15

Bhabhis

Woh Teri Bhabhi Hai, Pagle (Madman, She’s Your Sister-

in-law)
Bhabhiji Ghar Par Hain? (Is Bhabhiji at Home?)
Hum Aapke Hain Kaun (Who am I of Yours?)
—(Titles of two Hindi TV soap operas and
a Bollywood film)

Prashant and Rakesh have been friends since their days

together in college. Prashant is now married to Sunita, while
Rakesh is unmarried. For Rakesh, Sunita is his bhabhi, or
sister-in-law, even though they are not related by blood or
law. All three characters star in a hugely popular Youtube
video that has gathered over 27 million views so far.4 Titled
‘Lunch with my Friend’s Wife’, this video charts the course
of a lazy Sunday morning. Rakesh is on his way to Prashant’s
house for lunch. He is in a good mood, humming old Hindi
romantic songs. Then he gets a call from Prashant, which
causes him some annoyance. Prashant says he has had to go
out on an urgent matter and will not be back for another
two hours. Rakesh says he will go ahead to Prashant’s house
anyway. When Prashant tells Rakesh to wait for him at a
coffee shop instead, Rakesh guffaws that he will do nothing
of the kind. ‘Silly fellow,’ he says a minute later, ‘suspects me
of flirting with his wife.’

4. This video is based on a true story: https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=rEm-w5WPH58
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Rakesh reaches Prashant’s house soon enough and is

greeted by his Sunita bhabhi, who seems to be a bit out
of sorts. Over lunch, Rakesh asks her why she is looking
upset. Sunita then embarks on a tale of marital woe in which
Prashant, though a loving and attentive husband, is no longer
sexually attracted to his wife. The couple does not have sex,
Sunita complains, unless she complies with Prashant’s ‘weird’
desires. When Rakesh asks her what those desires are, she
refuses to answer, and runs off sobbing into the bedroom,
where she flings herself on her bed. After a couple of
perplexed moments, Rakesh follows Sunita into the bedroom,
starts to wipe away her tears, and then the inevitable happens.
The only word that can be heard as they get hot and heavy
is ‘Bhabhi, oh Bhabhi’ repeated many times over. The next
scene focuses on the post-coital moment—Sunita is patting
her hair back in place, Rakesh wakes up and starts smoking
a cigarette. The atmosphere between them seems strained.
Then Sunita looks at Rakesh in the mirror and says, ‘For
how long will all this continue, Prashant?’
The entire film then plays out in flashback: ‘Rakesh’
gets Sunita to call him in the guise of Prashant to say he
will not be at home. This puts Rakesh and his ‘bhabhi’ in
a potentially compromising situation, flagged by Rakesh’s
laughing comment about flirting with Prashant’s wife. Sunita
bhabhi then talks about Prashant’s weird desires, followed by
Rakesh trying to comfort his bhabhi by having sex with her.
The film pivots on and leads up to the fact that Prashant can
only have sex with his wife if he is ‘Rakesh’ and sees her as
his bhabhi. This is the ‘weird’ desire to which Sunita refers
early on in the film. The desire that desexualizes wives, and
hyper-sexualizes sisters-in-law.
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Prashant desires Sunita sexually only when he can see her

as his sister-in-law rather than as his wife. In much of the
post-Freudian West, the cult of the desirable older woman
has been cast in the mould of the mother figure (displayed
powerfully in a film like The Graduate). But in India, illicit
male desire tends to be focussed on an older female figure
who is not the mother while still being a relative in the family.
This older female relative is the ‘bhabhijaan’ of Vishal
Bhardwaj’s 2014 film Haider. Based on William Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, Haider is the third in Bhardwaj’s Shakespeare
trilogy, after Maqbool (Macbeth) and Omkara (Othello). In
Shakespeare’s play, the protagonist is gutted because his father
has been murdered by his uncle, Claudius, who has also
married Hamlet’s mother Gertrude. In the Shakespearean
family tree, Gertrude is, of course, Claudius’s bhabhi.
Sigmund Freud famously used Hamlet as an example of the
Oedipus complex—where the son is jealous of the father and
sexually possessive about the mother. For Freud, ‘Hamlet is
able to do anything—except take vengeance on the man who
did away with his father and took that father’s place with his
mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his
own childhood realized. Thus the loathing, which should
drive him on to revenge, is replaced in him by self-reproaches,
by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself
is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.’
Freud discusses Hamlet in relation to his theory of the
Oedipus complex, and most commentators have understood
this to mean that Hamlet is the son who wants to sleep with
Gertrude, the mother. But what if Hamlet is reacting badly
not because of the thwarted desire of a son for his mother,
but because of the fulfilled desire of a brother-in-law for his
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sister-in-law? Is he furious with Claudius because Claudius is

