Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television

Shoma Munshi is Research Scholar and former Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Kuwait (AUK) and Senior Research Partner at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Ethnic and Religious Diversity, Göttingen, Germany. She is the author of the first edition of Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television (2010) and Remote Control: Indian Television in the New Millennium (2012), as well as editor of Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia: Global Media, Local Meanings (2001) and co-editor of Media, War and Terrorism: Responses from the Middle East and Asia (2004, second edition 2007), in addition to authoring several articles in refereed journals. Munshi has earlier worked at Delhi University, University of Amsterdam, University of Pennsylvania, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), New Delhi, India.

"Shoma Munshi has crafted a sophisticated, theoretically penetrating, and richly informed account of Indian soap operas in the first decades of the twenty-first century. The second edition adds an essential introductory update in one of the world’s largest television markets. Munshi fuses scholarship and elegance in an extremely accessible narrative. It still remains the only book to cover this topic in the Indian context, thereby setting a milestone. It will be an indispensable benchmark for all future studies of Indian television and of similar television industries worldwide; and it will interest media scholars, anthropologists, sociologists of culture, and the curious general read." — Peter van der Veer, Director Max Planck Institute, Göttingen, Germany"The original edition of this breakthrough book placed Indian "soap" operas on a cultural map previously limited to their U.S. and British counterparts. Indian prime time soaps foreground women and their changing family and gender roles. The introduction to this new edition takes account of how both the soaps and the media through which they appear have dramatically transformed audiences over the past decade, and have equally been transformed by their audiences. The soaps now appear in regional languages, increasingly viewed not only through TV, but also mobile telephones, tablets, and computers. Claude Lévi-Strauss would have said that Prime Time Soap Operas is good to think with, and it firmly links media studies in India to the main currents of social thought elsewhere."— Dale F. Eickelman, Ralph and Richard Lazarus Professor of Anthropology and Human Relations Emeritus at Dartmouth College, USA

• Introduction to second edition1 Introduction2 Milieu of production3 Key elements of production: characteristics of soaps4 Soap tales5 Women: similar genre, different representations6 The male voice7 Themes and issues8 ConclusionAppendix 1: tracking the growth of television in IndiaAppendix 2: TAM (Television Audience Measurement) ratingsAppendix 3: synopses of soap operas