A soap opera is an ongoing, episodic work of fiction/non fiction usually broadcast on television or radio and more recently on mobile phones. Indian soap operas (written, filmed, enacted and produced mostly by Indians for an Indian audience), with episodes broadcast on a daily/weekly/semi-weekly basis on Indian television channels/channel chains (Star Network, Sony Entertainment, Sun Network, Doordarshan) are not always limited to India alone, but are broadcast overseas in the UK, USA, and some parts of Europe, South Africa, and Australia.

The term ‘soap opera’ was coined by the American press in the 1930s to denote the extraordinarily popular genre of serialized domestic radio dramas, which by 1940, represented some 90 per cent of all commerciallysponsored daytime broadcast hours. The ‘soap’ in soap opera alluded to their sponsorship by soap manufacturers while ‘opera’ suggested an ironic incongruity between the domestic narrative concerns of the daytime serial and the most elevated of dramatic forms.

The defining quality of the soap opera form is its seriality. A serial narrative is a story told through a series of individual, narratively linked installments. Unlike episodic television programs in which there is no narrative linkage between episodes and each episode tells a more or less self-contained story, the viewer's understanding of and pleasure in any given serial installment is predicated, to some degree, upon his or her knowledge of what has happened in previous episodes.

The global review observation of 1980 states, “A consistent picture emerges from those research studies which have investigated the media's portrayal of women. At the very best, the portrayal is narrow; at worst it is unrealistic, demeaning and damaging.” (Gallagher, 1981)

Media has erased the geographical distances and is now an integral part of man's living space. The impact of visual media as well as print media on the mind of the viewers and readers is tremendous. This necessitates looking into the coding and construction of femininity and whether or not it reflects reality. This essay will attempt to examine the images of women in newspaper advertisements and television commercials.

We often feel that there exists a disparity between women's actual lives and their representations in the media. This disparity exists, as the images of women in media seem to be a male fantasy and not a living reality. It is therefore necessary to understand how media constructs femininity. In the book, Affirmation and Denial: Construction of Femininity on Indian Television (1990), Prabha Krishnan and Anita Dighe refer to the complexity of women and media interaction, which is an outcome of the production of self-consciousness by media and society. Media as an organization seems to consolidate patriarchal ideology and define femininity. Decoding the content by analyzing images, is an attempt to question that ideology, which has commodified women and stereotyped them.

Women on television need to be discussed under two heads: women in media (as work force) and women as media subjects (as content in media). Another category is that of women as viewers. Women as viewers are also participants in a significant way. It has been established beyond doubt that all over the world, women constitute a considerable percentage of television viewers. In India, perhaps the percentage of female television viewers is even higher as television constitutes the chief source of entertainment for moderately educated middle-class women. A lot has been said about how badly women are portrayed in soap operas and how these serials, in all languages, are reinforcing the stereotypical female image. Much has also been said about the way women are portrayed in advertisements. Through this paper, I will try to build up an argument in favour of a Gender Policy in media.

Indian media, whether print or electronic, has recently been facing serious questions about the lack of a policy where women and depiction of women's issues are concerned. Print media has often been criticised for publishing advertisements which are demeaning to women, in the same pages where women's issues are seriously discussed. But such objections are rarely met with serious consideration by policy makers because media is, in the ultimate analysis, only a business enterprise. Advertisements give revenue which can obviously not be ignored by any policy maker.

What is perhaps central to the debate on women in media is the question of how completely a woman is identified with her body and how limited she is to her gender. When we talk about women, the subtext is usually the body. Critical discourse on the representation of women in media invariably focuses on how her body is represented. And when we say the media is sexist or insensitive, it is the treatment of women's bodies that we are troubled by. Therefore, the site on which my paper is built is primarily the body. However, in a polemical sleight of hand, I intend to make the body disappear and explore how gender is construed.

Discourses surrounding the body often hinge on the classic binary of sex: male and female. But how real is this binary? Tracing its origins, Thomas Laqueur, in his extensively researched book, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, shows how our concept of the body has evolved from the one-sex to the two-sex model. Examining medical and philosophical literature, and accounts from reproductive anatomy and physiology from the second century A.D. down to the twentieth century, he shows how descriptions of the body were used by scientists, political activists, literary figures and theorists to explain gender. In the one-sex model, prevalent from antiquity to the early seventeenth century, man was the only sex and woman was merely an inversion of this basic form.