the brother-in-law who now has sexual access to his bhabhi?
Does Hamlet’s dilemma in the play owe to the fact that the
brother-in-law’s sexual interest in the bhabhi is socially
accepted as being next only to the husband’s while the son’s
desire is not accepted at all? After all, marrying a husband’s
younger brother was quite a widely accepted practice even
in England. Henry VIII, father of the Queen of England in
Shakespeare’s time, married Katherine of Aragon, his older
brother Arthur’s widow.
Hamlet’s Hindustani rendition in Haider thus points to a
more widespread and acceptable version of male desire—that
of a man’s for his older brother’s wife.
The character of Gertrude is central to Shakespeare’s play,
but Vishal Bhardwaj makes her even more central to his film.
Haider’s Gertrude and Claudius are Ghazala and Khurram. In
response to Ghazala’s question about why he is not married,
Khurram says he will only marry someone as wonderful as
his bhabhijaan. And so it comes to pass. Khurram arranges
for his brother’s death, and marries Ghazala, who is shown
to reciprocate his desire for her. In fact, Ghazala’s desire is so
obvious in the film that it becomes hard to ignore. Married
to a man who puts duty above love, Ghazala is no longer
sexually attractive to her husband. And she has always been
sexually desirable for her devar, or younger brother-in-law.
Ghazala seeks and accepts emotional and sexual sustenance
from Khurram rather than from her son, Haider. Nor does
this seem unusual. Even as they are publicly mourning his
dead brother, Khurram asks the gathered community for
permission to marry his bhabhijaan in order to look after
her welfare. The members of the community are unfazed. Of
 bhabhis 237

course the younger brother ‘looks after’ the older brother’s

wife—this has long been a tradition in India.
After all, the etymology of devar is doosra var—or second
husband. In the conservative book of laws, the Manusmriti,
this tradition of marrying a dead brother’s wife is known
as niyoga, or delegation. It describes a practice common in
Vedic times in which the brother-in-law is allowed to have
sexual relations with, and even marry, his bhabhi for the sake
of her welfare and in order to produce offspring. As Sudhir
Kakar describes it in Intimate Relations, ‘the psychological
core of niyoga [is] the mutual awareness of a married woman
and her younger brother-in-law as potential or actual sex
partners’. In fact, so common does niyoga seem to have been
that Chapter IX of the Manusmriti lays out in great detail
the protocols by which it should be governed:
1. It can only happen when the husband is impotent or
infertile or has died without producing an offspring
2. It can take place only with the consent of the woman,
and only for the purpose of having a child, not for
pleasure
3. The man picked for the task should ideally be an
immediate family member. The Manusmriti names
only the husband’s brother as a familial candidate;
other contenders are gods or venerable sages
4. One man can perform niyoga only three times in his
lifetime (lest he get addicted to having sex with his
brother’s wife)
5. The child born of this union would be considered
to belong to the woman and her deceased/infertile
husband rather than to the sexual partner, who is not
allowed to make any paternal claim
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6. Both sexual partners need to cover their bodies in

ghee so that they cannot linger on the contours of
the body for pleasure and will focus only on the acts
required for reproduction.

Niyoga delegates have had a long and hoary history in Hindu

tradition. Without them, for instance, the Mahabharata
would not have had a story worth telling. Both patriarchs of
the warring factions, Dhritarashtra (father of the Kauravas)
and Pandu (sire of the Pandavas), were born only because
Queen Satyavati forces her son, the sage Vyasa, to have
sex with his dead brother Vichitravirya’s widows, Ambika
and Ambalika. (Vyasa also fathers a son with Ambika and
Ambalika’s maid, who is the first woman to be sent in to
Vyasa because the two sisters were terrified by his fierce
appearance.) King Pandu, one of the products of this niyoga,
in turn has his wives impregnated by several gods because
he is cursed to die if he ever approaches a woman with
amorous intent. And thus are born the Pandavas. When the
Mahabharata enters the epic stage, then, all its main actors
are in place thanks to the fact that women have had sex with
men who are not their husbands, and in the case of Vyasa,
the sisters-in-law have had sex with their brother-in-law.
While Vyasa is the older brother of Vichitravirya, and
dominates his sisters-in-law, such a structure of patriarchal
sexual privilege is the exception in cases of bhabhi desire.
Definitionally, bhabhis are older and more sexually
experienced than the brothers-in-law; in the bhabhi-devar
configuration of desire, the man is the dependent one.
Sometimes, though, the desire between the bhabhi and the
devar can highlight how both are lower in a pecking order
 bhabhis 239

