PUBLISHED
June 15, 2025
In the days following the recent Indo-Pak conflict, a freshly written short story — a tale of a theatre actress who grieves, resists, and ultimately reclaims her identity on her own terms — by veteran Hindi writer Mamata Kalia appeared on a social media outlet.
“A Pinch of Sindoor” (Chutki Bhar Sindoor, titled after the red pigment that married Hindu women apply as a dot on the forehead or in the parting of the hair) is the story of Rita, a celebrated stage actress at the peak of her theatrical career, who marries Alam Khan, a devoted admirer and dry fruit merchant, defying warnings from her peers. Their marriage, however, becomes strained when Alam grows insecure and disapproving of Rita’s progressive roles on stage. Unable to reconcile with her public life and independence, he commits suicide, using her wedding dupatta. The media frenzy and his family’s backlash force Rita into isolation and grief. Yet, the world of theatre, unwilling to lose its star, draws her back.
With time, she returns to the stage, emotionally scarred but professionally resilient. Her comeback role portrays a widow finding hope again, mirroring her own journey from personal trauma to public performance. The story ends with Rita reclaiming her identity and agency, symbolised by her act of applying glitter and lipstick like sindoor, marking both continuity and rebirth. Through Rita’s journey, the story delicately explores themes of artistic autonomy, gender expectations, public versus private identity, and the quiet strength required to survive love, loss, and societal judgment.
Set far from the battlefield, the story appears to bear no direct reference to geopolitics or military conflict, yet its timing and symbolic gestures — particularly the protagonist’s final act of adorning herself with sindoor as an assertion of self rather than subservience — invite a deeper reading.
Around the same time, the Indian state named a retaliatory military operation “Operation Sindoor”, invoking a traditionally feminine, conjugal symbol to frame a nationalistic act of aggression. What does it mean when a symbol of love and marriage is militarised by the state, while in fiction it becomes a gesture of survival and autonomy?
The gendered language of war, as this article explores, is never innocent.
The naming of India’s recent cross-border retaliation as “Operation Sindoor” is not just a tactical code — it is a deeply symbolic gesture, with Sindoor being the traditional symbol of marital status for women. The phrase evokes themes of marriage, conjugal unity, identity, tradition, femininity and feminine sacrifice.
By using this intimate, culturally potent symbol to name a military operation, the state effectively feminizes the nation and sacralises militarism — embedding within the language of war a narrative of chastity, purity, protection, and violation.
This is not a neutral move. It reflects a long-standing gendered metaphor in Indian nationalist discourse, where the motherland (Bharat mata) is cast as a chaste, violated body needing protection. In this symbolic schema: The nation becomes the wife or mother whose honour must be avenged; The soldier becomes the husband or son whose duty is to protect or restore that honour; blood becomes sindoor — a conflation of sacrifice and sanctity.
By naming an aggressive, retaliatory operation sindoor, the Indian state has not just asserted power — it has rehearsed a patriarchal fantasy, where masculine violence was justified as emotional duty, and feminine symbolism was conscripted into nationalist performance. The intimacy of conjugal imagery was made to do the work of public retribution. The battlefield was framed not in geopolitical terms, but in the language of marriage, purity, and desecration.
This move not only erases women’s autonomy (by making their cultural symbols into war metaphors), it also romanticises militarism—casting soldiers not just as fighters, but as husbands defending a wife’s honour. In this sense, the war becomes a conjugal drama, and women’s bodies and symbols become narrative property.
What makes this even more stark is the juxtaposition with Mamata Kalia’s story, where sindoor is reimagined not as devotion to a man, but a woman’s self-assertion. Kalia’s protagonist claims sindoor as makeup, as performance, as revival. But the operation claims sindoor as blood, as vengeance, as sanctified violence.
In both cases, the same symbol does opposite work: One reclaims feminine power. The other reabsorbs it into nationalist masculinity.
This symbolic repurposing of a deeply personal feminine marker for a military narrative suggests how states appropriate gendered language not just to galvanise support, but to mask the brutality of war in the softness of emotion.
During the same period of conflict, Pakistan’s airwaves were filled with the familiar strains of “Ae Puttar Hattan Te Naiin Wikde”[These sons are not sold in markets], Noor Jehan’s iconic 1965 war elegy that mourns sons as irreplaceable offerings to the nation. Though written decades earlier, the song has endured as a nationalist-lament, resurfacing with potent emotional force on official broadcasts and social media alike.
