If we are assigning Lana Del Rey’s “The Other Woman” to Bajirao Mastani and immediately pointing at Mastani, we need to sit down, hydrate, and re-evaluate the emotional architecture of this film.
Because the obvious reading says Mastani is “the other woman.” She is the second love, the controversial arrival, the woman outside the marriage. Easy label. Clean category. Neat little box.
But Bajirao Mastani is not a neat film, and pain rarely respects labels.
If we listen closely to “The Other Woman,” the woman in the song is elegant, waiting, lonely, polished, and emotionally sidelined by a man who splits his presence elsewhere. She has the home. She has the role. She has the appearance of legitimacy. Yet she does not have his whole heart.
Now tell me with a straight face that this is not Kashibai.
Because Kashibai has the house, the name, the sanctioned marriage, the family’s respect, the social position, the rituals, the rightful seat beside Bajirao. But when Mastani enters, Kashi becomes the woman standing inside the official life while being edged outside the emotional one.
And that is the most brutal kind of displacement. To still be present, still be respected, still be “the wife,” yet feel love shifting somewhere you cannot follow.
So yes, Mastani is called the other woman by society. But emotionally? Kashibai is the one living the song.
Let us unpack this beautifully painful mess.
Bajirao Mastani is not simply a love story.
It is a grand, glittering tragedy about desire colliding with duty, patriarchy colliding with passion, and one woman forever placed in the impossible position of being both cherished and condemned. Mastani is admired, pursued, and deeply loved by Bajirao, yet she is never granted the uncomplicated dignity of belonging. She enters rooms like royalty, but is treated like an intrusion. She is the centre of his heart and the scandal of everyone else’s conversation.
The genius of “The Other Woman” is that it understands something many stories avoid. Being the chosen secret is not the same as being chosen publicly. And that wound? Bajirao Mastani wears it like jewellery.
So if Lana Del Rey wrote in candlelight, Bhansali directed in chandeliers. Let’s talk about why Mastani is the ultimate “other woman” archetype, and why her loneliness echoes louder than every war cry in the film.
Kashibai has everything except certainty.
“The other woman has time to manicure her nails / The other woman is perfect where her rival fails.”
This lyric is often read as describing glamour and seduction, but there is another layer. Domestic stillness. Polished femininity. The woman who has learned how to hold a household, a reputation, and herself together.
That is Kashibai coded to the marrow.
Kashi is grace embodied. She is warm, dignified, devoted, emotionally intelligent, and deeply secure in her role at the beginning of the film. She knows the rhythms of Bajirao’s life, his family, his world. She is not scrambling for legitimacy because she already is legitimacy.
She represents continuity. Tradition. Partnership built over time. The sort of love that grows through familiarity rather than spectacle.
And yet, this is where the ache begins.
Women like Kashibai are often told that if they do everything right, love will remain stable. Be loyal. Be gentle. Be competent. Be supportive. Be beautiful but not vain, strong but not difficult, present but not demanding. Follow the rules and you will be safe.
Then life laughs.
Because love does not always reward correctness. Desire does not always obey structure. Men do not always remain where comfort built them.
Kashi’s tragedy is not that she fails. It is that she does nothing wrong and still suffers.
That kind of pain is difficult to narrate because there is no villainous act she committed, no flaw she can fix, no lesson she can learn to undo it. She is simply confronted with the devastating truth that someone can love you and still love elsewhere too.
Imagine being perfect on paper and still feeling replaced in practice.
That wound has no clean bandage.
Mastani is adored, but never allowed to belong.
“The other woman is perfect where her rival fails.”
That lyric lands like a dagger when placed beside Mastani. Because the tragedy of Mastani is not that she lacks grace, beauty, intelligence, or devotion. She possesses all of it in abundance. She is skilled in battle, magnetic in presence, emotionally fearless, spiritually loyal, and so luminous that the screen practically bends around her. She is not written as lesser. She is written as extraordinary.
And yet, extraordinary women often threaten ordinary systems.
Mastani enters Bajirao’s life not as a schemer, not as a seductress, but as an equal in courage and conviction. She rides beside him, fights beside him, loves him without apology. She is not trying to steal a place. She creates one naturally. That is precisely why the world around her cannot bear it.
Because the issue was never whether Mastani was worthy. The issue was that society had already decided who was acceptable.
Kashibai represents legitimacy, tradition, social order, the marriage everyone can publicly respect. Mastani represents disruption, passion, complexity, and a love that refuses to fit neat boxes. So no matter how deeply Bajirao loves her, Mastani remains outside the gates of approval.
And that is where the lyric becomes devastating. The “other woman” is often framed as competition, but in reality she is frequently trapped inside a game she did not design. Mastani is not competing with Kashibai as much as she is battling an entire structure that insists love only counts when stamped by society.
