Abstract
<title>Abstract</title> <p>Maternal grief is not only an individual loss for the mother, but a complex, multi-dimensional process that includes the use of digital surveillance as well. In this context, the article examines Rajni Jain, a food vlogger known as Chatori Rajni, who lost her son in a road accident in February 2025. The study analyses how grieving mothers, particularly Rajni, negotiate bereavement in online spaces. Drawing on Stroebe and Schut’s (1999) “Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement” and O’Connor’s (2019) “neuroscientific framework”, the study provides an in-depth understanding of digital manifestations of grief experienced by the bereaved mothers. Using qualitative thematic analysis and discourse analysis of social media posts and comments, the paper examines the audience’s response to Rajni’s grief and how they prescribe normative modes of coping and compel the grieving mothers like her to perform culturally acceptable grief. The analysis generated five overarching themes: prescriptive healing, public accountability, moral policing, continuing bonds, and digital sisterhood. The findings suggest that mothers who mourn online experience gendered moral policing, which results in an oscillation between affirmation and denunciation, silence and voice. Digital memorialization practices, which include sharing photographs, videos, stories, and culinary memories, serve as mechanisms for mothers to maintain their maternal identity and facilitate grief work. The paper argues that the process of coping with loss should acknowledge the variability in responses to loss, particularly in digitally mediated contexts, and when grief becomes publicly visible, it becomes subject to social regulation, where the audience both supports and attempts to grief police, troll, judge, question, and impose a restraint on how a mother is supposed to grieve online. Yet the findings also suggest that digital mourning can create forms of solidarity that coexist with, and sometimes resist, these normative pressures.</p>