A powerful teaser of Divya Dutta starrer Chiraiya has been unveiled on Friday, drawing questions on “one of the most deeply normalised injustices within Indian households.” It is for a web series that will soon stream on JioHotstar.
Chiraiya teaser tackles marital rape
The teaser of Chiraiya opens with a glimpse of a wedding, as a young bride, Pooja, enters a new phase of her life with hopes for a brighter future. Only for a haunting twist, the bride is shown in a traumatised state on the terrace, with tears silently rolling down her face and visible injury marks on her body. Divya asks in the teaser, “This is my question to society. Is it not a crime if a husband forces himself on a wife after marriage?”
“Behind all this celebration lies a truth no one wants to name. Chiraiya raises a difficult but necessary question to society: If a husband forces himself on a woman after marriage, does it stop being a crime just because they are married? Yeh sawaal hai samaaj se. Because marriage is not a license, and silence is not consent,” states the official synopsis, as per a press release.
Divya Dutta on Chiraiya web series
Speaking about the upcoming web series, actor Divya opened up about how she ended up confronting the uncomfortable truth about relationships.
“While living with this character in Chiraiya, I found myself constantly confronting an uncomfortable truth: how often we silence ourselves in the name of preserving relationships, in the name of keeping the peace. This story forced me to reflect on how easily marriage is assumed to be a space of unquestioned consent, and how sacrifice is romanticised to the point where pain becomes invisible,” Divya said in a press release.
She added, “When you witness someone you love being diminished or wronged, do you stay quiet to protect what exists, or do you risk everything to protect what is right? There is no easy answer, and perhaps that is what makes it so deeply unsettling. I hope when people experience this story, they don’t just watch it, they feel it and perhaps, in some quiet way, recognise truths we often hesitate to name.”
Directed by Shashant Shah and produced by SVF Entertainment, Chiraiya features an ensemble cast including Sanjay Mishra, Siddharth Shaw, Prasanna Bisht, Faisal Rashid, Tinnu Anand, Sarita Joshi, and others. The web series will soon premiere on JioHotstar; a release date has yet to be announced.