I have been a woman in the media for about thirty years and ever since, I have been grappling in various ways with issues relating to both women in the media and women and media, both as a media practitioner and as a media watcher and, of course, as a person who is concerned about social issues in general and gender issues in particular.

My work on gender and media has been primarily related to the print media, particularly news and current affairs, but also women's magazines. However, in this article, I would like to highlight an aspect of the subject that cries out for more attention from academic researchers: the implications of media globalisation for concerns about women in/and media.

This is, of course, easier said than done, especially since it is a relatively uncharted territory. While both globalisation and media globalisation have received considerable attention from scholars and activists in recent times, the process of developing a gender analysis of media globalisation is still, evidently, a work in progress. But it is clearly a process that we all need to engage with and contribute to. It is particularly important, I think, for scholars in India – which boasts of a large, growing, influential and complex media environment – to provide a perspective on media globalisation, in general, and gender within media globalisation, in particular, from the global South.

The debate on women and media has, over the years, become increasingly complex. Early issues of the positive or negative portrayal of women in the media have given way to questions of representation, of numbers, of the nuances of class, caste, region, religion, geography, to name only a few. With the exponential growth in all forms of media, whether print, broadcast, electronic, or those related to the Internet, to messaging and mobile telephony and so on, issues of access, of voice, of censorship and regulation, and indeed of reach have also become significant. Women are now much more visible in television programming, and in content. They are significant among the numbers of viewers and readers. They make up an important segment of the consumer market and are therefore the ones who are primarily addressed in advertising. And, increasingly, they are beginning to count among the numbers of media owners, gatekeepers and content creators.

These changes have also meant that questions relating to women and media have become more complex and troubled. Despite some seeming and some very real changes in the media, women still remain in the background in a number of ways. Media summits – increasingly popular today – mostly feature male media magnates and editors, with the occasional woman thrown in.

In this article, I will be focusing on the representation of women in crimestories in mainstream English newspapers and to what extent these are reflective of a deeper social position which itself is constituted of various contradictory attitudes; neo-conservative as well as radical.

The cases of Jessica Lal and Priyadarshini Mattoo have brought to the fore, discussions about the representation of women in media reports. The crimes committed against these women are not just rape and/or murder, but also delayed justice and media reporting. Even at its most sympathetic, the mainstream English print media has been blind and insensitive to certain gender issues. It does not understand for example that bringing crime against women to public notice is as important as the ideological/theoretical underpinning of the exercise. Through my paper I would like to explore this with special reference to the Lal and Mattoo cases. I would also like to look at how continued media focus may inadvertently help in perpetuating a discourse of oppression, by deflecting attention from the real issues to peripheral ones, which in turn may indirectly support a conservative approach to gender matters.

The story of the Jessica Lal case goes as far back as eight years. She was shot dead on April 29, 1999. The media has been congratulated for whipping up public interest in this case and mobilizing popular support to reopen the case.

Telugu Film industry, the second largest of its kind in India, celebrated its platinum jubilee recently. Conservative estimates indicate that the industry produces around 150 films a year. The corpus of Telugu films is therefore so large that it is hazardous to offer any generalizations about its trends and themes. The one aspect I wish to examine here is the forging of issues related to women in films, and the patterns that appear in the presentation/representation of these issues. I will quickly track here the trajectory of woman-centric films in Telugu and examine the ideological underpinnings of these film texts. This will enable us to determine the discursive shifts in the genre and note if these have made a qualitative difference to the perception and handling of women's issues. To plot this, I shall point to the dominant trends in each decade. Let me add that the analysis is by no means exhaustive; it only focuses on certain nodal issues at different points of time, in the evolution of women's film as a sub-genre in Telugu cinema.

Cinema has always been sensitive to the problems of women and given considerable space to women's issues. It is significant to note that the 30s witnessed the making of some reformist movies such as Mala Pilla (The Harijan Girl, 1938) and Malli Pelli (Remarriage,1939). Issues such as dowry, child marriage and widow marriage engaged the attention of the film makers through the 50s.

If there is one single revolution which has decisively impacted the lives of the largest number of people in the twentieth century, it is the explosion in the field of media, and its reach. There is not a single social group which is outside the influence of media; not a single issue that is not mediated by media. In fact media has erased several borders and facilitated trafficking of images across barriers. Media constructs and deconstructs identities, prescribes and proscribes values, makes and unmakes lifestyles, creates and destroys icons, and simply mediates every aspect of our life. Even remote geographic areas are influenced by advertising, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, music, films and other print and electronic media. The mediated images and messages construct the very fabric of everyday life, knowledge and frameworks of reality. Given this omnipotence and omnipresence of media, it is imperative that we examine the ramifications of this huge apparatus for all sections of people.

