4 min readMar 20, 2026 04:32 PM IST
Chiraiya review: To make a series on marital rape, a subject so thorny that decades of activism have gone nowhere in the courts — what happens between married couples in their bedrooms stays there — is brave in and of itself.
And the first three episodes of the six-part Chiraiya, a show revolving around a traditional Lucknow family forced to deal with uncomfortable truths, is truly effective in showing us just how hard it is for regular folks to accept that ‘something like this’ can exist amongst us all.
Kamlesh (Divya Dutta), married to what appears to be the nicest guy in the universe (Faisal Rashid), has consoled herself for not ‘being able’ to produce a son (she has a daughter) that she has lavished all her maternal care on Arun, her very pleased-by-himself ‘devar’ (brother-in-law). Her poetry-writing father-in-law (Sanjay Mishra) also appears, at first glance, a paternal figure who keeps his flock together amiably, without asserting his heavy-handed ‘sasur’ self, but only up to a point.
Into this family comes the brand new bride Pooja (Prasanna Bisht), who represents the new generation and its way of thinking: a young woman aware of the world around her, with an understanding of politics and the political, which shows in her lending her presence to rallies on such subjects as LGBTQi rights. Her treatment on her ‘suhagraat’, with Arun claiming his ‘marital rights’ despite her clear reluctance — her pleas of not feeling unwell falling on deaf ears — results in rape.
Except that’s a place no one wants to go, as ‘consent’ is considered all too ‘woke’, which doesn’t apply to marriages. What Chiraiya, created by Divy Nidhi Sharma and directed by Shashant Shah, manages to get right is putting these conversations baldly on the table in the way it begins– Kamlesh, the ‘jithani’ who has been content to read the back page of the newspaper, the front page being a preserve of the men, learns that there is life beyond the kitchen, even if her understanding comes at the cost of the show becoming all about her coming of age, rather than the girl who created the storm in the first place.
These clear declarations, so important for the kind of audience whose paternalistic bent and long years of patriarchal conditioning make them unable to understand just how a woman can say no, even if it is her husband, are heartening. As is Kamlesh’s character, whose narrow lens, fashioned by generational wisdom governing women, widens exponentially, even as her husband learns that being too passive is also a cop-out. The brutal exchanges between the newly-weds are also shown without too much coyness, both actors– the newly-minted husband exerting what he has been encouraged to think are his ‘rights’, and the wife, increasingly desperate, resorting to desperate measures like self-harm– doing their job well.
But soon after, the series adopts a degree of melodrama which belongs more to the Ekta Kapoor brand of kitchen-sink saas-bahu serials than a modern series that challenges patriarchy through personal choices which are held up for what they are.
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The conclusion thankfully does return to the smash-the-patriarchy position, and that’s a win for this Divya Dutta led show — with her driving the narrative solidly all the way through —but leaves us with this question: does a show like this need to include tired melodramatic tropes to make its point?
Chiraiya cast: Divya Dutta, Sanjay Mishra, Prasanna Bisht, Faisal Rasheed, Sidhharth Shaw, Sarita Joshi, Tinnu Anand
Chiraiya director: Shashant Shah
Chiraiya rating: Two and a half stars
