She peels, bites, grinds, cooks, serves, washes the dishes, sweeps and mops the floor. He eats. She rushed. He sits quietly, doing yoga – inhaling, exhaling.
This is the story of The Great Indian Kitchen, a small budget film in Malay that brilliantly captures the nuances of a patriarchal home and brings out the horrors of everyday life.
Already being called “the revolutionary film of the year”, the drama unfolding in a dark and dirty kitchen in a “respectable” middle-class home has become a major point of discussion in the southern state of Kerala and in the social networks and raised many unsettling questions about insidious sexism within the home.
“It’s a universal story. A woman’s struggle in the kitchen is the story of almost every woman in India,” said Jeo Baby, the film’s director. “Men think women are machines for making tea, washing clothes and raising children.”
The inspiration for The Great Indian Kitchen, he says, came to him in his own kitchen.
“After I got married in 2015, I started spending a lot of time in the kitchen, as I believe in gender equality. That’s when I realized that cooking involves a lot of hard work ”.
After a while, he says, he started thinking about “how to escape the kitchen – drudgery, monotony and repetition”.
“I felt like I was stuck in a prison. And then I started thinking about all the women who can’t escape and it bothered me.”
The film opens with a wedding. Like most Indian weddings, this one is also arranged – the bride and groom, played by the main actors Nimisha Sajayan and Suraj Venjaramoodu, met only once, surrounded by the family, and shared an affected conversation.
The festivities over, the guests are gone, the daily toil begins. The new bride joins her mother-in-law in the kitchen to ensure her husbands are well fed and happy. For, as the saying goes, the way to a man’s heart is through the stomach.
Life is just as sordid in the room where she is expected to provide sex every night, whether she is willing or not – for the woman’s heart, in India’s patriarchal configuration, is of little importance.
The film – which is being broadcast on the Neestream app after being rejected by Netflix and Amazon – has received rave reviews from critics and audiences, especially women.
“It is very identifiable. There is no violence in the film, nobody is demonized. It is a very realistic portrait of the insensitivity deeply rooted in our homes,” said Clinta PS, assistant professor of English at Christ College in the city of Irinjalakuda. the BBC.
Professor Clinta says she saw her mother and other women fighting in the kitchen because meals in Kerala are “too elaborate”.
“They involve a lot of cutting, washing, grinding and lining and take a lot of time. It can be simplified, but we don’t. And that’s because they tell a woman that her husband and family are everything, that she exists only to make them happy, she said to be a superwoman. “
Kerala is one of the most progressive states in India, it is often cited as the only place in the country that has achieved 100% literacy and a large number of women here work in formal jobs. But, says Professor Clinta, Kerala society is as patriarchal as the rest of India.
“We talked about the empowerment of women in Kerala, a large number of women are leaving for work, but at the end of the day, women have to do all the tasks, even in highly educated and progressive families.”
Her own home, she says, is gender neutral and chores are shared equally between her school friend who became a husband three years ago, but at her parents’ house it’s a very different story.
“Men know about gender equality, but that is not important in their own homes. Like most Indian men, my father also has two weights and two measures. I had heated arguments with him for being unfair to my mother. He is a modern, progressive man at home, the burden of housework is entirely borne by my mother. “
There is a popular saying in Kerala, she says, which translates to “you wear progressive slippers, but leave them at the door”.
In India, as in many other parts of the world, the burden of unpaid care work normally falls on women. According to a report by the International Labor Organization, in 2018 women in India’s cities spent 312 minutes a day in unpaid work. The men did 29 minutes.
That’s what The Great Indian Kitchen wants to change.
“Women live in prisons created by men. Men are the decision makers, women are the workers and they don’t even get paid for it ”, says Baby. “Through the film, I want to tell women that you must get out of this trap, why continue to suffer? This is also your world to enjoy.”
It will be a while before real change takes place, but The Great Indian Kitchen has certainly started a conversation about gender equality in the home.
A Malayali colleague told me that all of his friends and family were discussing the issue in their WhatsApp groups.
There has also been a lot of talk on social media with many people, mainly women, accessing Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to comment on the film and recommend it to their friends and followers.
“It’s our story,” wrote one. “It exposes our vision,” said another. Still another wrote that “the brightness of the film lies in the fact that it did not exaggerate, did not point a finger at anyone and showed us that gentle, soft-spoken men can be the most toxic”. Some speculated that the director of The Great Indian Kitchen must be a woman.
Some wrote that the film’s most important achievement was making the men squirm.
A man wrote on Facebook that after watching the movie, he felt guilty. Another said, “I can’t write more about this because I’m the same person [the entitled husband]. “Yet another described it as” an eye-opener “.
Professor Clinta says that it is good that people have started a dialogue, but it will take years, if not decades, to change the ideas rooted over the centuries.
“I discuss these issues with my colleagues and, in my class, I try to use my lectures to raise awareness among my students. Male students theoretically understand gender equality, but I’m not sure if they are willing to give up their privileges, ”she says. .
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