Indian soap tackles taboos to become one of world's most watched

Indian soap tackles taboos to become one of world’s most watched

An Indian soap opera whose themes include acid attacks, domestic violence and high rates of abortion of female foetuses has quietly become one of the most-watched programmes on the planet.

India’s public broadcaster announced in April that the audience for Main Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon – I, a woman, can achieve anything – had, in two seasons, exceeded 400 million viewers “and counting”.

Partly funded by UK foreign aid, and designed by an NGO to promote sexual health and family planning, the enormous reach of the radio and TV series was unexpected, says Poonam Muttreja, the executive director of the Population Foundation of India who developed the programme.

“Our estimate was that we would get 250 calls a day,” she says of a hotline they established for viewer feedback three years ago. “First day, first show, we got 7,000 calls within one hour. Within two hours, our switchboard collapsed.”

By the end of the first season more than 1.4 million Indians had called to comment on the drama unfolding around Sneha Mathur, the programme’s protagonist, who turns her back on a lucrative career as a doctor in Mumbai to practice in her home village of Pratappur. In one of the typically unflinching storylines for which the programme has become known, Mathur returns to her village after her sister is forced into a late-term abortion of a female foetus, and dies during the procedure. In another episode, another sister is attacked with acid by a local boy after she joins a mixed-sex football team.

The programme’s directors and writers spent a year visiting the Indian hinterland researching the social problems that persist in the country, especially in its villages. Muttreja says that an ignorance of sexual health is a key issue.

“It showed that entertainment education, if done well, can very quickly change social norms, and then lead to behavioural change,” Muttreja says.

After watching the first season, nearly 40% of women polled agreed that marriage at a very young age risked the lives of both mothers and children – up from 25% before it was screened. Attitudes about domestic violence also shifted. After watching the programme, the number of women who agreed a wife deserved to be beaten if suspected of cheating on her husband had reduced by over 30%. Among men questioned, 22% fewer agreed.

Soap operas have been a cultural juggernaut in India since the early 2000s, when cable television reached an increasing number of middle-class homes. Director Feroz Abbas Khan says that in a conservative society as India, the programme is clearly breaking boundaries. “In our society, nobody speaks. Children and parents don’t have conversations about sex. There, we’re talking about menstruation, masturbation, contraceptives,” he says. “These things never came on our TV. We’ve pushed the envelope.”