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| THURSDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2012
INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE
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Republicans loosen
embrace of Tea Party
TEA PARTY, FROM PAGE 1
KUNI TAKAHASHI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The Bhats, of Mumbai, watch soap operas together. Durga Bhat, second from right, said the characters in ‘‘Pavitra Rishta’’ (‘‘Pure Relationship’’) resemble her family, ‘‘a joint family.’’
India soap operas hold a mirror to family
INDIA, FROM PAGE 1
show — underage marriage is still prevalent enough to wedge its way into the
family hour. More shocking, perhaps, is
that in more recent episodes the in-laws
accept the young heroine as their own
and — brace for it — encourage her to
leave her husband (he’s a philanderer)
and find a better match.
That may be a fantasy, but matriarchal interference (call it guidance) is marriage Indian-style. When Indian women
discuss the need to ‘‘adjust’’ to matrimony, they do not just mean adapting to
a new husband. They mean moving in
with his parents, grandparents and siblings, a custom that is still the norm,
even in prosperous families. In a country with 1.2 billion people, about 148 million households have television,
amounting to as many as 600 million
viewers. In the slums of Mumbai, even
sections without running water sport
satellite dishes on corrugated roofs. Almost everywhere, Indians gather in
front of the family television — and the
mother-in-law controls the remote.
‘‘Women like to see their favorite
characters express their own feelings,
so the mother-in-law identifies with the
mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law with
the daughter-in-law,’’ is how Ekta Kapoor explains soap opera transference.
Ms. Kapoor, a 37-year-old television and
film producer who currently has five
shows on the air, became queen of the
Indian soap world with her breakthrough series, ‘‘The Mother-in-Law
Was Once a Daughter-in-Law, Too,’’ one
of the all-time hits of Indian television,
which ran from 2000 to 2008.
Male children are favored in Indian society, and wives join the husband’s family at the low end of the pecking order, often relegated to kitchen drudge work
while the mother-in-law rules over the
grandchildren. ‘‘We live with our parents until we are married, then we live
with someone else’s parents,’’ Ms. Kapoor said. ‘‘There is pressure to give everything to the son. It’s a source of conflict in so many homes.’’ (Ms. Kapoor,
the daughter of well-known actors, is
single and owns her own house but lives
with her parents in their home anyway.)
The family structures — and tensions
— on soap operas mirror those of the
audience with one glaring difference. In
many series, yearning and betrayal
play out in marble mansions. Women
are draped in silk and encrusted in jewels, a fantasy of wealth that has grown
all the more seductive since the rise of
India’s billionaire class. The formula
has lasted for more than a decade because it puts identifiable characters into
aspirational settings.
The yearning is not for the real-life
luxury lofts of India’s new rich. The sets
of houses look like a maharajah’s palace;
the costumes are so lavish and vivid that
they would stand out in a Bollywood
wedding scene. Social dynamics, on the
other hand, look more like middle-class
life in overpopulated Mumbai or New
Delhi. Even in vast mansions, family
members gather in tight clusters; no
dispute, no matter how personal, breaks
out without bystanders. A lover’s quarrel takes place in a crowd.
The classic Indian soap opera shot
has two characters at odds. One says
something shocking, or slaps the antagonist’s face, and the camera slowly pans
a circle of men and women frozen in horror and dismay, as chords of dramatic
music rain down.
The television landscape is just as
dense. There are many hundreds of
channels, and regional television is
booming. The most popular soaps are
translated into several languages, and
many regions, from Punjab to Tamil
Nadu, have their own channels and programs. Television is a bigger industry
now than Bollywood, and Bollywood actors are beginning to work in television.
The field is destined to keep growing because the Internet is not yet siphoning
away the nation’s television-viewing
youth.
There are growing numbers of single
career women in India, and in Bollywood
romantic comedies, but mainstream television is not yet ready to celebrate their
independence. After recently testing a
pilot about a group of single Indian women living together, Sony, one of India’s
leading networks, dropped the experiment. ‘‘An Indian ‘Friends’ just won’t
work here,’’ said Sneha Rajani, a senior
Sony executive in charge of programming, referring to a U.S. television show.
‘‘A family unit is essential for success.’’
On their own time, Indian network executives in cosmopolitan Mumbai
watch ‘‘Homeland’’ and ‘‘Grey’s Anatomy’’ and say they itch to create comparable niche shows. But right now
there is too small an audience. India is in
the middle of making the switch from
analog to digital, but premium cable is
still in the future.
Some producers are ready to take the
risk anyway, notably the Bollywood star
Anil Kapoor, familiar in the West as a
star of ‘‘Slumdog Millionaire.’’ He
bought the right to adapt ‘‘24’’ and intends to play the superagent Jack
Bauer. (Mr. Kapoor played a moderate
Muslim leader in Season 8 of ‘‘24.’’) That
Fox series was a hit in India, especially
with men; it was shown on weekends,
when matriarchs hand the remote over
to husbands, who turn on cricket and
the Indian police procedural ‘‘C.I.D.’’
