in a village highly superstitious, a deity is worshipped who only allows girls who haven’t attained puberty in her temple. Everybody else including men are not supposed to cross her boundary. A haunting folklore advices these people to marry off their daughters the very year they hit puberty as a measure to conserve their culture. A girl rises in such a landscape and tries to kill the stories woven by men to keep women under them always.Ayali Season 1 Download
In a very powerful scene in Ayali, Mythili played by a phenomenal Lovelyn Chandrasekhar says, “even if the Goddess Ayali decides to come down on Earth, these men will call her a woman and enslave her too”, goosebumps! The divide between being a God Lover and a God Fearing person is vast but blurred in a country that doesn’t even walk the way a cat crosses their path on. And when a show takes you back in time and tells you a story of women fighting for their rights in a system that purposely tries to press them under their toes, it is bound to create ripples.It is a world created by men using the name of a woman and the makers so skillfully address that. It is a village where girls don’t get to study beyond ninth grade and boys are not motivated enough to even pass the tenth. A mother scolds her daughter to not look up but towards her feet while she is walking because she is a grown-up girl. A school teacher is so misogynistic that he calls a girl who wants to study poison and even wishes for her death. Girls are dying of early pregnancies, their overaged husbands are abusive both physically and mentally. There is havoc all around but they are conditioned to think that is their normal and this is how a village flourishes. Remember how Kantara spoke about the Man- Nature conflict?