But are we Ready for Bishnu? Shape of Momo and After Reflections

Dr Rinzing Ongmu Sherpa

Laryoo abo laryo laryo (she will fall, she will now fall).

                                                                   Audience at the Inox West Point Mall, 4^th June 2026

The Security Guard: Baini, what kind of work you have outside at this hour of the night?  

                                    Where are you coming from?

                                                                                                         Incident April 2025, Sikkim

            The 21^st Century is obsessed with appearing ‘progressive and egalitarian’. The idea of empowering women, or what we call ‘women empowerment’, has become synonymous with mainstream culture. There is a crazy obsession with it, I see it everywhere through social media, billboards, marketing apps, magazines, you name it. Every other individual, irrespective of their orientation, has a say on the subject. Digital media in particular has become a powerful platform through which they perform and promote it further, which not only gains them attention but also pays off. They curate their lives carefully, like the aspired and envied ‘21^st century individuals’ who are independent, in control and committed to empowering the rest. Each one of us, in a way, represents this ‘21^st century woman’. But where are these women in real life?

The two instances mentioned in the opening of the article are of different times and of different contexts, yet they highlight the same underlying intolerance that society carries towards its women and their agency and autonomy. My most recent watch, Shape of Momo directed by Tribeny Rai, is a movie of female rage and her everyday resistance. The first instance I refer to comes before the movie closes, where Bishnu, the main protagonist played by Gaumaya Gurung, is once again shown doing her morning rounds of run, free and unhindered. While her place and her people tried to confine her to her ‘expected limitations’, Bishnu seeks a life beyond. While the scene played out, a few men seated behind in the auditorium remarked that ‘now she would definitely fall’. Their loud voice and their tone were enough to convey that a woman such as Bishnu would one day fall under the hyper independence of her own making. Our society may still not be ready to accept women such as Bishnu. Her ‘difficult’ nature and her rage, which she carries over her sleeves, are a threat to the hypocrisy our society hides behind. While it celebrates the rhetoric of her empowerment, it enjoys the power and control it has had over her. And Bishnu is a woman who sees through it and, most importantly, is angry about it. Thus, there is a troubling contradiction that lies beneath the celebratory banner of ‘women empowerment’. The narrative of empowerment is encouraged, as long as it does not challenge the age-old established structure of patriarchy and sexism in our society.

 When we think of home, we think of familiarity. It’s a culmination of several emotions: of belonging, of comfort and of warmth. A place where you derive your utmost strength from and to which you can return each time, either broken or healed, it simply accepts you. Returning home to Sikkim in 2023, after several years in Delhi, brought forth many emotions, it was of anticipation, of hope, of love and also of grieving for the place I was leaving behind. Delhi had been a place of growth and self-discovery. A place which at times broke me to my lowest, yet each time remembered to help me crawl back. I learned to navigate life on my own terms, though it was always the tougher way. As a Sikkimese woman living in Delhi, we are subjected to multiple layers of discrimination: as an ‘outsider’, a North Easterner, and as a woman. I was acutely aware and reminded of my vulnerabilities each day. However, while its people judged and held me down, the city and its anonymity gave me its space to breathe.

Though home was supposed to be different, yet the closer I went, it revealed the same prejudices and inequalities we often imagine exist elsewhere. The second context mentioned in the opening line is of my own experience in Sikkim. Like Bishnu, in that moment of confrontation with the security guard, I found myself longing for the autonomy and anonymity that I had just left behind. Several similar everyday instances that followed before and after compelled me to confront yet another difficult question. Is home necessarily synonymous to familiarity or belonging?

The ‘male patron’ is an ever-present figure throughout the movie, where even in their absence, their presence remains constant. Sometimes through Bishnu’s deceased father, who still holds power over the household and outside. At times, as her potential partner Gyan (played by Rahul Mukhia), who even starts taking over the role as the patron, and sometimes through the teenage boy of a migrant labourer, who deems it’s his duty to protect the house and its women. The idea of a ‘male patron’, however, often obscures deeper questions about power and control. The sheer concept of a ‘protector’ has always brought forth an unhealed rage. It questions our agency, our right to consent and outrightly mocks our potential. Exercising our ‘empowerment’ is used against us, where we are labelled as those welcoming harassment and violence. So, why is a woman's agency a problem? And most importantly, who or what are they protecting us against, while being entitled to disrespect, humiliate, and cross our personal boundaries as and how they please to. So, are they the ‘protector’ or the ones we should actually be protecting ourselves against?