She can be perfect where others fail. She can be brave where others tremble. She can be loyal where others judge. It still does not grant her belonging.
That is the sharpest cruelty of all. Sometimes excellence cannot save you from exclusion.
Kashibai is the queen in the house, but lonely in the marriage.
“And when her old man comes to call / He finds her waiting like a lonesome queen.”
I need everyone to breathe for a second because this lyric might as well have been embroidered on Kashibai’s sarees.
Kashibai is the publicly recognised queen of Bajirao’s world. She has the household, the rituals, the authority, the place beside the family. She is surrounded by wealth, attendants, respect, and ceremony. She is not lacking status.
She is lacking emotional security.
And there is a specific loneliness that comes from being surrounded by everything except the one thing you actually want.
Kashi does not wait for a man who abandoned her physically. She waits for a man whose body returns, but whose heart has become divided. That is a far subtler heartbreak. Harder to explain. Harder to protest. Harder to grieve publicly.
If he leaves entirely, society understands your sorrow. If he stays but shifts inwardly elsewhere, people tell you to be grateful he still comes home.
That is emotional gaslighting with bangles.
Kashibai must continue functioning. Smiling. Hosting. Performing normalcy while privately registering every fracture in intimacy. Every changed glance. Every delayed return. Every tenderness now shared in another direction.
And because she is dignified, she cannot explode without consequence. She must bleed elegantly.
A “lonesome queen” is not a woman without power. It is a woman whose power cannot purchase peace.
Kashi embodies that perfectly.
Mastani’s glamour is armour, not victory.
“The other woman enchants her clothes with French perfume.”
This lyric understands performance, and Bajirao Mastani is built on performance. Jewels. Fabrics. Architecture. Ceremony. Gold shimmering over wounds. No filmmaker wraps pain in splendour quite like Sanjay Leela Bhansali.
Mastani is consistently framed as dazzling. Her entrance, her clothing, her poise, her elegance, her dance sequences, her stillness under scrutiny. She is spectacle. She is beauty elevated into myth. But beauty in this story is not ease. It is armour.
Every ornament she wears feels like defiance. Every graceful movement feels like discipline. Every perfectly composed expression feels rehearsed against humiliation.
Because imagine the emotional labour required to remain regal in a room determined to diminish you.
This is where “The Other Woman” becomes painfully relevant. The polished woman in the song appears serene, controlled, enviable. But perfection is often a coping mechanism. If she is flawless enough, perhaps she cannot be criticised. If she is elegant enough, perhaps she cannot be dismissed. If she remains poised enough, perhaps the heartbreak will look smaller.
Mastani does the same. Her glamour is not proof she is winning. It is proof she has learned to survive scrutiny beautifully.
And women know this script too well. How often are women expected to suffer prettily? To endure rejection gracefully? To smile through disrespect because composure photographs better than rage?
Mastani’s beauty is frequently discussed as power, and yes, it is. But it is also burden. She must always appear untouchable while being constantly wounded.
That is not luxury. That is labour in silk.
Society validates Kashibai’s title, but cannot heal her hurt.
One of the cruelest things about Kashibai’s position is that the world constantly affirms her status while ignoring her pain.
She is still the wife. Still respected. Still first in hierarchy. Still the one everyone publicly backs. On paper, she “wins.”
But emotional life is not scored on paper.
This is where many readings of love triangles fail women. We treat legitimacy as consolation. As though titles can soothe heartbreak. As though being chosen first erases being emotionally displaced later.
Kashibai receives sympathy wrapped in expectations. Be mature. Be patient. Be understanding. Protect the family honour. Maintain composure. Accept complexity. Endure quietly.
In short, suffer beautifully.
Meanwhile, no one can hand her the one thing she actually needs. Mutual certainty.
Her pain is invisible because it is socially inconvenient. There is no dramatic exile, no public humiliation comparable to Mastani’s. Instead, there is something slower and often more recognisable. Internal erosion.
Many women know this feeling intimately. To be technically cherished but emotionally lonely. To have the label without the warmth. To have commitment in structure but distance in spirit.
Kashibai is not just hurt by Bajirao’s love for Mastani. She is hurt by a society that sees her symbolic victory as enough.
It is not enough.
To be loved privately and denied publicly is its own heartbreak.
“And when her old man comes to call / He finds her waiting like a lonesome queen.”
This may be the most Mastani lyric in the entire song.
Because so much of her relationship with Bajirao exists in moments stolen from systems. Private tenderness. Intimate declarations. Emotional certainty shared away from the gaze of those who reject her. She is his in feeling, but not in freedom.
A “lonesome queen” is exactly what Mastani becomes.
She has the devotion of a powerful man, but not the peace that should come with it. She has passion, but not protection. She has his heart, but not his world. And what is love worth when it cannot shield you from daily humiliation?
