When Ekta Kapoor first turned a family identify within the early 2000s, she was hailed because the “Content material Czarina” of Indian tv. A younger girl making it massive in India’s male-dominated tv trade, Kapoor redefined the each day cleaning soap for Indian millennials, incomes reward for elevating feminine and ‘female’ narratives, though inherently stereotypical and regressive, and reworking prime-time tv within the 2000s right into a so-called ‘girls’s area’, with homemakers—lengthy ignored by the trade—abruptly seen as a prized viewers.

Whereas her ascent might have appeared like a triumph of women-orientated illustration, there’s a paradox on the coronary heart of this story: moderately than difficult patriarchy, Kapoor’s empire of cleaning soap operas mass-produced it in glittering, bingeable packages, making submission aspirational.

Kapoor’s meteoric rise is inseparable from the cultural juggernaut of Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi and its many cousins, sprawling home sagas with limitless episodes, idealised heroines, cartoonishly one-dimensional villains, and thoroughly calibrated ethical spectacles, engineered to maximise rankings by flattering the established order.

Patriarchy as a protected funding

Kapoor’s gendered portrayal and caricatured representations might really feel stale in 2020’s India, but it surely’s financially bulletproof. In a society steeped in patriarchy, promoting it as leisure is the most secure guess as a result of it neither alienates advertisers nor dangers mass backlash. As a substitute, by wrapping hierarchy and obedience in emotional monologues, the reveals ship a comforting reflection of what audiences already know. Briefly, the method works as a result of it’s low-risk. Naturally, then, twenty years on, as Kyunki 2.0 returns to Indian tv once more, the script stays the identical; the one distinction is that patriarchy is being peddled to Indian audiences in sharper focus and richer color.

In Kapoor’s universe, capitalism and patriarchy go hand in hand, feeding off one another at any time when the chance arises. As such, patriarchal values turn out to be each the content material and the gross sales pitch, with the reveals functioning as limitless ads for the ‘virtues’ of obedience, sacrifice, and feminine self-effacement.

In Kapoor’s universe, capitalism and patriarchy go hand in hand, feeding off one another at any time when the chance arises. As such, patriarchal values turn out to be each the content material and the gross sales pitch, with the reveals functioning as limitless ads for the ‘virtues’ of obedience, sacrifice, and feminine self-effacement. From a market perspective, that is genius. The product works at two ranges: providing escapist spectacle by way of the glamour and wealth of the fictional households whereas reinforcing the very hierarchies that hold a lot of the viewers economically and socially dependent. The viewers are bought each fantasy and conformity and taught that one is the value of the opposite.

When Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi premiered in 2000, Tulsi, the present’s “matriarch-in-training”, rapidly turned the nationwide archetype of the perfect Indian girl. Draped in heavy silks, vermilion glowing like a badge of advantage, and scriptures on the tip of her tongue, her ethical compass by no means wavered. Ever aligned with preserving patriarchal values, the trials and tribulations in Tulsi’s fictional life invited girls viewers—lots of whom had been homemakers themselves—to see service and self-erasure as noble and fascinating and stay sure by maryada (loosely ‘propriety’, however in follow, a euphemism for ‘know your home’).

The best bahu, then, is an endurance athlete within the marathon of self-sacrifice, accepting humiliation as future and forgiveness as advantage. The characterisation of the reveals’ ‘vamps’, too, serves to bolster the identical ethical order: girls who defy custom by pursuing romance exterior marriage, rejecting rituals, and prioritising careers are framed as treacherous or doomed, except, after all, they study the error of their methods and undergo patriarchal norms.

Girlboss branding, anti-feminism core

That is the place Kapoor’s profession collides with critiques of girlboss feminism—the 2010s corporate-friendly model of girls’s empowerment that celebrated particular person feminine success tales whereas ignoring structural inequality. The girlboss archetype thrives on the optics of a lady on the high, which is supposed to be interpreted as a win for feminism, even when her ascent depends upon conserving the system (learn: patriarchy) intact for everybody else.

When Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi premiered in 2000, Tulsi, the present’s “matriarch-in-training”, rapidly turned the nationwide archetype of the perfect Indian girl. Draped in heavy silks, vermilion glowing like a badge of advantage, and scriptures on the tip of her tongue, her ethical compass by no means wavered.

