TELEVISION: CREATING THE "MODERN" WOMAN the media, leads to the relative primacy of the individual and the limited family unit in place of class, group, gender or other formations. In this construction, problems are reduced to the level of individual conflicts, and their social dimensions are underemphasised. Even the supposedly socially conscious Shanti pits individuals against one another and the desire for revenge on Shanti's part becomes a personal vendetta notwithstanding the crudely populist "feminist" rhetoric. Consumption replaces political activism or group movements as the means to achieve freedom from oppressive social structures. Women who protest the current trend of television programming are told that there are so many serials which feature strong, central women characters. However, these women characters are portrayed as individuals who are searching for individual solutions for problems which most of us will agree have social roots. This tendency to individualise social problems is a disturbing trend for all those involved in movements which emphasise and depend on group activism and solidarity. Just as the popularity of one day cricket on television has actually reduced the number of people who actually participate in the game, so too programmes like Shanti, Janani, Tara, or the many others on Doordarshan and commercial channels which have central women characters actually reduce the number of women who will look for collective solutions to individual problems. However, modernity itself is a complex construction with many disputed aspects and claimants to the label. One aspect which is relevant to this issue is the fact that Western-style modernity is not completely acceptable to many in the audience. Thus the disruptive aspect of modernity which advocates new social formations and its privileging of individualism above community is often undermined in many of the popular serials. Older characters are often made to bear the rhetoric associated with traditional values of the community. Interestingly, this is often made to converge on the figure of the mother, who is traditionally viewed as the guardian of the family and community values. In other survey conducted around Janani the first super hit on Calcutta Kendra of Doordarshan, we found that the sympathies were clearly divided on generational lines. The older generation of viewers were sympathetic to the long-suffering, self-sacrificing mother, whereas we could not find a single viewer below 35 years of age who even watched the serial regularly. In India, modernity itself is a complex matrix where many traditional values and ideologies coexist with modernist values. For the women of Ranaghat, attaining modernity is a process both desired