In Chapter 4 of our bestselling book “Behold the Leviathan: The Unusual Rise of Modern India”, we explained last year how Indian women are progressing much faster than their male counterparts in a range of areas. What we didn’t highlight in the book is the struggle taking place in millions of households and in the psyche on Indian women. The struggle is between traditional forms of identity for Indian women (mother, wife, daughter, etc) and more progressive forms of identity (leader, entrepreneur, breadwinner, etc). This brilliant piece in Scroll brings to the fore this struggle by highlighting trending podcasts & videos of Indian women who are “traditional wives” (or tradwives). Divya Aslesha & Nolina Minj’s article is worth reading in full but here is the crux of it in case you don’t have time to read about social upheavals in India:
“Over the past year, Instagram has seen a surge in videos featuring young Indian women with titles such as “a slow morning in life of a 21 year old married girl” and “day in the life of 20 yrs old married girl”. They have been notching up millions of views.
The women in the videos, most of whom refer to themselves as “married girls”, are usually impeccably dressed. Their clothes range from salwar-kurtas to dresses and athleisure wear. They prominently display markers of their marital status, such as sindoor, mangalsutras and red and white bangles up to their elbows.
There is usually an air of comfort and placidity to the videos. They have spacious houses as their backdrops. The women appear content, even blissful, as they pray, cook, wash dishes, chat and drink tea with their families, dress up for outings with their husbands and travel in luxurious SUVs.
But battles rage in the comments sections.
“May this kind of love never find me,” a comment on one such reel. Reads another, “Horror movies don’t scare me, but this reel did, it even appeared on my feed at 3 am [crying emoji].”
Others weigh in to support the creators. “God forbid a woman wants to live a traditional life and be happily married to her husband.” Another comment reads, “This comment section is the biggest proof that women can never see other women be happy! [laughing emoji]”.
Yet another, writing in Hindi, refers to the label by which such creators are sometimes known: “This tradwife trend has started in India too now.”
The term “tradwife”, short for “traditional wife”, has been used since around 2020 by Western anglophone social media to refer to a growing number of women content creators who make videos glorifying marital domesticity, focusing on cooking, homemaking and being good wives….
Falguni Vasavada, a marketing professor at MICA, who also posts about women’s issues and has more than 330,000 followers on Instagram, said she was shocked when she first saw this “extremely disturbing trend”.
She responded with a reel on her account, titled “Choice or conditioning”, which received over 1 million views.”
And so the battle rages around the identity of the modern Indian woman – between the happy homemaker vs the ambitious professional, between the old vs the new.
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