Indian Soap Opera
Indian soap operas are soap operas written, produced, filmed in India, with characters played by Indians (including those of Western descent like Tom Alter), with episodes broadcast on Indian television channels/channel chains that are often not limited to the Republic of India itself: often many “serials” (as they’re more commonly referred to) are broadcast overseas in Pakistan, the UK, USA, and some parts of Europe, South Africa, and Australia. (Doordarshan, or DD, is an exception: Until recently it was only viewable in India and Nepal, but now also in the UK.)
Indian soap operas are often mass-produced under large production banners, with houses like Balaji Telefilms — run by Ekta Kapoor and Shobha Kapoor, daughter and wife respectively to Hindi film star Jeetendra — running the same serial in different languages on different television networks/channels. (See below: Ekta Kapoor's "K" Phenomenon.)
India's first soap opera was Hum Log, which concluded with 154 episodes, was the longest running serial in the history of Indian television at the time it ended. Every episode was about 25 minutes long, and the last episode was about 55 minutes. (See below: India's first soap opera and longest running Indian soap operas.)
The most common languages in which Indian serials are made in are Hindi, Punjabi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam, though many contain a mix of the predominant language and English. This often creates and unintentional comic effect: a certain high school-themed serial on Star One has created a bizarre language of its own, a heavy mix of colloquial Hindi and corruptions of modern American slang, which, though fairly odd to understand at first, has created its own coterie of loyal fans devoted to using the very same language in daily speech.
Hindi soap operas have gained popularity abroad, across South Asia and beyond into Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, and among the Indian diaspora elsewhere. A number of Hindi soap operas have also been dubbed into Mandarin and gained popularity in China. They are also aired overseas in the US, the UK, Australia and so on.
Read more about Indian Soap Opera: India's First Soap Opera, Features, The "K Phenomenon", Success and Status, Speed To 1000 Episodes Club, Longest Running, Social Impact
Famous quotes containing the words soap opera, indian, soap and/or opera:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, and again, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A reader who quarrels with postulates, who dislikes Hamlet because he does not believe that there are ghosts or that people speak in pentameters, clearly has no business in literature. He cannot distinguish fiction from fact, and belongs in the same category as the people who send cheques to radio stations for the relief of suffering heroines in soap operas.”
—Northrop Frye (b. 1912)
“A pretty air in an opera is prettier there than it could be anywhere else, I suppose, just as an honest man in politics shines more than he would elsewhere.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)