You can’t sit with us: How Indian girls are navigating female rivalry amid the need for sisterhood

Pic/Satej Shinde

The video from Bennett University lasted only a few seconds where a group of girls were seen cornering, slapping and humiliating another girl. For many women, watching it online reopened memories that stretched across years. The accused student was reportedly rusticated after the clip went viral. Yet beneath the outrage we wonder why do so many girls grow up learning to fear other girls before they learn to trust them?

For generations, girlhood has been an invisible curriculum of comparison. Who is prettier? Who do the boys like more? Long before many young women learn the language of solidarity, they are often introduced to competition. Sometimes it takes the form of gossip disguised as concern, or humiliation softened into "just joking".

Psychologists call this "relational aggression" and it's rooted in social exclusion, manipulation, and emotional control. A 2012 study on adolescents in urban India, published in the International Journal of Behavioural Development, found that relational aggression among teenagers was closely tied to popularity and peer status, suggesting that social power often shapes teenage friendships.

Experts say this behaviour does not emerge in isolation. Girls often grow up within systems that reward comparison from beauty standards and academic pressure to social media validation and male attention.

Samiksha Nair remembers Class 6 not through report cards or school events, but through comments that slowly changed the way she saw herself. "I was really close to these two girls. We used to meet every single day, and I never thought I was being bullied," she says. At the time, the remarks felt casual, even helpful. Her friends mocked the way she dressed, the oil in her hair, the hairstyles she wore. "They would tell me, ‘Jaha se tu kapde leti hai, it's so down market.' I genuinely thought they were being honest with me because they were my friends."

Over time, she began scrutinising her appearance, believing she needed to change herself to fit in. Looking back now, she recognises it as a form of aggression disguised as being a girl's girl. It is something that a lot of girls experience growing up but rarely recognise. "Girls gossiping and b'tching about other girls they appear to be nice to is very common. I've seen it happen in friend groups, even participated in such conversations sometimes," she admits.

Nair says what makes the experience exhausting is how normalised it becomes during adolescence. "You're trying to figure yourself out, and constantly feeling judged by others can get draining." Still, she says finding genuine female friendships later in life changed her understanding of sisterhood entirely. "Now I have girlfriends who are my comfort. Female friendship can actually be one of the safest and most amazing things to have."

‘Expectations are higher than their emotional maturity'

Clinical psychologist Chandra Kumary SD points out that friendships in teens become emotionally intense spaces where validation is an achievement

Clinical psychologist Chandra Kumary S D of the Mpower school programme says the tension in teenage girl friendships often begins at a developmental level. "Adolescence is a major phase of change. Bodies, emotions and identity are all shifting quickly," she explains. In this period of uncertainty, friendships become emotionally heightened spaces where validation matters deeply.

Chandra Kumary SD

"Many girls want to feel liked, valued or chosen," she says. This can easily translate into thoughts like "I should be the best" or "I should be the one", which then fuel insecurity, comparison and competition.

She adds that today's environment intensifies these feelings. "Girls are growing up with constant exposure through social media. Validation comes instantly through likes, attention, and comparison," she says. When this external feedback loop intersects with school pressure, academic expectations and rigid beauty standards, it can outpace emotional development. "Sometimes expectations are higher than their emotional maturity," she notes.

"Teenagers are still learning self-worth, emotional balance and identity," she says. "They are also managing parental expectations, school pressure and the need to feel accepted." In this constant push-and-pull, friendships can become complicated, shaped as much by insecurity as by affection, while girls are still figuring out how to feel secure within themselves.

‘That's just how girls work'

Meghna Sharma tells us how she has prepped her teenage daughter, who is at a hostel in an elite residential school, to be resilient

A 13-year-old girl studying in a residential school in Rajasthan is learning independence, but also, as her mother Meghna Sharma puts it, an early sense of comparison. "As my daughter and her friends are growing up, I can see them becoming more competitive. Whenever one of them wins a medal or performs better, it seems to inspire an even stronger competitive spirit among the others," Sharma says. "If she doesn't get through achievements like others do, she feels like, ‘I could have done better'," she adds.

Meghna Sharma

Before her daughter left for boarding school, Sharma says she prepared her for the emotional realities of growing up among girls. "I used to tell her that girls are very competitive, sometimes they can be nasty, they can pull you down," she says, describing it as a kind of survival warning passed from one generation to the next. In the hostel environment, disagreements among friends often feel intensified.

"Whenever she calls me upset about a disagreement or comment within the dorm, she always says that she and her friends need to stand by each other to work through the issues," Sharma says. However, she always advises resilience. "Life is unfair," she tells her daughter. "That's a reality and an important lesson." Yet she acknowledges that while girls can be each other's harshest critics, they are also deeply capable of solidarity and care.

‘Everyone feels there can be only one hero'

Author and screenwriter Anuja Chauhan explains how girls are conditioned to believe there is limited space for attention and success

Indian novelist and screenwriter Anuja Chauhan says she once hoped things would be different for this generation with greater awareness around feminism, therapy, and "girl support girl" conversations. "Everybody is so self-aware now, I thought this wasn't happening anymore," she says. "You're woke enough, you understand feminism, that girls should side with girls but at the same time everyone wants to be seen."

Anuja Chauhan

She describes teenage female friendships as emotionally crowded spaces where performance often replaces ease. "Everybody is trying to be the good person, but in their own narrative they think they are right," she says. What looks like bonding or group behaviour from the outside, she adds, is often "roleplaying that is constantly switched on", where inclusion and exclusion blur into social strategy. Even acts of meanness, she suggests, can feel justified within that internal logic.

"Everyone feels there can only be one hero," she says, describing how girls are often conditioned to believe there is limited space for success, beauty, or attention. "The idea that many girls can shine at the same time doesn't fit into people's heads." Chauhan believes that this competition is about how girls are taught to imagine their worth in a world that rarely tells them there is enough room for all.

‘I've always been made an outcast'

Anya Anthony recalls her teenage years, where she was ostracised from girls' groups for not meeting their "standards"

For Anya Anthony, female rivalry often showed up less as direct cruelty and more as subtle exclusion. "At 16, we're all still forming our personalities, our cliques, our identities," she says. But within those circles, loyalty could shift quickly. A close friend who often mocked other girls as "annoying" or "pick me" later turned the same behaviour towards Anthony after the two had a falling out. "It becomes this snowball effect," she explains. "A group of girls suddenly starts telling others not to involve themselves with you over something they don't even fully know about."

Anya Anthony

Growing up in a sheltered environment, Anthony says she became aware of ideas around desirability much later than her peers. But among girls in her housing society, competition around boys had already started to shape friendships. She recalls being abruptly excluded from group plans and outings without explanation. "To this day, I don't know why it happened," she says. "But I know male attention was at the centre of it."

One memory still stands out to her of a girl warning her friends not to "dress nicely" when her crush was around. "It sounds silly now," Anthony laughs, "but that's how early girls start feeling like they have to compete." Those experiences eventually shaped her understanding of what being a "girl's girl" actually means. "It's not about these so called rules we set up," she says. "Its about looking out for other women as a whole, from the smallest of things. Looking out for strangers to your closest friends."