‘Bandi’; Or the Words that Redefine a Woman
When a young man calls a woman a ‘bandi’ in Made in Heaven, he casts the burden of decency upon her shoulders. Kavya Maheshwari explores how the intersection of language, power, and gender in contemporary Indian society reinforces patriarchal norms.
Words, like shadows, shift their shapes in the light of intent. In one breath, bandi can mean, simply, ‘girl’. But in yet another manner of speaking, it becomes something far more insidious. It is a word that slips between the cracks of casual conversation, a word that men wield when a woman laughs too freely, loves too boldly, speaks too much. A word that transforms into a collar around a woman’s throat, tightening with every deviation from the script that society has written for her.
In Season 2 of Prime Video’s Made in Heaven (2023), Dhruv (Mihir Ahuja) is a teenage boy who has inherited this script without question. He does not tear women down with his hands; he does it with indifference, with the slow, steady corrosion of respect that comes from a lifetime of absorbing the world’s quiet lessons. His mother Bulbul (Mona Singh) is a woman who has lived through the brutality of domestic violence, and should have been the rupture in his thinking. And yet, he remains untouched by her suffering.
For instance, he says, “Wo bandi hi aesi hai,” (She just is that kind of a girl) to a fellow young man, who he is accused of harassing a girl with his fellow male classmates, casting the burden of decency upon her shoulders, as if it is her responsibility to earn his respect. There is no malice in his voice, only entitlement, the certainty of a man who has never had to question where he stands.
Bulbul flinches at these words—not because they are the worst she has heard, but because they are familiar, because she knows too well the echo of a man who believes he owns the air around him.
It is a word that slips between the cracks of casual conversation, a word that men wield when a woman laughs too freely, loves too boldly, speaks too much. A word that transforms into a collar around a woman’s throat, tightening with every deviation from the script that society has written for her.
Dhruv is not an exception; he is a product. He is what happens when a man grows up in a world that tells him a woman’s pain is a private inconvenience, not a public reality. Bulbul’s bruises fade into the background noise of his life, drowned out by the louder, shinier voices in the media ecosystem that reward his indifference.
But within the same household, there exists another man: a counterforce, a quiet rebellion against the script Dhruv follows so effortlessly. Jauhari (Vijay Raaz)—Dhruv’s stepfather—is a man who stands at the other end of the spectrum, one of the rare men who understands that kindness is not a grand gesture but a daily discipline. He treats his wife (Bulbul) with the respect she has long been denied. His love is not possessive, not a cage disguised as care, but a refuge. And yet, despite his presence and his example, Dhruv chooses not to learn. Instead, he looks away, as if goodness itself is an inconvenience.
Jauhari’s presence is a whisper in a storm, proof that masculinity need not be cruel to be powerful. He watches as Dhruv dismisses his mother’s pain, as he parrots the language of men who do not see women as people. But goodness, unlike hatred, is often quiet. And Dhruv is too absorbed in the louder voices of the world to notice the dignity with which Jauhari loves, the patience with which he unlearns, the deliberate ways in which he refuses to let misogyny live in his home.
The making of a young man like Dhruv does not begin in teenage. It starts the moment a boy is born into a house where men sit and women serve. Juice (2017), a short film directed by Neeraj Ghaywan, personifies women who are made only to serve as the epitome of man-woman dynamics in Indian homes. The same homes where a little girl is told she must not sit with her legs apart is where her brother is never corrected when he throws his school bag at his mother and demands water. Where an elder sister’s dreams are cut down because her father deems them unnecessary, but her younger brother’s failures are excused as the world’s fault. Boys like Dhruv do not arrive fully formed. They are sculpted, bit by bit, by the careless conversations of men at the dinner table, by the silences of mothers who have been taught that peace is more important than protest, that standing in a heated kitchen is better than sitting in front of the cooler and drinking a glass of juice.
The media does not tell men to hate women—it simply asks them not to care. It teaches them that suffering is aesthetic, that a woman’s pain is a subplot, that rape is a narrative twist and domestic violence is a character arc. It tells men that bandis are to be categorized: the respectable ones to be protected, the transgressive ones to be punished. And it tells them, above all, that they are the ones who get to decide.
