Gandii Baat: the provincial calculus

Promotional Images from Gandii Baat Seasons 1-6 (2018-) showcase the series' provocative exploration of sexuality, relationships, and societal taboos. Each season highlights female characters in central roles, with a focus on their desires, struggles, and empowerment. Through its erotic storytelling, Gandii Baat engages with themes of gender, sexual agency, and the complexities of intimate relationships, challenging conventional portrayals of women in Indian media.

Gandii Baat (2018-), an erotic series about sexual proclivities in provincial north India, has completed seven seasons of varying length. It is quite probably ALTBalaji’s biggest success to date and one that the platform is known for. Each episode presents a distinct story, which allows the series to meander across a number of genre orientations, including horror, crime, comedy and thriller. Just as the long-running soap shifted the key site of conflicts over value systems within the domestic arena, Gandii… diverts attention away from urban sex comedies—a genre iindulged in by BMP and ALT Entertainment with series such as Kyaa Kool Hai Hum (2005), Kyaa Super Kool Hai Hum (2012), Kyaa Kool Hain Hum 3 (2016) and Great Grand Masti (2016).

The Kyaa Kool Hai Hum series (2005, 2012, 2016), produced by Ekta Kapoor and Shobha Kapoor under Balaji Motion Pictures, is recognized as a pioneer in Bollywood’s adult comedy genre, celebrated for its bawdy humor, double entendres, and risqué theme.

In contrast, Gandii… looks toward towards provincial India, and key examples of other ALTBalaji series set in provincial north India are Helllo Jee (2021) and Virgin Bhasskar (2019-2020). The idea that these series rail against is that provincial north India is the domain of dull and arduous struggles. In fact, the series is driven by a libidinal imperative and showcases all sorts of sexual adventures to scandalize its audience.

To be fair to Gandii…, ALTBalaji draws upon one of the key shifts in preferences that cinema in north India has responded to over the last two decades. This pertains to the emergence of Bhojpuri cinema on one hand (Kumar 2021), and the emergence of “small-town” Hindi films on the other hand (Kumar 2013).[10] Both trends began roughly around 2003, with Haasil (2003) and the Bhojpuri blockbuster, Sasura Bada Paisawala (2003).

Haasil (2003) and the Bhojpuri blockbuster Sasura Bada Paisawala (2003) highlight the significant shift in Indian cinema during the early 2000s. Haasil explores the gritty world of student politics, while Sasura Bada Paisawalabecame a milestone of the third wave of Bhojpuri cinema, paving the way for hundreds of Bhojpuri films to be made on a low-budget and occupy the decrepit single-screen theatres being gradually replaced by the multiplex-malls.

The trajectories of both Hindi and Bhojpuri cinema, therefore, were driven by a desire to re-invite those situated outside the shifting worldview of metropolitan cultures, shaped as they were in the wake of neoliberal economic reforms. If Bhojpuri films assert cultural pride in the region via the media industry’s feeding a working-class audience spread across the country, the provincial turn in Hindi cinema offered a new imaginary for the “small-town”—marked here by relentless buffoonery while also cautioning against a provincial capacity for uninhibited violence. Unsurprisingly, then, ALTBalaji also aired the first ever Bhojpuri language web-series, Hero Vardiwala (2019). However, unlike Hindi language ALTBalaji productions which only feature relatively unknown actors, the Bhojpuri web-series featured one of the most prominent Bhojpuri stars, Dineshlal Yadav.

ALTBalaji’s provincial constellations push the local imaginary forward by giving it an erotic surplus. Just like its engagement with low-res digital capture in the Ragini franchise, the substantial visual engagement with provincial worlds is dismal in Gandii… The series clearly uses a backdrop of provinciality to give a rustic flavour to the scandals that occasion multiple erotic encounters. Yet the imprecision and inconsistency of regional markers—for stories set in Rajasthan, Haryana or Bihar—is also glaring here. This laxness is unlike the visual production of the  saas-bahu saga, where sartorial, culinary and linguistic inclinations were relatively carefully mapped, even if in a stereotypical manner. The reason why that sort of careful cultural coding is not necessary here is twofold. First, the series is not targeted at the specific cultural demography it addresses, but at the widest cross-section of interest around rustic provinciality, much of which prevails among the urban audience. Second, budget constraints do now allow the time or resources required for such an elaborate mapping; indeed, amateurism is built into the production ethos of fast-fashion erotica.

