Tu Jee le Zara

Tu Jee le Zara, is a refreshingly new serial on Sony channel presenting the love story between a 34 year old woman with a younger man, seven years her junior. The theme is different from the otherwise drab TV serials that present an eternally suffering woman who puts up with hardships and sacrifices her personal happiness, desires and talent to keep her marriage intact. The central character in the new Sony serial is a confident, independent woman who has taken over the responsibility of looking after the business of her late father’s strawberry farm and the responsibility of taking care of her family consisting of her paternal and maternal grand -mothers and her two siblings.

The serial has reached the flash point when a young man declares his love for the older woman. She gets piqued at the young man’s temerity to woo her since it goes against the conventional notion that men should marry women younger in age.  The serial presents society's shock and its  negative gossip about a relationship that defies accepted tradition. Had it been the other way, with the woman younger even by ten years or more , it would not have raised a hornet’s nest.  The coming together of the two as per the run of the TV script-  an incompatible proposition according to traditional views- will open a new chapter in the history of TV serials.

Every matrimonial site and every matrimonial page in the newspapers  carry  ‘wanted bride’ advertisement  giving  partner preference for the bride to be younger at least by two years that is extendable to even 10+years in age difference. Older men at 60+ seek younger women at 30+ because for men there's no age limit when it comes to fathering children while for women, age plays a huge factor in the ability to get pregnant. It does not matter if the sexagenarian cannot run around the baby or tend to its needs so long as the young wife is at hand to shoulder the responsibility. So it has become an accepted convention that women must marry young and men must go on and on. If God forbid, the woman does not conceive during her childbearing age, she is hounded and blamed. The gender divide is at its worst, heavily tilted against women if she cannot ensure progeny,  in particular male progeny. 

Our seers and astrologers quote Manu Smriti that a woman should always remain dependent on her husband. "In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, and when her lord is dead, to her sons; a woman must never be independent.” On that ruling, it is made out that a woman cannot be older than her husband; otherwise how can she remain eternally dependent?

Again it is a convention that a woman after marriage adopts her husband’s family. She gets a new identity that wipes away her genetic or inherited identity. Her links with her parents are limited to meeting them twice a year-during Rakhi and Bhayya Dhuj . These occasions are special for her as she receives some form of gift or money to take back to her husband’s family.  The rest of the time her obligations are only to her adopted family while no such obligation exists for the husband towards his in-laws.

In Tamilnadu where importance is given to horoscope agreement over all other factors, girls born under certain stars cannot get married as they are branded as star-crossed vampires who will suck the life of their husband or husband’s father or brother and cause untold misery to their mother-in-law. It does not matter if there is any logic or not, these irrational beliefs are sacrosanct and they are always weighed against the fair sex. 

If marriages carry such bizarre notions, it is worse when a woman loses her husband. While the in laws would curse the wife for being the cause of her husband’s death, the rest of the family including her parents will be worried about the stigma of widowhood on her. If a man dies, all hell breaks loose.  But if the woman precedes her husband, she is forgotten even before her ashes are collected. Such is the gender logic in our country.

Can we ever break free of such absurdities? All talk of women’s lib, women’s security, women’s independence are empty words. The Khap panchayat will go on and since the women of the Khap men cannot beat them they will have to join them. Sati, the formal practice of wife immolating herself on her husband’s pyre may have ended, but women continue to be living Satis even in enlightened and educated homes as they endure suffering and humiliation heaped on them in the name of widowhood.

Tu jee leZara asks women to let their hair down and live life fully- a serial with a refreshingly new approach far from  the stereotyped projection of suffering women. Hope this sets a new trend for the 21^st century woman. For the first time the serial shows two grandmothers –maternal and paternal- living under the same roof-an absolute anachronism as far as tradition goes. In our customs- (I hope there is no reference to this in Manu Smriti)- after marriage the bride’s family members cannot even sip water in their daughter's adopted home. This may have somewhat changed in recent times, but what remains unchanged is the view that

                      Bride’s family is bride’s, Groom’s  is groom’s

                     The Two shall never meet.

How nice it will be if such foolish conventions that create a shadow line between the girl’s and the boy’s families are given up so that the coming together of the bride and the groom signals the start of a new camaraderie  between the two  families.

Maybe Tu Jee le Zara is a fantasy but it is certainly a welcome serial as it allows a ray of hope to  free our societal mindset laden with prejudices against women’s status in family and society.