“Don’t tell anyone what you saw,” Dhruv tells his younger brother, Gaurav (Krrish Rao), as the charges are pressed on him, who had been shown the video proof of the assault carried out by him and his friends causing the havoc of being charged for this crime. The crime that he committed, yet worked to blame the victim — the bandi. This blatant act of influencing his brother into silence is delinquent and borderline criminal, too; although his younger brother internally struggles with the burden of the hidden truth. Dhruv’s hatred towards biased views on his mother and women in general is a testament to false perspectives imposed upon young men—as if he understands, as if the quiet rage in his mother’s silence is something he has ever had to carry.
But it is that simple. It is as simple as listening, as simple as unlearning, as simple as realizing that a woman is not an accessory to his growth. It is as simple as recognizing that the word bandi—the word he uses with such effortless disdain—is one of the countless tools that have built the world he stands upon, the world that keeps his mother in the shadows, and his own complicity in the light.
Indian men grow up with grandmothers who tell them that the home is the most sacred space a woman can inhabit, that her greatest role is to nurture, to support, to remain steady like the earth beneath their feet. They do not realize that the same soil they stand on is also where women are burned alive, where daughters are buried before they take their first breath. They do not recognize that the same hands that serve them food have trembled in fear, have carried wounds they never speak of, have cleaned up the messes of the very men who claim to protect them.
The streets of this country are marked by the stories of women who have dared to exist outside the definitions imposed on them. The ones who are followed home at night, the ones whose bodies are found in rivers, the ones who choose ambition over marriage and are punished for it. The ones whose names do not become headlines because their deaths are not spectacular enough, their pain not cinematic enough for the nation to pause and grieve.
And then, there is the bandi, a woman, perhaps, who is like every woman in this country. The one who was punished not just for being a victim, but for the crime of having lived. One who extends beyond society's definition of a disciplined woman, shaped by patriarchy. Like, in Made in Heaven Season 2, her sin— in the eyes of the world—was having multiple relationships. This sin was hers alone, and her history remained tattooed on her skin. The boys she dated walked through the same halls she did with heads held high, their pasts left behind like discarded shoes at the doorstep of adulthood—like Dhruv, a high school student with a criminal past.
The media does not tell men to hate women—it simply asks them not to care. It teaches them that suffering is aesthetic, that a woman’s pain is a subplot, that rape is a narrative twist and domestic violence is a character arc. It tells men that bandis are to be categorized: the respectable ones to be protected, the transgressive ones to be punished
She is a woman like so many others, reduced to a ‘bandi’; and then, perhaps reduced to just a pronoun. She. She was a girl who had once kissed a boy in an empty classroom, who had laughed too freely at parties, who had believed, naively, that her choices were hers alone to carry. But a girl is never the sole owner of her own body, her own past. The world keeps receipts. The world reminds her, in stolen glances and slurred whispers, that her worth is measured not by who she is, but by who she has been seen with.
She was forced to leave because the city was too small for a bandi like her. Because the stares grew heavier, because the questions never ended. Because no one asked what the boys had done, only what she had done to invite it.
And in this, she was not so different from Bulbul, Dhruv’s mother. Different fates, different scars, but the same erasure. Bulbul had stayed silent because speaking had never been an option. The girl had left because staying had never been an option. Two women trapped in different prisons, both built by the same hands.
In middle-class homes, women hold their tongues between their teeth as their brothers joke about girls being fast or easy, as their fathers speak about real women—the ones who stay quiet, the ones who make good wives. In classrooms, teachers shake their heads at girls who talk back but never at boys who interrupt. At weddings, families say, She is lucky, he is a good man, as if the best thing a woman can hope for in life is not to be beaten too badly.
Made in Heaven refuses to let us look away. It reminds us of how men like Dhruv are nurtured by their environment, moulded by the hands of society like wet clay on a potter’s wheel. And it forces us to ask—how many times have we let them be?
Language has the power to shape the world, but it also has the power to dismantle it. The first step is simple: let women define themselves before the world does it for them.
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Kavya Maheshwari is a self-acclaimed writer and artist, and professionally-acclaimed managing editor of her University Newsletter. She enjoys verbally arguing about anything and everything and likes to find complexity in the mundane. You can find her on Instagram: @Kavyokado