It is not just the high-tech action sequences of ‘‘24’’ that are daunting to adapt. Government conspiracy and Islamic terrorism are treacherous topics in a
country where corruption is widespread
and Hindu-Muslim tensions acute. Raj
Nayak, the chief executive of Colors, the
network behind ‘‘Child Bride’’ that has
also teamed up with Mr. Kapoor, said the
creative team has not figured out how to
navigate the political and religious sinkholes. ‘‘It’s very sensitive,’’ he said.
Glossy Indian television ads for cars,
motorcycles and beauty products
provide some of the most modern — and
Westernized — images on television,
and even those are careful not to offend.
In an ad for ‘‘Attitude,’’ a skin cream, a
smiling college student gets out of a car
to greet her extended family, gathered
for her return. Her relatives freeze
when a second woman climbs out; her
friend is a tough-looking young woman
with Goth-style clothes and matching
expression. The chill is broken when the
Like many an Indian bride,
television occasionally tests the
boundaries but mostly finds its
way by following the rules.
visitor comes forward and bows respectfully at the feet of the matriarch.
Everyone sighs in relief, and the family
goes inside for a celebration.
Some television producers want to
embed more conspicuous public service
messages in their programs. ‘‘I despise
soaps about kitchen politics; they are
regressive,’’ said Ajit Thakur, the general manager of Life OK, a sister channel
of Star Plus, a network owned by News
Corp. Life OK has a soap opera called
‘‘Domestic Violence,’’ designed to focus
attention on spousal abuse.
But when the channel asked viewers
to call in with advice for the abused wife,
Mr. Thakur was taken aback that almost
half urged her to stay with her wealthy,
handsome, if violently possessive husband. A lot of the older women, he said,
argued, ‘‘Well, at least he really loves
her.’’ (He ends up killing her with poi-
‘Child Bride’
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DESI TASHAN
THE PREMISE
HIGHLIGHT
One of the top-rated shows in India,
‘‘Child Bride’’ is about Anandi, an
underage girl who was forced into an
arranged marriage by her parents.
After nearly six years on the air, Anandi is
now an adult woman with new marital
problems. Most recently, her in-laws
encouraged her to leave her cheating
husband and even helped her find a
second, happier marriage.
‘I Do’
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ZEE TV
THE PREMISE
HIGHLIGHT
This is a new soap opera about Zoya, an
Indian woman who returns home from
New York and has to adjust to her
traditional Muslim community. The
romances are predictable, but the
setting is not. Tensions between Hindus
and the Muslim minority remain so high
in India that ‘‘I Do’’ is the first soap opera
about Muslims in ages.
Asad is a handsome, brooding
businessman who disapproves of Zoya’s
modern ways, including her jeans. His
mother and sister, while traditional in
dress and deference to the man of the
house, often side with Zoya.
son, but she is reincarnated via heart
transplant and the new heroine plots his
comeuppance.)
Soap opera subplots are often inspired
by tales from the ‘‘Ramayana’’ and ‘‘Mahabharata,’’ epics that are the pillars of
Hindu culture. Ms. Kapoor said that
when she wanted to have a heroine kill a
man to avenge his abuse of another woman — not a normal role for women on television — she deliberately shot her in the
pose of Kali, the Hindu goddess of death.
Religion cannot be trivialized,
however. Inspired by ‘‘The Tudors’’ and
‘‘Rome,’’ Ms. Kapoor tried to do a more
daring series about the ‘‘Mahabharata’’
that humanized the gods. It bombed because it was too irreverent. Life OK is
having success with its more traditional
depiction of the adventures of Lord
Shiva.
Family is also not to be trifled with.
There are evil twins, fake deaths, comas, resurrections, time leaps, heartbreak, suicide, longing and lots of conflict on soaps — husband scolding wife,
wife scolding maid, sister accusing sister, mistress threatening lover — but it
is rare to see a younger person speak
rudely to an elder. Heroines can be
feisty, like the young woman raising her
younger siblings by herself on the astonishingly titled ‘‘Hitler Didi.’’ (Hitler
is a metaphor for bossy in India.) They
can sometimes be defiant, like Sia, who
rebelled when her future mother-in-law,
Ammaji, the village leader, incited the
killing of baby girls on ‘‘Don’t Come to
This Land, My Lovely Daughter,’’ a Colors network show that highlighted the
problem of infanticide in rural areas and
ended (happily ever after) this year.
But deference is essential and that is
not just made-for-television fantasy.
