'Chiraiya’ Series Review: A Liberal Mind Undone By A Conservative Body

There’s a special genre of Hindi social dramas that distinguish themselves by making a mess of perfectly sensible themes. They’re so chuffed about saying something progressive that they say it with the confidence of a 5-year-old teacher’s pet. They’re so determined to school the average viewer that they do it in the syllabus of pandering. They’re so convinced that only intent counts that the storytelling is treated like a Zoom meeting with an attendance-not-mandatory option. Did I need to use such an unnecessarily colourful analogy? No, but it would help if the film-making tried to be as creative. Chiraiya is the latest example. It brings a cartoon knife to a live-action gunfight. It’s more frustrating to watch because the ideology is sound, but instantly subdued by the demands of a deafening algorithm. The result is a performative women-written-by-men project, where the depth is more theoretical than practical, and where artificial moments are spoon-fed to convey brutal truths.

The six-episode series is centered on the transformation of a Traditional Indian Woman when her younger sister-in-law becomes a victim of marital rape. There’s no denying that it has a bunch of interesting ideas. This middle-aged protagonist, Kamlesh (Divya Dutta), is a product of patriarchy herself. She is the only uneducated person in a forward-thinking household. Her ideals about womanhood and domesticity are regressive. Her father-in-law (Sanjay Mishra) is a celebrated author and anti-establishment man, and her husband (Faisal Rashid) is gentle and caring; they are the ones who chastise her for wanting a son and not a daughter. What’s fascinating is that she is partly responsible for the horrors inflicted on young Pooja. She pampers her brother-in-law Arun (Siddharth Shaw) and inadvertently shapes him with her worldview to a point where he becomes the problematic creep in the family; she’s blind to his faults. What’s even more fascinating is that when Kamlesh is humbled by her own complicity, the two women soon realise that patriarchy cannot be smashed in a day; revolution is not the solution, evolution is. Even if they dream of grand statements — like escaping, self-harm, rage, revenge, or abandoning the family and hiring a lawyer to get justice — they know that they have to remain within the system to challenge it.

Kamlesh even mentions that all it takes is for them to cook a dish of their choice, not stop cooking altogether. Their dissent need not be dramatic; it doesn’t always need the cinematic flourish of feminism. It’s a leaf from the pages of Laapataa Ladies, whose co-writer Divy Nidhi Sharma is the creator of this show. I also like that it takes the axe to the hypocrisies of self-proclaimed liberals. The head of the family writes poetry and hides his primal chauvinism behind words. The mask fades the moment the carefully calibrated image of his family is under threat; a simple apology for him is enough to undo the trauma of sexual abuse. There’s nothing worse than “badnaami” in his book. His green-flag son — Kamlesh’s husband — admits he doesn’t have a spine to defy his dad, and that “I can be the hero’s husband, if not the hero”. He knows right from wrong, but he can’t stand up for his wife because it involves standing up to the old-school values of his father and toxic masculinity of his brother.

But there’s a thin line between mainstream self-awareness and contrived wokeness. At first, it looks like Chiraiya is being cute by delivering modern messages in the language of the dated tv-soap aesthetic. It’s like seeing a saas-bahu serial excavate the ruins of its own foundation. Arun even behaves like a 90s villain who licks his lips and offers an evil chuckle before closing the door and preying on his wife. There’s a grandmother who doesn’t speak much; you know her words will arrive when the script is in a tight spot. But then it becomes clear that Chiraiya is not that radical. It just knows no other way of putting across its packaged commentary. It’s the typical on-the-nose and patronising tone that epitomises social entertainment made by privileged classes.

The binaries are grating. Kamlesh is staged as such a village bumpkin that you’d think she’s an infant written by adults. The series mistakes her illiteracy for intellectual diminishment. When she addresses her husband as “Pinky ke Papa,” he encourages her to call him by his real name instead; she lectures other women on the duties of “lugai” (the colloquial term for wife) in the kitchen and bedroom; she slaps a broken Pooja when she tells her about the rape; she pronounces lesbian as “libian,” and her wariness of a short-haired queer activist is mined for cheap humour. The series makes her distinctly unlikable in its pursuit of a saas-bahu caricature. The character is more of a concept than a human; you can tell that empowerment means she will go from “lugai this lugai that” to “aurat this aurat that”. It’s as if the script notes are simply slapped onto the screen as dialogue.

Chiraiya also makes the cardinal mistake of presenting a female saviour as a gendered version of the male saviour. Pooja and her hell exist for Kamlesh’s transformation, which is why Kamlesh often behaves like a narrow-minded man who just happens to be a conditioned woman. She is essentially the protagonist of someone else’s story. And Pooja is presented as the kind of Gen-Z stereotype who would seem implausible in this setting; she does activism in her spare time, attends LGBTQ+ protests, says “I am more than my body” in the middle of an assault, speaks in trending terms, and generally acts like an urban and chronically online social media kid (“why expect middle-class women to start a revolution?”) who’s been parachuted into this joint family out of nowhere.

The performances are flattened by the simplistic writing. It’s nice to see Divya Dutta get a lead role playing a familiar character, but the Disney-fication of Kamlesh’s personality is difficult to see. Such women are usually relegated to the background as bitchy aunts or regressive relatives, so I get why the series chooses to spotlight her and not the victim. But her main-character energy is more acceptable on paper than on the screen; it reduces Prasanna Bisht’s Pooja to an accessory in search of a senior ally. Bisht was impressive in Farrey, therefore it’s all the more perplexing to see the woman culturally appropriated by a show that operates in the broadest of broad strokes. The finale paints itself into a corner and wraps things up with a poorly crafted and hurried climax. A slate with statistics at the end of six episodes is never a good sign, nor is a random slow-mo walk after an unconvincing speech. In short, Chiraiya thinks it’s a bird that can fly by virtue of looking like a bird, only to reveal that it has wings of clay.