“Yeah yeah, take a good show and spoil it by theorizing” said my labour lawyer/bollywood-gossip-junkie flat mate. All I said was that I thought Rakhi Sawant Ka Swayamvar was an “Interesting phenomenon that comments on the articulations of the notion of marriage within the context of fixed notions of culture among upper middle class north Indian families and within that the tropes of gender, normativity and melodrama! And so I should write about it on Kafila”.
Her comment wasn’t entirely unjustified.
The way in which one watches these shows in itself raises a range of questions. The show has taken over my life as of now. The final decision of who she will marry will be made soon and the restlessness and anxiety about it is immense and requires effort to contain.
It is the fascinating phenomenon of a quintessential item girl, (which Rakhi Sawant has made a tagged identity in a way that Silk Smitha might not have. Rakhi does not fight the item girl tag. She defends it vehemently.), who finds her husband on reality TV while also doing a number of other things. Through the show she tries to establish a few things. First, her lone struggle in Bombay and within the industry for which she demands respect. Second, her being a good Indian girl who knows her ‘limits.’ The item girl-ness is a job within which too, she will remain within her ‘limit’. Third, she wants a husband who loves her but more importantly with a family who accepts her as she wants to live in a ‘happy family’ which was denied to her in her natal home. Fourth, to establish herself as a commendable, independent woman who is rooted in her ‘culture’, who should not only be respected but emulated. She says so in so many words! The form of the show is one of melodrama, as epitomized by Rakhi herself.
What about the show catches my attention? As a ‘good old feminist’, I should shun it as ‘changing forms of objectification of women’ or as a ‘newer’ one, I should laugh it off as immaterial. What made me take the show seriously wasn’t really my analytical eye, but the fact that my heart went out to the story of a struggling young item girl who made it up the ranks of bollywood to secure her place, money, name and fame. Beginning with my slightly teary eyes, when I chanced upon Rakhi speaking of her difficult life, the show then threw up a whole set of questions and perspectives.
Objectification?
Throughout the show, Rakhi presents before these men, the Rakhi she or NDTV Imagine, the TV channel (although the gossip is that she does literally ‘run the show’) has made for herself. This self-made Rakhi includes being respectful to elders, religious (but not predictably, which we will return to shortly), knows how to cook etc; in short ‘homely’ (a term made popular by matrimonial ads). But this Rakhi also refuses to stop working after marriage and will not take certain breaches of her personal space by the men or their families. The men then have to prove their love for this Rakhi and their families have to demonstrate their acceptance. For example, when one of the contestants’ mothers declared that their family tradition necessitates that the women cover their heads, Rakhi promptly did so, but would not take it when the same mother says she will not be allowed to work after marriage. Similarly, while she seems to look at the past lives of these men only from the perspective of her future security, emotional and physical, when interrogated by one of them on her own past and her current lifestyle in bollywood, that contestant is promptly eliminated from the game.
In her individual interactions with the contestants, “dates” as they are called, or in the general chit chat that they indulge in, she strikes a balance of knowing fully well that she’s there to judge them, thus having a significant amount of power, while giving them the right amount of melodrama to keep intact the imagined normative heterosexual coupledom. She and the contestants seem like a relatively equal, urban, upper middle class couple while basic norms of gender roles are neither questioned nor reformulated. The contestants are not expected to cook or clean. Neither are they expected to take care or Rakhi financially. They are to be honest, genuine husbands who will love her for who she is and say the right things, borrowed from the rich culture of bollywood romance.
One of the eternal tests for all the contestants, apart from ‘true love’ and such like, is how well they will be able to handle their family and society vis-à-vis her status as a celebrity and more importantly an item girl. When a contestant suggested almost by mistake that Rakhi was not like an item girl when she came to his house, she literally jumps down his throat accosting him with questions of “are you ashamed of that? Are you ashamed of me?”. She has a soft spot for this young man and so lets him go at that moment. The moment may be alluded to again in the future as it often occurs in this world of the swayamvar.