In real life, the Bhats of Mumbai are a
modern family of sorts: Durga, 26,
works as a secretary at a real estate
company, and her husband, Sunil, 32,
works in computer technology. They
have a 15-month-old boy, Siddanth, and
live in a two-room apartment in a concrete tower in an industrial area of
Mumbai that happens to have a small
paddock of buffalo next door. They
share the space, no larger than a recreational vehicle, with Sunil’s mother, Jayshree, 53, and his sister Sheela, 28. His
mother’s 78-year-old mother-in-law,
Taralaxmi, sleeps nearby and spends
her days in the apartment.
Both parents work hard, saving to
send their son to private kindergarten.
But everyone gathers at night to watch
‘‘Pavitra Rishta’’ (‘‘Pure Relationship’’), a top-rated soap opera where
the family, Durga said, ‘‘is like ours, a
joint family.’’ Taralaxmi is a charmer,
full of stories, and one evening before
the show began, she pointed to her
daughter-in-law, Jayshree. ‘‘She used to
be thin,’’ she said cheerfully. ‘‘She put
on weight after menopause.’’ Even in India that did not seem like a compliment.
Jayshree kept smiling and did not reply.
‘‘Sunil’s grandmother has her views
and she loves to talk,’’ Durga said. ‘‘We
just let her go, just as I do with my mother-in-law. You have to keep things moving when you live together in this kind of
space.’’
Like many a soap opera heroine,
Durga has learned to adjust.
Alessandra Stanley, chief television critic
of The New York Times, has gone abroad
to watch foreign television this year.
ONLINE: TV WATCH IN INDIA
Watch a sampling of television shows
from India. global.nytimes.com/arts
For continuous coverage and topical
conversation about the world’s
largest democracy, go to the India Ink
blog. nytimes.com/indiaink
other way too often,’’ he said. ‘‘They
sort of smiled, winked and nodded too
often, when they should have been calling ‘crazy, crazy.’’’
The movement is not going away —
most Republicans in the House have
more to fear from primary challengers
on their right than from Democratic
challengers. An unpopular budget deal
could reignite the Tea Party, as the antitax crusader Grover Norquist predicts.
But surveys of voters leaving the
polls last month showed that support for
the Tea Party had dropped precipitously from 2010, when a wave of recession-fueled anger over bailouts, U.S.
spending and the health care overhaul
won the Republicans a majority in the
House.
The House members elected with Tea
Party backing in 2010 forced onto the national agenda their goals of deep cuts to
spending and changes to entitlement
programs, embodied by the budget
blueprints of Representative Paul D.
Ryan of Wisconsin, who became Mitt
Romney’s running mate. And some of
those lawmakers led the revolt last
week that prompted Speaker John A.
Boehner to cancel a House vote on a
plan to avert a year-end fiscal crisis by
raising tax rates on household income
above $1 million.
‘‘The Tea Party put a lot of steel in the
spine of the Republican Party,’’ said
Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma.
But the Tea Party activists have not
been front and center in the fiscal fight.
And Mr. Cole added that Tea Party leaders now excoriating Mr. Boehner for offering higher taxes in a budget deal did
not recognize political reality.
‘‘These guys want instant success,’’
said Mr. Cole, a member of the House
Republican leadership. ‘‘If they want to
see a better result, they’ve got to help us
win the United States Senate. We’ve
thrown away some seats out of political
immaturity.’’
But a number of Republican leaders
said the Tea Party seemed headed toward becoming just another political
faction, not a broad movement. It may
rally purists, but it will continue to alienate realists and centrists, they said.
‘‘I think the Tea Party movement is to
the Republicans in 2013 what the
McGovernites were to the Democrats in
1971 and 1972,’’ said Don Gaetz, a Republican who is the president of the Florida
Senate. ‘‘They will cost Republicans
seats in Congress and in state legislatures. But they will also help Republicans win seats.’’
Because the Tea Party comprises
thousands of local groups, it is impossible to determine whether its ranks
shrank after the many electoral defeats
last month, which activists said caused
grief and deep frustration.
Greg Cummings, the leader of the We
the People Tea Party in rural Decatur
County, Iowa, said his group had picked
up 12 members since the election, for a
total of about 50. ‘‘If you were in a fight
and someone gave you a good left hook,
it doesn’t mean the fight is over,’’ he
said.
But Everett Wilkinson, the chairman
of the Florida Tea Party in Palm Beach
County, said the number of active Tea
Party groups statewide ‘‘has diminished significantly in the last year or so,
certainly in the last couple of months,’’
with only a third of what there once
was.
‘‘A lot of people gave their heart and
soul to trying to get Obama out; they’re
frustrated,’’ he added. ‘‘They don’t
know what to do. They got involved with
the electoral process, and that didn’t
work out.’’
FreedomWorks, a national group that
has played a crucial role in organizing
Tea Party activists and backing insurgent candidates, has been riven by turmoil, leading to the departure last
month of its chairman, Dick Armey, a
former Republican majority leader in
the House.
