Sabhyata and the Mother Who Was Also a Woman: The Story of #RedefineThePerception

She is getting ready to meet someone special. For the first time. The kind of meeting that requires the right clothes, the right dupatta, the right version of herself — put together, hopeful, nervous in the way that first meetings with someone you genuinely want to impress always produce.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMJylMF6wDM

She goes to her mother's wardrobe. Not her own. She is looking for something specific — a dupatta, the kind that has the weight and drape and colour that her own wardrobe doesn't quite contain. She finds it. She takes it. She is almost out the door when her mother appears.

The girl braces herself. She has not told her mother where she is going or who she is meeting. The question is coming. The interrogation — gentle or otherwise — about the special someone, the plans, the expectations her mother will attach to a first meeting that the girl already knows is complicated by the fact that her mother is her mother, which means there are rules about what a daughter can want and where she can go and who she can meet.

Her mother says she wants to talk to her about something important. Something she needs her daughter's advice about.

And then — in the kind of reversal that requires real creative courage to pull off — the mother tells her daughter about her special someone. A person she met on a dating app. Someone who wants to meet her in person.

The daughter stares. The world, in that moment, reassembles itself. The mother who was supposed to be the one asking the questions is, herself, navigating the exact same territory — the excitement and the vulnerability and the particular logistics of wanting to look right for someone who might matter. She has a dupatta she wants to borrow too. She has her own nervousness to manage. She is not her daughter's supervisor in this domain. She is her peer.

The message is clear. And it leaves you with a smile: the modern mother wants to be a friend to her daughter — not her controller. Two women, two generations, the same wardrobe. The same human desire to find something real.

This was Sabhyata's #RedefineThePerception campaign, launched in May 2017 — and it was the beginning of something that would outlast any single film.

An Ethnic Wear Brand That Made Its Name Mean Something

Sabhyata was founded in 2003 by Pankaj Anand and Anil Arora. Its name, in Hindi, translates to culture or civilisation — a name that opened up, as advertising commentators would later note, rich creative possibilities for a brand rooted in Indian ethnic wear. The brand had established itself across multiple states and cities, building a loyal customer base of Indian women who saw in its salwar-kameezes and ethnic coordinates not just traditional clothing but a contemporary expression of their own identity.

By 2017, Sabhyata had identified a creative philosophy that would define everything it made: the brand existed to celebrate women — her beauty, her existence, her grace, her freedom. And it would do so not through aspirational imagery or celebrity endorsements but through storytelling. Specifically, through stories that took a perception about Indian women's lives and gently, deliberately, with warmth and a twist, redefined it.

Chayan Verma, Head of Marketing at Sabhyata, described the brand's approach with consistency across every campaign he spoke about: "Sabhyata is all about celebrating women, her beauty, her existence, her grace and her freedom." And Pankaj Anand, one of the co-founders, articulated the philosophical foundation: "It's high time that society has to change its conventional approach and gender should become a lived reality."

The #RedefineThePerception campaign was the first public expression of these values in the form of a digital film — launched not for Diwali but for Mother's Day, which was the natural occasion for a story about a mother-daughter relationship.

A Platform That Deepened Year After Year

What made #RedefineThePerception important in retrospect was not just the film itself but what it initiated. It was the first in a series of annual campaigns that became, over the following years, one of the most consistent and purposeful brand storytelling platforms in Indian ethnic wear advertising.

The progression was deliberate and cumulative. Each campaign identified a specific societal perception — about women, about relationships, about the constraints placed on women's choices by family, workplace, and community — and then built a story that subverted that perception with warmth, with a twist, and with the quiet confidence of a brand that knew exactly what it stood for.

In 2018, #RedefiningTheCelebration — Sabhyata's first Diwali campaign — turned the father-daughter relationship in a new direction. The film opened with a strict father entering the house to see his daughter leave for meeting friends at night, his cold stare freezing her at the doorstep. What followed was not the expected patriarchal confrontation but a reframing — a story that, in the words of Campaign India, gave a lesson about gender equality and proposed a new kind of father-daughter relationship aligned with modern life. The film featured veteran actor Shishir Sharma alongside Ritwik Sahore and Ahsaas Channa, and was conceptualised by Manish Sharma, Founder and Director at P Se Picture.

In 2019, the third campaign continued the series — this time using the Saas-Bahu (mother-in-law and daughter-in-law) dynamic, one of Indian television's most over-exploited dramatic frameworks, to propose something different. The film featured Jatin Sarna (known for his role as Bunty in Sacred Games), Sheeba Chaddha, and Anupriya Goenka — and placed the man of the household, caught between his mother and his wife, in the role of the person who had to find an unconventional answer to a conventional domestic conflict. The use of Jatin Sarna — whose screen persona was built on playing menacing male characters — to play a character navigating the complicated loyalties of an Indian husband was itself a piece of casting that redefined an expectation.

In 2022, #RedefiningCelebration took on workplace discrimination against pregnant women — featuring Sheeba Chaddha as a CEO who recognises a pregnant job candidate's situation and surprises her with an offer letter hidden inside a Sabhyata Diwali gift bag. The campaign was conceptualised through research drawn from real experiences, spending five months in preparation before arriving at the story.

In 2024, #CelebratingMotherhood addressed the absence of nursing rooms for new mothers in Indian workplaces — showing Chhavi, a new mother returning from maternity leave, using a storage room as her only private space. Her manager, initially unaware, transforms the storage room into a proper Mother's Room with a Sabhyata gift bag and a card wishing her success on the new project.