Religion?
A Christian, by choice it seems, Rakhi owns up to it and adds it as yet another ingredient to her delightful melodrama. All the contestants are expected to be respectful of this belief. Some contestants and some of their families go a step further and speak of it as her asset – this pious religious belief – irrespective of what religion it may be. She makes sure to clarify with all the contestants and their families that they are ok with her religion. She on the other hand, is absolutely respectful of their religions (all who are left are Hindu, except one who is a Punjabi Hindu but the family goes to the gurudwara regularly and they take Rakhi there as well). She plays the quintessential secular Indian public figure as well as a good Indian bahu who is adequately accepting of all religions and practices.
Dichotomies:
Rakhi stands as a self-made independent woman. A star, an item-girl, rich and famous. She does not compromise on any of these and asserts them repeatedly while she plays the role of the good Indian wife and daughter-in-law to a number of boys and to at least four families as of now. She mocks extreme traditional views on women and the way they should live their lives. She mocks them openly while celebrating ‘open-mindedness’ as she calls it. She demands (?) a general acceptance of her aberrant self while being rooted in her notion of family values, love and culture. Family values and culture include honesty, ‘pure love’, religious belief, respect to elders, adequate cooking and cleaning skills, time to be spent with ‘the family’, ‘understanding’ between the couple and so on. Many of these terms are used and not always explained. It is as if the whole world knows their unitary meaning and it is me who seems to have missed the bus. In any other context, one might have assumed certain meanings to them. But with Rakhi, you never know!
As an undercurrent to this expedition to find the finely balanced family is the romance between her and all of the contestants. They woo her and she tests them on it. She plays along when she feels like and doesn’t when she’s not in the mood it seems. She plays the role of the mildly submissive modern lover while not tolerating any challenge to her power within the swayamvar space. When one of the contestants came to her at night, in her hotel room and told her that the chances of them marrying one another are very low (for complex reasons not comprehensible to even those who are immersed in the world of Rakhi ka Swayamvar), her anger knew no bounds. While she plays the role of the submissive daughter-in-law she has no patience if she does not know that she is being respected, not as a star, but as a guest in any of the houses she visits. Highlighting of her celebrity status by any of the contestants only annoys her and makes her doubt their ‘genuine love’ for her rather than her fame and money.
Rakhi stands firm on her ground while playing all the appropriate roles as and when required, while the contestants scramble to fit themselves within the mould she has created for them. She reverses so many traditions while upholding them with fervor. She stands before us, gorgeous and attractive, a bundle of contradictions — of the ‘traditional’ and ‘the modern’; the ‘romantic’ and the ‘homely’; the ‘independent’ and the ‘submissive’; the ‘acceptable’ and the ‘digressive’.
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Sunday, 2nd august is the day she will choose her mate. This fully scripted reality show will come to a (melo)dramatic end. The suspense is mounting. Watch closely and see Rakhi bewilder your analytical self and move your ‘bollywood’ ‘melodrama’ self (I sure hope everyone has one of the latter. For their own good!).
The warmed cockles of my heart that secretly house the ‘solidarity with all women of the world and their struggle’ wish this melodramatic item girl all the very best in choosing her scripted husband on this scripted show and a life with love, romance, respect and dignity (scripted of course!).
Who knows, maybe the end of the show will leave me with overwhelming emotions and profound analyses which might lead to a Rakhi Sawant Ka Swayamvar part-II!
One of my personal favourites:
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
In these days of academising every thing i wont be surprised if this is the topic of at least one phd dissertation, not to speak of half a dozen journal articles, all with banal , and, (note i have avoided the but here) academically and politically correct conclusions :).
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I am so glad Ponni that you responded to Rakhi Ka Swayamvar with the the need for a serious theoretical formulation. Have been myself following every single episode like the rest of the country.
