Terrorists behind Closed Doors

This work draws from the reality of countless women and children who continue to suffer under the weight of dowry, domestic violence, marital abuse, and psychological terror. It questions where safety for women truly exists — before marriage, within marriage, or after it. Behind the symbolic use of white lies the fragile purity associated with motherhood and childhood, contrasted against the brutality that so often surrounds them.

The work emerged partly from reflecting on cases such as the murder of Nikita Singhaniya, alongside many unnamed stories that never reach public attention. Yet this is not only about one woman, one family, or one incident. It speaks to a wider social reality: women and children being beaten, silenced, violated, threatened, abandoned, or psychologically terrorised — sometimes privately behind closed doors, sometimes openly in public view.

I speak not only from observation, but from personal confrontation with these realities during my own period of life. These experiences were never something I had witnessed within my own family, which made the violence of society feel even more shocking and difficult to comprehend.

Everyday acts of violence against women and children strip away dignity, safety, and peace. The work asks a difficult but necessary question: if terror is defined by creating fear, helplessness, and trauma among innocent people, then why are these acts of violence not recognised with the same seriousness? This painting stands as both witness and protest against the normalisation of abuse hidden within ordinary life.

Draw from the horrific reality of cases, including gruesome case of Nikki. Similarly, each day countless women and children suffer under the weight of dowry, domestic violence and mental harassment. Where is safety for women before marriage she is unprotected after marriage she is even more vulnerable where violence is clocked in silence justified by case, religion, financial status and parental pride. The blood in the painting symbolises both literal violence on women and children as well as the process of birth along with the purity of motherhood and childhood symbolised by colour white.

It’s unfathomable, what Nikki’s son must be going through only in mother and sister-in-law driven by great heart involved, majorly. I speak not only from observation, but experience in my period I was confronted with this of society. Something never witnessed in my family not could access so this is not just about one woman, one family or one case. It is about every time against women and children from being hit, raped, kid or silence and domestic abuse to the men who terrorise with nothing just from a distance, each act with a hidden behind stores or committed in public is a attack everyday‘s gruesome reality forces to ask, why do we not call these What terrorist, stripping away the peace and dignity of innocent people.