Daldal Exposes How India Fails Its Single Mothers And Their Daughters

There is a scene in Daldal where a burnt-down house becomes a daughter’s traumatic memory that she can barely get herself to return to. With that, Prime Video’s 2026 psychological thriller, led by Bhumi Pednekar as DCP Rita Ferreira, pretends to be a whodunit. But it’s really about what happens when single mothers in a patriarchal society have to survive without any support. Their untreated trauma then metastasises inside their daughters.

Based on Vish Dhamija’s Bhendi Bazaar, the show features killers Anita and Sajid. But it is their mothers’ (and Rita’s) who are the foundation of the story. In the backdrop of ritualistic murders, we see how India has no idea how to care for its single mothers. 

Children raised in similar emotional droughts later pay a price in life.

The two main types of Indian single mothers

On one side, we have Isabel Ferreira (Rita’s mother), who is married but abandoned — at first emotionally and then physically, too. She is thus stuck raising a daughter who reminds her of her “useless” husband while working as a police officer. Read Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me? This part might sound familiar, then. 

So while Isabel is “socially single,” Vivianne is effectively widowed. The latter is a sex worker who tries to shield her daughter, Anita, from the red-light area she has to return to after her husband is killed and she is disposed of by his family. She starts dressing little Anita up as a boy, which later leads to a queer(ish) love story with her partner-in-crime, Sajid. 

Clearly, these mothers come from different moralities and classes, but have to live out their days in the middle of a venomous kind of patriarchy.

India’s traditional family paradigm, though, still ties motherhood to marriage. According to an IOSR Journal research, single mothers are labelled “broken” or “incomplete,” and (as I have seen my mother go through) are subjected to social scrutiny and economic issues. India has over 13 million single-mother households, yet only 20% get professional mental health support. So after the system isolates them, it then blames them for collapsing.

In Daldal, we see both Isabel and Vivianne crack.

Vivianne is killed in a police raid after she jumps off a balcony to save herself and her child. Isabel dies in a gas explosion by suicide, in which she manages to scar her daughter for life. Neither woman was allowed any fragility other than death. Both daughters, as a result, grow up with the fallout of their mothers’ desperate choices.

The myth of “it’s what you do with the pain” 

While in theory, Rita becomes a decorated police officer, Anita practically becomes a serial killer. This difference looks like a “thought of the day” you may have heard in a school assembly — both the egg and potato get boiled, but one becomes hard, and one soft. The show proves it isn’t that simple. Success does not equal stability.

Rita is high-functioning, sure, but to deal with how much she has repressed, she starts dabbling in drugs and loses her lover as she is knowingly incapable of intimacy. Anita, on the other hand, is nihilistic and convinced that all of the world’s “good people” are frauds because an orphanage leader with a saviour complex further messed with her childhood by sexually abusing her. 

Thus, both women begin operating on extremes and can barely regulate their emotions.

The NCBI study “Experiences of Single-Parent Children in the Current Indian Context” found exactly that. It turns out that 73% of its participants had difficulty in regulating their emotions even as adults, while 54% described hyper-careful decision-making that they learnt from their parental anxiety and financial strain. Sadly, 91% of the children from such single-parent households experience social stigma and no sense of belonging. 

Rita always finds herself retreating from intimacy, and Anita gets suspicious of anyone claiming virtuosity. These are textbook trauma responses, and it’s as simple and as complex as that. The show argues that children of overwhelmed single mothers can either become hyper-responsible or hyper-destructive. Sometimes, as life would have it, both.

What happens when mothers fail to protect their children?

The heart of Daldal is that both Rita and Anita grew up in homes where their mothers could not fully protect them. Both of the women would have loved to be present mothers for their daughters, independent of their social status. But the system didn’t let them.

Vivianne tries her best to shield Anita from the brothel’s politics and the mafia that, in a rivalry with the police, separates her from her daughter. Isabel, on the other hand, tries to balance policing Mumbai and parenting an artsy child alone. But patriarchy ensures they are unsupported at every turn, be it psychologically or socially. Then there’s the fact that they are already compromised because of, as we discussed, economic survival.

The IOSR research confirms this, as it categorises single mothers’ burdens into economic strain and psychological load. Sixty per cent of the subjects have reported workplace discrimination, and many of them have had to live hand-to-mouth. Only 40% were aware of welfare schemes, even if they couldn’t access them. 

And that mental anguish we see in the show is sadly but fairly common. When a mother is both a provider and an emotional sponge, absorbing society’s judgment daily, she burns out.

And when she burns out, her child barely learns to survive and doesn’t feel emotionally or physically safe, even in their own home. This inherited trauma, though not genetic per se, is embedded in Anita’s anarchy and Rita’s silence. They don’t know life without. 

Is murder a sin? Or is it child neglect? 

In the finale, Anita, just like Rita’s mother in her childhood, sets herself on fire.

But this time, because it had to be cinematic enough to make it to Prime Video and have thriller enthusiasts binge it in one night, Rita pulls her out of the flames. Yes, justice prevails, but also now that she is a grown woman, Rita saves her younger self.

By now, we know that the “original sin” in Daldal is systemic neglect. First, we saw the orphanage abuse, then the police raid that killed a mother. By the end of their lives, both mothers had practically no mental health support and lived in a culture that firmly believes, clearly for its own convenience, that women must survive quietly.

The NCBI study also notes that 82% of single-parent children assume additional responsibilities early in life. As a result, they learn to prioritise stability over desire. Rita embodies that statistic by performing competence so well that no one notices the flames inside her.

And here’s where matricentric feminism becomes essential. If we start centring mothers, we also need to remember that they are not black and white saints or villains. Structurally, they are some of society’s most burdened individuals, which can thus help us frame the tragedy differently. These two casualties are a result of a system that romanticises sacrifice to an extent that led my mom to once nickname my grandma “sacrifice sundari.” That might sound funny, but really, we have so much data to prove otherwise, and now a show too. 

What, then, is Daldal really about? 

It would be easy to pin Daldal as a story of resilience. After all, the NCBI also reports that 91% of participants displayed resilience, adaptability, empathy, initiative, and maturity. But is that the same as healing?

Rita solving the case does not fix her childhood. Anita surviving does not undo her trauma.

The show ends with Rita calling her former fiancé from (guess where?) the site of all her trauma, the house her mother tried to burn herself and her daughter down in. This step thus implies that she may finally be ready to confront her past. 

So in a country where single mothers are still treated as deviations from the norm, and where mental health remains taboo, Daldal insists that untreated maternal trauma does not disappear. It can resurface in daughters who either implode or overachieve. 

Sohini (they/she) hails from Calcutta and loves to explore and write about all things society, culture, gender. With a background in journalism and English literature – they have finally been able to make having heartfelt conversations a huge part of their life outside of boxes.