On Indian TV, \'I Do\' Means to Honor and Obey the Mother-in-Law

On Indian TV, ‘I Do' Means to Honor and Obey the Mother-in-Law

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

The Bhats, of Mumbai, watch soap operas together.

MUMBAI, India - Mothers-in-law are not a joke on Indian TV.

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Durga Bhat, second from right, knows all about deference to mothers-in-law. (She lives with her own.) Such relationships reign in soaps,  like “Pavitra Rishta,” which the Bhats watch together. 

They are the law.

Soap operas dominate prime time here and the mother-in-law reigns in almost all of them. However plucky the heroine or serpentine the plot, every love story seems to circle back to marriage and the many relatives who come with the words “I do.”

The extended family is still the bedrock of Indian society, where modernization meets its match. Soap operas here are outlandish - some so stylized and wildly melodramatic they verge on camp. But they are also oddly prosaic; expressions of duty, deference and parental obligation that inform everyday lives.

Television isn't an insurrectionist force in India. It's a relatively young medium struggling to adapt to a vast viewing audience that respects tradition and suspects change. Like many an Indian bride, television here occasionally tests the boundaries but mostly finds its way by following the rules and not making too many waves.

The rules can seem confounding to outsiders: India is a country where female infanticide can be a soap opera plot point in prime time but scenes of casual dating are taboo. In this realm it is the mother-in-law who is the metronome of Indian family values, issuing orders, giving advice and setting the rhythm of acceptable change.

Speed-clicking the remote after 8 p.m. is like watching a PowerPoint display of passion in hot pink, glimmering tears and the occasional stinging slap across the face. Sweet, noble Sandhya dreams of entering the Civil Service on “The Light and the Lamp Are We,” one of the top-rated shows in India, and her handsome husband, a humble candy shop owner, is all for it. But there's an obstacle that drives the narrative: Her mother-in-law is adamantly opposed.

The basic plot of “Child Bride” is evident from its title, and this soap about an under-age wife is also a top-rated show - under-age marriage is still prevalent enough to wedge its way into the family hour. More shocking, perhaps, is that in more recent episodes the in-laws accept the young heroine as their own and - brace for it - encourage her to leave her husband (he's a philanderer) and find a better match.

That may be a fantasy, but matriarchal interference (call it guidance) is marriage Indian-style. When Indian women discuss the need to “adjust” to matrimony, they don't just mean adapting to a new husband. They mean moving in with his parents, grandparents and siblings, a custom that is still the norm, even in prosperous families. In a country with 1.2 billion people, about 148 million households have television and that amounts to as many as 600 million viewers. In the slums of Mumbai even sections without running water sport satellite dishes on corrugated roofs. Almost everywhere, Indians gather in front of the family television and the mother-in-law controls the remote.

“Women like to see their favorite characters express their own feelings, so the mother-in-law identifies with the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law with the daughter-in-law,” is how Ekta Kapoor explains soap opera transference. Ms. Kapoor, a 37-year-old television and film producer who currently has five shows on the air, became queen of the Indian soap world with her breakthrough series, “The Mother-in-Law Was Once a Daughter-in-Law, Too,”one of the all-time hits of Indian television that ran from 2000 to 2008.

Male children are favored in Indian society, and wives join the husband's family at the low end of the pecking order, often relegated to kitchen drudge work while the mother-in-law rules over the grandchildren. “We live with our parents until we are married, then we live with someone else's parents,” Ms. Kapoor said. “There is pressure to give everything to the son. It's a source of conflict in so many homes.” (Ms. Kapoor, the daughter of well-known actors, is single and owns her own house but lives with her parents in their home anyway.)

Alessandra Stanley, chief television critic of The New York Times, has gone abroad to watch foreign TV this year.

A version of this article appeared in print on December 26, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: On Indian TV, ‘I Do' Means to Honor and Obey the Mother-in-Law.