This poem mourns and honours the deep value of a child, especially a son seen as a symbol of legacy, sacrifice, or martyrdom. It can be read as a commentary on the price of true devotion, patriotism, or divine blessings, emphasising that some things — like life, faith, or sacrifice — cannot be bought or demanded. However, is important here to highlight the word “کڑے” [kurṛe] in this context. It’s a vocative expression in Punjabi, often used to address a young girl or daughter with tenderness, sometimes admonition, sometimes deep love — like saying “O girl” or “my daughter.” Given this, the speaker of the poem is likely an elder — possibly a mother, father, or divine voice — addressing a young woman, cautioning or advising her against seeking something sacred (like a virtuous son, a blessing, or divine grace) in the wrong places. The refrain “O girl” adds emotional resonance, placing the speaker in a guiding, parental, or divine role. The poem is advisory and it implies: 1. True blessings (like a son or sacrifice) are not transactional. 2. One must earn them with devotion, not seek them like consumer goods.
But when examined through a gender-critical lens, the poem becomes more than an elegy for sons; it becomes a site of patriarchal reinforcement, laden with troubling hierarchies of gendered value.
At its core, the poem exalts sons as irreplaceable, invaluable, divine gifts — “not sold in markets” and “not available even for cash or credit.” This elevates the male child (especially as a shaheed, martyr, or protector) to a near-sacred status. But the girl — “کڑے” [kurṛe] — is invoked only to be corrected, consoled, or subtly chastised. She is seeking something she cannot understand. She is misguided in her expectations. She is cast as emotionally irrational. The repeated vocative: O girl / O daughter (“کڑے”) is tender on the surface, but structurally, it reinforces a didactic power dynamic: man as the knower, woman as the naïve seeker. The girl is not the subject of value — she is merely the one being schooled in it.
The poem speaks to grief and sacrifice. But it does so through a gendered lens that prioritises sons as invaluable and daughters as passive, peripheral learners. The female presence is not only optional — it is subordinated, enlisted to validate the sacredness of male loss. This doesn’t mean the poem is hateful — but it is steeped in a cultural worldview that marginalises women, even when they are allowed into the frame.
This triad of texts — one fictional, one martial, one lyrical — reveals a striking convergence: womanhood is repeatedly instrumentalised to dignify male action, while male sacrifice is elevated to mythic status. Whether on the theatrical stage, the battlefield, or in the lament of a mother, the female body becomes the symbolic surface upon which nation, grief, and masculinity are inscribed.
In the Hindi story, the protagonist Reeta navigates personal grief after the suicide of her possessive husband, Alam. Initially forced into retreat, she later stages her return to the theatre with the help of a symbolic act: she applies a pinch of sindoor — not as a widow mourning her husband, but as an artist reclaiming her identity. In this moment, sindoor shifts from being a traditional marital marker to an aesthetic act of selfhood. Yet, even here, the woman must negotiate her visibility through signs of conjugal legacy. Her artistic resurrection is only rendered legitimate by re-inscribing the marital symbol, even if in subversion.
In contrast, the Indian state’s use of the term Operation Sindoor for military action invokes the same symbol — sindoor — to romanticise national violence through the language of devotion, purity, and sacrifice. Here, the wife/goddess/motherland becomes the imagined object for whom sons must die. The feminine is not an agent but a metaphorical anchor, a justification for bloodshed disguised as sacred duty. In this rhetorical universe, sindoor is not choice — it is expectation, an inherited script of nationalist femininity that demands silence and suffering.
The Punjabi poem Ae Puttar Hattan Te Naiin Wikde takes this further by mourning the death of sons as unparalleled, sacred losses — gifts from God that cannot be bought or bargained for. The repeated vocative “kurṛay” [O girl, O daughter] subtly places the female listener in a subordinate role: she is emotionally overwhelmed, unknowing, and in need of correction. The son is glorified; the daughter is a narrative prop. The poem never questions why only the male sacrifice is mythologised, nor why the female grief must always be directed, shaped, or consoled rather than centred. Her presence exists only to exalt his absence.
Across these three texts, gender is not simply represented — it is managed. Women’s bodies, emotions, gestures, and even silences are made to serve larger scripts of male valour and national destiny. The woman may be the mourner [kurṛay], the muse (Reeta), or the metaphor (Bharat Mata), but she is never the myth. Her grief is real, but it is not mythologised. Her resurrection is aesthetic, not strategic. Her speech is personal, not sovereign.
This shared logic reveals a disturbing continuity: female subjectivity is continually subordinated to male narrative arcs. In the battlefield of symbols — be it sindoor, sacrifice, or speech — it is men who die and become legends, while women who survive are made into symbols: of tradition, of modesty, of duty. Her voice must either mourn or beautify; it is never allowed to command.
The real tragedy, then, lies not only in geopolitical conflict or personal loss, but in the quiet perpetuation of patriarchal scripts that continue to define whose voice is heroic, whose grief is sacred, and whose silence is assumed. These texts do not just echo cultural realities — they re-inscribe them, shaping how society continues to feel about gender, nationhood, and memory.
Dr Aftab Husain is a Pakistan-born and Austria-based poet in Urdu and English. He teaches South Asian Literature & Culture at Vienna University
All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer
