Matriarchal manipulation in a patriarchal world is depicted unsparingly in Usha Priyamwada’s Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein (Now playing on Prasar Bharti).
The mother resentful of her lecturer daughter’s comfortable life in her college residence because the younger daughters are still unmarried.
The mother also preying on the male interest in her life to figure if her younger daughter will be a good match for him even though he is obviously interested in the elder one.
A well-meaning acquaintance also “suggesting” helpfully that she let her sister marry her male friend to ease her mother’s “zimmedari.”
The best friend who is marrying an incompatible rich man because she wants to escape her life, telling her that she is jeopardising her reputation in the college campus by seeing a man openly.
The jealous colleague who just cannot help taunting her.
The little slights that women inflict upon other women they pretend to love as sisters, mothers, daughters and friends are just part of a bigger patriarchal design to keep unique feminine spirits chained to the yoke of compliance.
And if they cannot be hurt by direct attacks, to tame them through guilt as the mother does when called out for her selfishness. She instantly begins to dab her eyes to mourn her inability to raise her own children.
When I first watched this series in the early nineties, I did not understand how the heroine could give up the one beam of sunshine in her life. Now I understand it much better. Women don’t give up on themselves or joy in an instant. Joy and hope are drained out of them drop by drop by other women, by society, by those who resent them just for existing and seeking something extraordinary.
Abuse in the end is not just a patriarchal construct. Its machinery is greased by women who demand conformity and subservience from the spirits of other women. And the only way out is to break the moulds and as Clarissa Pinkola Estés says, to walk in the shadow of the sword that is always primed for women who won’t stay in the chalk circles drawn around them.