This TV show, to me, stands for both a left political economy reading as well as a postmodern reading:
1) Firstly, it brings the norms of the political economy of the contemporary personal into a public deliberative space. It brings out the contradictions and splits through which women infact negotiate their own version of being a , what Rakhi calls, a ‘modern’ girl, a woman who earns, a woman with property.
It embarasses the deep seated discomfort of ostensibly progressive and ‘modern’ educated urban families with the possibility of economic development(albiet of a neoliberal kind) REALLY allowing women the space to utilise their bodies and labour in their own terms.
She does not hesitate to respond with a pinching and almost humiliating remark to all possible attacks on her right to work…and lets us NEVER forget..her RIGHT TO WORK….
2)And, in a postmodern tenor, she mocks our self transparent Cartesian confidence in our so called ‘real’ existence..which apparently to us stands in contrast to her ‘dramatised’ screen existence…the Rakhi Ka swayamvar sceptic is crushed in the burdens of an authentic personhood and feels disturbed by the play of images that constitute what Rakhi Sawant stands for…Although she lays claims to an authentic identity behind the image…she loves to live in and through the image and yet never finds her existence any less authentic than the ones who shudder to give up the quest for that non existent real self..which they define and redefine and yet are unable to ever play with it (like Rakhi)and recraft it without concern for Cartesian logical consistency that is demanded of an ‘authentic’ existence…
She mocks the real that we all are doomed to chase…
I dont care what reallly happens in the show tomorow…but i do think that instead of being too post-academic to regard this as a legitimate object of study… we should interrogate the reasons for our own discomfort with Rakhi Ka Swayamvar…
So Ponni, I loved reading your piece and would love to read your Part II for this piece…
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>>Firstly, it brings the norms of the political economy of the contemporary personal into a public deliberative space.
Yet this public deliberative space is a very complex production… isnt it ? There are all sorts of pre-production contracts, there are all sorts of technologies and norms of production; and then the spaces so produced are all articulated in very complicated ways — we dont quite know how things flow between them — the studio, the homes, the offices etc. I would really appreciate it if someone can comment on that or point to resources that look at realities shows as spaces of deliberation.
>>It embarasses the deep seated discomfort of ostensibly progressive and ‘modern’ educated urban families
Somehow, I ended up picking up a completely different end of this. I can think of a play in Telugu – first produced in 1892 and performed and studied hundreds of thousands times over the last 110 years — in which the protagonist, a dancing girl, in principle available for anyone who can pay for her upkeep, articulates and rearticulates moralities, undermines some, and colludes with some — all through skillful orchestration of family and professional intrigues. I am sure there are comparable productions in other languages. There is a difference between that Madhuravani of Kanyasulkam and Rakhi Sawant of this reality show- Madhuravani was content with helping break a child marriage, making a mess of a fraudulent widow remarriage advocate and gently manipulating a self righteous anti-nautch campaigner to confront the painful fact that her work is no more morally degrading than his own as a lawyer. Madhuravani does not seek to get married. Rakhi wants to hold on to her right as a dancing girl and at least as the script of the show goes… also wants to get married.
But I think the really significant difference is in the form of the two productions. That was a stage play. This is a TV reality show. They enrol the audience in very different ways. If somany families are willing to host Rakhi and the country is so avidly watching it from its living rooms and bedrooms – does it point to an already unsettled moral economy which is being rearticulated in all sorts of new ways?
>>i do think that instead of being too post-academic to regard this as a legitimate object of study..we should interrogate the reasons for our own discomfort with Rakhi Ka Swayamvar…
This is really about ‘our’ discomfort right ? The TV watching public seems quite happy to be interrogated by and to interrogate Rakhi Sawant.
How can a dialogical interaction of that scale be an illegitimate object of study ? In any case, it is the academic who renders an object of study banal by how he/she chooses to study it. The object is never banal or illegitimate. (I am not disagreeing with you… just adding to what you say.. such discomfort if there is any in the ‘academic’, it is worth simply jettisoning it and moving on.)
