Sorry to the fans of Chiraiya, but what you have been told is a lie. To those who don’t know, at the end of this series, a statistic is flashed, which reads: ‘82% married women face sexual violence from their husbands’. This is nothing but a lie. And it has been told in a manner that if you do not dive deep, get ready to be misled.
First, where does this statistic come from? It was in the National Family Health Survey (2019–21), in which the women participants were asked whether they had ever faced sexual violence. Out of 100 women, 5.4% of them said yes. Then, on being asked who the perpetrator was, 82% of these said their husband. Hope you are able to trace the fraud now. In all, it was 82% of 5.4%, not the total number of married women. To the lovers of data, you can say it’s roughly 4% of total married women, not 82%.
Released on Jio Hotstar in March 2026, the series is supposedly based on a serious topic like marital rape. But is the seriousness shown in making the same? No. It’s ‘completely one-sided’ and ‘melodramatic’.
What it does is basically this: in the name of presenting a social issue, the series labels the entire male gender as villains. It’s basically ‘toxic feminist propaganda’ in the name of entertainment.
Propaganda of a sort that every man is a potential rapist, and there isn’t a single woman in society who hasn’t been touched without consent. To extend this point, deliberately, whenever a male character appears, the series tries to create a negative subconscious impression of him. And even the few ‘exceptions’ shown, men who are not rapists as per the series, are depicted as being boycotted by other men collectively.
Basically, every element that can be used in ideal propaganda filmmaking has been used here.
What are its elements and what’s the hypocrisy?
The biggest bluff of this series is the 82% statistic. But why only 82% and not the context? This is a textbook example of data manipulation. Change the denominator, and the narrative changes. They took the NFHS data but removed the ‘of’, meaning, the context, and flashed only 82% on screen. And you had the people crying and feeling the pain, which, in reality, doesn’t exist in the way in which it has been portrayed.
And when backlash happened, per some viewers, the 82% statistic was no longer visible. Maybe it was silently removed. A classic ‘spit and scoot’ tactic: show wrong data, set the narrative, and once enough damage is done, delete and run.
Chiraiya is basically a Hindi remake of a Bengali web series called Sampurna. It’s a 6-part series set in Lucknow.
And what’s the story? Here’s the crux for you: the husband is a rapist. The father-in-law represents patriarchy. Other men in the house are either complicit or silent. And throughout the series, there isn’t a single male character with both spine and morality. So, all of us, the men, are thugs, is what this so-called feminist series claims.
The series begins with a scene where a newly married woman is forced into sex by her husband on the first night. It’s portrayed very gruesomely.
But if you objectively analyse this scene, you’ll realise it’s quite arbitrary in real life. Because sex in marriage is a normal thing. Even if you include marital abuse in the equation, real-life situations are very different from what’s shown here. The series suggests that it’s almost impossible for married women to refuse sex to their husbands. That their husband’s only wish is to have sex in marriage. But as already told, the NFHS 5 data suggests the opposite. In a nutshell, real-life situation is the opposite of what the series actually portrays.
For those living under a rock, it’s also not true that there are no strict laws to deal with marital abuse. In fact, many now say that laws are so heavily biased that a woman can legally ruin a man’s life if she wants. Dowry cases are one example, where the entire family of the man, including relatives, is named. What’s interesting is this: of all dowry cases, only 30% are genuine.
But what does the series show?
At the end, Divya Dutta delivers a mic-drop monologue. A woman walks out in slow motion. Dramatic music plays. Text flashes. But nothing changes: no system, no law, no arrests.
Whereas in reality, we all know that the Indian law provides protection against physical, sexual, emotional, and economic abuse to women. If a woman makes such allegations, the man and even his family, including women like his mother and sister, can end up in jail. For him, along with legal consequences, there are financial and social repercussions too. One of the reasons that has made many men afraid of marriage altogether.
You’ll be shocked to know, but every year, around 40,000 allegedly false cases are filed under such laws. Around 200,000 people are directly affected annually.
But the series doesn’t talk about these darker aspects of the law at all. Why would it? After all, it has been made to appease a certain ideological audience one-sidedly.
An audience that writes long paragraphs on their Instagram stories, tweets on X and whatnot in support of a ‘liberal’ character who talks about consent and liberty, gets raped in marriage, and then sets out to change society.
But which society? Because the society in which we live, where 82% of women can refuse sex, where strict laws already exist, and where some women allegedly misuse them. In such a society, at least to me, all this looks flawed.
I have heard women who consider things like hookups, indecent public behavior, or explicit social media content as empowerment. So, extra-marital affairs are seen as a choice, but sex within marriage is called rape. What to say has also become an answer nowadays.
Then, we are aware of the incidents where wives, along with their lovers, have killed husbands. The Meerut blue drum case is one example. There are multiple such cases reported. Start using Google and it will do wonders for you.
Yet still, there is little remorse from the toxic feminists when such cases come into the limelight. Leave taking them seriously, they turn these incidents into jokes, like gifting blue drums at weddings. In some cases, such examples are even used to justify physical assault on husbands. Even when caught in extra-marital affairs, some women react violently toward their husbands. I mean, just look at the hypocrisy.
This abuse is traceable. According to a study titled ‘A Cross-sectional Study of Gender-Based Violence against Men in the Rural Area of Haryana, India’, out of 1000 men, 51.5% have experienced violence at the hands of their wives/intimate partner at least once in their lifetime. For women, per the NFHS 5, this number is 32%.
This shows: when the attempts are made to know the truth, facts do not hold back from appearing outright.
Despite all this, web series like Chiraiya vilify men one-sidedly and ultimately affect the institution of family. Actually, that’s the aim of the leftists everywhere.
Remember Atul Subhash’s ‘Justice is Due’? It is due. Did a series on him come out or on any of the cases that independent journalists like Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj continue to report on a daily basis? No. Will it ever come? I don’t know. But what I certainly know is that what Chiraiya has shown is something that doesn’t exist.