that is dominated by the older man—the bhabhi’s husband,

and the devar’s brother. The two get up to mischief because
they are both consigned to a place of frivolity. This is certainly
the treatment that Rabindranath Tagore gives to the bhabhi
(or boudhan in Bengali)-devar romance in his short novella
Nashtanir, which was later turned into an acclaimed film
and named Charulata after its female protagonist. In the
novella, Charu and her loving-yet-distant husband Bhupati’s
younger cousin, Amal, build a bond over a shared love of
literature. The intensity of their emotional interactions,
the quality of their literary encounters, their moments and
months of privacy, rise to a crescendo that is breathtaking in
its intimation of a love that dare not speak its name. Charu
does not realize what Amal means to her until he leaves her
to get married to someone else. But when she does realize
the extent of her loss, that fact is not lost on her husband,
who then leaves her to take up a job in Mysore. Scholars
and biographers have speculated that Nashtanir is based on
Tagore’s real-life interactions with his boudhan, Kadambari
Devi, wife of his older brother Jyotirindranath Tagore. Like
Amal in the novel, Rabindranath too starts developing his
love of literature alongside his sister-in-law; like Amal, he
too leaves his love to get married and then go to England to
study. But while the novella only hints at the disaster lying in
store for Charulata, in real life, Kadambari Devi committed
suicide within months of Rabindranath’s marriage.
For many young men in India, bhabhis fill the socio-
sexual gap with which they have grown up. Reporting from
the ground in Banaras, Steve Derné notes that ‘Indian men
have little opportunity to interact with women outside
their immediate families. In Banaras, men do not usually
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attend schools or universities with women, and even in

places where coeducation is common, a man usually has
little experience interacting with women since parents try
to limit daughters’ contacts with young men. For younger
sons, the often sexually charged relationship with their
bhabhis—women who are defined as sexual creatures—is an
important experience that may lead them to desire similarly
close relationships with their own wives.’ For the bhabhi,
like for Kadambari Devi and Charulata, the presence of the
devar fills a gap of emotional loneliness and physical longing.
This comfortable co-existence can be shattered for the
bhabhi by the impending marriage of the devar since that
takes him away both sexually and emotionally. This was the
subject of a bold soap opera on Indian television that ran
from December 2015 to April 2016. Aadhe Adhoore had as
its protagonist Jassi, whose husband is working in the Middle
East, and who lives with her mother-in-law and devar. In
the very first episode we are told that Jassi and her brother-
in-law are in an emotional and sexual relationship with one
another. Jassi even gets pregnant during this affair and has an
abortion. In order to provide a veneer for her relationship, she
arranges a marriage for her devar, but predictably, everything
goes wrong after that. In the case of Aadhe Adhoore, what
also went wrong was a moralistic viewership, which wrote
in frequently to demand that the ‘characterless’ Jassi be
punished in the show. And so she was—made to fall to her
death. Her devar’s wife stands triumphant and pregnant over
her corpse. Like Charu and Kadambari, Jassi too succumbs
to the intolerable pressure exerted by the departure of the
devar from her love life.
Even Sita in the Ramayana seems to be aware of this
 bhabhis 241

dynamic of desire in India. Devdutt Pattanaik points to an

episode in the Valmiki Ramayana (dated between 200 BCE
and CE) that makes such sexual tension clear: ‘This episode
is fairly well known yet few people like to talk about it. It
happens in the forest in the final year of Rama’s 14-year exile.
Sita is so smitten by a golden deer that she begs her husband,
Rama, to get it for her. After a long chase, Rama manages to
shoot it down only to discover that it is no deer but a shape
shifting demon who before dying mimics Rama’s voice and
shouts, “Help, Sita! Help, Laxman!” Hearing this cry, Sita
begs Laxman to go to Rama’s rescue. Laxman refuses since
his brother had ordered him to protect Sita and not leave
her side under any circumstances. Annoyed by his reticence,
Sita says, “You wish his death in order to secure me. It is
clear to me that just for me you have refrained from going
to your brother…” These are the exact words of Makhan
Lal Sen who translated the Ramayana of Valmiki in 1927…
Laxman responds to the accusation with horror and to prove
Sita wrong goes in search of Rama, leaving Sita unguarded.
Shortly thereafter Sita is abducted by Ravana, the demon-
king of Lanka.’ And thereby hangs a tale.
Elsewhere, in literature and life, the physical absence of
the husband creates the necessary conditions for bhabhi-
devar romance. An anthropological study in Kerala, which
is the cradle of Indian migration to the Gulf, bears this
out. ‘When men reach their late 20s or early 30s without
being married (recently, relatively common because of Gulf
migration), they are said to be “desperate” for a woman,
and dangerously over-heated. These unmarried men can
constitute a direct danger to the community, as they might
start illicit sexual relations with married women (brother’s
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wives in most common cases),’ note Filippo and Caroline

