Mrs, The Great Indian Kitchen & the Cinema of Unseen Labour

Kitchen Confidential: The Silent Chains Of Patriarchy

Mrs joins The Great Indian Kitchen in exposing the kitchen as a site of silent oppression. More than just cooking, it's unpaid, invisible labour — one that patriarchy refuses to see as work, writes Subha J Rao .

EVER SINCE Arati Kadav’s Sanya Malhotra-starrer Mrs, the Hindi remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen , premiered on Zee5, there’s been constant chatter on social media. Many men, and some women have been outraged as to why a woman would mind cooking. Why would she complain when she has a family that gifts her jewellery? After all, all she has to do is cook. And be available when her husband desires sex.

The point of the movie completely bypassed them.

To those who questioned why expecting the wife to cook was considered patriarchal, there came a news report from Chennai in mid-February that a 79-year-old man with diabetes murdered his 65-year-old wife because she was unwell and failed to give him food on time. He thought it was her duty to cook and serve him on time. He thought he had that right over her.

There’s a space in most homes that has been romanticised beyond compare over the years, in real life and cinema. We have heard stories of the delectable fare that emerges from it, and seen images of succulent food. No one really spoke about the sweat and grime, and sheer toil. Everything was swept aside under the umbrella called mother’s/wife’s/sister’s love. No one realised that, over decades, the kitchen had become a prison of sorts for many women, who had no way of escape, even for a single meal. It was the place where, during certain religious occasions, they fasted, even as they cooked succulent dish upon dish for the men in the family. Where in smouldering summers, they bent over hot stoves, wiping off sweat to serve fresh food for every meal. Even in Mrs , the husband initially tells the wife that there’s nothing sexier than the smell of the kitchen on her. But when she speaks of intimacy issues, he uses those very words to wound her: "You stink of the kitchen!"

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In noted writer Ambai’s Veetin Moolayil Oru Samayal Arai ( A Kitchen in the Corner of the House ), reference is made to the smells of the kitchen. One of the characters tells another who has spent a lifetime cooking and is very unwell in her last days: “ Delve deeper into your private well, touch the vast waters and be in touch with the world around you. The smell of food and cooking that sticks to your vagina, breasts and uterus will go away. ”

Two filmmakers — Vasanth S Sai in Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum (Sony LIV) and Jeo Baby in The Great Indian Kitchen (Amazon Prime Video), dared to focus the spotlight on the labour behind it all. In between, there was R Kannan’s faithful Tamil remake of TGIK . The Malayalam original starred Nimisha Sajayan and the Tamil version featured Aishwarya Rajesh, both fine actors whose crumpling faces showed the state of the marriage.

The latest to join that list is Mrs . That these creations dared to speak of the sheer repetitive drudgery of the kitchen, which only women are consigned to, has not gone well with the crowd that still has a patriarchal mindset.

In 2020’s Sivaranjiniyum Innum Sila Pengalum , which won its actor Lakshmi Priyaa Chandramouli a National Award for Best Supporting Actress, promising athlete Sivaranjini is reduced to a life that revolves around the kitchen, and serving her husband and child.

The only running she manages is in between rooms, as she stretches and bends to find things, and in a rushed sprint up the stairs, with her husband’s freshly-ironed shirt. The climax is heartbreaking, because it represents the plight of so many women who are plucked from their chosen fields and replanted in a place that they never see as their own, and without the cushioning of financial freedom.

Jeo Baby is happy about the discussions about feminism happening yet again, this time post Mrs . “I am hopeful these will lead to a new progressive society. Like with other things, there’s diversity in patriarchy too, depending on the region and the local culture. The end goal is that there should be equality for women in every corner of the country,” says the director, who discovered what drudgery housework can be when he was 33, and married. “And this, when I was just sharing the work, not doing all of it. I was exhausted on the very first day. I could not read a book, or watch a movie. I slept within 10 minutes even though the movie was interesting. And, to think I had to repeat this entire routine tomorrow. I felt trapped and thought about the women in my life, and their labour, and wanted to make a movie set in the kitchen. That process was an eye-opener and I organically saw myself becoming a feminist,” he adds.