Mr. Armey said in news accounts that
he questioned the ethical behavior of senior officials in the group, though others
told of a power struggle. He was eased
out with an $8 million consulting contract, a copy of which was obtained by
The Associated Press.
FreedomWorks spent nearly $40 million on the 2012 elections but backed a
string of losing Senate candidates, including Richard E. Mourdock of Indiana,
Josh Mandel of Ohio and Connie Mack of
Florida. Some Tea Party firebrands lost
their House seats, including Allen B.
West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois.
Billie Tucker, an activist with the First
Coast Tea Party in Florida, said she and
others suspected that corruption on local election boards had led to Mr.
Obama’s victory in the state. Activists
want to investigate.
‘‘Some people say it’s just a conspiracy theory, but there’s rumbling all
around,’’ she said. ‘‘There’s all kinds of
data, and no one’s talking about it, including, hello, the mainstream media.’’
CHIP LITHERLAND FOR THE NYT
Dick Armey quit as chairman of FreedomWorks, which organized Tea Party activists.
Richard Baum, 72, creator
of renowned China forum
BY WILLIAM YARDLEY
Richard Baum, who presided over
Chinapol, an online discussion group
about China that has become an essential forum for many experts, diplomats
and journalists, died Dec. 14 at his home
in Los Angeles. He was 72.
O B I T U A RY
The cause was cancer, said his son,
Matthew.
Dr. Baum, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, was an accomplished China scholar who wrote influential works on Mao Zedong and the
period leading to the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, as well as on the market-based policies promoted by Mao’s
successor, Deng Xiaoping. He advised
top U.S. leaders, including President
George H.W. Bush.
But he had a particular affection for
Chinapol.
In the 1990s, Dr. Baum spent parts of
several years in Japan. He had a steady
e-mail dialogue with several dozen other
China experts, but keeping it going while
he was overseas became increasingly
expensive because of Internet charges,
which were steep at the time. To save
money, he started Chinapol, a Listserv
group whose first members were mostly
academics. The group steadily expanded to include ambassadors, business
leaders and journalists — all seeking insight and perspective as China rose as
an economic and political power.
Participants had to be approved by Dr.
Baum — a recommendation from another member helped, as did an affiliation
with a prominent news organization —
and advocacy, attacks and self-promotion were not allowed. Violators could be
quickly culled, an intolerance that some
joked evoked that of China’s leaders.
‘‘Rick was lovingly known as ‘Chairman Rick,’’’ said Clayton Dube, a longtime friend and colleague who leads the
U.S.-China Institute at the University of
Southern California.
The forum has been especially useful
for journalists working in China. Although posts on Chinapol are confidential within the group, a reporter can contact a member separately to follow up
on a post or to request permission to
quote from it.
‘‘Off-list replies welcome,’’ a post
might read.
Members can submit questions to the
group, whether they are looking for articles on China’s relationship with Iran or
context for news at it develops.
Chinapol currently has about 1,300
members. Dr. Baum recently gave responsibility for moderating the forum to
Mr. Dube and Richard Gunde, another
longtime colleague at U.C.L.A.
‘‘Online groups tend to burn out, burn
up, become dominated by certain loud
voices and in other ways eventually degrade,’’ James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic who has written extensively about China, said in
response to an e-mail about Dr. Baum
and Chinapol. ‘‘Through his careful selection of members and infrequent but
firm policing of what he considered inappropriate discussion, Rick Baum allowed people from a wide variety of interests to share news, impressions and
questions about China, in a way that left
nearly all of them better informed.’’
Richard David Baum was born on July 8, 1940, in Los Angeles.
He made his name early as a China
scholar. As a graduate student at the
University of California, Berkeley, in the
1960s, he gained rare access to classified
documents that shed light on the inner
workings of the Communist leaders,
and he went on to write extensively
about them, including a 1975 book, ‘‘Prelude to Revolution: Mao, the Party and
the Peasant Question.’’
Dr. Baum was director of the Center
for Chinese Studies at U.C.L.A. He taught
at the university for 44 years. Late in his
career, he wrote and delivered ‘‘The Fall
and Rise of China,’’ a 48-part video lecture that was published in 2010 as part of
the Great Courses series. He published a
memoir, ‘‘China Watcher: Confessions of
a Peking Tom,’’ the same year.
In 2008, Dr. Baum was among more
than 160 prominent scholars and writers
who asked President Hu Jintao to release Liu Xiaobo, a well-known intellectual and dissident detained that year. Dr.
Baum circulated a petition on Chinapol.
‘‘While I have always tried to maintain Chinapol’s political neutrality,’’ Dr.
Baum told The New York Times in an email at the time, ‘‘some violations are so
egregious that I cannot, as a sentient being, remain neutral.’’
Mr. Liu, who was awarded the Nobel
Peace Prize in 2010, remains in prison.