Indian soap operas make their way to the Sahara Desert

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Loved and loathed in equal parts, a new breed of Indian soap operas have emerged in the last 15 years. For some folk these are compulsory watching. For others (including me) these are a mindless, pointless sequence of visuals strung together by hordes of characters who utter very little and count on the ever-zooming camera and elaborate make-up to move from one episode to the next.

The producers are fixated on propagating a vision of Indian family and culture that is steeped in orthodox beliefs and superstitions. In almost every sense they take us back several decades by displaying the often patronising and clichéd manner in which society, especially women are represented.

I make no secret of my disdain for the Indian television today, compared to the quality programmes when I was growing up. Despite this, I was filled with amazement a few months ago, when I walked into Hotel Kasbah le Touareg in Merzouga at the edge of the Moroccan Sahara. In it's cozy lounge was a TV screen playing a distinctly Indian soap opera with an Arabic voiceover.


I stopped and stared at the TV, convinced that my 7th day in Morocco and recovery from a slight fever had led to hallucinations.  But no, here was the traditional Indian Hindu thaali held by a lady in a silk sari, wearing piercingly bright gold jewellery that made you want to watch the show with sunshades on.


A few conversations later, I had made friends with Fatima, the wife of the hotel manager and an avid lover of Indian soaps. In her broken Arabic and French she wanted to ask me all about India. It was the India she had seen in the soap operas: the India of big mansions and large families where women seemed to wake up in full makeup and diamond-studded necklaces. Where men were forever striding about purposefully but never seemed to have a real job. Where the daughter-in-law was either a scheming, manipulative woman out to destroy the whole family or a slave to her mother-in-law. Where exorbitant weddings occurred in every family and babies were born in 9 months like clockwork. Where occasionally multiple Hindu gods were displeased, causing misfortunes to occur on wealthy families who had to undertake elaborate prayer ceremonies and/or orthodox rituals to get into their good books again.


She said, 'I hope I can go there one day'. I could not ruin her imagination of the India that she had grown to love from her television set. So I just nodded, 'Of course India is like that'. Well I suppose it is, in small, disjointed parts. They are not the parts I consider representative of India's past or it's future but for a small settlement in the Sahara this is the India they know. So be it!




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