For decades, Indian cinema has had a rape script with three roles. A lecherous villain, a woman violated, and a hero who arrived just in time to avenge her. That template is cracking with a new crop of films and shows where the perpetrator grows up listening to poetry about women’s empowerment, speaks English, and belongs to your family.

‘Chiraiya’, a new web series that has ruffled feathers in India’s ever-growing manosphere, puts a face to that. In a reputed joint family in Lucknow, a sari-clad Kamlesh — the elder bahu — asks a question that old cinema never had to answer. “As women, we’ve been taught to never cross the rekha like Sita, and we’d be safe. But what if we aren’t safe inside the rekha itself?”

Her question follows an event that rarely makes it to popular culture: her sister-in-law being subjected to marital rape, an act not yet criminalized in India.

The show’s afterlife online has seen one of the rape scenes turned into a meme in incel circles online, where it is used to argue that ‘modern women’ are okay with increasing their ‘body count’ before marriage but quick to label sex within marriage as rape.

Beyond these rage-bait debates, however, the show is emblematic of how a string of recent shows and films are tackling rape, moving beyond helpless victims, macho male saviours, and neat definitions of justice. They are taking on ‘hushed’ issues like marital rape, and also examining systemic failures, legal hurdles, and the everyday-ness of perpetrators — a far cry from voyeuristic tropes, torn blouses, and villains laughing as women beg ‘bhagwan ke liye mujhe chod do’.

‘Chiraiya’ director Shashant Shah says moving beyond villains was a “conscientious” decision, as is placing the story of rape in a liberal, middle-class family. Arun, who commits marital rape on multiple occasions, is shown as an English-speaking younger son of a progressive father, who writes evocative poetry about women’s empowerment — but fails to stand up for his bahu.

“We wanted to show education has nothing to do with how women are getting treated, and it’s not something that happens in lower-strata societies,” he adds.

Assamese short film ‘Xoudaamini’ takes a similar approach. It begins where most films tend to end — with an intercaste couple eloping and marrying. But instead of a happy ending, the marriage unravels when the husband, in a drunken state, forces himself on his wife.

Priyanka Sohoria, the film’s director, says the story was born out of personal experiences of women in her family. In ‘Xoudaamini’, the woman leaves home after the incident, along with her son.

“After watching it, many women reached out to me and said they had gone through something similar, but couldn’t leave,” Sohoria adds. “That’s why such stories are important — to show other possibilities.” Released on YouTube for free, the short film has amassed nearly three lakh views.

The National Award-winning Malayalam film ‘Aattam’, too, avoids depicting the act itself, and instead focuses on what follows within a ‘liberal’ theatre group. The accused, a colleague, is defended by peers, while the survivor faces questions in a space she once considered safe.

This move away from stereotyped villains towards familiar, everyday perpetrators has implications beyond cinema, says Nikunj Kulshreshtha, assistant professor at Jindal Global Law School.

In a study of 4,485 Hindi films between 1980 and 2022, he analyzed markers commonly associated with rape victims, such as whether the victim was educated, her relation with the perpetrator, whether she struggled physically, and her dressing.

“I found that these films were not only pushing the image of an ideal rape victim, but also the ideal offender,” says Nikunj, pointing to the long-standing depiction of rapists as visibly deviant men with criminal pasts or addictions.

“Such depictions impact how the judiciary views offenders, and often damage the credibility of victim narratives, as a lot of people have difficulties in believing that a boy from a good family could be a potential sexual offender,” he adds.

Along with the changing depiction of victims, the hero too is being reimagined. In older films such as ‘Shahenshah’, ‘Damini’, and ‘Insaf Ka Tarazu’, rape often functioned as a plot device to trigger a male protagonist-led revenge arc. While such narratives persist in some recent blockbusters like ‘Dhurandhar 2’ and ‘Maharaja’, a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from it.

In Anubhav Sinha’s ‘Assi’, a courtroom drama centred around a gang rape where Taapsee Pannu plays a fierce lawyer, there are no dramatic victory speeches or cathartic endings. Instead, there’s a call for reflection, with the movie title alluding to the NCRB data of over 80 rapes happening every day in the country.

“I was not interested in creating a hero, or making this incident the podium the hero stands on. I also didn’t want to blame a single perpetrator, or even the police or the judiciary in isolation,” Sinha says. “Maybe the onus rests on us. There’s a lot left to be desired in the way we raise our boys. On the other hand, from a young age, we ask girls to keep quiet and ignore small acts of harassment.”

‘Chiraiya’ too resists a cliched saviour saga to focus on imperfect allies and female solidarity. At its centre is Kamlesh, who initially struggles to recognise marital rape but gradually educates herself and stands by her sister-in-law, acknowledging that women often pass on and perpetuate patriarchal norms, too.

“I wanted to focus on this aspect of sisterhood because even today, a lot of women feel that they don’t have anybody to go to when something like this happens to them,” Shah says.

More recent narratives are also widening the lens. Oscar-nominated crime drama ‘Santosh’ examines caste bias and corruption in the investigation of a Dalit woman’s rape and murder, while the sequel to the successful ‘Dhurandhar’ briefly touches on sexual violence against men — as a way of exerting masculinity and power — often ignored in mainstream depictions.

“It’s more about looking inward. I’m fighting with my own misogyny every day,” says Sinha, recalling how he grew up in a household where he would get his plate of food before his sister.

Unlearning such “small” acts, he argues, is crucial in battling ‘rape culture’. “We have to understand that it’s not a group of men gleefully fantasizing about rape. It’s the normalization of sexual objectification. Rape is probably the by-product of that…both on and off the screen.”