Chiraiya: Abuse wrapped in a ritual
In March this year, CNN published a months-long investigation into a hidden online network where men were teaching each other how to drug their wives unconscious, rape them, film it, and sell the footage. The Telegram group was called “Zzz.” One porn site alone hosted over 20,000 videos of this so-called “sleep content” — women filmed while sedated, men lifting their eyelids to prove they were under. When one survivor went to the police with actual video footage of her own assault, the police told her they couldn’t use it as evidence. Because, in their words, it looked like she was pretending to be asleep.
I need you to stop there. A woman. Her own rape. On video. And the police said: she’s pretending.
Now let me tell you about Chiraiya.
The show, written by Divy Nidhi Sharma and streaming on JioHotstar, is about a kind of violence that doesn’t need a Telegram group. It doesn’t need drugs. It doesn’t even need raised voices. It arrives dressed in ritual — the mangalsutra, the sindoor, the suhaagrat. And because those rituals are sacred, because they have been blessed by religion and codified by law across centuries, the violence underneath them is rendered not just invisible, but inconceivable. The show’s entire premise is simple enough to be radical: marriage does not imply consent.
In India, where the Union government has opposed striking down the marital rape exception in a pending Supreme Court case, stating that premise out loud on a mainstream streaming platform is a political act.
Chiraiya means sparrow. A sparrow lives close to the ground, embedded in the everyday, in the domestic. It does not soar to symbolic heights. And this show is entirely about what it costs a woman to survive the ordinary.
Consent prepaid at the mandap
The story centres on Kamlesh, played by the brilliant Divya Dutta — the ideal daughter-in-law of a joint family headed by Papaji (Sanjay Mishra). Here’s what the show gets right immediately: this family is not cartoonishly backward. Papaji quotes verses about women’s freedom while ruling with velvet-gloved control. He is educated, outwardly progressive, privately invested in keeping everything exactly as it is. Every Indian woman watching will know this man. He is not invented for drama. He is a sociological reality. He is the patriarch who never raises his hand — he doesn’t need to. The architecture of control is already built into every room of the house.
The nightmare begins when Arun (Siddharth Shaw), Kamlesh’s younger son, marries Pooja. On their wedding night, he forces himself upon her. And the chilling detail the show refuses to flinch from is this: Arun does not understand that he is doing something wrong. He is not a predator who knows he is preying. He is a man who has been taught — by his mother, his family, his religion, his law — that his wife’s body is a marital benefit. A feature of the institution. Like a shared bank account. Consent, in his worldview, was prepaid at the mandap.
The benevolent patriarch
The show also understands — and what I think a lot of people who haven’t lived inside a marriage like this might miss – that the violation doesn’t only happen in the bedroom. It happens in every room. It happens when your opinion is overruled in front of guests and everyone smiles through it. It happens when you’re told you’re “too sensitive” for reacting to something that would make any person flinch. It happens when your reality is denied so consistently, by so many people around you, that you begin to wonder if you’re the problem. Emotional abuse doesn’t announce itself with a raised fist. It arrives in the language of love — “I’m only saying this for your own good,” “You know how much I care about you,” “Why do you always have to make things difficult?” — until you’ve been so thoroughly reshaped that you can no longer locate the version of yourself that existed before.
I have lived in the proximity of this. Not the same story — everyone’s story is their own — but close enough to recognise the texture of it. The way you learn to shrink. The way you become fluent in reading a room for danger before you’ve even walked into it. The way you start to manage someone else’s emotions as a full-time job, because the consequences of getting it wrong fall entirely on you. The show captures this without melodrama.
The unraveling of conditioning
What makes Chiraiya genuinely extraordinary is what it does with Kamlesh.
The show is built around her unlearning — and this word matters. An awakening implies discovering something new. An unlearning is far more painful. It is the process of excavating beliefs you did not know you held. Of realising that what you thought were your values were in fact your conditioning. Each episode is another premise that Kamlesh built her entire life on cracks. The system she perfected herself within — the one that rewarded her silence with status and her sacrifice with love — is revealed, piece by piece, to be the same system that has destroyed her daughter-in-law. Divya Dutta performs this not as a revelation but as a grief. It involves shame. It involves looking at every relationship you have ever built and asking: how much of this was real, and how much of it was the performance the system required of me?
And then there is Prasanna Bisht as Pooja.
I have seen criticism of her quietness in the role. That criticism is wrong, and it misunderstands what trauma looks like on a body. Trauma is rarely operatic. Prasanna gives us a woman whose body has been repeatedly violated — who cuts herself rather than face another night of it — and she carries that weight in her stillness, in her flinching, in the way she seems to be going somewhere else inside herself even when she is present in the room. This is not underacting. This is precision. When your “no” has been treated as irrelevant often enough, you stop experiencing your body as your own. The dehumanisation is not just something done to you from the outside. It eventually becomes something you do to yourself from the inside. Prasanna makes you feel that. It is a devastating, controlled performance.
There is also Vinay (Faisal Rashid)— Kamlesh’s husband, Arun’s elder brother— a man who is privately decent and publicly cowardly. He knows the system is wrong. He chooses not to disturb it. He calls that choice “neutral.” His line — “Main hero nahi ban sakta, lekin hero ka pati ban sakta hoon” — is both genuinely moving and quietly damning, because it maps a particular kind of Indian masculinity that believes its goodness exempts it from responsibility. Good intentions, unexpressed, protect no one. Silence is a position. And Chiraiya, to its credit, does not let Vinay off the hook simply because his heart is in the right place.
Too tidy an ending
The ending, I’ll be honest, left me wanting. When the legal system fails Pooja (there is no law against marital rape in India, so her experience literally does not exist in the category of crime), the show turns to the community as the court of last resort. The neighbourhood becomes the only available mechanism of justice. I understand why the director made this choice — the show had to conclude somewhere, and this conclusion contains a real argument: when law withholds justice entirely, public witness becomes the only door left open. But something in me resists the tidiness of it. Because I know — and the show knows — that in most homes where this happens, there is no community reckoning. There is no public witness. There is just the woman, the walls, and the silence that the system has perfected over centuries.
The discomfort is the point
The show is not without its weaknesses. It leans on exposition, drifts into soap opera territory more than once, and Pooja’s character arc is ultimately thinner than it should be. She exists too often as a catalyst for Kamlesh’s transformation rather than as a full human being in her own right. A show that argues women deserve to be seen as complete human beings ought to practise that in its own storytelling. That is a real creative failure and it deserves naming.
But here is what I keep coming back to.
We are living in a world where men gather in online groups to drug their wives unconscious and livestream it for twenty dollars a viewer.
Where a survivor brings video evidence to the police and is told she looks like she’s pretending.
Where a government argues that criminalizing marital sex without consent as rape would be “excessively harsh” and “disproportionate.”
In that world, Chiraiya — imperfect, occasionally preachy, sometimes clunky — is still doing something that needs to be done. It is making visible a violence that has been hiding inside the sacred for centuries. It is saying that the kitchen is a battleground. That the dinner table is a site of power. That the woman who quietly decides, inside her own home, to stop covering for the man — that is resistance.
Watch it with discomfort. That discomfort is exactly the point.
