As I have shown, Sindhi women working for sinetron production during the research period (1991–2013) demonstrate a conscious effort to conform to the gender expectations of the local Sindhi community. They are no feminists. Their actions and the images they have created for themselves largely reproduce, not challenge the gender norms of the Sindhi community. By conforming to the norms of the Sindhi society within the space of mainstream sinetron production even when many gender barriers for
151 The negotiations were successful and the deal between MultiVision and Astro brought huge
profit for Punjabi's company.
152 Since the expansion of MultiVision into other Asian markets (Malaysia, Cambodia,
Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and the Philippines), Anita Whora is also in charge of joint film productions.
middle class women in the Indonesian society were removed, the Sindhi women have contributed to the image of the sinetron production culture as a patriarchal space. Moreover, the fact that in the major (read Sindhi-owned) sinetron PHs certain positions at the top seem unattainable for non-Indian women is possibly one of the reasons why highly qualified female professionals have looked for the opportunities outside the major PHs. In the eyes of professionals, the mainstream production continues to be equated with patriarchy largely due to the inner organisational structure of the PHs.
But this is only a part of the story. Sindhi women, acting from a space confined by their ethnicised gender, have significantly altered the sinetron text. First, Sindhi women introduced glamour to Indonesian soap opera. Luxury and excessiveness became one of the distinctive features of Indonesian sinetron produced for commercial television (Barkin 2004). Moreover, in Indonesian sinetron the already existing markers of wealth, prosperity and glamour are underlined by additional expressive means. For example, most Sindhi-produced sinetron would feature fat, bold, dark, short male actors with uneven or missing teeth. The characters played by these actors would usually be a comic relief, at the same time accentuating the beauty of fair, slim, tall female
protagonists. If American day-time soap operas work only with so-called "beautiful people" (Munshi 2010:93), Indonesian soaps usually include several "ugly characters".
But Sindhi women not only changed the aesthetics of sinetron—they made aesthetic aspects as important as the narrative. The make-up, costumes, and interior design started to play a very important role in building the characters of sinetron. In sinetron aired on the state-owned TVRI the meaning was primarily conveyed through narratives and dialogues. Costumes, makeup and hair style played a secondary role. But in the case of sinetron made by the Sindhi PHs the role of narrative and aesthetics became equally important.153 This change is expressed in the substantial redistribution of production budgets. While TVRI during the peak of propaganda years (the 1970s–the early 1980s) allocated only eleven per cent of the total budget for talent and costume
153 Audio aspects also started playing an important role but more in a sense of covering the
faults of production (bad sound during shooting, lack of expression and emotions from the actors). One can argue that the focus on the appearance, physical features is also a means to compensate the inability of sinetron actors to act well and it holds true to a certain extent. But while most background music was, according to the production crew, copy-pasted from the Indian daytime soaps, the creative look was an original work executed by the local professionals (under supervision of Raakhee, Shania and others).
(Alfian & Chu 1981:37–38), the Sindhi-produced PHs could easily spend half of the production budget for the main talent, costume and makeup. For example, in the 2000s Raam Soraya allocated the lion's share of sinetron production budget to designing and making costumes, composing and recording songs in Bombay, and inviting leading Indian choreographers and art directors to take part in shooting in Indonesia. It is also a well-known fact that the fees of sinetron stars, the selected few, far outweigh the fees of all other production crew members, as I discussed in detail in chapter Five.
Of course, the international companies who used sinetron stars as the promoters of their goods (discussed in chapter Three), mostly beauty products, advertised on national television, did play an important role in encouraging PHs to emphasise the physical features of sinetron stars. But while these requirements were put forward to all
sinetron production studios, it was only Sindhi-owned PHs that responded to these demands truly successfully. And this is due to the fact that for Sindhi women, raised in mercantile society, the idea of beauty "manifested in bodily glamorous beauty,
materialism and consumption" (Widodo 2002) was nothing new. As obedient wives, Sindhi women were experts in expressing beauty through conspicuous consumption of expensive products and services.
Whether the change in sinetron aesthetics and its equal role in the narrative had a significant impact on the female viewers' subjectivity and, in general, empowerment of women, requires research on its own and is beyond the scope of my research. I just want to indicate that commercial sinetron, which was full of images of "sexy
'temptresses' who sport the latest Western fashions and place their glamourous jobs and lifestyles above their families" (Smith-Hefner 2007:415), might be one of the factors that changed women's self-perception in the rapidly transforming world. The significant modification of sinetron aesthetics and its role in the text, where visual aspects became as important as the intricacies of the plot and moral messages, created the possibility of reading sinetron as an authoritative guide for the emerging form of femininity, which invoked sophistication, wealth, professionalism and cosmopolitanism (Sen 1998:43).