When my daughter showed me celebs giving ‘gaalis’: With OTT platforms, has family viewing ended?

We have come to accept the widespread use of such language as a fact of life. Gone are the Chitrahaar days of the 1980s when the whole family would sit together before the television set to enjoy their favourite shows, without having to bother about the sudden embarrassment caused by the characters hurling four-letter words at each other. The occasional nudge-nudge wink-wink commercials promoting morning-after pills, condoms or sanitary pads would make the audience recoil, but watching television as a collective family activity was still considered a safe pastime. Not anymore.

In the era of shows like Mirzapur, if you and your family are naïve enough to sit together to watch an OTT drama, you run the risk of facing acute embarrassment every single second, thanks to the unchecked usage of taboo words and explicit sexual content. These shows can only be watched sitting alone in a quiet corner — all you need is a smartphone, a pair of earphones and some data. How on earth would anyone know whether grandpa is watching a religious show and listening to bhajans on his phone, or whether he is actually enjoying a dirty joke told by a carefree lass from Lakhisarai?

That’s another noticeable trend. A growing number of women of all ages freely use swear words on social media platforms, and even in public places like the metro, restaurants and office spaces. It is indicative of the fact that foul language is no longer seen as a male prerogative. Armed with a smartphone, a young girl from mofussil India records a reel spouting Hindi cuss words and doesn’t bother about her “character” being judged. Similarly, a wrinkled old peasant woman in dark glasses, reeling off four-letter words in her own boli in a 30-second reel, can garner hundreds of thousands of views — and some moolah on the way.

For better or for worse, access to technology is breaching old boundaries of patriarchal morality created for women. Up until now, only men and social demimondaines were known to use expletives to express anger, frustration or pain — barring, of course, the traditional gaari songs sung in north Indian wedding soirees, which provide women with the rare but much-needed agency to be able to humiliate their male relatives, fearing no reprisal publicly.

There are many studies that explain why humans use expletives. In a research paper published in 2022, Science Direct concluded that swearing serves as a catharsis that increases the pain threshold; it is also an explosion of emotions that gives the user a sense of empowerment and superiority. This probably explains why some women and young girls are shrugging off the shame normally associated with “dirty words”. It’s their new-found freedom that makes them feel at par with their male counterparts who swear either to vent their ire or to forge bonds with other men.

However, an invisible wall of decency still stands between the language spoken at home and the one used at the corner paan shop. In most middle-class households, there is an unwritten rule, especially for men and boys, that prohibits them from bringing home the “colourful” vocabulary acquired at the paan shop. Any violation of this rule will shock the family and cause immense embarrassment to the guilty party. Yet, while the filters that protect the “decent” from the “vulgar” may still be intact, they are fast becoming meaningless, as technology allows profanities to seep through to all family members — male and female, young and old, alike — via their earphones.

Before the advent of social media, Indian audiences were largely insulated from strong language on television and popular cinema. But unchecked obscene language on entertainment TV was rife in the UK even in the 1960s. It became such a serious concern that in 1964, the British regulatory authority, Ofcom, had to introduce a set of rules known as the watershed. Still in force, these rules ensure that any content inappropriate for children is not broadcast before 9 pm and after 5:30 am. Regulators around the world have been grappling with the increasing use of such language on television and social media. While signing the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act in 2005, US President George W Bush lamented that the use of profanities on TV shows had increased by 95 per cent between 1988 and 2002. “It’s a bad trend, a bad sign”, he warned.

But even President Bush could not have imagined how bad it was going to get. Soon it would reach epidemic proportions, with children having easy access to profanity, and the battle to protect them from foul language would finally be lost. As a result, a 15-year-old schoolgirl in India would find it perfectly normal to show her father a video clip full of the choicest Hindi expletives!

The writer is a New Delhi-based independent journalist and media trainer. He comments on news and current affairs