Iqbal Masud in an interview on December 15, 1990. 24. Among my upper-caste interviewees, anxiety about their vulnerable class position reached a peak

when the government attempted to introduce the Mandal Commission Bill, which proposed to provide lower and "backward" castes special quotas in educational institutions and state jobs. This bill prompted widespread rioting and street violence all over North India, including New Delhi. My upper-caste but precariously lower-middle-class informants were enraged at the government because they felt their only hope for upward mobility was being snatched; lower-caste people with whom I spoke were, not surprisingly, unequivocally in favor of the legislation. At stake for all concerned was upward mobility.

25. Many parents, however, confessed that such attempts were futile because the children usually slept (or rather pretended to sleep) in the room where the television set was.

26. Because I was generally treated as a visiting "daughter of the house" by most of these families (and, undoubtedly, because of my class position), I would often be made to sit on a chair or, as they became more informal with me, on the floor with the older daughters.

27. I would like to thank Edgar Winans (personal communication, 1991) for emphasizing the significance of this fact.

28. I am indebted to critiques of Anglo-American feminist theory by feminists such as Alarcon (1 990) and Lorde (1984), who have shown us the pitfalls of conceptualizing gender as a category sui generis.

29. Hence, his speech was rife with words such as shaheed (martyr), buzdil (cowardly), and haqiqat (reality).

30. Once, when I asked him how the theme of the brave wife had been handled in the "last story," Selapan took exception to my choice of words. "It's not a story. It is reality [haqiqat]. It is history," he insisted. He was mollified only when I hastened to explain that I did not mean the episode was fictitious but that I was referring to the dramatization of the hero's dilemmas. In an article entitled "Notions of the Real and Indian Television Serials" (1993b), I attempt to analyze discourses about realism that are deployed by the producers and viewers of television serials.

31. Selapan was referring to the public unrest fomented by the anti-Mandal Commission movement. The presence of phrases like "these days," "this era," and "modern times" reflects a certain image of the "traditional" constructed in contradistinction to modernity. This nostalgic reconstitution of tradition is fed

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by Doordarshan's depiction of "the glorious Indian past" in serials like the "Ramayana," the "Mahabharata," and "Chanakya." The implications of these serials for Hindu nationalism are discussed in Mankebar (1 993a).

32. See Wadley (1980) for discussions of the concept of women's shakti. 33. The religious origins of notions such as Bharat Mata (Mother India) point to the Hindu hegemony of

"mainstream" nationalist discourse. This reveals the slippage between Hindu nationalism and Indian nationalism from the outset and is worth a separate investigation.

34. By no means do I intend to assert a "generational cleavage" of any sort: in fact, as I show, Uma herself seemed to be caught between different discourses on Indian Womanhood. This example simply foregrounds the fact that notions of Indian Womanhood are not static, and it highlights the role played by television in their gradual transformation.

35. See Chakravarti (1 986) for an excellent analysis of the hegemonic construction of pativrata dharma. 36. The rasasutra refers to the "aesthetic organization" of a state of being or emotion (bhaav) found in

classical Sanskrit literature (Gerow 1974:216), and it singles out the following emotions for aesthetic exegesis: love, mirth, grief, energy, terror, disgust, anger, wonder, and peace. Works of art "transmute" each of these into a corresponding mood (rasa)-for instance, grief inspires the mood of compassion-and rasas "render the personal and the incommunicable generalizable and communicable" (Ramanujan 1974:118). Effective realization of a rasa depends not only on whether a particular performance or other work of art is "suited" to its construction, but also on the capacity of the viewer or reader to apprehend and therefore affirm the prevailing rasa (Gerow 1974:221). Hence rasa refers at once to an aesthetic tradition and to a philosophical state of being. Perhaps the rasasutra provided a vocabulary, if not a conceptual apparatus, for viewers like Aparna, who often spoke of the street plays and musical performances she had watched in her village during her childhood.

However, attempting to identify "indigenous traditions" of spectatorship is tricky because it can sometimes lead one to overemphasize continuity and to underestimate change and borrowing: this danger is particu- larly acute in the case of popular culture, which necessarily operates in an increasingly transnational world. Therefore, we must pay particular attention to the sociopolitical contexts in which interpretive processes occur. For example, what happens when cultural production is shaped by the modernist discourses of the state? And how are particular themes and images interpreted by viewers who live in a postcolonial, cosmopolitan setting? We must also emphasize the fact that aesthetic categories are neither static nor totalizing and that there is no single "Indian" tradition of aesthetics; instead, many different traditions exist, often in conflict with one another. I explore the relevance of rasa theory to analyses of television watching in urban India in "Notions of the Real and Indian Television Serials" (1993b).

37. Pendakur reports that he had a similar experience when he did fieldwork in a small town: when he spoke to lower-middle-class children they demonstrated an astonishing knowledge of production tech- niques, such as freeze shots and instant replay (1 989a:178).

38. As those familiar with Indian metropolitan centers would know, it is not unusual for even illiterate city dwellers to use English words like "guided."

39. Although a detailed exploration of class consciousness and subjectivity is outside the scope of this article, Surjeet Kaur's thoughts on how her reception of television differed from that of women living in slums showed clearly how people sometimes construct their identities in relation to prototypical others.

40. Surjeet Kaur's opinion is interesting in light of Modleski's attempt to link the lack of narrative closure on American soaps with the subject positions of women in suburban U.S. culture (1983).

41. Their suspicion of the state came as no surprise to me: when I was growing up in India, strangers in trains, buses, and other public spaces frequently treated me to long, often vitriolic, discourses on the government's inefficiency, corruption, and so on.

42. Although this particular example tells us nothing about gender ideologies per se, it does show how viewers appropriate television's discourses to criticize their own world. It also reflects the creation of certain notions of citizenship that allow viewers to feel they have the right to expect accountability from their elected leaders.

43. For an excellent analysis of melodrama and the construction of gendered subject positions, see Vasudevan (1989).

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