Contemporary Challenges to Entertainment-Education: Health Narratives from the Hindi Language Show ‘Mai Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon’

Abstract

With a five-decade-long history in India, Entertainment-Education (E-E) programs have been successful in keeping up with the evolving entertainment sensibilities of the Indian audiences. Through the case study of a popular health edutainment program in India titled Mai Kuch Bhi Kar Sakti Hoon (MKBKSH), we investigate the ideological tussles between the two segments of E-E, namely, entertainment and education which are particularly glaring in the current socio-political context of popular media. MKBKSH is targeted towards rural women in India and aims to promote positive and progressive messages of feminism and gender empowerment through discussions on reproductive rights, contraception, period positivity, and amongst others. However, in doing so, it employs regressive and stereotypical gender tropes that are borrowed from popular entertainment. This contradictory positioning of using regressive gender stereotypes to convey a development narrative posits a major ontological struggle to the genre of E-E. Given this context, we explore the show MKBKSH to understand the challenge of retaining the regressive popular to remain entertaining while resisting the dilution of its educative-emancipatory potential.