The Indian 'Big Brother'?

Reality TV has arrived in India ? but a new primetime show offers its winners not cash or temporary celebrity, but a chance to meet the perfect spouse. Maseeh Rahman tunes in

After several bungled attempts at finding a show that could boost its sagging ratings, two years ago Rupert Murdoch's Star India Network finally hit the jackpot with a hugely popular Indian remake of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. The game show made television history. Not only did Star emerge as the No 1 satellite-and-cable TV network in India, but it also rewrote the rules in what is still a nascent entertainment business.

The show was hosted by a major Bollywood actor. Until then, Bombay's glitzy film industry had treated television as a creatively challenged country cousin surviving on the cheap with poorly made soaps and sitcoms, along with re-runs of old Hindi blockbusters. But with Star's quiz show, its avuncular host Amitabh Bachchan actually experienced a second coming as a national cultural icon. The show also acted as a technology demonstrator – it was expensively mounted, and proved that money spent in the studio or on prizes could be won back many times over at the ratings table.

But above all, Star's gamble with the quiz-show formula showed that Indian television viewers could be weaned from their addiction to family melodramas, romantic comedies and Bollywood song and dance. There are an estimated 70 million TV homes in the country. Around 30 million, mostly in urban centres, are hooked to satellite channels distributed through local cable companies. The rest have to make do with the dour, government-owned Doordarshan terrestrial network. According to television executives, the average Indian viewer is not just a couch potato – he or she (and often it's a she) comes fully mashed. The viewer gets easily turned off by programming that is even remotely taxing, what's known in the business as "lean-forward TV". Until Star's breakthrough, a major international cricket match would be the only instance of a lean-forward telecast making it to the top 10.

Star's Millionaire has run its course, but ever since the ageing Bachchan shook up the TV business, programme executives in all the major networks have been desperately hunting for another edge-of-the-seat entertainment that could liberate the studios from the conveyor belt of soaps and sitcoms. Many see reality TV as the next saviour. But nothing has worked so far. AXN put on Survivor, and the show bombed. Despite the occasional caste or religious riot, the middle-class Indian, they say, is too socially inclusive to enjoy blatantly aggressive outcasting.

Before going native with an imported reality-TV formula, Star tested the waters with Fox's original Temptation Island series. The network had to hurriedly pull the programme in the face of a public outcry. Viewers were shocked that young couples were subjected to wanton sexual temptation. In a society where marriage is destiny and divorce is rare, a young woman's comment summed up the viewers' bafflement: "Personally, I can't see why any couple would want to test their relationship. It is anyway so difficult in today's times to find that someone who you can share your life with."

Sony Entertainment Television is now banking on the possibility that the young woman's dilemma will provide the magic reality-TV formula. At prime time last Monday night, the satellite network launched Kahin Naa Kahin Koi Hai, or There's Someone, Somewhere Made for You. The show is hosted by Madhuri Dixit, another declining Bollywood superstar looking for a second life in television.

Sony has turned a Western reality TV concept on its head – the beautiful Dixit, whose star persona successfully combines sexual oomph with girl-next-door charm, does not try to separate couples. Instead, she plays the matchmaker, that hoary figure at the heart of Indian society's greatest obsession – the arranged marriage. In four episodes every week, Dixit will help a young woman, supervised by her parents, to find a husband. Sony has taken no chances – the producers UTV have conducted intensive research to prepare a database of eligible men and women, complete with their personal and family histories, likes and dislikes, dreams and eccentricities, horoscopes and medical records. Based on that information, the producers created a shortlist of eight men for each woman participant, asked her to choose three, summoned them all with their families to Bombay and, without using any hidden cameras, shot the matrimonial wheeling and dealing anchored by Dixit on an opulent, Bollywood-style set.

"The show is a perfect fusion of reality and fantasy, it's the visual incarnation of the biggest part of the Sunday paper – the matrimonial ads," says Shiv Vishwanathan, a social anthropologist. "And Madhuri Dixit is the perfect choice to lead us through this reality-fantasy thicket."

Dixit reigned as Bollywood's biggest female star through the 1990s, but she easily fulfils most of the requirements for an ideal bride commonly listed in matrimonial ads – "beautiful", "fair complexioned", "convented" (short for convent-educated), "cultured", "from well-to-do family", though maybe not "homely". In real life, despite a rumoured love affair, Dixit, who once cited Winston Churchill as her "dream man", ended up marrying a Los Angeles-based NRI (non-resident Indian – the holy grail of the marriage bazaar) in a match arranged by her brother.

Vinod Deshpande sells health-care products, and frankly admits that the prospect of meeting Dixit, rather than of finding a bride, took him to the Sony show. He is on the list of three suitors selected by Meenakshi Wagh, a professional badminton coach whose quest for a husband opened Sony's series this week. The other two suitors are a photographer and a herbal-products salesman. Wagh is looking for a man who will understand her passion for badminton; Deshpande will be content with "a nice, kind-hearted girl who'll adjust to living with my parents". The viewers find out only on Thursday, but during the pre-recorded shoot Deshpande proposed to Wagh on the set, and the two were married in February. So the Deshpande and Wagh households can lean back and happily watch the show. It's the Sony executives who will be sitting tensely, wondering if their gamble will pay off – the show has cost a rumoured one billion rupees (£13m). As Deshpande's father observed, you can never tell when there'll be a turning point in life – or, he might add, on TV.