From homes and heartbreaks to cinema, solitude, queer identity and evolving desire, The Daily Eye’s 2025 gender discourse traced how Indians negotiated power, love, labour and selfhood amid rapid social, emotional and cultural transformation.

In 2025, The Daily Eye published a wide-ranging body of gender-focused writing examining masculinity, femininity, queer identity, marriage, fidelity, ageing, solitude, cinema, mental health, patriarchy and changing family structures in India. Featuring essays and reportage by Monojit Lahiri, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Aparajita Krishna and Vinta Nanda, the year-long discourse captured India’s shifting emotional, cultural and political landscape through lived experience, popular culture and critical analysis.
The Private Sphere as Political Ground

Across 2025, The Daily Eye returned repeatedly to one foundational truth: gender is shaped most powerfully inside the private sphere—homes, marriages, relationships, and emotional labour—long before it enters public debate. Monojit Lahiri’s incisive essays on masculinity (Hands-On Mr Mom!! and Why Indian Men Avoid House Work??) laid bare the contradiction of modern India: while women surge ahead professionally, domestic equality remains stalled by conditioning, ego and inherited patriarchy.

Lahiri’s writing exposed how masculinity is still measured through avoidance—of kitchens, care work, emotional vulnerability—even as society celebrates the idea of the “new man.” His exploration of fatherhood, paternity leave, and male postpartum depression revealed not just changing roles, but the resistance they provoke. Equality, the pieces argued, cannot remain aspirational if it collapses inside the household.

This interrogation extended seamlessly into cinema. In Exit Matasree… Enter Mom–Ki Hoya??, Lahiri traced the fading of the sacrificial Bollywood mother, linking her disappearance to post-liberalisation consumerism and cultural impatience with care, restraint and emotional depth. In contrast, Dawn at Dusk celebrated Bengali cinema’s quiet rebellion—older women reclaiming narrative centrality, challenging ageism alongside sexism. Gender here was inseparable from time, memory and visibility.
I

Desire, Identity and the Refusal of Simple Answers
If one axis of 2025’s gender discourse focused on labour and care, another confronted desire—sexual, emotional, and existential. Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri’s sweeping essay, The Legacy of Queer Films in India, mapped Indian cinema’s long struggle with queer representation, from caricature and coded subtext to intersectional, politically charged storytelling. By placing films like Fire, Aligarh, Nagarkirtan and Geeli Pucchi within a cultural continuum, the piece argued that queer narratives are not marginal but central to understanding India’s moral anxieties and democratic contradictions.

This questioning of normative frameworks deepened with Vinta Nanda’s When Fidelity Meets Modern Desire, triggered by Twinkle Khanna’s provocative remarks on infidelity. Drawing on national data, Nanda examined how marriage itself is being renegotiated—as emotional contract rather than moral fortress. The piece did not glorify infidelity; instead, it confronted discomfort, asking why honesty about desire feels more threatening than silent dissatisfaction.

Similarly, A Bold Love Story Emerges, Nanda’s report on Lala & Poppy, brought gender fluidity and transgender love into mainstream cinematic conversation—without tragedy or tokenism. Together, these pieces reflected a society no longer satisfied with inherited scripts of love, loyalty and identity, even as it struggles to articulate new ones.

Solitude, Power and the Patriarchal Backlash
The final and perhaps most emotionally resonant strand of The Daily Eye’s 2025 gender discourse addressed autonomy—particularly when individuals, and especially women, step outside sanctioned roles of marriage, family and dependency.
In Living Alone, Finding Inner Strength, Aparajita Krishna offered a deeply personal yet collectively grounded reflection on single living and ageing in India. Writing from her own lived reality as a single woman, Krishna expanded the conversation by bringing together voices across creative and professional worlds. Among those who reflected on aloneness, companionship, fear, freedom and ageing were Arif Zakaria, Harinder Baweja, Usha Dixit, Suhail Tatari, Vijay Akela, Rucha Pathak, Arundhati Ganorkar, Monika Chandna, Anuraadha Tewari, and Seema Kapoor.

Their testimonies—ranging from chosen solitude to enforced loneliness, from fear of ageing to the empowerment of self-sufficiency—revealed that aloneness in India today is neither monolithic nor tragic by default. Instead, it is a condition shaped by economics, gender, emotional resilience and the slow erosion of the joint family system. Krishna’s article became not just an exploration of solitude, but an urgent inquiry into what social, emotional and community infrastructures India is failing to build for its growing population of single adults and seniors.

Running parallel to this introspection was Vinta Nanda’s reportage in Breaking the Silence, which expanded gender discourse beyond identity politics into mental health and collective care. Central to the piece was Seher Hashmi, a young woman who has lived with mental illness for over a decade and chose to transform her experience into public action. Riding a motorcycle across nineteen Indian cities, Seher—along with fellow campaigners—initiated conversations on stigma, vulnerability and seeking help, particularly among young people.

Together, these two pieces insisted that autonomy is not only about breaking free from institutions like marriage or patriarchy, but about building new forms of belonging, care and visibility. Whether through chosen solitude, community imagination, or public activism, they asked a crucial question that echoed across The Daily Eye’s 2025 gender discourse: How do we live—emotionally, ethically, and collectively—once the old structures no longer hold?

A Year Without Closure, and That Is the Point
Taken together, all the gender-focused pieces published by The Daily Eye in 2025 resisted neat conclusions. They did not offer manifestos or moral certainties. Instead, through the distinct voices of Monojit Lahiri, Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri, Aparajita Krishna and Vinta Nanda, they mapped a society in transition—uneasy, argumentative, introspective and alive with contradiction.

From kitchens to cinema halls, from bedrooms to WhatsApp groups, from ageing alone to loving differently, gender in 2025 emerged not as a settled debate but as an ongoing negotiation. The value of this year-long discourse lies precisely there: in refusing closure, and in insisting that the most important conversations are the ones we are still learning how to have.
You can read all the articles here:
GENDER 2025 FROM THE DAILY EYE