Hello,
If you are a frequent user of Instagram, there is a good chance that over the past year or so, you have encountered videos by Indian content creators with titles such as “A day in the life of a 21-year-old married woman”.
And if you glanced at the views counter, you might have found that the videos had been watched tens or hundreds of thousands of times, or in some cases more than a million times.
These videos are in some ways a parallel phenomenon to the trend of “tradwife” videos in the West, by women who glorify marital domesticity, focusing on cooking, homemaking and being good wives. But as experts told Divya Aslesha and Nolina Minj, in the West, this trend represents an embrace of traditional lifestyles, and a rejection of pressures to work and earn a living. In India, however, these content creators are in essence promoting conservative values and lifestyles that are already the norm.
“Two of the creators we spoke to used to post content before they were married, but it was only after they started sharing wedding and marriage related content that their followers shot up drastically,” Minj said. “It indicates that the audience and the algorithm likes such content despite their polarised feelings toward the actual content.” She added, “Some of the creators said that hateful comments actually help their engagement. Despite the hate, the creators have learnt to prioritise traction above everything else.”
Aslesha noted that while these women were often criticised, “they are also showing us, however inadvertently, the immense contradictions of modern womanhood”. She added, “Social media content is often dismissed as something insignificant, superficial or unworthy of any deeper questions, but this trend says something important about ideas of gender, domesticity, and even how feminist politics and ideas are perceived in Indian society.”
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Ajay Krishnan
Senior Editor

Follow the Scroll channel on WhatsApp for a curated selection of the news that matters throughout the day, and a round-up of major developments in India and around the world every evening. What you won’t get: Spam.

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