Statisticians say that soon, and possibly even now, the nation of India is the world’s most populous. The country is hardly a monolith, with a wide range of cultures and mores, beliefs and practices as well as a disparate history spread across a country that is the seventh largest in area. However, one constant cultural tradition had endured in India for hundreds of years: Women experienced lives that had fewer rights and choices than men have. Now, that was often the case in the western world as well (see the differences in pay rates for women verses men even today in most western nations), but India’s discrimination against women often bordered on servitude. But the culture has experienced change in the prospects for women mostly in the past 100 years. Most of that drastic change has occurred in the past almost 40 years due to an interesting addition to the lives of most Indian families.
The typical Indian family used to be patriarchal, hierarchal, and relegated women to specific roles and jobs within the family. For example, traditionally, women in India couldn’t own land or have any sense of self-determination. Multi-generational households depended on keeping the men as the decision-makers and keeping women in the supporting roles. Again, this was true to a degree in the west as well, but in India, the oppression was somewhat harsher before the 1900s. Change began happening during the period of British control of India (one of the few good things to result from that period, perhaps); women were granted more rights, and a few upper class Indian women were even allowed to serve as governmental administrators.
And that’s an added layer of oppression for women in India, historically: The Caste System. The upper class, made up of priestly families, is followed by an administrative class, a skill worker and famer class, and then a laborer class is at the lower end. Even still, there is one more class below the laborers–the untouchables, the poorest of the poor and lowest of the low. The British not-so-subtly used this caste system throughout their occupation, using the upper classes and Christian Indians in governmental positions almost exclusively.
However, women in India were given the right to vote at almost the same time women in the United States were given it–1921. But the combination of a tight family organization and the caste system kept most women from achieving their dreams and ambitions.
That began to change dramatically in the 1980s, and it changed for an unusual reason. You see, the change began to happen because of the purchase of a consumer item by most Indian homes. It has been documented that, in the year 1988, for example, five of these items were sold in India every minute, and the purchase of the item radically changed women who were exposed to it. The women of India were introduced to other women through the item; they were able to see that there were options to the lives they were living and those their daughters could have in the future. And the laws in India in the modern era meant that there was nothing legally the men in the families could do to stop the women from pursing their dreams and goals. They began shunning old traditions, according to one source, and they began to become more independent. They began practicing self-determination without the control or interference of the men in their lives. That means that today an entire generation of Indian women have reached their 30s with this new mindset and this new-found freedom of self-determination.
And what was the instrument of this radical change in India society among the women there?
Television.
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