What Yami Gautam's Haq Reveals About The Politics Of Marriage

Haq, starring Yami Gautam and Emraan Hashmi, is a tale about marriage. It traces a woman’s journey from being adorned like a crown to becoming a tail, invisible and disposable. A fate quietly foreshadowed when newly married Shahzia Bano notices three pressure cookers in the kitchen and is told casually that when one stops working, it is simply replaced. None of them is damaged; they only need care, a part replaced, and some attention. But Abbas believes it is easier to move on than to mend.

The first half of the film is built on intimacy. Its world unfolds inside kitchens, bedrooms, dining tables, upholstery, and telephone lines.

These spaces are familiar, mundane, almost safe. Yet it is within these ordinary domestic interiors that Haq exposes the politics of marriage.

When structured by power rather than partnership, marriage trains women to absorb pressure quietly, without noise. No one oils the screeching hinge when a new door swings more easily.

From crown to tail

When Shahzia’s first marriage begins to fade, when the honeymoon period ends, and her voice no longer sounds sweet to his ears, she is no longer heard.

The pattern repeats in the second marriage. When the second wife questions Abbas’s position in the legal battle and his moral authority, she is told to keep quiet and write a diary.

Her emotional expression is invalidated. She is no longer someone who needs to be listened to.

The film suggests that women are valued only as long as they remain silent, private, and self-contained.

What makes this dynamic particularly unsettling is that it is first introduced as romance. During courtship, Abbas appears attentive and generous.

He spends hours on the phone. He takes her out. He gifts Shahzia a sewing machine, an act that seems thoughtful, even empowering.

Later, the same machine becomes her means of survival. What begins as a gift quietly turns into compensation.

A man who once gave her something eventually forgets to provide even basic food and care for her and the children.

In another celebrated scene, when Shahzia complains about a neighbour’s misbehaviour and a land dispute, Abbas responds by buying the entire land in her name.

The gesture is framed as protection and love, one of the most romantic moments in recent cinema. It shows how a husband becomes his wife’s protector, how he listens, acts, and makes her feel secure. Her problems are his problems.

But this attentiveness has an expiry date.

Once marriage settles into possession, listening dissolves. Abbas leaves the telephone receiver off the hook so he does not have to hear Shahzia’s household troubles.

When she persists, he threatens to disconnect the phone. Shahzia asks, almost innocently, who else she is supposed to share these issues with if not him. Her problems are no longer shared; they are a hindrance to his work.

The film’s visual grammar deepens this critique. After both marriages, Abbas is repeatedly shown walking ahead, holding his wife’s hand, leading the way.

The locations repeat. The choreography remains unchanged. The women change, but the movement does not. In the second marriage, however, the frame widens.

Abbas continues forward, unburdened, while the second wife walks behind him with visible baggage, the first wife and three children trailing her steps. A man’s life progresses linearly; a woman’s life accumulates weight.

Within this structure, the wives do not compete for love but for alignment. There is a quiet battle over upholstery, scent, and appearance, over how best to approximate the husband’s preferences.

In one telling scene, the second wife tells Shahzia that Abbas only likes satin bedsheets. Desire here is not mutual; it is managerial.

The wife’s world contracts to maintaining her husband’s sensory comfort, how she looks, how she smells, how and where they sleep.

Marriage in Haq does not interrupt male momentum; it redistributes female labour. Love does not function as a partnership but as a relay, where responsibility is passed on.

The film’s moral clarity sharpens through Shahzia’s parents, especially her father. Each time his daughter is reduced to aurat, he insists on her name. Naming becomes resistance.

In a world eager to collapse women into roles like ex-wife, mother, burden, he insists on personhood. His progressiveness is not performative; it is costly. He risks social standing, income, and religious respectability for his daughter’s dignity.

Haq does not ask us to hate Abbas. That would be too simple. Instead, it asks us to recognise him, to notice how attentiveness in marriage is often temporary, how listening expires once possession is secured, and how women are expected to manage their own pressure so that the household remains calm.

The pressure cooker does not explode in the film, not because the system is humane, but because it is designed to move on quietly.

And that is what makes Haq unsettling.

Authored by Aastha Jadon, a PhD researcher, Author of Sunflower on My Shoulders, exploring women's narratives in mythology and cinema.
Views expressed by the author are their own.