From Kitty Parties to Kirtans, Why Women-Only Gatherings Are Spaces of Healing, Not Just Gossip

Think of Carrie Bradshaw's brunch table in Sex and the City, or the defiant female circle at the heart of The Great Shamsuddin Family, and you begin to notice a pattern: whenever women gather together, the world grows quietly uneasy. Perhaps because something decidedly non-trivial tends to happen when they do.

In India, these gatherings wear many faces. A kitty party in CR Park on a Tuesday afternoon. A kirtan that stretches past midnight in West Delhi. A Pilates class in South Delhi that doubles, improbably, as a confessional. A midnight walk through Mayur Vihar where young women reclaim streets that were never formally offered to them. Mocked as gossip circles, dismissed as "aunty culture," or reduced to a punchline, these spaces are, in truth, something altogether more essential, and the women inside them have always known it.

The Psychology of Belonging

Science has long confirmed what women in sarees and salwar suits have quietly understood. Psychologist Shelley Taylor's landmark research at UCLA introduced the "tend and befriend" response, the finding that women, under stress, instinctively seek social connection, producing oxytocin through communal bonding rather than retreating into fight or flight. A 2015 meta-analysis published in Perspectives on Psychological Science by researcher Julianne Holt-Lunstad found that social isolation carries a mortality risk equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day, a sobering measure of how profoundly human beings need one another.

"Women's gatherings serve a therapeutic function that formal therapy often cannot replicate," says Mihika, a queer psychotherapist based out of Delhi. "These are spaces where a woman is not a patient, not a client, she is simply herself, amongst people who genuinely see her. The healing that happens in collective, informal settings is deeply valid and deeply powerful. We underestimate it because we have been conditioned to undervalue the things women build for themselves."

Shreya Menon, 21, a Delhi University student, came to this understanding on foot. She joined Women Walk at Midnight, a collective of women spread across the country,  and now even across the world , who reclaim city streets after dark and well past midnight, expecting, if nothing else, new friends and a sense of community. What she encountered was far richer.

"Walking Delhi's streets at night with other women felt like reclaiming space that never felt ours before," she says. "We shared career anxieties, relationship doubts, even book recommendations. It's like a moving classroom, a picnic, and a therapy circle all combined, where every step reminds me that solidarity is stronger than fear, for us, always together now."

Building the Room

Some are now creating these spaces with deliberate, architectural intention. Anu Bajaj is the founder of Evolve, India's first women-only wellness club, housed at Dhan Mill Compound in New Delhi. Evolve is not merely a facility; it is a philosophical statement, that women deserve dedicated, purposeful space in which they can simply exist, according to Bajaj. "What happens in those rooms, the conversations, the silence, the laughter, that is the real programme," says Bajaj. "We were building permission. Permission for women to arrive with no agenda except their own wellbeing."

That permission, once extended, transforms even the most seemingly ordinary setting. Nandita Kapoor,44, a marketing professional in South Delhi, attends a women-only Pilates class at Greater Kailash-1, that she describes as anything but routine. She joined for her fitness but stays till date, even after 5 long years for the community she has gained and the emotional support she gets from it. "My Pilates class looks ordinary from outside, but inside it feels like a sanctuary built by women for women. Between stretches, we talk about menopause, office politics, marriage fatigue, and dreams we postponed. The instructor corrects our posture, yet the group straightens our confidence. It's the one hour where nobody interrupts us, judges us, or needs us, and that freedom quietly strengthens both body and spirit more deeply than medicine ever could."

The Parliament That Already Exists

Long before wellness clubs and organised collectives gave women's gathering a contemporary vocabulary, there were kitty parties and kirtans, and they have never needed rebranding, though often ridiculed across social media as gossip mongering spaces, ‘data-transfer centres’, and attached to any middle-aged woman as ‘kitty-party aunty’ in terms of age-shaming.

Meena Chatterjee, 68, a retired school teacher and kitty party host in CR Park for over two decades, is characteristically direct, "I have hosted kitty parties in CR Park for over twenty years, and people who mock them have clearly never sat inside one. We discuss everything from rising vegetable prices to our children’s careers and our own health scares. Recipes are exchanged alongside investment advice. Much of my own family recipes I would have forgotten if not for this group, much of my everyday movement and recommendations from this group. I don’t have to rely on Google or Zomato for reviews, I get it from first-hand experience. Laughter comes easily, but so do tears when someone needs support. These afternoons are our parliament and our celebration of surviving life with grace and dignity, always."

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For Kavita Arora, 55, a homemaker and an avid kirtan organiser in West Delhi, the gathering is both spiritual and profoundly human. "In West Delhi, our kirtans and jagratas are not just religious rituals; they are lifelines of the community. When women gather to sing bhajans through the night, something shifts inside us. We bring our worries, our children's struggles, our financial tensions, and place them gently before the divine and each other. Faith is present, yes, but so is friendship, advice, humour, and healing that no doctor or priest alone could ever provide to women like us."

The room, whichever form it takes, a living room in CR Park, a night-lit lane near Kailash Colony, a studio at Dhan Mill, a patch of pavement at midnight, is not incidental to what happens inside it. That is the point. The women who fill these spaces have not been waiting for the world to catch up. They have simply been getting on with it.