This is the part many romantic narratives skip over. Being loved by someone powerful does not automatically make your life easier if that power is never fully used in your defence.
Yes, Bajirao loves Mastani deeply. That is undeniable. But love alone cannot dismantle the structures hurting her, especially when he remains tied to those same structures. His affection is sincere. His ability to secure her place is limited, inconsistent, or tragically late.
So Mastani waits. She waits in longing, in hope, in resilience, in rooms where she is both treasured and isolated.
The image of waiting “like a queen” is cruelly perfect. Queens are adorned, elevated, admired. They are also lonely, watched, and often politically trapped.
Mastani is not lonely because she is unloved. She is lonely because love is not enough.
That distinction hurts the most.
Kashibai’s grace is not weakness. It is survival.
One of the most misunderstood things about Kashibai is her restraint. Because audiences often mistake quiet pain for passivity.
Absolutely not.
Kashi’s composure is not lack of depth. It is discipline under devastation.
She does not collapse publicly because women of her world are rarely allowed to. She does not scream because screaming would cost her more than silence. She does not become cruel because integrity matters to her even when life has not been fair.
That takes strength many louder characters never need to develop.
She navigates humiliation, heartbreak, divided loyalties, family politics, and emotional abandonment while retaining softness. Do you know how difficult it is to remain kind when wounded? Olympic-level difficult.
Her femininity is not ornamental. It is strategic. Her grace is not decorative. It is armour.
And perhaps that is why audiences ache for her so deeply. Mastani burns bright and tragic, but Kashibai endures. There is something profoundly human about the woman who keeps standing after tenderness has been bruised.
She is not dramatic because she cannot afford to be.
That does not make her pain smaller. It makes it quieter.
Sometimes the quiet hurts longest.
The ending was always written in loneliness.
“The other woman will always cry herself to sleep… The other woman will spend her life alone.”
Lana’s final verses are not melodramatic. They are prophetic.
The “other woman” in many stories is imagined as glamorous, dangerous, victorious, irresistible. But those fantasies rarely account for the emotional cost of loving in the margins. To live as someone’s great love while also being someone society refuses to legitimise is to live with constant precarity.
Mastani’s tragedy is not simply that people oppose her. It is that she carries the burden of proving her humanity in every room she enters.
She must prove she belongs. Prove she is sincere. Prove she is honourable. Prove she is worthy of a love already given to her. That is exhausting before it is heartbreaking.
And in the end, loneliness surrounds her not because she lacked love, but because love was forced into conflict with honour, family, politics, religion, and pride. The relationship is doomed not by absence of feeling, but by abundance of resistance.
That is why her story lingers. Many romances end because people stop loving each other. This one endures because they did not.
Mastani becomes the embodiment of a painful truth. Sometimes the deepest love stories are not the happiest. Sometimes they are the ones crushed by the world around them.
Sometimes they end exactly as the song promises.
Alone.
What makes Bajirao Mastani such a perfect companion to “The Other Woman” is that both understand the loneliness hidden inside beauty. They know that elegance can mask ache. That devotion can coexist with exclusion. That being adored is not the same as being safe. That being loved in private can feel like abandonment in public.
Mastani is not tragic because she loved the wrong man. She is tragic because she loved in a world too rigid to hold complexity. She was too brave for polite society, too visible for comfort, too undeniable to be ignored, and too inconvenient to be embraced.
And perhaps that is why audiences still ache for her.
We recognise the women who are asked to be graceful under pressure. We recognise those who must earn spaces others inherit freely. We recognise the heartbreak of giving your whole heart to something that cannot fully house it.
Lana Del Rey sang the sorrow softly. Bhansali staged it in grandeur. Mastani lived it in every glance, every silence, every step through halls that never welcomed her.
Some women are called “the other woman” simply because history did not know where else to place them.
Mastani deserved better than being an afterthought in anyone’s story. She was the story all along.
But if we listen to Lana Del Rey’s song through the lens of emotional reality rather than public titles, Kashibai emerges in devastating clarity.
She is polished, poised, and waiting. She is the queen in the home and the outsider in her own love story. She is surrounded by honour yet starved of certainty. She is loved, but not wholly held.
That is “The Other Woman” in its most heartbreaking form.
Because sometimes the other woman is not the second arrival. Sometimes she is the first woman who suddenly finds herself standing second in someone’s heart.
Kashibai’s story lingers because it is painfully common. Many people know what it is to keep the structure while losing the intimacy. To have the role while mourning the reality.
Mastani is the scandal history points at.
Kashibai is the sorrow many quietly recognise.
And that, babes, is the twist that hurts the most.
For more such articles, visit Her Campus at MUJ. And if you also believe that Bajirao was the real problem, find me at Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ.