Prime Time Soap Operas on Indian Television

This book examines the phenomenon of prime time soap operas on Indian television. An anthropological insight into social issues and practices of contemporary India through the television, this volume analyzes the production of soaps within India’s cultural fabric. It deconstructs themes and issues surrounding the "everyday" and the "middle class" through the fiction of the "popular".

In its second edition, this still remains the only book to examine prime time soap operas on Indian television. Without in any way changing the central arguments of the first edition, it adds an essential introductory chapter tracking the tectonic shifts in the Indian "mediascape" over the past decade – including how the explosion of regional language channels and an era of multiple screens have changed soap viewing forever.

Meticulously researched and persuasively argued, the book traces how prime time soaps in India still grab the maximum eyeballs and remain the biggest earners for TV channels. The book will be of interest to students of anthropology and sociology, media and cultural studies, visual culture studies, gender and family studies, and also Asian studies in general. It is also an important resource for media producers, both in content production and television channels, as well as for the general reader.

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.