My grandmother was not exactly the target audience for soap operas. She retired from BSNL after working all her life, raised three children, managed her finances, and held her own with my grandfather’s colleagues in academia. But she had her guilty pleasures. One of them was the hypnotic pull of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi. Each night, she would retire to the drawing room, coffee in hand, and switch on the show “just to see what all the fuss is about”. And then she stayed, night after night, drawn by the histrionics and plot twists, like the show itself, impossible to quit. Kyunki became her post-dinner cigarette, something she knew was not good for her, but somehow an addiction. Of course, I was banned from the room when my grandmother was watching the show, but like second-hand smoke, its presence was inescapable. My friends and their mothers and grandmothers debated plot twists with all the seriousness of stock portfolios. With the benefit of hindsight, I can confidently say the show shaped not just what women watched, but their definition of womanhood.
When I heard that the show is making a comeback, nearly 20 years after it ended, my first thought was why. Why should we return to an era of over-the-top shows with gratuitous thunderclaps, inexplicable resurrections, and 30-minute monologues about samaaj and sanskaar? But that’s not the only thing. Smriti Irani, once Tulsi Virani, now a seasoned politician and until recently a cabinet minister, will reprise her iconic role. It is a moment thick with symbolism. A public figure who spent the last decade shaping national policy, and asserts her identity as a “full-time politician and part-time actor”, now steps back into a fictional kitchen to light the eternal diya of familial duty. Detractors may say why make a mountain out of a molehill: if you have a problem, exercise your god-given right to switch the channel and I would, as a matter of principle, agree, but for the fact that when a show like Kyunki comes with the weight of a politician’s endorsement, it stops being just a show. It runs the risk of becoming a cultural ideology.
In an interview, Irani has insisted Kyunki was never patriarchal, that it tackled serious issues like marital rape and euthanesia. Yes, it did flirt with these themes, occasionally dipping a toe into these waters, but it did not quite know how to swim in it. Tulsi did what she could in a world built around men and myth. But unless the new show goes beyond lip service, unless it dares to show the complex lives of Indian women, and the very real tension of class, caste, gender and ideology, for a generation raised on OTT diversity, its version of “Indianness” might not hold interest.
Today, thanks to the OTT-driven content liberalisation, we have more choices. We have shows that tell women’s stories beyond the kitchen, of their ambitious, flawed, hilarious, heartbroken, and liberated lives. Stories that are set elsewhere but reflect our realities, too. I often wonder what might have been different if my grandmother had had something like Grace and Frankie, a show about two older women who rebuild their lives in their seventies after their husbands leave them, back in the day. Or, a Fleabag, where womanhood is not painted in virtue, but in chaos and contradiction.
I also wonder if Kyunki in its new avatar will draw anything from Irani’s real-life story, far more compelling than any television serial arc. From a modest upbringing to a job at McDonald’s, to a near-miss at the Miss India pageant, to starring in the most-watched television show in Indian history, and eventually rising through the ranks of the Bharatiya Janata Party to defeat Rahul Gandhi in Amethi, it is an inspiring tale of a woman who beat the odds time and time again and showed her mettle not just as a television star but as a politician of heft in India’s patriarchal political landscape. Irani is a quintessential modern woman , she is powerful, complicated, ambitious, but still rooted in Indian traditions. But her Tulsi never reflected a trace of her complexity. As the ideal daughter-in-law and the moral gatekeeper of the joint family, the larger narrative of the show remained unchanging: Women were exalted when they sacrificed, revered when they stayed silent, and redeemed when they forgave.
Irani’s career – both in politics and entertainment –is a study in how power, visibility, and narrative intersect. But now that she will be back speaking of a woman’s duty, the line between the real and the performative stands to blur. So, yes, welcome back, Tulsi. May your saris be sharp and your moral compass unwavering. But please don’t leave us – and our stories – behind.
aishwarya.khosla@indianexpress.com
