Sabhyata and the Man Between Two Women: The Story of Milibhagat

Before Netflix arrived, before streaming platforms began producing their own content, before the cultural conversation about Indian television moved to web series — there was the saas-bahu serial. The mother-in-law and daughter-in-law drama. The format that had, across decades, defined what primetime looked like in millions of Indian households. The genre that had elevated the conflict between a woman and her husband's mother into something between a social institution and a national obsession.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0fsaJ_hIP0

Indian television had explored this relationship in every conceivable register — from villainy to tragedy to comedy. Audiences had watched it with the familiarity of people who knew the territory and the characters and the plot beats before the episode had even begun. The demanding mother-in-law. The struggling daughter-in-law. The husband standing in the middle, unable to please both women, trying to navigate the impossible geometry of being a good son and a good husband simultaneously.

Sabhyata took this dynamic — this soap opera staple, this familiar domestic drama — and in its Diwali 2019 campaign, titled Milibhagat (and also referred to as Celebrate a Change), directed by Manish Sharma of P Se Picture, directed it toward something the genre had never quite managed: the radical suggestion that the man in the middle might be the solution rather than the problem.

The Third Chapter in a Series

By 2019, Sabhyata had established itself as the ethnic wear brand most willing to tell uncomfortable truths through its Diwali advertising. The pattern had been deliberate and consistent, built year by year into something that the brand's audience had come to anticipate.

In 2017, on Mother's Day, #RedefineThePerception had turned the mother-daughter relationship on its head — the mother who was supposed to be interrogating her daughter about where she was going turned out to be navigating the same territory herself, looking for advice about someone she had met on a dating app.

In 2018, #RedefiningTheCelebration had placed a strict father in a Diwali scene and asked whether the double standards applied to a daughter versus a son could be questioned, challenged, and changed — featuring Shishir Sharma, Ritwik Sahore, and Ahsaas Channa in a film about the specific, everyday inequalities that go unexamined precisely because they are so ordinary.

In 2019, the campaign stepped into the most contested domestic space in Indian popular culture: the saas-bahu relationship.

The creative team — Manish Sharma directing, Chayan Verma as the brand's marketing head — cast the film with deliberate intelligence. Jatin Sarna, who had become nationally known for playing the brutal, menacing Bunty in Sacred Games, was cast as the husband. Sheeba Chaddha, who carries in her public persona a kind of knowing warmth that can shift between comedy and emotion without warning, played the mother-in-law. Anupriya Goenka, known for her nuanced performances across film and web series, played the daughter-in-law.

The casting was itself a form of storytelling. Jatin Sarna's screen identity — built on characters who dominated through menace — was the expectation the film could then subvert. The man who had played Bunty would not, in this film, be domineering or self-interested. He would be trying, with varying degrees of success and confusion, to do something that the saas-bahu genre had rarely given the male character space to do: to see both women clearly, to treat both fairly, and to use the particular position of being the person both of them loved to build a bridge between them.

The Story: An Unconventional Answer to a Conventional Problem

The film opens in a way that every Indian viewer immediately recognises as the beginning of a saas-bahu drama. The tension is visible. The dynamics are familiar. The man of the house is caught between his mother and his wife in the way that the genre has always placed him — pulled in two directions, incapable of satisfying both, watching the festival of Diwali become a site of domestic contestation rather than celebration.

But then — and this is where Manish Sharma's direction made the critical creative decision — the film moved away from the conventional resolution of such scenes. The husband did not take a side. He did not manage the conflict by suppressing one woman's needs in favour of the other's. He did not escape through the front door to leave the two women to resolve things themselves.

Instead, he moved toward the kitchen — a space that, in the traditional architecture of Indian domestic life, was not his territory. Having absolutely zero knowledge of the technical know-how near the stove, he moved in to rescue the festivity of the day. He entered the space where the women were in conflict and he participated — not as an arbiter or a peacemaker in the formal sense, but as someone who was willing to be incompetent, to be funny, to be useless in the kitchen in the specific way that men who have never cooked are useless, and through that specific uselessness, to create the conditions in which the two women found something shared: the shared exasperation, then the shared amusement, then the shared kitchen, then — perhaps — the beginning of something that looked like understanding.

Sabhyata described it as the man going back and forth to reach an unconventional answer — and the unconventional answer was not heroism or a speech about gender equality or a dramatic confrontation. It was the smallest possible act of participation in a domestic space that had, up to that point, excluded him.

The Intelligence of Jatin Sarna's Casting

The Social Samosa analysis of the campaign at the time identified exactly why the casting of Jatin Sarna was the campaign's most important single decision: "The fact that Jatin Sarna who played the character of a brutal man having an inimical attitude towards women in Sacred Games helped further in unraveling the plot scene by scene."

This was not simply clever counter-casting. It was a structural use of the audience's prior knowledge to generate a specific kind of engagement. Every viewer who brought the memory of Bunty to their viewing of the Sabhyata film watched it with a particular alertness — half-expecting the familiar aggression, the domination, the dismissal of both women in favour of his own comfort. The knowledge that this actor had played that character created a shadow text behind every scene.

And as the film unfolded — as Jatin Sarna's character chose not to dominate, not to dismiss, not to escape — the contrast between what viewers feared and what they saw created its own emotional argument. The man who could have been Bunty chose not to be Bunty. The man who could have perpetuated the conflict chose to walk into the kitchen and fail at cooking and, in failing, bring two women together in the most natural way possible: through shared laughter at someone's expense.

