The old order has changed

In ads and soaps,watch the women have the last laugh.

Virginia Valentine was a brilliant semiotician who,through cultural analysis,helped marketers get a better understanding of how to connect with the world of consumers. She must turn in her grave at this limited and prosaic description of her work. But when she explained it at first meetings,clients eyes glazed over,and her business partner,husband Monty,gently interrupted with,I work as the bridge between Ginnys world and the real world. She had flaming white hair,and made riveting presentations,putting to good use her study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Her substance matched her form,and her take on marketing and popular culture almost always made CEOs of her client companies do a double take. She analysed advertising and decoded popular culture,and opined whether brands were in step with popular culture or not.

One of her case studies was about a TV advertisement of a leading brand of household liquid cleaner in the UK,which had the male voice-over saying,Kills one hundred per cent germs DEAD,and a visual showing the woman cleaning the house. She explained that one of the reasons the brand was losing market share was that its ad was out of sync with the rise of feminism. The ad had the male,authoritative voice-over coded as master and the workabee female coded as servant. A decade or so ago,a popular Indian toilet cleaner brand ran an ad with a woman relaxing with the newspaper and the husband saying appreciatively,Thats my wife cleaning the toilet,and explaining how easy it was to achieve great cleaning with no effort. Today,while toilet cleaner ads still talk to the woman and explain the wonders of U-bends and germs to her,it isnt the this is your job and Im glad you are making progress in it kind of conversation.

It will be some time before our ads show the man cleaning the toilet and the woman expertly commenting on it. But we have done even better,in that insidious way India has of morphing. Ads now have women laughing openly at the poor man stuck about two centuries behind and utterly incompetent in dealing with his mother or with his weight or contraception or his home and office load. She,on the other hand,blithely innovates and organises her way through it all,is the opinion leader and the boss,and the one whom the kids look up to,in order to solve their problems. Like Ogden Nash said,As for father,why bother? He brings the problem and she the solution,he is the before and she the after! And please note,her laughter is not the let him think he is superior,we know best womans room laughter. It isnt even the poor man,what does he know my husband cannot even shell peas laughter. It is the out-in-the-open,good-humoured teasing laughter of the winner. The upper-class,educated,urban Indian woman has indeed turned the tide slowly and imperceptibly!

The same religion,with different rituals,is being depicted on TV soaps. Many from my peer group and social class,both men and women,say that the soaps are regressive ,and a blot on women,but I think they are getting taken in by the decoy trappings and are not looking beyond the ghungat and the grihasti,and the subversive mind of the ghar ki rani. They are not noticing how the men in these serials are often reduced to convenient props,or powerless protesters or tyrants,who dont realise that the rug is being pulled ever so gently from under their feet. Most often,they are mamas well-brought-up boys who are gradually being reformed by their wives,rather than the other way around.

I love watching as many of them as I can,and as one of the women in a focus group explained to us,they help drag issues confronting so many families,from inside the dark closet to the living room where the family watches TV together. Of course,some of the packaging is absurdly exaggerated,but thats what makes for interesting viewing. Mrs Kaushik Ki Paanch Bahuein has a sergeant major tyrant mother-in-law,a liberal but hold-yourtongue-and-keep-the-peace father-in-law,and four daughters-in-law who toe the line despite one being a police officer! Along comes Lovely,who slowly,but surely,changes power structures in the household,not through open rebellion,but by role-modelling and by being the bad-good-bad-good girl,making it hard for us to decide whether she merits applause or disapproval.

Anandi of Balika Vadhu is the woman sarpanch,the apple of her parents-in-laws eyes,who has silently yielded turf to her husbands second wife. Is she a loser or not? In Ram Milaayi Jodi,Mona becomes chief strategist and advocate for her mother-in-law in trouble with the rest of the household and has turned the tables of power with logic and smarts and goodness. Of course,the vamps abound with their traditional intrigue. But look beyond them,at the message that there is a new way of winning!

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