Each film was a chapter in the same sustained argument: Indian women are more than the roles they are assigned. Every perception that limits them can be redefined. And the women who do the redefining are, in their everyday lives, already doing it.

The Brand That Stayed in the Background

One of the most consistently noted — and praised — aspects of every Sabhyata campaign was the deliberateness with which the brand stayed in the background. The product appeared not as the subject of the film but as a natural, understated presence: the Sabhyata bag as a Diwali gift that contained something unexpected; the dupatta from a mother's wardrobe; the gift bag that revealed an offer letter.

Chayan Verma was explicit about this decision: "The idea is not to over-impose the brand. The reason why this ad is going viral is that the brand has been placed very intelligently and realistically. We have always thought that we want to keep the brand minimalistic. If the ad reaches people, eventually people will be aware of the brand."

Campaign conceptualiser Manish Sharma added: "This is a purpose-driven ad campaign and it is very important to connect with the audience or the target audience of the brand. People would connect the emotion with the value Sabhyata stands for."

This was not false modesty or an oversight. It was a calculated understanding of what purpose-driven advertising needed to do: earn the emotional real estate first, let the brand follow. The Sabhyata bag became, across years of these campaigns, a symbol — a container for an unexpected kindness, a gesture of recognition, a surprise that changed the temperature of a scene. The brand became synonymous not with a product but with a feeling.

Five Lessons We Should Learn From This Campaign

1. An Annual Purpose Platform Compounds Into Brand Equity

Each Sabhyata campaign was a standalone story. But taken together — the mother-daughter dating app twist, the father-daughter gender equality story, the Saas-Bahu-husband triangle, the pregnant candidate and the CEO, the nursing mother and the transformed storage room — they formed something more durable: a portrait of a brand that had consistently, year after year, taken a specific perception about Indian women and found a way to subvert it with humanity and wit.

The lesson: purpose-driven advertising is most powerful when it is sustained. A single campaign makes a statement. Five years of campaigns makes a character. The brands willing to return, annually, to the same philosophical territory with a new story deepen their association with that territory until it becomes, effectively, owned.

2. The Twist Is the Lesson — Not the Speech

None of the Sabhyata films used a voiceover to explain what they were about. None had a character deliver a lecture about gender equality or workplace fairness or generational understanding. The films delivered their messages through reversal — through setting up an expectation and then dissolving it at exactly the right moment. The mother who was supposed to be asking the questions is herself asking for advice. The CEO who looked like a stranger turns out to be the person who can change the candidate's life. The strict father turns out to have a heart that the daughter had misjudged.

The lesson: social issue campaigns earn more when they demonstrate their argument than when they assert it. A reversal that the audience experiences emotionally will change their thinking more lastingly than a message they are told intellectually. Structure the story so that the audience arrives at the insight themselves.

3. Real Stories Are the Most Reliable Research Method

For the 2022 #RedefiningCelebration campaign, the agency conducted research drawing on real experiences of working women — spending five months in preparation, going through several draft scripts, drawing from the brand's marketing head's own wife's experience of balancing pregnancy with professional life. This investment in genuine research produced a story that felt specific, credible, and impossible to dismiss as a generalisation — because it wasn't one. It was a composite of documented realities.

The lesson: the most resonant social issue campaigns are built from reported experience, not imagined scenarios. The effort of research — of talking to real people, finding real situations, drawing specific and verifiable details from lives actually lived — produces stories that audiences recognise as true. And recognition, in advertising, is the beginning of trust.

4. Minimalist Brand Presence in Purpose Advertising Creates Maximum Brand Recall

The Sabhyata bag's presence in these films was always understated, always natural, always the last thing you noticed — which meant it was the thing you thought about afterward. When a Sabhyata gift bag contained a job offer letter, the brand was transformed from a product into an act of generosity. When the dupatta in the first film was from a mother's wardrobe — available to a daughter because a mother wanted to be her friend — the brand was present in the intimacy of that exchange without ever having to announce itself.

The lesson: in purpose-driven advertising, the loudest brands are often the least trusted. The brand that is present in the scene rather than on top of it — that allows the story to be the story and trusts that the emotional associations will transfer — builds a relationship with its audience that product-first advertising cannot replicate.

5. Your Brand Name Is a Creative Brief Waiting to Be Written

Sabhyata means culture. Culture, in its deepest sense, is the set of beliefs and behaviours that a community has agreed to inherit from the past. And cultural change — the progressive redefinition of the perceptions that limit women — is the specific territory that Sabhyata's entire campaign platform has claimed. The brand name was the brief. The campaign platform was the answer.

This alignment — between what the brand is called and what the brand believes — is one of the most underexplored opportunities in Indian advertising. The lesson: your brand name contains a creative brief that no external document can equal in specificity or authenticity. The brands that take the time to ask what does our name actually mean, at its deepest level, in the emotional vocabulary of the culture we serve will find that the answer is already a campaign waiting to be made.

The Dupatta That Started Everything

She took the dupatta from her mother's wardrobe. She was going to meet someone special. She thought her mother would stop her.

Her mother was also going to meet someone special. She needed advice from her daughter.

In that exchange — between two women who had both been held inside their respective roles for too long, and who found, on the morning of a first meeting, that they had more in common than either had allowed themselves to understand — Sabhyata found its voice.

Not as a clothing brand. As a brand that believed women were more than their roles. That the perceptions that constrained them could be redefined. That the story of Indian womanhood was not over — it was being rewritten, year by year, campaign by campaign, one subverted expectation at a time.

#RedefineThePerception. The dupatta was just the beginning.