“Ek Kachori, Do Samosa… In Mardon Ka Kya Bharosa?” — from the ongoing female andolan across Delhi University.
Tempting, isn’t it? I haven’t been able to get it off my zuban—a word that this patriarchal society is too scared to handle for a woman. I had been wanting to get back to writing my blog, but the search for topics was eating my brain. It is like I uttered these words, and as I saw these ongoing slogans on my Instagram, they got stuck in my mind, making me realize that the slogans were bigger than just a social media wireframe.
Hasn’t it been a long time since the women of the world have been fighting for their rights?
Right to be seen without being stared at? Right to be heard without being abused and slurred at? Right to move out in public without being touched and felt?
But what exactly is stopping us from doing this? MEN? Or the WOMEN?
I know this question might plant an even bigger question in your brain: Is this girl crazy?
Well, NO!
When a young girl experiences her first period, she expects comfort and guidance. Instead, she is handed a rulebook. Don’t touch the pickle, don’t sit on the prayer mat, stay away from the Tulsi plant, wash your hair on a specific day. And who is the one enforcing these rules with rigid, unyielding severity? It is rarely the men of the household. It is the mother, the grandmother, the aunts—the women who whisper these taboos like ancient secrets passed down for generations.
This is the profound paradox of patriarchal socialization: women are often its most efficient enforcers.
Why does this happen? To understand it, we have to look at how patriarchal societies grant women power. Historically, a woman’s survival and status within a traditional household depended entirely on her compliance with the system. The young bride who is policed eventually becomes the matriarch who polices. Over decades, she learns to equate endurance with virtue. She tells herself, “I suffered through these restrictions, I mastered them, and I survived; therefore, you must too.” Forcing the next generation to conform isn’t always done out of malice; often, it is a distorted form of protection. In their eyes, breaking the rules invites social ostracization, bad karma, or familial shame.
By passing down the torch, older women validate their own lifelong sacrifices. Admitting that the system was oppressive would mean confronting the painful reality that their own restrictions were meaningless.
True unlearning, therefore, doesn’t happen in university lecture halls or through thick political textbooks. It happens in the quiet, heartbreaking realization at home—watching the women we love police the very bodies they share. Breaking the patriarchy doesn’t just mean fighting against men; it means breaking the cycle of internalised policing handed down by the hands that once fed us.
I know that a single blog post cannot dismantle systems that have stood for centuries. I may not see an immediate shift or spark a revolution with these words. But I am putting them out there anyway—so that in the time to come, these patterns are named, questioned, and understood. And if these words manage to reach even one person, if they help just one woman pause, reflect, and break the cycle for the next generation, then writing this was worth every word.
BE THE CHANGE TO SEE THE CHANGE