How 'Sister Midnight' Was Recast To Fit Wikipedia’s Familiar Narrative
By Manu Shrivastava
Wikipedia’s treatment of Sister Midnight is not merely a misreading. It is a familiar performance, polished, predictable, and deeply ideological. The film is flattened into a morality tale that suits a pre-approved global script: India, arranged marriage, woman wronged, patriarchy exposed. What does not fit this script is quietly sanded away.
In the encyclopaedia’s telling, the protagonist becomes a symbol before she is allowed to remain a character. Her actions are moralised selectively, psychologised generously, and ultimately sanitised. The brutality is blurred. The savagery is softened. The fact that she murders her husband, consumes birds and animals, and exhibits behaviour that is clearly malevolent is reframed as metaphor, as resistance, as an outcome of oppression rather than an expression of evil. The possibility that the film dares to centre a female character who is not a victim but a predator is simply too inconvenient to acknowledge.
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| Image for representational purpose only |
This is where Wikipedia’s bias announces itself most clearly. The platform does not merely summarise art. It interprets it through a narrow ideological sieve. When an Indian arranged marriage appears on screen, the conclusion is pre-written. The institution must be the crime. The woman must be wronged. Any deviation from this arc is treated as symbolic exaggeration rather than narrative fact. Violence committed by the protagonist is explained away as catharsis. Moral agency is outsourced to sociology.
What is striking is not that Wikipedia errs, but how consistently it errs in one direction. Western cinema that portrays female monstrosity is allowed complexity. Madness, cruelty, and moral collapse are discussed as artistic choices. Indian stories, by contrast, are routinely recruited into a civilisational trial. The arranged marriage is not contextualised. It is indicted. The culture is not examined. It is blamed.
This is not accidental. Wikipedia’s editing ecosystem rewards consensus over courage. Articles settle into a tone that mirrors dominant academic and media discourse, much of which views India through a reformist, corrective lens. The subtext is always the same. Indian social systems are regressive. Deviance within them must therefore be read as rebellion, not depravity. To admit that a character emerging from such a setting can simply be evil would disrupt a narrative that has become comfortable, even profitable.
The result is a distortion that does violence to the film itself. Sister Midnight is not a pamphlet against arranged marriage. It is a disturbing, unsettling work that refuses moral comfort. Its protagonist is not a spokesperson for feminist suffering. She is a figure of horror. By rebranding her as a wronged woman pushed too far, Wikipedia robs the film of its nerve and its danger.
This trend matters because Wikipedia presents itself as neutral ground. Readers arrive expecting description, not instruction. What they receive instead is a moral framing that aligns neatly with a particular worldview while claiming objectivity. The bias is quiet, bureaucratic, and therefore more insidious than open polemic.
The issue is not feminism, nor is it critique of social institutions. Both have their place. The issue is dishonesty masquerading as balance. When every Indian narrative is bent to confirm the same assumptions, it stops being analysis and starts becoming ideology management. Wikipedia, in such moments, ceases to be an encyclopaedia and becomes a sermon, delivered with footnotes and a straight face.
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