However, ALTBalaji is fully conscious of the burdensome legacy of Balaji Telefilms, not merely as the powerhouse of Indian television, but as an ideological force, which ALTBalaji is often measured against. In that light, Gandii… also presents a scenario which mocks the legacy by making a snide reference to it, before violating its ideological basis. For example, the first episode of the first season opens in a village located in western Uttar Pradesh with the Karwachauth ritual, wherein the married woman (Gunja) is seen worshipping her husband on the terrace at night. Karwachauth, in particular, has been central to the films and television soaps that characterized the panoramic interior. It represents a cultural fabric which refuses to bother with contemporary criticisms of the gender politics of traditional rituals. But having made a reference to the conservative social fabric that Balaji often upholds obdurately, the episode goes on to establish a charade behind the ritual, as it ends with a threesome to save Gunja’s dysfunctional marriage with a gay man. Both Karwachauth and the threesome are used as for their scandalous potential, pitched against each other.

These images from the first episode of Gandii Baat (2018-) showcase the series' subversion of traditional rituals, specifically the Karwachauth ritual, which is later followed by a provocative threesome to 'save' a dysfunctional marriage. The show critiques and challenges the conservative social fabric upheld by mainstream Indian media, particularly the legacy of Balaji Telefilms, by using scandalous twists to disrupt societal norms.

The series is also peppered with double-entendre and playful titillation via an elaborate verbal and gestural vocabulary that generally is featured all across the B-movie and fast-fashion erotica segment. Often enough, this means re-using a staple diet of cliched witticisms, which reek of amateurism at the level of screenwriting. Most of these verbal duels in Gandii…, but also in other ALTBalaji series, are meant to amplify the primarily sexual value of female bodies; except that in several instances, the women themselves deploy their sexuality to extract value. While this may appear to reverse or critique the sexualization of female body, such workarounds only give gender-equal opportunities to showcase a cynical manipulation of sexuality. For ALTBalaji series, the scandal is the pre-eminent dressing for sexual encounters of all sorts. The incidents help not only showcase eroticism for titillation, but they also extract the full “value” of sexuality in a professionalized cynical manipulation of identity politics.

Presumably, the idea behind a whole spectrum of sexual “revolution” is to “break social boundaries” by giving its apparent due to “taboo love”—as declared explicitly in the trailer of another ALTBalaji series, Hai Taubba (2021, both seasons). Disappointingly though, breaking social boundaries and challenging social evils only amounts to romances contained within LGBT relationships. None of these are given their due in terms of (inter)subjective emotional complexity, because the purpose is to manipulate the scandalous value of sexual desire from across the preference spectrum. In the ALTBalaji paradigm, therefore, sex is often the scandal, the crisis event as well as the redemption. However, going so strategically and aggressively after the post-censorious vistas often activates other regimes of censorship.

Crowd-sourcing censorship

The distinctive characteristic of censorship in India has always been its uneven application, which offers a lot of room for creative as well as political maneuverability. Considering co-productions by ZEE5 and ALTBalaji, one may ask, for example, why ZEE5 found certain shows in violation even though ALTBalaji took the opposite stance. In an episode of X.X.X.: Uncensored, one such co-production, a woman married to a soldier makes her lover wear her husband's army uniform. Some viewers found the scene offensive to the Indian armed forces, and it was promptly removed by both the platforms. Another such co-production, Virgin Bhasskar, was censored after the intervention of the minister of Information & Broadcasting, Prakash Javadekar. In this case, a ruling party member of the Indian Parliament took offence to a signboard in the show that mentioned the name Ahilyabai; he claimed that it defamed Ahilyabai Holkar, an 18th century Maratha ruler (Deep, 2020). These co-productions follow from an alliance formed in 2019, when ZEE5 and ALTBalaji began collaboration on original content production, which allowed both to leverage each other’s strength in the streaming market and reinforce their respective catalogues. While the alliance still continues, both of the shows along with Gandii… have been removed from ZEE5 since the announcement of above-mentioned IT Rules, 2021.

