For decades, Indian cinema has had a rape script with three roles. A lecherous villain, a woman violated, and a hero who arrived just in time to avenge her. That template is cracking with a new crop of films and shows where the perpetrator grows up listening to poetry about women’s empowerment, speaks English, and belongs to your family.
‘Chiraiya’, a new web series that has ruffled feathers in India’s ever-growing manosphere, puts a face to that. In a reputed joint family in Lucknow, a sari-clad Kamlesh — the elder bahu — asks a question that old cinema never had to answer. “As women, we’ve been taught to never cross the rekha like Sita, and we’d be safe. But what if we aren’t safe inside the rekha itself?”