In the last two decades Media Studies has quite rightly and understandably become a popular discipline operating under the broad rubric of Cultural Studies and has provided the necessary critical analyses of the developments in media from a variety of perspectives. One of the major concerns of media critics has been “the gendered structures and relationships between human beings on the inside of media industries who control the resources, determine the images, words, and sounds that we consume” (Ross and Byerly: 1).

The words woman and women have intrinsically interwoven masculinity in them and scream out that a lady is incomplete without the other gender ‘in’ her, and if she ever dared to reject, she is left with nothing but woes. The terms are to be recognized and accepted as derivatives of a ‘phallogocentric’ society.

A new vocabulary that has arisen from many feminist movements will help us in redefining the role of modern human beings in a liberated society. ‘Wimin’ ‘womin,’ ‘womyn’ are terms produced by many parts of lesbian feminist movements to distinguish it from men and masculine (or ‘phallogocentric’) language. I choose to derive from this vocabulary in this paper. ‘Wimin’ are people who consciously reject men from their lives and choose to live their own lives free from the binding shackles of the dominant man (men) made society and cultures. They feel, find, and enjoy completeness bereft of the other gender.

Feminism as a philosophy is a shift of focus to women from men, to prove that women matter too. Gynocentrism is a focus on women as a clan and their views and experiences, needs, desires, likes, dislikes, usually without consideration of the other gender's views. Ultra-feminism (caused by both internal and external factors) can give birth to misogamy.

From the very beginning of his career, since he made Unishe April (1995), acclaimed Bengali filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh has made films with women protagonists, so much so that he has often been labelled “the woman's director of Bangla (Bengali) cinema.” His explanation for his oeuvre is simple – he merely feels that he understands the inner feelings of women, their passion, agony and suffering. All his films up to Titli (2001) dealt with women-centric situations, they are either about the new woman, the lonely woman, the rebellious woman or the persecuted woman. Ever since he adapted Tagore's Chokher Bali (Sand in the Eye, 2003) and Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay's short story “Protima” as Antarmahal (Views of the Inner Chamber, 2005), Rituparno has been mired in controversy for making films with too much, and often unnecessary, focus on sexuality and what film critics like Laura Mulvey call ‘visual pleasure’ and ‘the gaze’. In Rituparno's case the situation is further complicated by three factors – his own preference for alternative sexuality, his constant harping on the statement, “I feel I understand the inner feelings of women, their passion, agony and suffering” (Mandal: 18), and his own declaration about the androgynous nature of human characters: “I believe in the art of androgyny which includes the male and female opinion.”

Through a detailed discussion of Chokher Bali and Antarmahal, I will focus upon some of these issues and try to analyze why the director feels that he understands the psyche of women better, and hence can offer a more objective approach.

Water law in India has experienced significant changes over the past few years and is still evolving. These changes have an internal and an external dimension. On the one hand, water law grew over time into a relatively amorphous set of laws, principles, rules and judicial decisions. The lack of clear direction given, for instance, by an overall water legislation, setting principles governing all water in all its uses, explains in part the relative lack of clarity that water law exhibited. The need to give more clarity to this regulatory framework together with the changing situation in the water sector in general called for reforms. On the other hand, there has been a growing push among international institutions over the past two decades for water sector reforms and water law reforms in many countries. International water policy making has been very influential and a great number of developing countries have adopted reforms that closely follow the model proposed at the international level. The level of compliance with the set of principles propounded by international agencies can be partly ascribed to the fact that lending institutions, such as the World Bank, have strongly endorsed these principles and included them as part of their lending instruments. Since lending institutions such as the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have been quite active in India and have included a number of law reform conditionality in their loans, a number of ongoing reforms in India are directly linked to international principles.