To be clear, the content regulation for digital media has a three-tier structure, and must be initiated by user grievances. One of the many self-regulatory bodies set up for this purpose is Digital Publisher Content Grievances Council (DPCGC), under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021. After the first step in which users file complaints to be resolved by respective OTT platforms, the user could approach DPCGC if she is not satisfied with the resolution. The third tier is where a committee set by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting could be approached (Mitaksh, 2023). The interpretation of these guidelines, therefore, depends on platforms’ anticipation of the threat posed by viewers’ grievances. But of course, if the above-mentioned cases are anything to go by, crowd-sourcing politically motivated grievances is a potent threat.

Since the government of India is controlled by a political party known for its prowess for crowd-sourcing and unleashing terror and organized boycotts, the platforms are in no mood to run afoul of it over compliance, even as the country’s apex court deliberates upon the legal validity of IT Rules. In fact, the fear of crowd-sourced censorship is so intense that even self-regulatory bodies with no constitutional powers to order removal of content take direct inspiration from the “censor board,” as CBFC was known prior to 1983. In a rather striking example of this, DPCGC, which is “neither a court nor a tribunal, and can only issue guidance or advisories to platforms,” ordered another fast-fashion erotica platform, ULLU, to take down several of its web-series (Srivastava, 2023). The complaint was indeed raised by an “aggrieved” user, even though there are no legal bases to take down content on account of obscenity. In another recent instance, which was a direct reminder that the OTT platforms are not free of regulatory oversight, the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting has moved to block 18 OTT platforms found distributing “obscene, vulgar, and in some cases, pornographic content,” after consultations with other Government of India departments and domain experts in media, women's rights, and child rights (MIB, 2024).

ALTBalaji’s position should therefore be considered brave in a streaming market where offence can be taken with most of their deliberately designed taboo erotica. This is why we must be mindful in our analysis of the rhetoric that secures erotica with a cladding. This is the rhetoric of celebrating alternative sexuality, identity politics, feminist media production and sexual liberation at large—ideas fundamentally alien to the Balaji Telefilms worldview. Even though most of the ALTBalaji audience comprises young men—aged between 18-35 years and outnumbering women three times (Jalan, 2020)—most of their series are led by female protagonists. By foregrounding women as assertive participants in their audacious sexual adventures, it champions the cause of compensating for centuries of repression. Is such a compensation enough, however, to offset the losses incurred by ALTBalaji on the financial front?

ALTT: Balaji no more

While ALTBalaji appeared to be a successful force within the streaming market, it was rapidly burning the capital earned by Balaji Telefilms. Most OTT platforms cannot delink financialization from their long antecedence in television, or ancestry based in other media as in the case of The Times Group-owned MX Player. ALTBalaji’s needed to acquire enough direct subscribers so that its losses could be covered by profits made by TV and film business (Jalan, 2019). But ALTBalaji could not streamline and optimize production work in the way its parent company Balaji Telefilms did for television. In spite of the evident amateurism of its productions, “the cost of 20 to 30 minutes of fiction content on digital can be as high as Rs 12- Rs 15 Lakh (1 lakh = 100,000 INR, or approximately 1,200 USD)… which is almost twice of that of TV” (Pahwa, 2017). The logistical and financial discipline practiced at Balaji Telefilms, along with its choice of new actors and recurrently-used sets and post-production equipment, gave it an advantage it has not been able to replicate on the streaming platform.

ALTBalaji’s preference for fast-fashion erotica mounted atop its rhetoric of sexual liberation, we argue, emerged from a desire to find a stable production ethos, so as to find its optimized logistical grid. Its failure to square off cheap erotica with feminist rhetoric has resulted from its inability to find viewers’ support for series such as The Test Case (2017), which deviated from the recipe. Mainstream’s paradigmatic soap’s triumph must be seen as a result of Balaji Telefilms’ Fordist production design, which does not extend easily to streaming cultures. In Ekta Kapoor’s assessment, the standardization of television soaps followed from its televisual mode of address, which remains tied to a mixed demographic setting. Streaming cultures, however, are expected to address private individuals’ “slightly darker” sensibilities, and are premised upon individual taste (Ramachandran, 2022). In this distinction too, OTT platforms resemble cinemagoing and its attendant investment in engulfing a darkness that isolates the individual even as one participates in a collective experience. An inability to downsize production costs for web-series has, however, compelled the re-branding and downsizing of the platform itself.