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Infact i have been really fascinated by the nature of the space..its production..And what are really the possible processes for which the reality show serves as a site…and i figure that there are two lines on which we can think of it…the “pre-production contracts” that you mention can help us think it more clearly..
through that there is a first line of thought that would want to identify a big money making conspiracy behind the ideological veil of swayamvar…and clearly that is a simplistic notion…the second line of thought can lead us to understand the very space of the reality show for Rakhi as a space of work..labour…may be creating a certain kind of value…and yet this workspace operates through the most intimate sphere of her existence…and a kind of sphere of ‘essence’…here Rakhi, the grooms and their families work out their personal choices.The Space is thus constructed by contracts signed between not unitary atmoistic selves in the public sphere(like the social contract in the liberal tradition)..but between selves split between the authentic, the viritual and the possible…The contracts are not merely between people, but people located in multiple positions of their existence..moving between these borders with a fluidity that almost disturbs…and yet this disturbance plays a critical role…
as Rakhi surrounds herself with a ‘virtual’ family made of actors of the TV soaps of NDTV Imagine…she mocks the society from where she seeks legitimacy and she mocks their claims to the Real…maybe the ‘real social’ is as virtually crafted as her screen world at the moment…maybe our authentic lives are hardly any more ‘real’ than hers…besides is there not a massive political economy operating in the private sphere which claims of authenticity constantly barr from a public exposure…the show really disturbs the borders of the real, unreal and through that exposes the structures of oppression that animate either of these spheres…
in fact its a fantastic way in which a postmodern decentered virtual self..that of Rakhi Sawant..is able to stand her ground and with a voice more critical that the stable self of the revolutionary agent of history(the class for itself)…its a critique of the real that can actually expose the constitution of the structures of oppression within this ‘real’..
Vis-a-vis the thought about the already unsettled moral economy of the audience..I must say that its difficult to say anything ..the difficulty arises from the really complex question of the ways in which this show been received…is it welcome? if indeed it has been welcomed, then as what kind of a phenomenon?..i am not too confident about the welcoming nature of enthusiasm that is shared by people for the show…
and finally, much like Ponni, and as feminists, we all feel a certain rage of anger, when the world, including academics would not take a woman’s mode of subversion seriously, because it does not conform to certain established modes of resistance…this is precisely how histories of the subversion are lost…
I think what Rakhi Sawant is upto is something way too complex for us to fathom in these initial reactions….but am glad we are able to re-cognize this as a moment for reflection..
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thanks ponni for this piece. i hadnt seen a single minute of this show till i saw the link u put up. and its so interesting what rakhi sawant and mallika sherawat are doing to our understanding of class, gender, commodification, and notions of transgression and conformism. this also calls for retheorisation of images and performances of people like helen of earlier times.
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thanks parth shil for those thoughtful comments.
a few thoughts just to nudge your ‘second’ line of thought a bit further along.
TV reality shows in my mind belong to a family of productions that have become popular in the last 20 years. First, role-playing games… especially those that are played by small groups without the aid of the internet, like say the old “dungeons and dragons” games. these games involve a master – who narrates the script, specifies the roles and their dilemmas and life contexts. The players choose their roles and start improvising. These games have a long history that goes back to the first world war. But in their contemporary versions, they can be quite complex, very absorbing, and often completely take over the players’ daily life as the games can continue for days. As players wrestle with their emotions, confront moral dilemmas and make difficult choices and relate these choices to other players and their actions – the unfolding psychodramas are not entirely in anyone’s control. The subcultures that have emerged from such games some times fade away as demands of ‘real’ lives – such as having to go to regular work etc. take over. That is, often it is only those who are somehow outside the regular labor markets that can afford to play and you can imagine what a range of people that might include. There are some interesting studies on the psychologies and sociologies and politics of these games. (I havent delved very much into it, as i am generally content with knowing some people who are veterans at playing these games and knowing what others are thinking about these things, than doing anything on my own.:)
Then there are the computer games. Here, the players either at standalone systems or via networked computers, enter into a world of fantasy – part scripted, with rules and resources that structure action. But there is a wide latitude in making moral decisions.
