Each night at 8 pm, Deepti Sharma switches on her television in the northern Indian town of Mathura and opens a window onto Pakistan, regarded as an enemy after three wars between the two neighbours. Sharma, 55, is a recent fan of Zindagi (Life), a Hindi entertainment channel that began in June 2014 and shows Pakistani soaps through the day.
The school teacher loves the elegant, flowing clothes the women wear, the gentle Urdu language they speak, similar to the Hindi spoken in India. She is riveted by the family dramas, the struggle to make a marriage work, the class and generational clashes.
Across India, there are viewers who prefer the Pakistani serials to the current Indian fare because of their realism. "Everyone does not live in a mansion, actors dress normal - they wear slippers at home and don't go to bed bejewelled and dressed to the hilt - and they have tight scripts," says Nivedita Gupta, 45, a housewife in Kolkata.
"Some are powerful stories, some not so great, but overall better than ours," Gupta adds.
The numbers of viewers are not huge - about 33 million compared to over 600 million for Star Plus channel that airs Indian serials - but Zindagi channel's business head Priyanka Khanna says it was never just about numbers. "We do a lot of research and surveys and we found the desire in the Hindi-speaking space for something beyond the melodrama that Indian serials provide," Khanna says.
"So we looked at the Pakistani serials for content that was finite - each soap stretches from 20 to 30 episodes - stories that connect to an Indian audience and are reasonable and realistic." "The actors are superb ... The people seem very real, like us. It's all very familiar and yet different," says Sharma. "In one of these soaps - Ye gali, Ye chaubara (This Lane, This House) two daughters aren't allowed to go out of their home and the father plans to marry one off to a cousin 10 years younger - that can't happen in urban middle-class India."
Gupta says she did not know much about Pakistani society when she first started watching the serials. She did have some notions that were confirmed and others that were challenged. "I was expecting some anti-India stuff. That's not there. Maybe the ones with stuff like that were not chosen," Gupta says. She likes that they choose difficult issues like a man struggling to accept his wife's child, born after she is raped in Piya Re (Oh My Love) or strong women with their own sense of identity like in Zindagi Gulzar Hai (Life is a Garden).
Gupta also feels that things are pretty bad in Pakistan though the life shown seems good. "People keep talking about going to the United States or Dubai." She feels uncomfortable that everyone is marrying their first cousins, although happens in some parts of India as well. And she was surprised to find that polygamy is not looked on favourably in most of Pakistani society. In Amritsar, a town in Indian Punjab, barely 30 kilometres from the border with Pakistan's Punjab, Gursharan Singh and his wife Satinder Kaur watch Pakistani soaps every day.
"It is all so familiar, but the cities look different now," Singh says. His family moved to Amritsar from Lahore after the country was partitioned to form Pakistan and India in 1947. Partition saw bloodshed and thousands of Muslims moving to Pakistan and Hindus and Sikhs moving to India. Since independence from British rule in 1947, India and Pakistan have had an uneasy relationship that has extended to their people. Getting visas from one to the other is not easy.
The South Asian neighbours have fought three wars, two of them over the disputed Kashmir region. And India accuses Pakistan of sheltering terrorists who carry out attacks on India like that in Mumbai in 2008, a charge that Pakistan has denied, saying that it too is a victim of terrorism. Khanna says when they started the channel they were prepared For some criticism, given the constant bashing of the other country that goes on. "There is the odd haranguing element, but overall the reactions have been very positive.
"We find the audience is very mature, intelligent. Maybe it always was but we underestimated them," he says. "It's been very, very encouraging." Sharma says some of her relatives ask her why she watches these serials. "They say: 'Why? Aren't Indian serials good enough for you?' Like I am some traitor."
"Most people in India don't know of Pakistani literature, their fashion trends. It's all enemy territory except for cricket," Khanna says. "They seem to have been pleasantly surprised that they could so easily relate to issues in Pakistan - family ties and sibling rivalries, emotions, relationships."
"Pakistanis have had more exposure to Bollywood films, songs, etc, while Indians have never really had a window on Pakistani society," Khanna says. Zindagi channel seems to be providing that window. Pakistani actor Fawad Afzal Khan has become a heartthrob in India and is starring in a Bollywood film. And in markets across small towns in India, garments shops are crammed with palazzo pants and the long kurti dresses worn by the Pakistani actors. What better sign of success.
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