The Great Indian Kitchen

How do you show patriarchy without drunken men, womanising, adultery or abuse: as it exists in everyday life, with a kitchen, sink and a few men and women! We may not have drunken bawling men at home, but we all have a kitchen and a sink: both playing pivotal roles in this movie, replicating life on screen.

About 10 minutes into the movie, my 12-year-old says, “Men Suck”. And not soon thereafter her younger sister asks, “Why are men so lazy?”. The movie has done what it set out to in less than 10 minutes. Two impressionable girls have a few questions they will want answers to.

I had to stop watching with them when there was a love making scene. The woman’s bare hand is stretched out on the bed and she takes it to her face so she can smell it. She frowns. She doesn’t like the smell of the day’s work in the kitchen that has settled itself down on her palm. That will be her story every day; every night as she is raped by her husband.

This movie wasn’t constructed to please. It was carefully laid up brick by brick to make men squirm in their seats. Every scene tells a tale. When she leaves the drudgery behind and walks by the sea to her place, there are people in the background sweeping their courtyard or bathing the boys- none of them are men. The background score is outstanding: crackling chilies, the sound of the mixer-grinder, grating of coconuts, hoot of the blow pipe kindling the fire, broom sweeping the floor, ammikallu grinding, water dripping, sink gurgling, utensils clanging and pressure cooker whistling. This is what every woman listens to every waking moment. And this is what they dream of when the man is doing it at night. Sometime towards the latter half, these sounds form the background for a montage of happy photographs that ends with their wedding picture telling us how these sounds must have been the background for each one of those marriages. The sounds are relentless. It just worms into your ears and stays back with you.

Towards the beginning of the movie, he is in the kitchen with her, telling her how nice the tea she made is. He drinks the tea from his cup and then keeps it by the sink. She takes it and washes it, her wrists dazzling with gold bangles. These hands clean more than just a teacup once those bangles go into the treasure chest. Towards the end of the movie, this scene repeats itself: there is another woman now with even more gold bangles. The man can resume his life after a comma. The woman puts a period and starts a new life. And while one girl liberates herself by the end of the movie and finds her calling, another may have walked into the trap — willingly?

The movie starts with a happy girl dancing away to happy music while her folks are frying bananas to welcome her would be groom. When everyone lets the man and the woman be by themselves, they confess to having the same problem. This probably is the only time they shared something. Scenes move rapidly as she is welcomed to the man’s house by his mother and aunt holding a lamp and asking her to put her right foot first. While it may be the aunt who asked her to do that, you can hear the men giving instructions, never losing their sense of importance, even if it be repeating what the women said. Orders can only come from the men.

Nights pass quickly in this movie while the days trudge.

The morning after, she wonders why they need sambar and chutney for the dosa here. The mother-in-law explains that everyone has their preferences; something you recognize she has learnt, adapted to and delivered for the past many decades. The men here have their own cups in which the women unfailingly serve them tea after tea. My heart pained at seeing the mother-in-law grinding away in the kitchen: that could have been any woman in the house I was brought up in. She has been toiling for so long that the flames don’t burn her when she checks the lid on the pot of, quite unlike her daughter-in-law, who is still coming to terms. The two of them race between the kitchen and dining room to serve piping hot dosas and then make a few for themselves to sit and eat after the men. The men think nothing of scattering waste and leaving their plates with leftovers on the table. The filth on the table makes the girl pause before sitting down to eat. Her post graduate mother-in-law walks past her and sits on the table nonchalantly. She has internalized the life that the men of the house expected of her.

When she is cutting the okra, she wants to know what length to cut it to. Her mother-in-law says she could cut it as she pleases. That was the only time she was given a choice! But the mother-in-law has not just this house to look after; she must help her daughter who is pregnant and lives in another town. The one person who could have been her ally has packed a full bag and gone.

She wakes up the next day and offers morning tea to her father in law who is on his easy chair reading the morning papers.

“But, I haven’t brushed molu”, he says.

She asks him to brush; she would warm the tea for him then.

“But I haven’t got my toothbrush, molu”.

This was the beginning of many endearments he showers on her. “But please cook the rice on fire, molu” “Please don’t wash my clothes in the washing machine molu”. His postgraduate wife would do all these for him like clockwork. Her departure has had him have to wear his footwear on his own.

The sweet-talking father-in-law gets under your skin. The husband is your everyday man, in who you catch glimpses of yourself. Like in life, villains don’t come dressed up to scare you, they live with you. The movie makes you question everything you have seen at home and shames you.

