As Christmas approaches every year, there is a surge of romantic comedies (aka rom-coms) on Netflix. Women, particularly single women, discuss how the rom-coms remain an ephemeral way to visually experience romance. Many of these women, including myself, remain single out of choice. A choice that remains a socio-economic privilege that isn’t available in the lives of many girls and women who are coerced into marriage.
Marriage remains one of the most stringent institutions in India, attaining its high status due to customary religious codes and sacramental status. When it comes to the emphasis on marriage as the ‘stepping stones’ in life to reach the ‘end-goal’ that is reproduction, religions such as Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and most branches of Christianity treat it as an essential aspect of fulfilling human duty in life. Celibacy is seen and considered a threat since it is a path that leads to transcending the routine ‘grihastha,’ i.e., householder life. But I intend to mention these points to discuss how the film Single Salma, directed by Nachiket Samant, felt like a breath of fresh air amid the growing cinema and OTT market of rom-coms, from Emily in Paris to Christmas Homecoming to Nobody Wants This. Single Salma interrupts the marital romantic fantasy. It asks a far more unsettling question: what happens when a woman refuses marriage as destiny and chooses herself instead?
Salma, played with remarkable restraint by Huma Qureshi, is thirty-three, single, and under constant scrutiny. She is the eldest daughter in a Muslim household, burdened with financial responsibilities, family expectations, and emotional labour that often goes unnoticed. Her singlehood is treated not as a neutral fact but as a social problem that must be urgently resolved. In this sense, Salma becomes a familiar figure in contemporary India, where marriage remains one of the most powerful institutions governing women’s lives—legitimised through religion, custom, and the promise of respectability. Salma, a character so well played by Huma Qureshi, is a grim reminder of the stereotypical gaze single women in India receive daily.
A still from the film Single Salma
The film refuses to centre a male saviour. This may explain why Single Salma failed to make waves at the box office. Salma is engaged to Sikander Khan (Shreyas Talpade), a seemingly kind man who repeatedly praises her as “beautiful, capable, and talented.” Yet these affirmations ring hollow against the larger coercive structure within which the marriage is arranged. Whether Salma desires the marriage or finds emotional fulfillment in it is ultimately irrelevant to the cis-heteronormative social order that demands she settle down.
When Salma travels to London on a work assignment, the narrative briefly flirts with the conventions of a rom-com. She meets Meet Singh Sahni (Sunny Singh), and a romance begins to unfold. But even here, the film resists easy resolution. Meet embodies a liberal masculinity that prioritises freedom and emotional non-commitment—luxuries that men often enjoy at women’s expense. When Salma realises that their relationship exists on unequal terms, she chooses to walk away. Her decision is not framed as a moral triumph but as clarity: the refusal to accept love that does not meet her on equal ground.
Random feminist solidarities as life-saving endeavours
Salma looks guilty unless feminist solidarities around her free her from the guilt of living her life with joy and freedom. Her office colleague, Mrs Srivastav (Navni Parihar), takes care of Salma after a party where she ends up experimenting with drinks and gets drunk. Salma wakes up and sits on the bed, guilty for enjoying the previous night. Mrs Srivastav looks at Salma as Salma extends her hand towards her.
“You know, Salma, we girls are taught from childhood that having any kind of desire is a sin. It is not wrong to have any kind of experience.”
Both Salma and Mrs Srivastav share a moment of feminist solidarity that otherwise remains rare in official and public spaces open for scrutinising women’s behaviour, mobilities, and actions. Both become vulnerable in this exchange of information that is otherwise considered profane about their lives. Mrs Srivastava doesn’t resort to shaming Salma; instead, she continues to offer her support in choosing joy.
Salma’s mother is another character who shows immense care and concern for Salma’s well-being. In between moments when Salma is burdened by life’s responsibilities that she carries without complaint or expectation of praise, her mother sees her and serves her a cup of tea. The cup of tea is symbolic of someone offering warmth, especially a mother’s feminist care. She keeps waiting for Salma to pick it up, but soon the landlord approaches Salma to sell the old Rizvi family mansion. His sister also arrives during this time, trauma dumping her marital issues on her. Her younger brother comes to demand a cricket bat from her. By this time, a mosquito lands in her tea. The house is riddled with chaos, with all the family members narrating their own demands and concerns to Salma. Seeing this, Salma’s ammi (mother) comes to take a promise from Salma to ‘get married.’ An annoyed Salma agrees to this demand in haste.
But it is not just Salma’s mother or Mrs Srivastav; the most comforting support she finds throughout the movie comes from her childhood best friend, Ratna (Nidhi Singh). Always available, always honest, Ratna’s own complaints about married life puncture the myth that marriage guarantees happiness or stability. Their conversations allow Salma to imagine a future that does not revolve around sacrifice masquerading as virtue.
In London, Salma’s life takes a beautiful turn as she encounters circumstances that compel her to challenge her routine and habits. She takes up go-karting, competing with Britons who are seen making racist remarks about Indians (such as ‘curry people’), and wins that race, showing how patriotism has always dwelled in her heart. Still, more than that, Salma is also anti-caste, as she stands up for her office employee whose merit is questioned and his right to be in London on an official trip. These scenes, though fleeting, are crucial: they expose how gendered experience is inseparable from hierarchies of race, class, and labour, especially in transnational professional spaces. Salma’s resistance emerges not from liberal notions of tolerance, but from a political instinct honed through repeated encounters with exclusion and humiliation.
