Gauhar Khan is the winner of Bigg Boss. It's a brave, new world

Take two Indian women. Both are single, relatively young and good looking. One never states any opinion and is also what many would call gharelu – she hasn’t pursued a professional course or earned an independent living in years, choosing instead to rely upon her affluent and respected family. If there is one thing that defines her, it is that she’s in love with a man she’s met recently. She blushes and acts coy when they talk about the relationship, but her behaviour makes no secret of how she sees herself as his plus one. Possibly as a result of this ‘love’ they share, she accepts him for who he is, which is a man who screams and shouts at her, humiliates her publicly and has even shoved her around, uncaring of the fact that he has an audience. He, on the other hand, repeatedly tells her she is insecure and that he has no time for her in his life. (It’s important to note that he has no upper hand over her in terms of class and they’re both from the same religion.) She stands by him despite all this and sides with him when he’s similarly offensive to other women. She says her submissiveness is actually a quality. [caption id=“attachment_1313431” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Sachin Gokhale/Firstpost[/caption] Now, the second woman. She is strong-willed, doesn’t hesitate to voice an opinion and is often criticised for stating her opinion too often. She belongs to a middle class Muslim family and has steadily built up a modest but stable career over the past 10 years, thus becoming financially independent. She’s also in love with a Hindu man who is a couple of years younger than her. He proclaims his love for her in public and vice versa. He speaks to her affectionately, stands up for her and has asked her to marry him. Despite their relationship, she ticks him off when he misbehaves with others or doesn’t listen to her, and she doesn’t shy away from giving anyone who doesn’t agree with her a piece of her mind. Her one gharelu quality: she cooks like a dream. If India — particularly the section that watches Hindi television shows religiously — had to vote for one or the other woman, you’d think that the soft spoken adarshiya bharatiya naari would get all the votes. Right? Wrong. This year, in the seventh season of Bigg Boss, Gauhar Khan got more votes than Tanisha Mukherjee and became the winner. It’s a brand new world. I’m of the belief that reality TV shows like Bigg Boss are windows into the minds of the average Indian, the constituency that determines what kind of shows are successful and the kind of characters we will see on the telly. When you see women playing pativrata naris bedecked like they’re Christmas trees all year round on our entertainment shows, it’s because the viewer response tells channels that this is what people want to see. In the same way, India TV reports news of UFOs drinking up the milk of cows on Earth because that’s the kind of nonsense their average news viewer would like to see. This is why Gauhar Khan trumping Tanisha Mukherjee is a fabulous step forward. We usually assume the average viewer is conventional and straitjacketed, the sort that would never vote for an independent, opinionated woman over a woman-shaped doormat bharatiya nari. That they did vote for the opinionated one is shocking, but very welcome. More power to the Indian viewer, I say. Maybe in the coming year, we’ll see female characters in films and serials who are more normal – women who are financially independent, working, attractive and unafraid to state their opinions or exercise their right of choice when it comes to their partners. If it happens, we’ll have to thank Bigg Boss for putting the reality in TV.