CONSTRUCTING AND NORMALISING THE IDEAL WIFE/NON-IDEAL WIFE BINARY IN HINDI TELEVISION SERIALS

Abstract

Indian television serials remain one of the most consumed and culturally influential forms of mass media in the country, and women continue to be their central narrative anchors. Yet the range of roles available to these central female characters stays narrow. Across decades of daily soaps, a recurring binary organizes almost every storyline: the ideal wife, marked by obedience, sacrifice, and quiet endurance, set against the non-ideal wife or vamp, marked by ambition, assertiveness, and a rejection of familial duty. Existing scholarship has documented this stereotyping extensively, but it has largely treated the two figures as separate character types rather than as a single, mutually defining binary, and it has rarely traced how this binary travels beyond the screen to shape everyday expectations of women within Indian marriages. This paper undertakes a qualitative document and discourse analysis of secondary sources, including peer-reviewed studies, industry commentary, and journalistic criticism, to examine how the ideal wife/non-ideal wife binary is linguistically and visually constructed in Hindi television serials, and how its repetition across thousands of episodes normalizes patriarchal expectations as an everyday standard for women's conduct in marriage. Drawing on feminist media theory and cultivation theory, the analysis finds that the binary operates through costume, ritual, dialogue, and narrative consequence, and that its persistence, even in serials marketed as progressive, reflects a commercial logic in which patriarchal conformity is repackaged as entertainment. The paper concludes that the binary's cultural power lies less in individual storylines than in its sheer repetition, which allows onscreen conduct to harden into offscreen expectation. Keywords: ideal wife, gender representation, Hindi television serials, feminist media theory, cultivation theory, patriarchal normalization, saas-bahu narratives.