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In 2021, we watched with pleasant surprise, Jeo Baby’s enlightening film The Great Indian Kitchen. With great finesse and expertise, Jeo Baby hammer-nailed right into our heads the terribly abusive but invisible torture inflicted on the married woman in the sophisticated name of “housework”.
We women have internalized the ideology that everything related to the kitchen and the mundane chores directly linked to housework such as dusting, cleaning, brooming, sweeping, washing, are the exclusive domain of women. And without suspecting that we are being brutalized not just by the men but the women too in a patriarchal world.
We keep on grinding, pasting, basting, baking, frying, roasting, toasting, beating, peeling, slicing, mashing mounds of potatoes, bread, cakes, puddings, etc, .washing tons of clothes – sorry, no washing machine, till finally, we realise too late that we are an integral part of the abuse and the torture in the name of “housewifely duties.”
Aarti Kadav has remade this originally Malayalam film in Hindi with Sanya Malhotra portraying the protagonist Richa who takes time to realise that she is being persistently victimized in the name of “duty of a married woman towards her marital family.”
When she tries to bare her miseries to her mother, she simply shoos her off and she is back to square one. Her husband, (Diwakar Kumar) a successful doctor, uses his wife only for sex, insular to her own desire for sex and the act, for him, is solely targeted at begetting the cherished male heir.
She is a trained dancer who ran her own troupe and performed at shows with her troupe, stopping completely the minute she steps into her in-law’s home. Dancing is something never even mentioned as a profession for newly married women, right? So, she is constantly worried by the heavily leaking pipe under the kitchen sink which her husband gives a deaf ear to never mind that this leaking pipe makes her everyday chores quite hazardous.
Her father-in-law Ashwin Kumar (Kanwaljeet) does not like the spices to be ground on a mixer-grinder so, her mother-in-law tells her to use the grinder so that the final dish has that ‘magic’ touch. Is the father-in-law a magician? If he is, why can’t his son request him to mend the leaking pipe?
He and his utterly spoiled and ill-mannered son thrive on tawa-hot phulkas and she does the needful. No one ever bothers to ask her what she had for lunch or dinner. No one ever comments appreciatively of her cooking. An aunt-in-law who comes in for some time, keeps poking her constantly for not keeping the kitchen clean, for keeping the bottles on the shelf sticky with oil and insists on her fasting for Kadva Chauth!
It takes a lot of time for Richa to realise that she is being exploited. When she informs her husband and father-in-law that she wants to go back to her dance troupe and present a choreographed performance, the father-in-law puts his foot firmly down and the obedient son conspires by remaining silent.
Strange that the two men, the father and the son, are neither womanizers nor alcoholic wife-beaters. They are not ‘abusive’ in the popular understanding of the term. They are merely a drop in the massive ocean of like-minded men who take it for granted that their wives must be excellent in the kitchen, around the home, in preparing glasses of drinks for dozens of guests without expressing weariness.
They must be ready to surrender to sex at night whether they enjoy it or not, whether they are too tired for sex or whether they dread the very thought of sex. Finally, pushed to the edge of human tolerance, Richa throws the dirty water collected from the kitchen sink dropping into the bucket below on her husband and father-in-law and drives out of the house which was never, ever, her own.
Compared to the original The Great Indian Kitchen, Mrs. Is a bit too sophisticated and high-brow than its inspiration and therefore, much less hard-hitting than the original. Maybe the director thought of a Pan-Indian audience which the original Malayalam film did not demand. But Sanya Malhotra has brought Richa alive in every moment of the film.
The sledgehammer-like impact The Great Indian Kitchen brought out has been quite softened by the glamour and chutzpah of Mrs. True. But it is still a hard-hitting attack on patriarchy.
The second film, Dhoom Dhaam, is directed by Rishabh Seth. It is pitched as a comedy-thriller. But the script cleverly uses this pitch to hang the story on a hard-hitting feminist ideology in a different way. The perspective, the narration and the story are diametrically opposed to Mrs. But therein lies the beauty of versatility.
The leading lady, the beautiful Koyel Chadda (Yami Gautam) who appeared ‘nice and docile and coy’ at the bride-seeing ritual before an arranged marriage to a sober, decent, soft-speaking vet Veer Poddar (Prateek Gandhi) turns the tables on her wedding night to show her real self. On their wedding night in a hotel, the newly married pair is virtually attacked by two gun-toting goons who demand that they produce “Charlie”.
While Veer is too decent, proper and soft-spoken to face up to the threat of the two ‘goons’, Koyel is just the opposite. Much to the gentle Veer’s shock, she hits back at the attackers with the choicest of expletives, some dishoom-dishoom and runs off with her brand new husband fully attired in her bridal ghagra, choli, ghunghat and jewellery as the only way they can save themselves from the two goons.
They have two targets to fulfill. One is to find who or what “Charlie” is and deliver this “Charlie” to their chasers never mind that they have neither met, or heard of “Charlie” before, and two, is to save their lives from the gunshots of the two goons.
This unending chase to keep away from the goons goes on the whole night and this forms the time-span of the film. At each turn, the unassuming and naïve Veer discovers that his bride is a champion in every way as she is the one who leads the running away game in her bridal dress while she discovers that Veer, though he is a qualified doctor (of animals) is afraid of heights (vertigo), of closed spaces (claustrophobia), and agoraphobia, an anxiety disorder that causes people to fear situations where escape might be difficult.
It is Koyel who leads the escape every time and a very scared Veer follows her all the way, shocked that she has lied all through her growing up years to her parents about her ‘ways of the world’ because, according to her, “every girl must lie to everyone in order to be treated as a normal human being.”
So saying, she takes Veer to a Bachelorette Party in the middle of the night on the eve of a friend’s wedding. But she tells her mother and friends on the phone that she is going to Mata Ki Chowki, a thoroughly religious space God-fearing men and specially women, repair to specially on religious occasions like a wedding.
To the utter shock of the propah Veer, this turns out to be a Bachelorette Party (the feminine counterpart of the Bachelor Party) crowded by women of all ages and all kinds of weird dresses, shouting at the top of their voice demanding the only professional male stripper to dance and strip to his bare essentials.
Veer finds himself stuck in this role much to his chagrin but he plays to the gallery which takes his bride by incredible surprise. He gets so sucked into his strip tease act that he finally finds himself holding his underpants in his hands! The film should ideally have ended here but the director keeps going on and on and on to establish that he is making a “comic thriller” till the film loses all the funny magic it had built up till then.
The film is a direct attack on the dominance of patriarchy in the upbringing of girls even in high-brow Indian families where all daughters are forced to become skilled liars to just be what they want to be instead of what their parents and the society wants and expects them to be. Koyel explains this once during the film to her brand new husband when he accuses her of lying through her hat, of behaving in an unladylike manner and last, but never the least, in using an entire encyclopaedia of invectives without either fear or embarrassment.
Dhoom Dhaam comes like a stinging slap in the face of patriarchy. And listen to this: the aesthetics, the technical expertise, the finished product does not really matter if the film is a big scream of entertainment. And it is also the sterling performances of Yami Gauram and Pratik Gandhi who make this possible.
