All for love

Randeep Wadehra on how love makes the television soaps go round. In the process, varied reactions like jealousy, sadness, anger, possessiveness are triggered off

Jab Love Hua shows the cultural clash between the rustic and the city-bred

AMONG all the strands woven into the tessellated pattern of human relationships, love is the most colourful and vital. Legal and illicit, real and presumed, comforting and painful, beautiful and ugly... it dominates our television soaps.

Saat Phere’s Shubhra is an interesting instance. An explosive mix of hubris and insecurity, she becomes an epitome of jealousy and bitterness when her love for Nahar remains unrequited. Her condition gets exacerbated when she finds that her ordinary-looking elder sister, Saloni, has succeeded where she has failed. This leads her into situations where she becomes an unwed mother.

When Neel and Saloni rescue her from a dark future, she becomes grateful, but only temporarily. Her sister-in-law Kaveri, evil personified, plays on her insecurity and turns her against her well-wishers.

Neel, on the other hand, exemplifies sublime love. Failure on gaining Saloni’s hand makes him despondent for a while but he comes out of it. He accepts a platonic relationship with her. Later, he marries Shubhra to save her from disgrace.

Matters of heart provide staple to our TV soaps. Hearts brimming with multi-hued multi-layered emotions affect actions of different characters in a narrative. Each emotion manifests itself in a manner peculiar to the story line and cast. But what is really interesting is the Krishna motif that often crops up on the small screen. For example, allusion to Yashoda and Devki in Sindoor is a time-tested dramatic device that has been in use ever since motion pictures came to India. Thus, Vedika, the foster mother is locked in a tussle with infant Krishna’s biological mother Anisha for the child’s possession. Needless to say, streams of tears inundate the narrative.

There is a rather unwholesome dimension to onscreen love. Of uncontrolled passion that breaks all societal norms, thus creating rather piquant situations later on for protagonists. So we have nostril-flapping, rebellious born-out-of-wedlock progeny confronting errant parents as shown in Kasauti Zindagi Kay, Miilee et al. This provides enough dramatic content to lure and retain eyeballs.

However, the manner in which the angry young misbegottens are portrayed does nothing to discourage illicit love in real life; instead it insidiously glamorises the concept.

Not that legitimate relationships have any attraction for young viewers when they watch spouses going out of their way to be nasty to each other as Jai Walia is towards Baani in Kasamh Se.

Or, the senseless ease with which one is ready to break the bond for reasons that look oh so selfless and altruistic, viz., in Sindoor Niharika forces Rudra to sign on divorce papers so that he might be acquitted of false charges.

There is an explosive mix of hubris and insecurity in Saat Phere

Of course, there is a fine example of ideal conjugal love in Saat Pherebetween Nahar and Saloni, or platonic one between Neel and Saloni. But, a cynic may well ask, isn’t such pure sentiment a bit too unrealistic in the real world. The likes of Dheer, who cheats on his wife in the same serial, are closer to real-life characters.

But love survives. In fact, it forms the dominant sentiment, triggering off varied reactions like jealousy, sadness, anger, possessiveness and what have you. So we have Ramona going to pieces on learning of Aoni’s passion for Miilee, while the latter’s attitude to her former bete noire changes from platonic to not so ambivalent.

The sublime variety too makes its presence felt in such soaps as Pyaar Ke Do Naam–Ek Radha, Ek Shyam (the Krishna motif again!), which uses the hackneyed but effective narrative device of rebirth to portray ideal love.

Perhaps the award for the most crass portrayal of love should go to Jab Love Hua. The Shroff women flee the city to take refuge in their ancestral home in a distant one-telephone-no-electricity village. The metro-bred girls keep wrinkling their pretty noses at all things rural. Situations are contrived to impel them to fall in love with ganwaars — Ananya with Raghu, for instance.

The dialogues, no the entire scenario, reminds one of Hindi movies of 1960s when it all used to begin with cultural clash between the rustic and the city-bred.

And a few contrived situations later one would find the duelists burying their hatchets and turning into cooing lovebirds. There would be song, dance and romance in idyllic surroundings. Talk of love life coming full circle.

First published in The Tribune dated 28 May, 2006