Between the Screen and Everyday lives: Daily Soaps, Migrant Domestic Workers and Cultural Appropriation in Assam, India

Abstract

With migration and mobilities of people, their identities and lived-in worlds also turn mobile, complex enough to intersect with the dominant social, cultural and economic structures of destination spots. Today, this is visible across the translation of visual idioms and practices, represented through the everyday(ness) of soap operas in Indian homes. Daily soaps in a South Asian country like India, often socialize us to the norms of ideal femininity, caste and class hierarchies, which also lurk in the complexities of making migration as a (mis)representation, involving socio-economically marginalized rural population. The expansion of the labour market and the growing demands of domestic work sector often locates the reception of rural women as a potential resource of labour, where the question of their inclusion moves between the glorification of their bodies, marginality vis-à-vis their social othering. But, underlyingly, soap operas and the discussion of its contents immunize women domestic workers belonging to rural areas with agencies, enhancing their sphere of productive aspirations. Soap operas largely transact real-life roles of commuting domestic workers. The televised content channels the interactions between the domestic workers and their employers, entrapped within the ‘modern’ upper-class cultural reception of life-chances, humor, leisure-watching and market-oriented consumption. Stretching across this, the article analyses the influence of Assamese, Bengali and Hindi daily soaps on the domestic workers, their socio-emotive practices and migration in a metropolitan Northeast Indian city like Guwahati. This article, based on case studies of migrant domestic workers in Assam, uncovers communicative facets of daily soaps across the women domestic workers’ lives, families and workplaces. Lastly, the article explores how the politics of cultural appropriation across soap opera discourses reproduce notions of power relations on one hand and engenders interactions of various caste/class groups on the other.