Therefore, would it be wrong to say that we as a society have given birth to these young, angry and ‘difficult’ women that Bishnu has so commendably portrayed. Her character emerges as a product of the everyday workings of our society. Bishnu embodies the frustrations of countless women whose lives are shaped by incessant surveillance, control, and paternalistic notions of care. Thus, the social structure has a huge role to play in bringing forth and perpetuating patriarchy, misogyny and chauvinism.

I have off late found myself angrier than ever, while I do realise and am made aware of the comforts and privileges of working and living within my own state. However, the past two years have been anything but a comfort. Shape of Momo also highlights the struggles of those women disguised behind the privileges that she is simultaneously entitled to. Bishnu likewise enjoys certain entitlements of being an insider, but she is also expected to embody the woman that our society expects of her. The discomfort surrounding women's autonomy is not always expressed through direct control, it is also reflected in our everyday interactions. I have, over time, found myself feeling uneasy when being addressed by a random stranger or acquaintances as their baini (younger sister). Over the years, I realise I have been addressed as a baini of every other individual. While the term is commonly used in the region, it also subtly places the other in a position of seniority. Our society which believes a thulo manchay can never be wronged or questioned, a baini is placed in social positioning with little room to question, resist, or challenge authority, placing her in a more vulnerable position than she already finds herself in. It permits an unspoken authority and patronship, where a baini needs to be protected as she is ‘fragile’, ‘young’ and incapable of assuring her own safety. What appears to be a simple kinship term, therefore, reveals how social hierarchies are reproduced through everyday interactions. Why does society find it easier to engage with women through these hierarchical kinship categories rather than recognising her as an autonomous individual of her own right?

A few months ago, a casual Women's Day greeting from my father organically developed into a conversation on women's empowerment, where I asked him his opinion on the matter. He further casually remarked, ‘I don’t know about elsewhere chori, but our society is progressive, have you ever heard of dowry deaths or female infanticides happening around? We believe in equality, see I never wanted a son because you are no less than one.’ Even when I wanted to find comfort in it, his response revealed something deeper. I was being valued because I was ‘like a son’ to him, not simply because I was his daughter. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that egalitarianism cannot be measured solely through the absence of discrimination. My father's confidence in our society’s progress proved how easily we mistook individual goodwill for structural egalitarianism. Even the most liberal men still live in a society that largely affirms their authority and validates their choices. My father is, after all, a man who would unconsciously and unintentionally want to protect and safeguard his male privilege. Irrespective of how progressive a man may claim to be, he has tasted the ‘power’ that comes with being born one.

The movie shows women across three generations. The grandmother (played by Bhanu Maya Rai), the mother and the two daughters who come together in a rare intergenerational portrayal of womanhood, bonding, and companionship. The grandmother, who is conveyed to have lived a ‘dignified life’, a life where she embodied the woman the society wanted of her, is shown anticipating the arrival of her son as the saviour who would take her away to Dubai. The mother (played by Pashupati Rai) each day engages in a silent war of her own where she juggles between filling in the presumed vacuum left by the demise of the patriarch of the household and being and doing the role of a mother and a daughter. Her rage towards the system never got a space to surface; her choices were never really hers. Yet, in a moment of quiet realisation, she eventually lets Bishnu have hers. Junu, (played by Shyama Shree Sherpa) Bishnu's sister, through her period of pregnancy comes to realise how she relinquished her own hopes and aspirations in order to conform to the demands of domesticity, as a married woman. As a wife, a daughter-in-law, and now an expectant mother, she is rarely recognised by herself or by others as an individual in her own right. Her future, like her present, seems increasingly defined by the expectations of bearing a son. Amidst it all, Bishnu is conflicted between confronting the structure while fiercely guarding her agency and at times subtly giving in to it. Each of them represents the type of women in our society, where one sees through patriarchy, the other breeds through it. However, the movie goes beyond and resists the presence of such simplistic binaries, as they are all women within the patriarchal system, who navigate it differently. Bishnu's anger and Juju's compliance emerge from the same source.

Each of us in a way represents the imperfectly shaped momo that Bishnu so carefully crafts with all her effort; difficult, unapologetic and unwilling to be perfectly shaped. Its imperfections are not flaws but rather a defiance to be shaped into forms deemed acceptable. While standing firm and confident with her ‘shapeless momo’, she stands firm with her ‘assertion and resistance’ both in the public and within the private. And perhaps the question remains, are we yet ready for her, or are we only comfortable with the idea of her?

The author is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Centre for Distance and Online Education (CDOE), Sikkim Manipal University, East Sikkim. She earned her PhD in Sociology from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi in 2023. Her interest areas include gender, ethnicity, identity, indigeneity, community study and ethnography. She is a resident of Pelling, West Sikkim.

Email id: rinzing.ongmu93@gmail.com