Kapoor’s public picture has been managed on this mould. Her success story is deployed as proof of progress, masking the truth that the substance of her work usually entrenches the very hierarchies feminism seeks to dismantle. Interviews emphasise her function as a pioneering feminine producer, her entrepreneurial grit, and her knack for understanding ‘what girls need’. However the girls in her reveals hardly ever need liberation—largely as a result of they’re by no means actually empowered to know what they need.

So, whereas capitalism rewards Kapoor for promoting patriarchy, her gender makes the sale look fashionable. Probably the most commercially profitable feminine characters in her portfolio bridge generational divides, restore household honour, and heal rifts with out difficult the patriarchal foundations that brought on these rifts within the first place. In different phrases, the form of feminism on show in her reveals—if it qualifies as feminism in any respect—is ‘protected’, within the sense that it champions private energy with out structural change and company with out autonomy. However to single Kapoor out as a lone villain ignores that the tv trade she conquered is constructed to monetise inequality, with audiences serving to maintain it, and family manufacturers and company sponsors turning into silent co-authors of the scripts.

Ladies who defy custom by pursuing romance exterior marriage, rejecting rituals, and prioritising careers are framed as treacherous or doomed, except, after all, they study the error of their methods and undergo patriarchal norms.

This doesn’t absolve viewers, although, but it surely does complicate the concept of ‘selection’. The audiences’ preferences are formed by many years of saturation messaging that defines morality in patriarchal phrases. As such, if one’s media weight-reduction plan is dominated by a single style that rewards obedience and vilifies autonomy, ‘selecting’ such narratives turns into much less about free will and extra about conditioned familiarity. The long-form serial format can also be designed to permit for deep emotional conditioning. In time, the reveals turn out to be social scripts, instructing what is appropriate and what’s deviant. Characters like Tulsi progressively turn out to be each day companions within the viewer’s life. So, when her virtues are repeated, examined, and reaffirmed over a whole bunch of episodes, they begin to really feel like widespread sense. That widespread sense, after all, is a patriarchal script that capitalism is more than pleased to underwrite.

Custom in HD in 2020s India

The return of Kyunki in 2025, in an age of progressive internet collection and international streaming content material, serves as a message that the previous order is undamaged, roles and hierarchies stay unshaken, and ladies’s narrative centrality continues to be conditional on service to household honour. Kyunki 2.0 lands in a conservative political local weather the place state-endorsed tradition emphasises household values, gender hierarchies, and preserving custom. Its timing mirrors the rise of the ‘tradwife’ aesthetic on-line—hyper-feminine domesticity reframed as empowerment—a script Kapoor herself perfected many years in the past.

At its core, then, the present is little greater than a re-broadcast of an ideological framework that trains girls to see self-erasure as noble. It’s a prime-time reassertion of a worldview the place obedience is aspirational and domesticity is future.

‘In an period the place the Indian state is actively selling spiritual and cultural regression, Kyunki… mirrors the state’s imaginative and prescient of disciplined Hindu womanhood,’ notes an article in The Quint, including, ‘The Virani family is a microcosm of a ‘good’ nation, the place obedience and reverence are the cornerstones of a functioning society. This drills in the concept that true happiness and stability are present in conforming to custom, not in difficult it.’

The blame doesn’t lie with a single entity, although, however with the convergence of market forces, political local weather, and cultural conservatism—a triangle wherein the Ekta Kapoors of the world are each entrepreneurs and functionaries.

Rebranding patriarchy isn’t progress.

The Kapoor case examine underscores the broader fact that girls’s development inside patriarchal capitalism doesn’t assure feminist outcomes. Illustration on the high issues, however when it comes and not using a dedication to difficult structural oppression, it dangers propagating the very programs it seems to disrupt. The glass ceiling could also be shattered, but when the ground plan stays intact, the view doesn’t change. The girlboss can succeed spectacularly, however in doing so, makes the structure of inequality extra glamorous, extra watchable, and extra immune to critique. Ladies-centric tales aren’t inherently empowering till they centre autonomy, complexity, and self-determination, moderately than martyrdom and home advantage.

With numerous content material flourishing on-line, the necessity is for creators prepared to danger discomfort and depict girls as flawed, demanding, and wanting greater than residence and sacrifice. Till such narratives turn out to be mainstream, Kapoor’s legacy will stand much less as a milestone of illustration and extra as a cautionary story about how simply capitalism can costume up previous hierarchies in new garments and the way readily audiences will applaud the costume change. And whereas Kapoor is probably not the architect of patriarchy, she has actually confirmed herself a luxurious developer inside it.

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