The one common thing across all the versions of TGIK is the leaking kitchen sink, and what the protagonist does with that water when pushed to the edge. This is drawn from Jeo’s life too. “I remember cleaning the clogged sink once, and how the stink never left my hand. Sometime after that, when I had cooked a meal for relatives, they questioned why I was cooking, and not my partner. I was so angry, I wanted to throw something at them. And that was when that scene entered the script. I wondered what was the worst thing to throw at the husband. That clogged drain water. So, I worked backwards to create a leak in the pipe, create the constant irritation of droplets of water falling, and the final outburst. It is not my brilliance but experience, and many men don’t know about it, because they don't have the experience.”

Some comments on social media question why a leaking drain is such an issue. To this Jeo says: “It is not possible in Indian society for the common man to learn how horrible these jobs are. Cleaning the drain, cleaning a dining table. It is the fault of our education system that we teach them how food comes in, but not about how women also reinforce patriarchy.”

Vasanth shares a similar thought. “We can and should make a hundred films to get them to be more sensitive. We should not stop trying. Boys should realise the kitchen is a part of the house, and cooking is a skill to be learnt. They should enter the kitchen, not as a duty, but because of love and a sense of shared responsibility. I see some young couples doing that, and it makes me very happy."

Vasanth says parents must introduce their children to the kitchen with the same dedication they send them to school and provide them with an education. “Who demarcated housework? That the male should do this, and the female should do this?” he asks.

Sivaranjini, even while accepting of her fate, still tries to clutch on to fragments from her past — her time on the running track, her desperate search for the trophy that’s missing in her college. In the Malayalam original and the Tamil version, the wife is without a name — her identity is slowly eroded at every step. However, the brilliant Sanya Malhotra as Richa Sharma, the effervescent, even excited girl, who can set an interesting WiFi password, and loves her prime numbers and dance, takes a while to allow the stillness and loneliness to enter her heart. Once it does, you know she won’t settle — her visage is both porcelain and steel, her lips quiver when she speaks her mind. In this version, Arati focuses on another aspect of patriarchy — the crushing loneliness within a marriage that’s deeply unequal.

If the Malayalam and Tamil versions had the Sabarimala issue at the heart of the gender debate, Mrs stops with Karva Chauth, moving the debate from religion to culture.

Arati had seen TGIK during the COVID lockdown and the film shook her. When she got the chance to work on the remake, her first reaction was that a classic should not be touched, especially when people have such a warm and strong relationship with it. That was when she ended up meeting a lot of women to understand this problem in the context of North India. “Something struck me, and I felt that I should tell the story correctly because, maybe, I’ll approach it with a love for the original material, and also with some fidelity to its central essence. I wanted to retell the story with a female gaze, focus on subtle nuances and spark the correct conversations around invisible labour,” says Arati.

Arati has faced her share of critique regarding the staging of some scenes. “I wanted to change the psychology of the central character. I wanted her to have more passion, and a wide-eyed wonder for her new life, like how the rabbit of Zootopia is excited about her first job. I wanted the girl to have the same excitement for her marriage. I wanted her to have desires so she goes and buys herself a nightie. She also tried harder and sought validation. Either by consulting a cooking show, or asking her father for her childhood choreography videos. I wanted to weave in her passion a lot more — like the way a woman comes back to cooking, despite any fight, in the kitchen — I wanted her to come back to her passion for dance, and I wanted to tie her identity to her passion. Also, I wanted to set this story in an educated middle-class household.”

While many have questioned exactly this, what Arati says makes sense — when a school teacher refuses to buy his wife sanitary napkins, you can still try to understand it. But when a gynaecologist who is supposedly in tune with a woman’s body as part of his profession does not and also does not understand intimacy issues, you are forced to think. And though you know it, it is underlined yet again — education has nothing to do with patriarchy. It has everything to do with the power men have wielded in society and homes for centuries. And they’ve honed the ways in which they display it — it is rarely aggressive, neither does it create ripples. It just crushes women’s spirits, silently.

Watch Mrs here

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