In India’s cultural landscape, storytelling plays a central role. These tales, rooted in tradition, traverse threads of social diversity and linguistic abundance. Beyond entertainment, they inform and educate audiences across generations, extending their influence beyond screens. With the evolving storytelling landscape comes a mandate—to create narratives while emphasising equity and representation. This imperative finds its stage in TV content, where storytelling captures its widest audience, resonating within the hearts and homes of viewers.
A 5-year study,“Reflecting India: An intersectional and longitudinal analysis of popular scripted television from 2018 to 2022,” led by Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, supported by Google Research, reveals demographics representation across Indian TV.
GDI and IAA studied 10 top TV shows in five Indian languages (Bengali, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil, Telugu) from 2018 to 2022, per BARC India. Powered by Google’s AI, the analysis covered various genres. Google Research MUSE and Universal Speech Model facilitated a multimodal analysis, processing 430 hours of footage in under 48 hours and extracting insights from over 15 million frames and two million words. The automated approach ensured accuracy and consistency, unveiling nuanced data impractical for manual collection.
Interestingly, female characters assert dominance with 55.8% of screen time, eclipsing male counterparts at 44.2%. However, a prevailing age bias is evident as young adults, aged 18 to 33, monopolise portrayals across languages and years, sidelining older characters.
The study exposes imbalance in skin-tone representation, with light-skinned characters eight times more common than medium or dark tones. Noteworthy exceptions emerge in Tamil- and Telugu-language series, showcasing skin-tone diversity.
Gender bias persists in nomenclature, with female names mentioned more frequently but unique female names lagging behind male counterparts at 46.7% versus 53.3%.
The study recommends enhancing gender inclusion in Indian TV by featuring diverse women in terms of age and skin tone. Despite equal screen time, women tend to be portrayed as younger with lighter skin tones compared to men. Introduce narratives showcasing middle-aged and older adults, particularly women, to diversify age representation. Emphasise skin tone diversity by casting characters with medium or dark skin tones in prominent roles, aligning TV content with the rich diversity of India’s population.
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