Dr Rinzing Ongmu Sherpa
Laryoo abo laryo laryo (she will fall, she will now fall).
Audience at the Inox West Point Mall, 4th June 2026
The Security Guard: Baini, what kind of work do you have outside at this hour of the night?
Where are you coming from?
Incident April 2025, Sikkim
The 21st 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 ‘21st century individuals’ who are independent, in control and committed to empowering the rest. Each one of us, in a way, represents this ‘21st century woman’. But where are these women in real life?
The two instances mentioned at the start of the article are from different times and different contexts, yet they highlight the same underlying intolerance that society carries towards its women and their agency and autonomy. My most recent movie 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 running, free and unhindered. While her people tried to confine her to ‘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 due to 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 accepts you. Returning home to Sikkim in 2023, after several years in Delhi, brought forth many emotions – 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, I am 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 the space to breathe.
Though home was supposed to be different, the closer I went, the more 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 with 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 of the patron, and sometimes through the teenage boy of a migrant labourer, who deems it 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 of late found myself angrier than ever—even as I remain aware of the comforts and privileges of living and working within my own state. Yet the past two years have been anything but comfortable. Momo also throws into relief the struggles of women who, like Bishnu, are entitled to certain privileges while still being expected to embody the ideals society prescribes. Bishnu enjoys the advantages of an insider, but she is also held to the standards of what a woman should be.
The unease surrounding women’s autonomy is not always enforced through direct control; it manifests in everyday interactions. Over time, I have found myself unsettled when addressed by strangers or acquaintances as baini (younger sister). I have been called baini by almost everyone I meet. Though the term is common in the region, it subtly positions the other as senior. In a society that holds a thulo manchay (elder) as beyond reproach, the baini is placed in a role with little room to question or resist. It leaves her more vulnerable than she already is—permitted only a kind of unspoken authority and patronage, where she must be protected because she is presumed ‘fragile,’ ‘young,’ and incapable of ensuring her own safety. What seems like a benign kinship term thus reveals how social hierarchies are reproduced through the most ordinary exchanges. Why does society find it easier to engage with women through these hierarchical categories rather than recognise them as autonomous individuals in their own right?
A few months ago, a casual Women’s Day greeting from my father turned into a conversation on women’s empowerment. When I asked for his views, he remarked lightly, ‘I don’t know about elsewhere, chori, but our society is progressive. Have you ever heard of dowry deaths or female infanticide happening around here? We believe in equality—see, I never wanted a son because you are no less than one.’ Even as I wanted to find comfort in his words, his response revealed something deeper. I was being valued because I was like a son, not simply because I was his daughter. The more I thought about it, the more I realised that egalitarianism cannot be measured solely by the absence of visible discrimination. My father’s confidence in our society’s progress showed how easily we mistake individual goodwill for structural change. Even the most liberal men live in a society that largely affirms their authority and validates their choices. My father is, after all, a man who would unconsciously protect his male privilege. However progressive he may claim to be, he has tasted the ‘power’ that comes with being born male.
The film brings together women across three generations. The grandmother (played by Bhanu Maya Rai), the mother, and the two daughters form a rare intergenerational portrait of womanhood, bonding, and companionship. The grandmother, who is said to have lived a ‘dignified life’—one where she embodied the woman society demanded—is shown awaiting her son as the saviour who will take her away to Dubai. The mother (played by Pashupati Rai) wages a silent war each day, juggling the vacuum left by the patriarch’s death while fulfilling the roles of mother and daughter. Her rage toward the system never finds 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, comes through her pregnancy to recognise how she relinquished her own hopes and aspirations to conform to domesticity as a married woman. As a wife, daughter-in-law, and expectant mother, she is rarely recognised by herself or others as an individual. Her future, like her present, seems increasingly defined by the pressure to bear a son. In the midst of it all, Bishnu is torn between confronting the structure and fiercely guarding her agency, sometimes subtly giving in. Each woman represents a type we recognise—one who sees through patriarchy, another who breeds through it. Yet the film resists such simplistic binaries; all are women navigating the same patriarchal system in different ways. Bishnu’s anger and Junu’s compliance spring from the same source.
In a way, each of us resembles the imperfectly shaped momo that Bishnu crafts with such care—difficult, unapologetic, unwilling to be perfectly formed. Its imperfections are not flaws but a refusal to be shaped into acceptable forms. Standing firm and confident with her ‘shapeless momo,’ she stands equally firm in her assertion and resistance, both in public and in private. Perhaps the question remains: are we ready for her yet, or are we only comfortable with the idea of her?
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Dr. Rinzing Ongmu Sherpa is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the 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.