A show like Rakhi ka Swayamvar (any reality show for that matter) is different from these in some obvious ways. Here the decisions that one makes along the way can potentially have some direct and lasting consequences. (e.g. actually getting married to Rakhi; winning 50000 dollars or whatever). But, there are many parallels as well, which are worth exploring.First, apart from the intense involvement in the show/game while one participates in it (even as a viewer), and its immediate consequences (such as showing up late for work?) I think role-playing games; computer games and reality shows sort of rehearse certain routines which are internalized by the participants. What do these practised routines mean for one’s conduct outside of the spaces and times of enrolement in the game itself ?
I know that the above almost sounds like a roundabout way of saying that the question of whether or not violent images on TV and cinema cause violent behavior among young adults need to be asked again in the context of interactive media. But I am actually trying to say something more.
First, that these productions pose some fundamental challenges to the way we think about production and consumption (and therefore worker and consumer). We could do that via the idea of immaterial labor – the labor of producing new subject positions, (one that might aptly describe a range of activities from development activism to teaching to media work) or we could do that via the idea of performativity and the political economy of the sign. Whatever route we choose, it is clear that we simply have to move beyond the the previous rounds of feminist attempts to transcend the dichotomies of the real and the unreal, material and non material and so on .
Second, if we can hold on to the idea of rehearsing for a moment longer, I think it also becomes clear that it is not enough anymore to say that what we consider the real is really the substratum of previous rehearsals (the norm or the habitus). The norm is obviously being unsettled and reworked in new ways (not just via reality shows, although this is one of the most obvious examples of it) by forces that we do not have the tools to begin to understand.
Provisionally, it seems to me that the political questions lurking behind all this is as follows: what sort of power do those contracts between split selves actually exert ? Where and how exactly in all this does power get instanciated ?
As you can probably already see, I am deliberately skirting around the question of women’s subversion in all this – partly to avoid us getting locked into a battle whose time, I suspect is long past – quite literally, the action has moved elsewhere. And partly because I suspect that subversion is only one (no doubt an important one) route to reworking reality (whatever that may mean in the present context). By this I dont mean to say that your anger is pointless. It is just that perhaps, we are all actually seeing new horizons where we need to reevaluate the significance subversion itself and possibilities beyond it ?
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A great piece Ponni!
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Via Randomblogs
Shaifali Sandhya – An Open Letter to Rakhi Sawant
I want a husband to approach me like Salman, speak like Aamir, and kiss me like Shah Rukh, you told us. As millions sat transfixed by your swayamvara you sifted through sixteen thousand men around the world and finally from four wannabe husbands in your quest for non-filmy love. Now as you stand on the threshold of married life, I want to congratulate you Rakhi but as a clinical psychologist, who has been interviewing Indian couples (both in India and abroad) for over a decade, let me also caution you.
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wow, everything I wanted to say about Rakhi has been written here, only in a theoritical language.. :P
So, I guess I will have to write my version in lay man’s language :)
Thanks for the post…
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So the comments here are always moderated…I thought only first time commentators are moderated. Not good.
Blanket comment moderation, not good.
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Hi
Thought it would be interesting to bring in another show – this is the Jackpot question hour programme anchored by the actress Khushboo on Jaya TV. From time to time Khushboo asks in ‘representatives’ of fringe communities to be part of her admittedly mindless glamorous show, where you are asked questions that are as silly as they can get, but meanwhile you get to admire Khushboo’s audacious costume, her fantastic self assurance and her blouses that tease and provoke.
