Streaming on JioHostar, the brand new sequence Chiraiya starring Divya Dutta, Siddharth Shaw and Prasanna Bisht, takes on a troublesome query typically ignored in India—consent inside marriage in addition to the legal and cultural invisibility of marital rape in our nation.
In a media panorama the place we’re spoonfed tales that depict marriage as the final word completely satisfied ending, Chiraiya does one thing radical. It begins the story there and dismantles the phantasm we affiliate with marriage as the final word vacation spot for love. Chiraiya is, in flip, a remake of the Bengali net sequence ‘Sampurna’ streaming on Hoichoi.
For so long as I can bear in mind, society and widespread tradition have handled marriage as an ethical blanket. Once it is draped over a relationship, every thing turns into permissible or a minimum of non-public. We are hushed underneath the anomaly that what occurs inside the wedding, it stays between the husband and spouse. The contract turns into binding; legality precedes consent.
Marital rape is structural
Chiraiya confronts this head-on and shows us how absurd this declare is, how custom is used as a beating stick to maintain ladies in test. And how internalised misogyny makes ladies take a look at different ladies as objects as nicely.
This will be seen by a devastatingly easy change in the sequence. After the protagonist, Pooja (Prasanna Bisht), is sexually assaulted by her husband, her sister-in-law, Kamlesh (performed with an unsettling conviction by Divya Dutta), makes an attempt to rationalise the abuse.
If somebody takes their very own issues out of their cabinet, she argues, does that make them a thief?
To everybody watching, the flawed logic of the road can’t wash away the sensation of the acquainted sentiment we have now grown accustomed to. This is precisely how marital rape retains getting normalised in our society, with metaphors that cut back ladies to property. Wives are checked out as ‘things’ you possibly can have entry to or take from everytime you need.
Pooja’s rebuttal to this assertion is easy. “I am not a thing,” she says, “I was not bought”. A reasonably easy assertion that isn’t revolutionary. But if you connect with the context of Indian legislation, the place marital rape is nonetheless not criminalised besides underneath particular circumstances, it turns into a press release of defiance.
What we additionally want to know is that marital rape as an act doesn’t stand in isolation. It is not simply bodily however structural. It is embedded in language, in legal frameworks that present caveats to abusers, in household dynamics the place ladies are subjected to the key phrases “adjust”, “compromise”, and if she is graced with an oz. of dignity, “forgive” for Indian ladies, who’re the testing floor of persistence and endurance.
What makes this actuality much more suffocating is the backdrop of the normalcy of home life. Women are anticipated to fulfil the ‘marital act’ as an obligation and likewise carry out home and emotional labour, a aspect of which we discover in Sanya Malhotra starrer ‘Mrs’.
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Series like Chiraiya necessary
Conversation about consent, in current years, has began getting into mainstream discourse. We have a whole lot of movies exploring the significance of consent, one of many necessary films being Shoojit Sircar’s Pink (2016) and likewise the much less talked about film about date rape, Satyaprem Ki Katha (2023). But movies about marital rape are but to make the lower.
But this subject is equally, if no more, necessary. To put it into perspective, for 163 years, raping your spouse has not been thought of against the law in India.
It doesn’t cease there. Some Indian judges have even ruled that the denial of intercourse is psychological cruelty, as seen in the remark made by the Allahabad High Court in May 2023, whereas granting divorce to a husband, the petitioner, who filed for divorce from his spouse, alleging “mental cruelty”, when she refused to dwell and have intercourse with him.
These “observations” then surrogates the identical legal basis that legitimises marital rape. Because in accordance with the Indian legal system, intercourse is owed, it is a marital obligation, denial of which is manipulation and cruelty. Then how does taking what is owed to you by pressure quantity to a prison act? Consent must have a “sufficient” if not a “valid” purpose, because it is “implied”.
Marriage in India, really the subcontinent, is plunged deep in the pits of patriarchy and is instantly proportional to property and permanence. Thus, consent turns into arbitrary, a formality, possibly not even that.
As of January 2026, the Supreme Court held that as a consequence of Exception 2 of Section 375 IPC, the husband couldn’t be prosecuted for rape. Thus, I really feel the sequence Chiraiya and the discourse round it is of the utmost significance, particularly when it comes on the auspicious time of Women’s History Month. Because in a society the place marital rape is nonetheless debated as an thought quite than acknowledged as a actuality, that insistence is, in itself, a type of resistance.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)
