Kitchen's prisoners

Much has been written about the new Malayalam movie The Great Indian Kitchen ever since it was released this month. With major streaming platforms dropping it like hot potato, a virtually unknown platform called Nee stream took it and made hay while the sun shone on Suraj Venjaramood and Nimisha Sajayan as a newly married couple adjusting to the rigours of family life. Nee stream offered a pay-and-watch facility for random people who were not prepared to take a monthly subscription. For Rs.144 in India and $2 abroad, it gave viewers access to the movie for 5 days.
My personal experience with Nee stream subscription was bad - the movie refused to load properly even after I used Chrome incognito mode on the channel personal assistant's recommendation. How I managed to watch is another story.
The long and short of it is that it is a powerful movie that has made women relate to it and men sit up and notice similar patterns in their own homes or heave a sigh of relief that they are different. While conservative Hindus and right-wing supporters took offence because it picked on a Nair Hindu household and also dwelt on menstruation and the Sabarimala verdict, the truth is that it can happen in any conservative household whatever the faith. There have been recent reports of girls dying in menstrual huts in Tamil Nadu and Nepal - flimsy structures outside the main house that cant withstand lightning or heavy rain. Anyway our heroine has to spend her period days in a dingy dark room only, and escapes kitchen chores too. The rules surrounding menstruation and purity must have originated to give women some time off from the kitchen, but in a patriarchal society it has gone against women. Ironically, it has its stranglehold of Nair women too, who belong to a community that was matriarchal not so long ago. The women often lorded over their ancestral homes and their husbands were mere guests as the movie Ozhimuri revealed.
If it seems unnatural that the nameless heroine brought up in the Gulf is married off to a schoolteacher from a prestigious Nair family living in the countryside in a huge but decaying mansion - the decay seems to be mainly in the kitchen which the men of the house have no real interest in rectifying - I can cite the case of my mom who lived and studied in urban India and ended up in rural Kerala as the wife of a college lecturer. In a house with a cattle shed, a hen coop and farmhands tending to the sprawling property, she learnt to acclimatise. The bathroom and the toilet were outside the house, and curiously toilets were kept 50-200 metres away from the main house so that it didn't pollute. When a toilet was built inside for our ailing grandfather, it was seen as an aberration by neighbours.
Then comes the issue of the heroine being nicely told by the father in law not to apply for a job and the husband cleverly pacifying her. The older man boasts how he made his postgraduate wife stay at home and how it helped his kids to do well in life. Yeah, so well that the mother continues to slog like a servant for her husband and son, and later for her pregnant daughter in her home outside Kerala. The older lady is loving and supportive of her daughter in law - both in her kitchen duties and later encouraging her to apply for a job - and thankfully we dont see the typical mother in law kind here tyrannising the young bride. There are men who insists on post graduate brides who should be homemakers only while there are female engineers and auditors I have known who gave up flourishing careers to look after their children much to the chagrin of parents who spent a fortune educating them.
Then comes the husband - who cannot eat hotel food, needs his daily yoga time, turns a blind eye to the leaking sink and doesn't take kindly to criticism about his table manners. His only saving grace is that he doesn't criticise the dishes she makes. We see much worse in real life.
A North Indian friend who saw the movie noted that the sink is a metaphor of all that is wrong in the marriage. Feeding the men the dirty water instead of tea and throwing the stinking water on them when she reaches breaking point may be far fetched in real life, but in the movie it is poetic justice and what the audience - not the chauvinists among them - will clap for.
The girl moves on and becomes a successful and confident dance teacher while the man remarries - the system helps a widower or divorcee man to find a partner with ease and does not expect him to change his ways at all.
The movie, however, talks only about her kitchen and housekeeping chores. There are women who do all this and go out to work, commute long hours by bus or train, do grocery shopping, and return home to cook, clean and help their kids with school homework. After all, a woman is expected to be Lakshmi, not Durga.
The movie has been able to make people sit up and notice, which is commendable.
#GreatIndianKitchen #MalayalamMovies