Jul 19, 2026 12:13 pm IST

Opinion | Maa Behen, Obsession, And The Gaze That Eats Itself

Every society has a woman it has already judged. Every man has a story about her. Cinema has long inherited both.

Ishita Sengupta Ishita Sengupta Columnist

Ishita Sengupta Columnist

In a certain colony, a woman lives alone. Stories about her, however, are everywhere. She lures men, scans them like QR codes, and some even lie buried in her garden. Widowed early, she has a daughter with her late husband. But in a tryst shrouded in mystery, she birthed another with a man no one knows about. Her tainted character is further infected by the recurring visuals of her waist peeking out from the cotton saris and the sleeveless blouses she continues to wear, and by the place she chooses to work at: an alcohol shop. Therefore, when the self-appointed moral guardian of the neighbourhood is found dead in her house, the implication is clear as day. Rekha, the eternal seductress, has committed the murder.A premise such as this can largely go two ways. It can either confirm the rumours and craft a narrative of a woman doubling down on her reputation, or it could dispel hearsay and culminate as a tale of a woman killing a moral custodian to vindicate her disrepute. Suresh Triveni's latest film, Maa Behen, playfully smart, does neither. Instead, the outing finds a near-impossible middle ground where the social prejudice is replicated only to be critiqued.

The filmmaking, too, responds through heightened tonality and camp. A male journalist, trained in sensationalisation, is the narrator. He briefs the viewer about the notoriety of Rekha (Madhuri Dixit) as flashbacks of her massaging her husband on the terrace as a newly-wed and men........

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