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Shoma Munshi, Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television, Routledge, 2010. ISBN 978-0-415-55377-3.
Shoma Munshi's book is the first book-length study of the new wave of soap operas which appeared on Indian television starting in 2000, following the economic liberalisation of the country in the early 1990s and the accompanying spread of cable and satellite television, a process which is still on-going. The author is an anthropologist by training, and much of the book reports on interviews she held with television executives, producers and, to a lesser extent, actors involved in the new soaps. There is also a considerable amount of textual analysis of the soaps, in particular as regards the representation of women (and to a lesser extent men) and the ways in which these soaps use elements from broader Indian (in particular Hindu) culture. There is no audience analysis of any kind, something about which the author is quite open. This is not in itself, of course, a problem, as many extremely useful books have been written on soap operas that do not include any reception analysis at all. But it does problematise to some extent a few of the claims the author makes for the soaps: on numerous occasions we are informed that this or that element of the soaps is, for example, 'a source of pleasure for audiences' (p.176) without any concrete evidence being adduced at all. In addition there are around 50 colour plates of the main characters in the soaps, and a number of appendices summarising the history of Indian television, the plots of the soaps, and the evolution of viewing figures over the past decade.
The Introduction offers a brief overview of early television serials on Indian television in the 1980s and 1990s produced by the public service broadcaster Doordarshan. It then defines a number of key terms for the overall argument of the book - series/serial, melodrama/realism, tradition/modernity - before locating the study of Indian soaps within the framework of broader European and North American scholarship on this subject, of which the author displays a truly extensive knowledge. It offers an overview of the influence on the soaps of the successful TV series based on ancient Indian epics, Ramayan (1986-88) and Mahabharat (1988-1990),...