ALTBalaji is now ALTT, with a new logo. On one hand, the new brand allows the legacy of Balaji Telefilms to disengage from the production style, pretty much in the same way as BMP floated ALT Entertainment for its experiments with digital capture. It has also allowed the Kapoors to step aside from possible legal hassles born out of crowd-sourced censorship, while ALTT has hired executives from fast-fashion erotica platform ULLU (Broadcast and CableSat, 2023). On the other hand, making a new entity clears the way for ALTT to pursue its destiny with low-budget amateur erotica, while Balaji Telefilms focuses on producing content for other platforms, including Netflix; as it did and continues to do with its television productions. For ALTT, however, fast-fashion erotica is not their genre preference, but that of their audiences, “especially from non-metro, tier-II and III areas” (ibid.). If the cladding of feminism and LGBT rights over cheaply produced erotica is the first layer of curatorial deception, the championing of provincial north India’s colorful desires provides the second layer.

The problem, however, remains that these claddings are unsecured in terms of business. In a climate of data-driven media production, especially for streaming platforms which often insist on third-party agencies’ traction reports, securing content by data must endorse capital investment and manage financial risk. As discussed above, as a media production outfit primarily invested in television, Balaji Telefilms entered streaming with a content-centric approach. It failed to develop the armor required for a predictive calculus that forms, by and large, the fulcrum of streaming cultures. Kapoor herself admitted ALTBalaji’s shortcomings with any algorithmic extraction of usage data (Ramachandran, 2022). This lack marks ALTBalaji as not as a “digital native” but more as a legacy media platform, one never prepared to invest heavily in things such as flagship crime thrillers that are prohibitively expensive to mount. Its struggles in the streaming space must therefore be seen as a problem faced by its model built on ideology and censorship. Having launched an alter-ego to shift the balance, ALTBalaji’s foray into fast-fashion erotica and the provincial calculus was shaped by how it shifted gears from conservatism into neoliberal identity politics, and from relishing censorship to flag-bearing a “rebellion” against it.

Coda

In a 2021 conversation with Mumbai-based producers, Karan Johar, owner of Dharma Productions that produces content for both box-office and streaming platforms, spoke about the unprecedented rise of legal cell and market research agencies like Ormax Media over the previous few years in the industry (YouTube, 2021). A legal cell is a dedicated team within a media organization, such as a film production company, responsible for managing legal matters, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations, protecting intellectual property rights, and addressing potential legal threats, including crowd-sourced censorship. Market research agencies specialize in collecting and analyzing data on audience preferences, viewing behaviors, and cultural trends. These agencies provide insights that help media companies make informed decisions about content creation, distribution, and marketing by mapping cultural preferences to specific demographic segments through audience surveys and other analytical tools.

While the legal cell is the corporate response to threats of crowd-sourced censorship attempts, Rastogi (2023: 73) argues that the role of data prophecies in gatekeeping content emerges from audience surveys, which provide the “framework for the curatorial logic of platforms” that map cultural preferences against sampled demographic segments. This retooling of media production serves computational capital’s insatiable appetite for metrics (Beller, 2016), as is most evident in the case of companies like Netflix, Disney+ Hotstar and Amazon. It is fundamentally about the ability to show to investment banks, asset managers in financial services, venture capitalists and shareholders the algorithmic capability of processing data—on media genres, audience segmentation, traction measurement etc. The Asian expression of the financialized platform economy has led to the emergence of super apps, funded by technology and investment megacorps such as SoftBank Vision Fund and Tencent (Steinberg, Mukherjee and Punathambekar, 2022). The Indian counterpart of this phenomenon of “national champions,” Reliance Jio, certainly has the capability to convert oligopoly capital into computational capital, but it has yet to unleash that capability in terms of productions’ catalogues. In the meanwhile, relatively traditional media outfits are confronted by a lack, as and when they enter the realm of media portfolios built on a predictive calculus (see Kumar, 2018).

As we have shown, Balaji Telefilms’ journey toward its alter-ego takes us from the lavishly mounted conservative worldview contained within panoramic interiors toward amateurish predation upon provinciality. The infantilization of characters within the production of fast-fashion erotica is symbolic of ALTBalaji’s inability to trust its audience with either storytelling devices or capital investment. This follows from a legacy media company’s unwillingness to enter the “data game”—in which traction metrics are traded for promotions and research, but most important, attract investment capital from asset management services like Vanguard, BlackRock, Fidelity etc. Ideological maneuvers have limited value in the battle against numbers, especially when the latter become a reference unto themselves. What is underway within the Indian streaming market, then, is a battle between ideological containment and containment by financialization.