Salma’s representation challenges the oppressed-Muslim-women stereotype
Salma’s character is not the conventional depiction of Muslim women in Indian cinema wearing hijab and performing religious duties. In fact, Salma herself highlights the centrality of ‘choice’ in clothing as agential. When a swimsuit photograph of her is circulated maliciously to sabotage her marriage prospects, the attempt at public shaming backfires. Instead of retreating, Salma reclaims the narrative—eventually leading to a modelling opportunity that becomes her exit route from an imposed future. The need to feel free, free of societal obligations and norms, becomes the climax of the movie. Salma felt free in London for a moment, making her life choices based on how she felt, not how others forced her to think, feel, and act.
The final rupture comes when Sikander responds to Salma’s honesty with entitlement and threat, insisting that the wedding will proceed regardless of her feelings for Meet (Sunny Singh). At this moment, the illusion of security that marriage promises collapses entirely. Salma leaves—not in pursuit of another man, but in the quest for herself. Boarding a train to Delhi, dressed as a bride for a professional shoot, she transforms the most potent symbol of social control into a vehicle of escape.
Salma choosing herself is the social change women should adopt
Every woman who is shamed for not ‘marrying or settling’ early enough and faces the constant vigilance in society on her movements and choices should watch this underrated movie, as it carries a transformative message of rising above cis-heteronormative marriage as a ‘fulfilling’ goal without which women remain incomplete.
Salma charts the path of choosing self-love as a feminist revolution. At the root of every feminist rebellion has been the restoration of self-recognition, needs, and wants. Women’s needs and wants are often taken as secondary in an Indian society where they are constantly expected to ‘adjust’ to the demands of the other—their partner or the family they are going to wed into.
The stark reality of increasing dowry deaths in India showcases the essential need to encourage young girls and women to take such cinema seriously, where marriage is not central to their personality development. As the movie reaches its end, Salma tells her Abu (father), who keeps shaming her for her swimwear photoshoot and for not marrying Sikander, that she will continue to work. But, this time states explicitly, it will be ‘to earn for her mother’s deteriorating health, her brother’s future, and herself.’
Single Salma speaks in a Marxian feminist language, emphasising the importance of financial independence for women in India.
Her cinematic presentation aligns with what Friedrich Engels aggressively asserted in his work, The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884), that the primary cause of women’s oppression was the lack of capital and property. Engels’ view was that the creation of the monogamous family unit was “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” Engels situates this family form at the heart of capitalist exploitation and argues that its dismantling is essential. As he contends, the liberation of women requires their full reintegration into social production. This transformation necessarily entails the dissolution of the monogamous family as the basic economic unit of society.
Single Salma speaks in a Marxian feminist language, emphasising the importance of financial independence for women in India. It shows the subtle elevation in power within the household when one contributes as the breadwinner, and the freedom that becomes possible when one pursues one’s aspirations outside the societal template of what is counted as ‘respectable.’ Financial freedom is not just crucial for survival, but becomes indispensable if you refuse to be dependent on any man for your needs and wants.
Single women are empowered
Single Salma breaks the norm of treating singlehood as a burden and reframes it as an agential choice many women choose in today’s modern world, considering they do not wish to live a life like their mothers, who were forced to lead a life against their wishes. Patriarchy barred their freedoms, choices, and aspirations and pushed them into the kitchen and into doing care work for the family. This left little time for the women who were mothers. The kids born to mothers who kept struggling and bargaining with their happiness have chosen an alternative path where their freedom does not become bargainable under the guise of a marital tag.
Single Salma is a stark reflection of what it means for a woman to stand up to religious moralities, social shaming, and the coercive timelines that demand she find a man and settle down.
Instead, they believe in defining a partnership for themselves, “under their own conditions and terms,” as Salma says to both the men she rejects, who always loved her on their terms, never thinking about hers. She questions her Abu, “What does marriage even mean? Why is everyone after it? Why are girls not taught to choose themselves? Or asked, where does their happiness lie? Why is no one happy in this setup? …at least, I have had enough: single Salma, enough. I am just Salma. But not just that, I am single and happy.“
Single Salma is a stark reflection of what it means for a woman to stand up to religious moralities, social shaming, and the coercive timelines that demand she find a man and settle down. Its message feels especially urgent in contemporary India, where many women are choosing singlehood to refuse the lives their mothers were forced to live. The film reframes marriage not as an obligation but as something grounded in love and choice. Huma Qureshi’s performance feels deeply real—the rage, the fleeting joy of being away from a life organised around responsibility, and the quiet rebellion of existing freely in a place where no one knows your abu, chachaji (uncle), or padosi (neighbour). Ultimately, the film insists that love must begin with self-recognition. Women must be centred as protagonists in their own lives, capable of loving, being loved, and choosing otherwise. In doing so, Single Salma helps rewrite a script that has long defined marriage for women through silence and compromise.
Shainal Verma is a feminist research scholar at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. She is a Writing Urban India fellow and an Institute of Critical Social Inquiry New School fellow. She writes on gender, caste, visual culture, and urban space.