Every once in a while comes a book or a movie that just cuts through your defences and leaves you gasping for breath. The Great Indian Kitchen, a movie (now available on Amazon Prime) written and directed by Jeo Baby, belongs to that club. For centuries, we Indians have normalized the near-slavery of half of our population (a better half, I would say without exaggeration) in the name of cultural practices. We have been conditioned to not look at it, or if we looked to not process it, and if we processed it to not talk about what goes on in our homes, because, that’s how things are. But Jeo Baby wants none of it. He wants us to look. He wants us to see (and the movie uses the camera like a weapon), to process it, and to talk about it. And God knows, it’s time we did.
Not a lot happens in the movie. There are deliberately repetitive shots of women (or a woman) working in the kitchen, both before and after the meals. The makers want you to be bored, irritated even. Just watching it is drudgery enough. And yet, many of us have looked away or stopped noticing, when we’ve seen it happen in our homes, or the homes of people like us. After all, we’ve told ourselves, that’s how things are. But the camera ruthlessly makes us see, to make us feel the mind-numbing boredom that’s thrust on the women of the house even in good, reputed households.
There is no unnecessary background music, there are no spurious dialogues. When the words are spoken, they have an impact of their economy. Many of the characters, admittedly are two-dimensional, in the tradition of movies with an agenda (and I say it not as a criticism). The wife’s character (most characters don’t have a name) is a little more nuanced than the husband’s or the father-in-law’s. The mother-in-law is a docile, good-natured lady, who acknowledges the wife’s predicament, but obviously enjoys no power in the literally patriarchal family (no evil mother-in-law here — the ultimate agent of patriarchy in many Indian homes, but husband’s aunt plays that role later in the film, so I won’t complain about letting women off lightly either). And she is sent away soon enough to take care of her pregnant daughter — and there is a perceptive replay of Indian family power equations here, where the married daughters are very much part of the patriarchy in their parent’s home — almost unwillingly.
But the genius of The Great Indian Kitchen is that it makes you introspect, not just about your direct role in your home, but also your indirect role — as a mere spectator, more so because that’s what you’re reduced to as a viewer. But while, as a viewer of a movie, we don’t have an option to be anything but a spectator, we have an option in our lives. And the film would have done its job if it were to force at least some of us from the spectator position to become an ally, a questioner, a noisemaker …
Watching The Great Indian Kitchen, my first reaction was — thank God I’m not anything like that. But like what exactly? I’m not like the husband? The wife? The mother-in-law? The friend of the husband? The aunt? The cousin, or his wife? Because patriarchy isn’t just one or two roles. It’s how we have normalized power-structures in the lives of others we care for — if not our wives, then our mothers, our sisters-in-law, our aunts, … Can we really claim we have been entirely blameless, however progressive we think we are?
A week back my father passed away and I wrote a very genuine eulogy for him. But behind many of the tributes was the backbreaking, expected labour of my mom (and other women of the extended family). Was my glossing over it an act of an implicit condoning, or apologizing for, the system that I hate from the bottom of my heart? And I can easily see shades of the husband in my dad, in my uncles, in some of my cousins, even some of my friends. I have (and more so has my wife) endured the spite of patriarchy through my loved ones (not all male) because we refused to play by its rules. It took years of unflinching fight to change some of those attitudes and judgements (and even now I’m not so sure if it’s acceptance or just avoidance). But what about all those other roles we play — as friends, and cousins, and nephews, and so on (assuming we play our primary role as partners flawlessly)? Do we just stay spectators? Or do we confront?
The gaze of the film’s camera, I felt, is meant to make us all (conservative/liberal) uncomfortable, and to develop that muscle memory of extreme discomfort — to an extent that we feel the discomfort off the reel too, and we stop being spectators where we have the choice, in whichever way.
Yes, The Great Indian Kitchen is absolutely a must-watch film for each and every one of us. Especially the men (but not just men, because, patriarchy may give power to men, it maintains power through both men and women). The only significant action that happens in the movie is at the end, and it’s too dramatic (make no mistake about it — I don’t mean to imply that’s not how it should have been, just that it does not sit well with the stark realism (naturalism?) of much of what precedes it) to be believable. And yet, I was glad for it. Please watch it when you get a chance. And if you feel the discomfort, wallow in it. That’s the price each and every one of us has to pay for allowing things to be as they are.
This one I may watch, in honor of all of those reduced to lives of roti-slaves while lazy men grow preposterous bellies while failing to develop their mental, emotional, intellectual, spiritual capacities beyond that required for a foolish, ignorant existence within the folds of white supremacy's bigoted compound.