Introduction

Water policies at all levels are shaped by a variety of actors – governments, interest groups within nations, social movements, international institutions such as the World Bank, water multinational companies, and so on. But one often finds common threads in the views and actions of actors at different levels (for instance, in the kind of water reforms that have been advocated), which indicates the presence of dominant discourses that shape opinions and provide legitimacy to particular kinds of policies. This chapter looks at how two discourses – the Global Environmental Management (GEM) discourse and the rights-based discourse – have shaped water reforms in Maharashtra, a state in western India. Since the relationship between knowledge and policy is complex, the aim is not to show a precise relationship between discourses and policies at different levels (international, national, and sub-national). Instead, this chapter emphasises the commonalities in the discussions around one aspect of water (delivery of water services) at different levels. As Adger and others point out in their analysis of the environmental discourses associated with deforestation, desertification, biodiversity use, and climate change, such an exercise is useful to show how adopting particular languages and rhetoric constrains the solutions proposed for specific issues.

The arena of delivery of water services is particularly interesting to study from this point of view because it has seen changing trends in recent times, which are due, in no small measure, to the influence of different discourses in water.

Introduction

Parts of Australia have recently experienced the lowest rainfall on record since 1900. For a period of six years from 2001 to 2007 drought affected southern and eastern Australia in a broad arc extending across southern South Australia, most of Victoria and New South Wales (NSW), and a large part of southeast Queensland. Storages across the country, particularly in the Murray and in South East Queensland were at record lows. In the former, storages were at 13 per cent capacity in mid 2007. An established La Nina event in December 2007 and January 2008 brought heavy rainfall across the eastern states, especially in Queensland. However long-term deficiencies remain, especially in Tasmania, southeast Queensland, the southwest coast of Western Australia (WA) and central Victoria into southern NSW.

Most of the cities in Australia are subject to water restrictions. The most severe is in southeast Queensland. In September 2007 householders in the fastest growing region in Australia were imposed with Level Six water restrictions. Households which use more than 800 litres a day of water were asked to file a water usage audit report to provide information on their household, water use and water efficiency. Certain types of water use will be banned. The target is for individuals to use no more than 140 litres a day. Tough penalties apply for households using excessive amounts of water. This includes an outdoor watering ban, fines up to $1050 and restricted flows.

The Editors of this volume (Philippe Cullet, Alix Gowlland- Gualtieri, Roopa Madhav, and Usha Ramanathan) deserve warm appreciation for assembling in this work a range of distinguished contributions concerning the nature and scope of ‘water law’ in national and international perspectives. Because I believe that nearly everything worth saying has been here well said, I tried to resist the request of Philippe Cullet and Usha Ramanathan to contribute an additional chapter. I failed; hence, this Epilogue which merely constitutes a cluster of remarks concerning the question of relation between theory, policy, law, and movement, the will to human rights, forms of ideological critique, and the affairs of justice.

Towards Understanding Water Policies: A Preliminary Excursus

‘Policy’ emerges as a ubiquitous notion, and a key category, and yet also as a disquieting sphere. One may (here following Radha D'Souza) deploy the difficult notion of ‘regimes’ in speaking about ‘water policy regimes’ (WPR). This requires some analytical unpacking. One may proceed to do at several levels of analysis such as the distinctions typically furnished by the purpose, intent, or the overall telos of water policy regimes often unhelpfully described in terms of the trichotomy – water for life, industry, and development, or proceed to perform a level-of-analysis task. In the latter perspective, one distinguishes among: (a) macro water policies provide a general approach to water governance (often expressed as WRM – water resource management- policies; as ‘water sector reform’ policy (WSRP); (b) meso water policies are those specifically concerned with a particular sector/vector of water management or governance or (c) micro-policies, primarily though in terms not so much of policy enunciation but rather as strategies of implementation at the ground or the local level.

This paper aims at presenting a general overview of some of the important legal questions that arise in the course of the current international debates on water. It is not a detailed technical paper meant for a scholarly audience but a broad presentation, in simple terms, for the interested general reader. It is explanatory in nature, but it is also partly prescriptive, and in the latter aspect it is a personal statement. It draws upon Indian experience, but is not India-specific.

In the past, questions of law relating to water tended to arise mainly in three contexts:

1. (i) in the riparian context, regarding claims to the use of river waters arising from location in relation to a river, conflicts over such claims, complaints of injury caused by other (mainly upper) riparians, and so on (at the level of households, farms, villages, provinces or states, or countries);

2. (ii) in the context of wells (ground water, i.e., water lying under one's land), giving rise to the idea of ownership of or property rights over water; and

3. (iii) in the context of small ponds and lakes or springs near a village, perceived as ‘commons’ belonging to the community, giving rise to the idea of a common property resource.

All these were, of course, subject to the overarching sovereign powers of the state.

These three water sources were perceived as distinct, and governed by different legal principles.