Imaginary Homes, Transplanted Traditions

Abstract

This article calls for an understanding of Indian television as a transnationally mediated apparatus, rather than examining it as a national enterprise. At the production, distribution and reception levels, contemporary Indian television is enmeshed in an interconnected network of ‘contact zones’; its storylines and rhetorical strategies are shaped by the transnational traffic of programming and peoples, and the national–cultural identity it articulates is transnational in character. Consequently, its programming is, at least, double–sited and offers a double–vision, simultaneously referencing the transnational and the local to produce a global–parochial sensibility. Using the concept of the transnational optic, I analyse prime–time melodramas produced in India as well as in the diaspora to highlight the central role women have come to occupy in narratives about the Indian nation. Although the national and diasporic melodramas offer different definitions of ‘Indian tradition’, it is the figure of the woman who is presented consistently as the ‘bearer of tradition’. Paradoxically, in the melodramas I examine, this ‘traditional’ woman, who is located firmly in the domestic realm, is the primary figure through which the shows stage anxieties concerning national and global issues.