With her mother-in-law in the kitchen, the coconut would be ground on stone, the rice would be cooked in a pot over wood fire, the clothes would be washed beating it on a stone and dosas would come in piping hot. The men are always at the table expecting food to magically turn up. They get it the way they want it. Even when his wife doesn’t have any support in the kitchen, the man doesn’t think twice about asking for his entitlement of hot dosas.

There is this scene that shows a sink filling to the brim. It was around that time in the movie that you feel that she has had enough. As if it wasn’t enough to meet the exacting daily demands of the men, she now has new tests awaiting her. And these are ones beyond the house.

Having been in the gulf most of her life, she has never seen anyone in her family undertake the penance to go to Sabarimala. When the Sabarimala verdict was passed, the social fabric in Kerala was abruptly subject to new pressures. And just like that the movie too abruptly moves from her struggles within the house to those outside jolting the viewer. She warms the left over cherupayar and offers it for breakfast, she runs to help him when he falls of the scooter, she plucks a Tulsi leaf for her cold, she sits on a bed when she is menstruating! She just doesn’t seem to do anything right. The father-in-law calls his sister to set things right so he can go complete his penance. The sister comes in to police her, quarantine her and run the house — for seven days after which she will be pure. She is now locked in a room.

Ah! there is this scene where she tells her husband that she has had her periods.

“So, you haven’t made the morning tea, I suppose”

“No”

“Good. We will get Usha to cook for us”

When all she wanted was for him to buy her some sanitary pads, she gets a lesson on how her bodily functions may have made her impure.

Usha is a lady who works as a household help. She keeps humming songs as she works. She confides in her that she has cooked in kitchens when she was menstruating. How could she lose 4–5 days of work because of this. There is this scene where Usha asks for some money and then goes on to ask how she was:

“Sughamano”

“Bhayangara Sughama”

‘I am very well’, she said. That brought a tear!

When she wants to apply for the job of a dance teacher, her father-in-law turns it down sweetly saying it won’t befit their stature. He later expounds the virtues of the housewife rationalising his decision. But her mother-in-law, on the phone, encourages her to apply. This is the same mother-in-law who was on the phone asking the men why they could not adjust with the rice cooked in the pressure cooker. I wonder if the story would have been different had she not gone to help her daughter. Or maybe it may have eased her into the patriarchy, and she would have been just another woman.

There is a little girl. Curious as all girls are, I saw some defiance in her when she walked into the room where she was quarantined during her periods with some rose apples, despite repeatedly being told not to. Is she symbolising the next generation that could be defiant and rebellious? Janaki.

The men here can do as they please. Their house, their rules. And if need be, they can bend these rules too. Having been touched by a woman during his abstinence, the priest tells him that he has to eat cowdung to purify himself. But then he could just dip in the pond if he wanted and that would purify him. The women had no way around the rules that ran the house. They had to stick by them.

Before he was to start abstaining, he wanted to ‘do it’. It hurts her she said, and it would be nice if there was some ‘foreplay’. That word seemed to hit him, and he accusingly asks her “So you know all these”. This is the man who teaches a class of girls what family is!

This is a movie with men sitting around tables and eating. This is a story about women’s hands that toil round the clock to serve the men at this table. The only time the men cook, they leave the kitchen worse than a battlefield and don’t even realise the work load they have added. Men are doing yogasana, swiping phones or reading the morning papers while the women create music in the kitchen slowly imprisoning themselves in a cage the men sweetly built for them.

As if to say that there is another world out there, there is a scene showing a glimpse of the relationship her friend and her husband share. While it did seem a little out of place not doing anything beyond playing out the stark difference in the two households. Maybe it was the directors way of saying, ‘not all households’.

No further spoilers, but you have to watch it till the end.

Only two characters have names in this movie: Usha and Janaki, the two who are friendly to her and are the exception to the rule. The others in the movie are every man and woman dealing with patriarchy around the world in its various forms.

Suraj and Nimisha, the lead characters have been impressive, Nimisha specially! She immerses herself in the character. Every character seem to be cast well. I liked the mother-in-law too as she seemed to resemble many women in my family. Every scene in the movie counts. The movie makes very strong statements on patriarchy, religion and politics. That it does this with no grandstanding but with long laborious shots and scene after scene of everyday life will make it difficult for you to ignore.