Mainstream Weekly“In India, where thousands of young women are murdered every year for bringing in insufficient dowries, a dowry death rarely makes news. But the death of Twisha Sharma in the central city of Bhopal on 12 May has sparked a huge media frenzy, with the case making headlines every day.” read the opening lines of a news article posted by BBC on 22nd of May, 2026.
From unmarried daughters getting warned by their mothers of "domestic complexities" to progressive, independent women remaining trapped in abusive homes, the mysteries of Indian domestic life continue to be an unfathomable territory, even in the twenty-first century. Domestic abuse, both physical and psychological, remains a shared reality amongst many Indian households. Although the hypocritical Indian elites frequently relegate this as a lower-class phenomenon, innumerable cases of gruesome abuse regularly emerge from the “high-profile” society. The suspected dowry death of Twisha Sharma, where the prime suspects are her lawyer husband and ex-judge mother-in-law, serves as a crucial reminder of this fact. Ultimately, the perenniality of such crimes has fostered a deep-seated apprehension towards post-marital domestic life; an apprehension that mothers generationally hand down to their daughters.
While the overwhelming number of documented dowry deaths and domestic abuse cases rarely find justice, the unrecorded cases perpetually remaining in oblivion present an even more alarming truth. The inherent discomfort experienced by Indian women within post-marital domestic spaces is a reality that holds through time and social strata. However, women have often attempted to express the experiences from their post-marital domestic lives in multiple ways, and the artistic medium is no exception. The troubled memories from problematic domestic lives lived by South Asian women have often featured in verses that they have written. Women have composed poetry detailing their post-marital life - reflecting the claustrophobic nature of it, and the physical or emotional exploitation within the households, leading to the systematic erasure of their desires. These accounts trace back to the sixteenth-century Bhakti poet Mirabai, one of the subcontinent’s earliest female poets. In some of her surviving poems, Mirabai explicitly writes about the problematic treatment by her in-laws and a certain "Rana"(found as “The King” in some versions). In these accounts, Rana functions not just as a literal reference to the men in her family, her husband, brother-in-law, and father-in-law, but as the ultimate embodiment of patriarchal power.
The abuse.
Mirabai boldly articulates the abuse faced by women trapped within Indian domestic spheres, as she writes:
I donned anklets and danced
The people said “Mira is mad ”
My mother-in-law declared
That I had ruined the family’s reputation
The King sent me a cup of poison (Alston, 1980: 48)
Born a Rajput princess and married to the crown prince of Mewar, Mirabai’s sixteenth-century account of royal domestic abuse aptly mirrors the contemporary events splashed across daily newspapers. Whether driven by unmet dowry demands as seen in the murder of a twenty-four-year-old newlywed in Karnataka(2026), the birth of a daughter as witnessed in the suspicious death of a woman in Uttar Pradesh (2025), or failure to embody the image of a sanskari wife, as in the case of Twisha Sharma (2026), women in modern India are still routinely brutalized within domestic spaces.
The Claustrophobia.
A woman’s fear, especially towards her female in-laws, is found even in ancient bandishes and folk songs using the phrase, “sun pāvegī sās nanadiyāṅ” / “The mother-in-law and sister-in-law will get to hear”. Indian culture has historically churned the trope of malicious female in-laws, producing the persistent apprehension of married women towards the female members of her husband’s family. Mirroring this is the counter-trope of a malicious daughter-in-law who aims to out-power the mother-in-law’s domestic authority and diminish her status; a narrative that fuels anxiety among mothers-in-law. Together, these interlocking fears feed a bigger patriarchal narrative designed to pit women against one another and keep them un-united.
Mirabai’s statement, “My family members repeatedly try to restrain me” (Alston, 1980: 37) finds an echo four centuries later in Kamala Das’s poem,
The Old Playhouse,
You planned to tame a swallow, to hold her
In the long summer of your love so that she would forget
Not the raw seasons alone, and the homes left behind, but
Also her nature, the urge to fly, and the endless
Pathways of the sky. (Das, 1973)
Another idea constantly chanted within the Indian domestic spheres is that of “adjustment”. For the cultural lineage of patrilocal relocation, where the bride moves to the groom’s home, Indian women are taught to abandon their pre-marital lives after marriage. Their past identity automatically becomes obsolete as they are forced to adopt a new existence centered entirely on the husband and his family. The pressure to adapt to an unfamiliar domestic environment, irrespective of difficulties, renders this process immensely claustrophobic for several women. However, society does not leave any room for resistance; women are either left stranded in unbearable domestic spaces or ostracized and abused for trying to bend.
Post-marital Roles
Later in The Old Playhouse, Das pens the new habits that she had to perform under the title of a wife, “You called me wife, / I was taught to break saccharine into your tea and / To offer at the right moment the vitamins” (Das, 1973). The specificity of domestic routines can also be noticed in Mamta Kalia’s poem, Matrimonial Bliss, written almost around the same time as Das’s, which also enlists the usual chores expected from a wife, “You have no need of me / You know where’s your towel, your slipper, your toothpick, / Salt and pepper containers” (Kalia, 1970). In these verses, the woman’s memory of matrimonial domesticity is often presented as a separate, estranged existence, almost like a secondary life that refuses to mingle with their true, authentic self. Yet, despite a palpable sense of alienation in this "other" life, very few women choose to leave it, the way Mirabai did.
This raises a crucial question: why do these women, suffering so acutely in post-marital domestic spaces, not simply leave? While there is no simple or objective answer to this, the intersecting layers of cultural taboo and generational conditioning keep them bound. In her reflective essay, ’Mrs. R.P. Sengupta,’ similar to the other women discussed here, Keya Chakraborty documents the innumerable domestic impediments that deplete a married woman’s energy and restrict her professional efficiency. Yet, in listing these burdensome post-marital chores, she notes: ’It’s after marriage, that girls … but why blame marriage? I had no time even in my father’s house.’ This uncovers a parallel stream of grievances rooted in the traditional upbringing of the female child in Indian households. Many families continue to raise daughters following the ruthless pattern of grooming them into compliant housekeepers for future in-laws. As Chakraborty notes, some families even refrain from investing in a daughter’s education under the patriarchal preconception that they will never reap the financial return on investment once she is married off. It is neither solely the female in-laws nor the male, nor is it solely the woman’s upbringing or the groom’s family, but rather parts of all of them, and of many other things that actively work towards creating claustrophobic domestic spaces for women. Thus, the chains binding a woman to an abusive marriage stretch from the sacred gospel of ’adjustment’ to the nature of their upbringing to the fear of the social stigma that follows a divorced woman. The dilemma of discerning the problem amidst normalised problematic practices and deciding if it is worth resisting, going against the rules of society, is a difficult decision to make for most women, irrespective of their social or educational backgrounds. While we continually come across the brutal outcomes of women’s troubled post-marital lives, very little thought is contributed to understanding the systematic failure of the South Asian societies that produce such outcomes.
(Author: Adrita is a researcher currently residing in Heidelberg, Germany. Her academic background is in Modern South Asian Literature (from the University of Heidelberg) and Comparative Literature (from Jadavpur University).)