Osella in ‘Migration, Money and Masculinity in Kerala’. They
even give as an example a case that was recorded in North
Kerala: ‘While elder brothers Joyson and Joey worked away
in the Gulf, their wives stayed back in Valiyagramam with
their children, their husbands’ parents, and the youngest
(unmarried) brother, Jojan, then in his late teens. When
Joyson came home on leave, his wife appeared around the
village with a black eye, while Jojan was extremely subdued:
it was rumoured that Joyson had found evidence of an affair
between his wife and Jojan and had beaten the pair of them.
One year later, Joey came home unexpectedly, having received
a letter from his mother informing him that Jojan had this
time been found with his second sister-in-law. A public scene
ensued, in which Joey openly beat his wife in the compound
outside his house; she was later rushed to hospital, having
drunk poison in a suicide attempt. When Joey returned to
the Gulf, he took his wife and children with him.’
But most tales of bhabhi-devar romance are not tragic. In
fact, extending the historical legacy of niyoga, bhabhis are
very much in the realm of sexual fantasy in India. According
to PornHub, one of the world’s most popular adult websites,
India pushed Canada aside to become the world’s third largest
online consumer of porn in 2015. Indians visited the site 21.2
billion times; of that number, 30% identified themselves as
women. In ‘The Top 10 Searches of 2015 in India’, PornHub
lists ‘Indian’ as the top keyword search and ‘Indian Bhabhi’ as
the second most frequently searched keyword. Fascinatingly,
there was a 222% increase in the search for the phrase ‘Indian
bhabhi devar’. The Indian obsession with bhabhis is now
measurable on international websites, and in comparison
with the rest of the world.
 bhabhis 243

http://www.newindianexpress.com/lifestyle/books/2009/jun
/06/savita-bhabhi-is-the-new-face-of-freedom-55291.html

Savita bhabhi, of course, epitomizes this obsession.

India’s first and perhaps most famous porn icon, Savita
bhabhi started life in 2008 (and was banned by the Indian
government in 2009) as the star of a pornographic online
cartoon series about a ‘bored Indian housewife’. She fulfils
the two considerations for bhabhi desire in India—her
husband is not sexually interested in her, and she is sexually
fascinating to younger men who call her bhabhi. Even more
interestingly, and perhaps reflecting the increased percentage
of female Indian visitors to porn websites, Savita bhabhi
slakes her desire with devars of various stripes, from salesmen
to enemies of the state. With her voluptuous figure, Savita
bhabhi looks like a Barbie-Bhabhi. She is a fantasy of Indian
male desire for bhabhis but she is also an expression of the
sexually curious and bold Indian bhabhi herself who wants
to be desired. Savita bhabhi could be the aspirational ideal
for the Indian woman who visits PornHub in the dead of
night. Or perhaps even in the broad light of day.
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This modern-day bhabhi comes in multiple guises, and

in Deepa Mehta’s 1998 film, Fire, she finds herself in an
interesting situation. Fire was not only passed by the Censor
Board of India, but also commended by them as an important
film for Indian women. Nonetheless, the censors asked for
one fairly significant cut to be made before the film was
released. This involved changing the name of one of the
protagonists from Sita to Nita so as to avoid hurting religious
sentiments. The change was in effect only in Maharashtra;
all other places in India saw and heard Sita on screen.
The other protagonist—and Sita’s love interest in the
film—is named Radha, who too has an illustrious presence
in Hindu mythology. But perhaps her name bothered the
Censor Board less since Radha is already known as the
extra-marital lover of a younger man who happens also to
be the god Krishna. Thus, the name of Sita, the model of
dutiful and self-sacrificing Indian womanhood, needed to
be protected more than that of Radha.
In the film, both Radha and Sita/Nita occupy the position
that bhabhis often do both in fantasies like Savita Bhabhi
and also in real life: they are stuck in loveless marriages.
One’s husband prefers chastity to his wife while the other
husband prefers a Chinese girlfriend. The women are drawn
together because they lack both emotional and sexual
sustenance in their marriages. This is the second staple of
a classic bhabhi-devar romance, except that in this film the
romance is between two sisters-in-law. Predictably, all hell
breaks loose when their relationship is discovered. The film
ends in a utopian manner, with Radha and Sita escaping the
bounds of a patriarchal household to a dargah in which they
seek refuge. But what is even more startling than the lesbian
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desire openly depicted in the film is the fact that such desire
remains within the bhabhi romance genre. Sita’s husband,
Jatin, calls Radha bhabhi because he is her husband’s younger
brother, and the usual suspect for an illicit romance with
her. But this time, it is the brother-in-law’s wife who runs
away with the bhabhi.

Bhabi-love from Fire. Source: Hamilton-Mehta Productions

Fire was ground-breaking in several ways, but one of the

most significant was that it provided a variation on the theme
of the bhabhi-devar romance. By making the brother-in-law
a sister-in-law instead, the film points to the pervasiveness
of certain lines of attraction in the Indian family. Radha
and Jatin get set aside in favour of Radha and Sita, but they
continue to occupy the positions of desire that have been
familiar to Indians from even before the writing of the
Manusmriti.