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Women: International
Media Don’t Portray the Realities of Women’s Lives
Business decisions and societal ambivalence in India
leave many women’s stories untold.
By Sakuntala Narasimhan
Take one billion people, add a
mind-boggling diversity of
lifestyles, and what you have is a
nation of paradoxes. There were, at
last count, 49,145 newspapers and
periodicals in over 100 languages and
dialects in India, but the country also
has the largest number of illiterates in
the world. Indira Gandhi, a woman,
was prime minister for 16 long years,
yet more than 250 million Indian females
remain unlettered.
To portray the changing role of
women in journalism and the changing
ways in which women are portrayed
in the media, it
is to images I turn, like
someone pulling
snapshots from albums
to describe an
evolving place and
people.
In the first set of
snapshots, a popular
Tamil-language
weekly serialized a
story some 50 years
ago in which the protagonist,
a battered
wife, decides finally to
break away and takes
off her “thaali” chain
(the sacred marriage
symbol that a bridegroom
ties round the
bride’s neck, never to
be removed as long as
he is alive). Though
fictitious, the gesture brought angry
waves of protests from outraged readers.
She could leave her husband, but
to remove the thaali? Sacrilege!
Today, a young bride in “Kora
Kaagaz,” a popular family serial, enjoying
a high viewership on nationwide
television, yanks off the same auspi-
cious marriage symbol and walks out
of a sham marriage. And millions of
viewers applaud her spunk.
In another set of snapshots, 20 years
ago, I was asked to contribute a short
story to Savvy, a leading women’s magazine.
I wrote about a young, recently
widowed woman who refuses to dress
in drab white or remove her bangles
(as decreed by custom) and decides to
continue to dress and live the way she
used to, for the sake of her young son.
Brickbats flew. Some readers accused
me of “destroying our glorious culture
of fidelity and purity in women.” (How
A comparison between coverage of beauty and dowry deaths.
wearing a green, rather than a white,
sari constitutes infidelity I haven’t yet
understood.) Some praised it for its
“boldness.”
Today, this story wouldn’t raise half
an eyebrow.
And so the comparisons go on: During
1984, when I produced a radio
documentary on women in Indian society,
a woman reporter I interviewed
commented on her fight for inclusion
in riot coverage assignments. “Well,
don’t come crying to me later, when
you get hurt,” her male editor quipped.
“Male reporters can be just as scared by
bullets—they too can get hurt, right?”
she argued.
Today, Barkha Dutt has won kudos
for her courageous reporting from a
bunker in war-torn Kashmir, with missiles
whizzing past her ear.
A Sunday morning in October 2001:
Every paper carries, in its supplement,
a “women’s section”
ranging from serious/
feminist to frothy/
frivolous. But even in
the ones that carry
strongly feminist columns,
the matrimonial
ad section is an
eye opener. “Wanted,
fair, tall, slim bride,”
says an advertisement
from the parents of a
software engineer
based in the United
States. (There are no
such specifications in
the “grooms wanted”
columns.)
I asked an editor if
he had considered refusing
such ads for
“fair” brides. “You
must be joking,” he
retorted. The ads go out on the Internet
and mean revenue. Market forces (not
social ethics—much less gender equity)
dictate contents, with profits the
main criterion, especially when most
publications are owned by businesses.
A strong, high-profile woman edits the
popular weekly section of the paper. I
88 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001