When it comes to protecting the Indian woman and giving her the respect she deserves, Indian media has a very crucial role to play. The most crucial role can be and is being played by the visual media, because today television is also watched in villages and small cities where uneducated men seem to be clinging to their age-old or, shall we say, traditional attitude towards women.
Reportedly, the gradual increase in the number of Indian villages having access to cable television has promoted female autonomy and decreased the acceptability of wife-beating, and also reduced the preference for sons over daughters. There is no recent survey available in this regard. But a 10-year-old survey by the US-based National Bureau of Economic Research says that cable television is slowly raising women’s status in India.
Authored by Robert Jensen and Emily Oster, the study concludes that maybe “cable television, with programming that features lifestyles in both urban areas and in other countries, is an effective form of persuasion because people emulate what they perceive to be desirable behaviours and attitudes, without the need for an explicit appeal to do so”.
According to the study, the authors followed women in 2,700 households in villages in four states (Bihar, Goa, Haryana, and Tamil Nadu) and the capital, Delhi, from 2001 to 2003. In areas that never had cable, or always had it, there was little change in attitudes. The villages that added cable were associated with improvement in measures of women’s autonomy, a reduction in the number of situations in which wife-beating was deemed acceptable, and a reduction in the likelihood of wanting the next child to be a boy. The effects were quite large.
So, if TV is that effective in the rural areas in improving the status of women, it is heartening to see that a large number of the anchors and field reporters on major Indian TV channels are women, chosen for their intelligence and good delivery and capability to report live from the field without any tele-prompter. Of course, some of them have neither looks nor skill, and it is apparent that they were selected because of favouritism or nepotism. But that can happen anywhere in the world.
Besides news shows and serials, TV ads can also influence people’s attitude towards women. Even today, some TV ads only show women either cooking or doing the dishes or washing clothes. In contrast, other ads depict women as scantily-clad sex objects either licking luscious liquid chocolates or being seduced by perfumes used by men. Some ads depict wives who don’t have any say in financial decisions taken by the husband. There is a State Bank of India ad about home loans with lower EMI. The husband promises to take the kids on vacation and the wife rushes in from the kitchen to question the husband why he is making false promises to the kids when he knows there is no money left after paying the EMI. But he says she is wrong, because now he has the money for a vacation because he has switched the loan to State Bank with lower EMI payments. Here, there is confusion over the wife’s role in financial decisions. The question is, how could he switch the loan without talking to her? And if she is not part of financial decisions, then how did she know that there is no money left with him after the EMI payments?
Then there is this popular wall paint brand ad in which a woman is telling a kid that since an apple is rotten on the outside, it would also be bad inside and therefore should not be eaten. At that point, her husband (played by the Bollywood King) scolds her in the rudest way possible: “You can see the apple rotting,” he shouts, “but you can’t see the house rotting from outside.” That is very impolite.
Meanwhile, an Idea commercial shows a realistic relationship between husband and wife. In this ad, it is clear that the two are running the house together as equals. After the son switches their telephones to let them know how busy both are all day, both realize each other’s stress and burdens. And when the husband returns home from work, he offers to make tea for his wife. She replies, “Why don’t you do the dishes too!” This is a real depiction of the woman of today, the large middle class in which men and women work shoulder to shoulder to make ends meet.
So, as the government brings in more laws aimed at protecting and empowering the Indian woman, the Indian media, especially TV that can even sneak into bedrooms and influence relationships, must realize its responsibility towards the “naari shakti” of India.
(Author/analyst Ravi M. Khanna has covered South Asia for Voice of America from Washington and New Delhi for more than 24 years.)
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