Five Lessons We Should Learn From This Campaign

1. Cast Against Type to Subvert Expectation Before the Film Begins

The Milibhagat campaign's most powerful creative decision happened before the camera rolled — in the casting meeting where Jatin Sarna was chosen for the role of the husband. Every viewer who knew his work brought to the film a set of expectations about what this man would do in the scene. The film systematically denied those expectations and, in doing so, generated an emotional surprise that a conventionally cast film could not have produced.

The lesson: when a campaign is telling a story about the reversal of a stereotype, the most efficient creative investment is in casting someone whose screen identity embodies the stereotype — and then having them refuse it. The contrast between expectation and reality, playing out in the space between the audience's memory and the film's present, creates a depth of engagement that no amount of expository dialogue can replicate.

2. The Most Overlooked Character in a Social Issue Is Often the Solution

The saas-bahu genre had, across decades, positioned the husband as the problem's location — the man between two women, whose inability or unwillingness to engage meaningfully with the conflict was what allowed it to persist. Sabhyata's Milibhagat reframed him as the solution. Not a perfect solution. Not a speech-making solution. A bumbling, kitchen-incompetent, genuinely trying solution — which was both more realistic and more moving than the idealized version.

The lesson: when a social issue has been framed in the same way for a long time, the most interesting creative territory is often found by shifting the lens to a character who has previously been positioned as the problem and asking: what would it look like if this person were the answer? This is not the same as absolving the character of responsibility. It is asking what responsibility being assumed would actually look like in practice.

3. Incompetence Can Be the Most Radical Act of Inclusion

The husband in the Milibhagat film entered a kitchen he knew nothing about. He was incompetent. He was useless. He was the wrong person in the right place — and his wrongness, his incompetence, his obvious inability to do what the two women around him did with ease, was the act that dissolved the tension between them.

This is a form of creative intelligence that is rarely recognised as such: the moment of male incompetence used not as comedy relief but as the specific mechanism through which a domestic conflict is resolved. His willingness to be bad at something, to enter a space where he was the least capable person, to risk the embarrassment of failing at a basic domestic task — this willingness was itself the argument. He was not performing heroism. He was performing participation. And participation, however flawed, is what the film was asking for.

The lesson: in campaigns about gender equity in domestic spaces, the most powerful argument is often not a speech about equal responsibility but a demonstration of unequal participation being willingly entered into. Showing a man cooking badly is more radical than showing a man giving a speech about the importance of women in the home.

4. The Saas-Bahu Dynamic Has a Third Character Who Has Never Been the Subject

Every saas-bahu narrative has three characters: the mother-in-law, the daughter-in-law, and the man who belongs to both. Popular culture had spent decades examining the first two. The man in the middle had been a supporting character — a source of conflict, a passive observer, an agent of others' stories rather than a subject of his own.

The Milibhagat campaign made him the protagonist. Not to excuse him from responsibility — the entire situation exists because he exists between two women with a dynamic he has allowed to persist — but to ask what it would mean for him to choose differently. To use his position not as a place of escape but as a place of agency. The lesson: the unexplored character in a well-worn narrative is almost always the most interesting one. The third character of the saas-bahu drama had never been asked to be the solution. Sabhyata asked it — and the answer was both funny and true.

5. A Brand That Takes the Same Risk Every Year Earns a Different Kind of Trust

By the time the Milibhagat campaign arrived, Sabhyata had spent three consecutive years taking a specific, uncomfortable social issue — gender relations in Indian families — and finding a new angle on it. Each year, the risk was real: the saas-bahu dynamic was perhaps the most loaded domestic territory in Indian popular culture, easy to get wrong, easy to offend, easy to condescend. Each year, the brand chose the risk anyway.

The cumulative effect of these decisions was something specific and durable: audiences who had watched the 2017 and 2018 campaigns arrived at the 2019 film with a trust that Sabhyata knew what it was doing — that the uncomfortableness was intentional, that the subversion was earned, and that the brand understood the social territory well enough to walk into it without stumbling.

The lesson: the first time a brand takes a creative risk on a social issue, it is making a statement. The third time, it is demonstrating a character. Audiences extend a different quality of trust to brands that have shown, across multiple campaigns and multiple years, that their engagement with difficult social territory is genuine rather than opportunistic. That trust is the most valuable creative asset a purpose-driven brand can accumulate.

When the Kitchen Door Opened

He went into the kitchen without being asked and without knowing what he was doing. He found two women who had been in a dynamic neither of them had chosen and neither of them quite knew how to change. He offered, through his incompetence, a third option: not the tension of two women competing for the space, but the comedy of both of them watching a man fail at occupying it.

Diwali, in the logic of Milibhagat, was not the occasion on which the conflict was resolved in any grand or permanent sense. It was the occasion on which the small, incremental, specific act of change was made — the act of one person choosing to enter a space they had never entered, and finding, in the unexpected laughter that followed, the beginning of something that looked, improbably, like togetherness.

Sabhyata, the brand whose name means culture, had spent three years asking what Indian culture could look like if the people in it made different choices. In 2019, it found its most complicated and most interesting answer: it could look like a man holding a spatula the wrong way, while two women stopped fighting long enough to show him how.

Celebrate a Change. Milibhagat.