The great Indian soap opera 'Kyunki...' has finally surrendered to reality. The serial ratings had gone considerably down during last many months and the producers had to shut the show. The last episode of the serial was aired on November 6..WHEN MILLIONS of TV soap opera lovers switched on to Star Plus this Monday (November 10), they might have felt disappointed, as the great Indian television saga aired its last episode on the last Thursday itself (November 6). We are talking about ‘Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi’, which had glued the viewers to their TV sets for years.
The audiences, it seems, have had a mix up of feelings at the exact moment when the last scene of the serial was aired last Thursday. Tulsi stood in a deserted dried place and Parvati got down from her car to slowly walk up to Tulsi to tell her that it is she who had brought up Karan and Nandini’s lost son.
When a few weeks ago the surprising news came that the serial was to end soon, the first reaction among the audiences was that it was but natural a decision.
The serial ratings had gone considerably down during last many months, especially when another serial ‘Balika Vadhu’ being aired by TV channel ‘Color’ had taken the audiences unaware with its literary merits. Comparing and contrasting the two serials ‘Kyunki…’ and ’Balika…’ just makes one feel that it is a frivolous idea to think of comparing the two.
The serial ’Kyunki...’ had started in 2000 and suddenly gained the popularity across the India. And soon Tulsi and Mihir became household names. Mihir’s death in one of the episodes had become a national event and lakhs of people in India were seen mourning for his death.
A paper showed an interesting cartoon with a housewife sobbing in a corner of her house and the husband informing a visitor that she was weeping because Mihir had died. But Mihir was suddenly found alive. The viewers had to hold their breaths for many episodes till the separated leading pair actually met. In many episodes, the two stood side by side but didn’t meet each other. The shocked audience held their breath till the next episode. It was an intelligent extension of a situation in late BR Chopra’s famous film ‘Waqt’, where all separated family members of a Lalaji (Balraj Sahni), suddenly came together in a scene but here they did not know each other, so every one missed others.
However, the serial ultimately turned out to be the story of a very weak family since Shanti Niketan, which housed Tulsi and her vast Veerani Parivaar became a soft target for anyone who could come and bully this Rs 500 crore empire. Tulsi herself proved to be the weakest character of the whole serial.
Showing such weak women could not generate the usual sympathy which the Indians audiences normally have towards women’s sufferings through social wrongs. In one episode, Tulsi just reaches helplessly outside her glorious Shanti Niketan after a stint of expulsion for no fault of hers, but suddenly decides not to go inside. She goes instead to Haridwar, to live a pilgrim’s life. What can one say about women abandoning their own rights to live in their own houses. She passes exactly two decades there, during which another woman Meera is proxying for her in Shanti Niketan as Mihir’s wife. No member of the Niketan has guts to turn her out.
Tulsi’s daughter Shobha’s husband is murdered and her (Shobha’s) mother-in-law is getting her re-married to none other than the killer himself. Tulsi is in jail at the time for having killed Ansh and despite knowing that her daughter was being married to the wrong person, she is helpless and unable to stop the marriage as if she is made of vacuum.
At Haridwar, Tulsi adopts a one-year-old girl who is put in a basket and just thrown into the river to die by none other than her real though cruel father. This girl grows up to be the pretty 21-year-old Krishna Tulsi. She comes to Shanti Niketan when Tulsi returns there and successfully drives out the outsider woman Meera, who had encroached into her household as Mihir’s wife. Krishna Tulsi, in her new house falls in love with Tulsi’s grandnephew Lakshya.
But alas, in spite of Tulsi, Krishna Tulsi falls a prey to the designs of Ansh’s son Eklavya and ends up marrying him, losing her lover Lakshya. Tulsi has no strength even in such crucial situations. The Shanti Niketan seems to be made of straws since any outsider can enter and deceive the family, hold every member to ransom and enjoy their helplessness. The most frequent visitors to Shanti Niketan were the policemen who off and on enter and arrest either Mihir or Tulsi and the whole set of human beings again look like made of straws to helplessly see the police walking away with their ‘accused’.
It seems like Ekta’s concepts are born from the fear psychosis of the non-working housewives who are always afraid of outsiders who would come and ruin them as well as some criminalised insiders. For example Tripti, who snatched Sahil from his wife Ganga, and lived deceptively in the Shanti Niketan for 23 years with an eye on the wealth, is able to bring Mihir to the verge of being sentenced to death.
These could only be the ill dreams of some uneducated housewife and Ekta’s only creativity lies in giving vent to these ill-conceived dreams, which the audiences ultimately must have hated badly. These situations also made all family relations unbelievable. In the serial, snatching husbands from other women seemed to be so handy that one wondered if any married woman in the society was safe at all.
Tulsi’s husband snatched by Mandira (who gave birth to Karan), Meera and Juhi Thakral. Which woman can be more unfit for sympathy than Tulsi who is ultimately kicked out of her own prided Shanti Niketan as a mad woman? She then dies in a serious accident and it is here that another woman Juhi Thakral takes the chance to bully the Veerani Parivaar, lives there as the Tulsi with plastic surgery.
The episodes showing Juhi Thakral as Tulsi are so natural that it wasn’t so easy to digest that Juhi was actually an imposter with the ill intent of robbing Shanti Niketan! Perhaps Ekta felt that the audience could not have reconciled with the absence of Smriti Irani as Tulsi (or perhaps that Gautami playing Tulsi was not as impressive). So, Ekta had to change the storyline as an after-thought (or some feel, compromised with Smriti Irani who had abandoned the serial after falling out with her). The come back of Smriti as Tulsi was given lot of publicity through TV channels as an exercise to sooth the audiences.
Ultimately, when the husband-snatching game stagnated, Ekta suddenly brought in Shiv who entered Shanti Niketan with the intent of snatching Ganga from her husband Sahil. It only seemed that Ekta was saturated and the serial was going nowhere. There however were some situations, which made the society sit and think for a while.Tulsi’s killing Ansh in order to prevent him from raping Nandini was reminiscent of Mehboob’s black and white film ‘Mother India’, in which the last scene showed Nargis, a farmer’s widow, picking up the gun and killing her son who was escaping on a horse after kidnapping the daughter of his mother’s tormentor.
Smriti Irani’s acting in episodes following Ansh’s murder was superb and on par with all legendary heroines like Meena Kumari, Mala Sinha and others. But the scriptwriters did not have the heart to hand down an exemplary verdict in the court where Tulsi was tried for the murder. Tulsi was given a three-year imprisonment for this murder. A judgment exonerating Tulsi on the ground of saving the honour of another woman would have made even the legal experts sit and ponder.
The death of Tulsi’s mother-in-law in hospital after protracted, unbearable illness too created a debate over mercy killings. But such thought provoking situations, which had some literary as well as social values were very few in the serial.
Last look at Kyunki Saas Bhi Bahu Thi : www.webnsn.com
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