Some months ago, sex workers were her guests: fourty plus old women, who spoke boldly and simply into the camera. They discussed their lives, the manner they managed their trade, and their struggle to keep together soul and stomach together, as one of them put it. At regular intervals Khushboo pointed out that these women were exceptionally brave and self-sacrificing, and were doing all they could to make sure their children could move out of poverty and into a dignified social life. The women did not affirm this refrain, neither did they refute it. They continued to speak of selling sex in a matter-of-fact tone and the conditions of that labour. Some of them spoke of having found work in HIV_AIDS health centres, where they helped out talking to sex workers who had been forced to forsake their trade on account of ill-health. They spoke too, with relief, of not having to work anymore, plying the streets. Their concerns had to do with price rise, the rising costs of education, the fact that in many cases, their marriage choices had proved not worth the effort…
Here then was a reality show whose pre-script was elaborately formalistic in its constant assurance that the women we were watching are not to be construed as ‘deviant’ but as veritable martyrs to the cause of their children. But its formalism was made evident and Khusbhoo did not seek to domesticate whatever else the sex workers said.
Then again, there was a certain earnestness about it all – as if we had to know that these lives are not what they seem and that we ought not to pre-judge them. The women coded this desire to gain a hearing in their choice of clothes: silk saris, braided hair with flowers, all of which cried out a performative respectability. Khushboo represented it in the manner she refused to cast them as victims, while rendering them worthy of our ‘moral’ attention.
The contrast with the Rakhi Sawant show could not be more evident, yet there is that same tethering of the public woman between her own defiant sense of her self, of where she has walked and how she has arrived and the social respectability game she wishes to play. Only in this instance, there were no men to be had, no asking for a re-writing of the sexual contract. Instead, there was an insistent marking of sexual labour as labour, and of the sex worker as a labourer who has to constantly negotiate her status – meanwhile the social respectability game was to be played, if only to secure a visibility in the public eye on at least partially her terms.
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Hi.. thanks so much for drawing attention to Khushboo’s TV show… sometimes linguistic barriers limit our awareness of these extremely fascinating things people are engaged in…
Although i havent seen the Khushboo show ever..(and so what i am thinking aloud over here might be off the track and please correct me)…but from what i gather from your comments…a couple of thoughts come to me..
1) When it comes to the sex workers, we are able to make sense of it in terms of labour. however, the peculiar kind of labour in which people like Rakhi and Khusbhoo are invested, is something that still seems to evade a conceptual articulation.
2) There is also a dominant contradiction with which we associate these figures on screen like Rakhi or Khushboo (or even the sex worker guests on the show)…as u put it quite aptly …”that same tethering of the public woman between her own defiant sense of her self, of where she has walked and how she has arrived and the social respectability game she wishes to play”..we frame these women through this contradiction…
we look at these women(i mean here Rakhi and Khushboo)..firstly not so much as labouring beings, but we see them as beings in search a kind of legitimacy while not abandoning their defiant selves….A usual response to Rakhi Sawant has been to point out the ways in which she would not leave the tag of an item girl and yet demand the same privileges that a patriarchal society offers to a conformist woman…she is rendered as a person in search of respectability from society….
Sometimes i wonder if this is at all a contradiction that helps as a conceptual analysis of what we witness on screen…
So, a)we hardly ever look at these women(Rakhi and Khusbhoo) as investing labour and b) we dont think of them as complete agents or persons – in that they are persons in search of respectability, in search of a completion through social recognition of a certain kind.
Women in these positions as that of Rakhi or Khushboo are possibly redefining boundaries of the self, of labour, of value(in the sense of value generation), of even liberal principles like dignity, recognition and autonomy…in ways that we dont completely fathom…
The contradiction between their defiance of social norms and their efforts at gaining social respectability are possibly NOT the conceptual framework to understand the phenomenon…it is the conceptual framework portrayed BY the phenomenon itself…we need to possibly distance ourselves from such frames and rethink…
And thats why i like your term, which contingently helps us move ahead, “social respectability game”…
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