‘Mrs.’, ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’, and the Women Who Couldn’t Choose to Walk Away
Films like Mrs., The Great Indian Kitchen, Thappad, Dor, and more sparked widespread discussion about the value our society assigns to women’s labour and agency. Sarthak Parashar writes about how the impossible choices faced under patriarchal social obligations—in reel and real life.
In Ashwini Iyer Tiwari’s Panga (2020), Jaya (Kangana Ranaut) is a former star Kabaddi player who quits her passion to look after her newborn, immunosuppressed child. When she gets back to the sport after years of working as a reservation counter clerk, she only does so after her supportive husband and mature-beyond-his-years son tell her that she can make a comeback. Reviewing the film for the Indian Express, Shubhra Gupta wrote, “What if, horrors, Jaya had ditched her family, not having found enough fulfillment, and merrily gone her way? Nah, we are still far away from that kind of film.”
This is a simple but stark observation, and one that runs across films and decades in Bollywood. In Gauri Shinde’s English Vinglish (2012), Sridevi plays the character Shashi, who learns English, makes new friends across ethnicities, and commutes confidently throughout Manhattan in sarees and trench coats. She gets close to a charming Frenchman who describes her eyes as two drops of coffee in a cloud of milk, but never quite enough to lean and kiss him. She is never close to leaving her largely ungrateful family and finally live for herself. One can argue that it is not love that she desires but respect. And one can counterargue and ask why she cannot demand both? Perhaps it is Shashi’s ‘Indian values’ that hold her back: after all, she is the traditional Marathi housewife who looks after her family’s needs before she goes to deliver the laddoos of her entrepreneurial venture.
Many women, in film, do choose to leave. In Anurag Basu’s Barfi! (2012), Shruti (Ileana D’Cruz) leaves her husband to go back to the deaf-mute man, Barfi, whom her mother had convinced her against marrying. It is not ambitions that woo her, or a toxic husband who does not respect her. In fact, in a conventional and societal manner, her husband can probably offer her more than Barfi can. For her, contentment lies in being with a man who no longer loves her instead of staying in a marriage of convenience. Her mother, on the other hand, sticks to the ‘respectable’ man she had chosen to marry, instead of the one she loved.
There is a ‘leaving’ in Aanand L. Rai’s Tanu Weds Manu Returns (2015), too, where—as unjustifiable as it is—Tanu (Kangana Ranaut) gets Manu admitted to a mental asylum out of sheer boredom before leaving for India.
In Mrs., the lead protagonist is Richa, who realizes that her position in the household is a mere extension of the chores she completes. A lot has been said about the repetitive sequences of the chores featured in the film, which are jarring and seen by some as symbolic of the larger monotony of patriarchy.
The women in most of these narratives operate in grey, isolated instances, and their actions rarely become part of the country’s mainstream discourse. This changed with the release of Arati Kadav’s Mrs. (2024)—an official remake of Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen (2021)—a film that sparked widespread discussion about the value our society assigns to women’s domestic labour. In Mrs., the lead protagonist is Richa (Sanya Malhotra), who realizes that her position in the household is a mere extension of the chores she completes. A lot has been said about the repetitive sequences of the chores featured in the film, which are jarring and seen by some as symbolic of the larger monotony of patriarchy. As the housewife, Richa is reduced to waking up each day to cook, clean and do the laundry. When the day ends, she must motionlessly lie on the bed while her husband uses her as a sex toy, one who is also expected to conceive. The men in the household have many specific demands for her: they like their chutney grinded on a silbatta, their biryani cooked in a handi with aata on the edges to seal the dum, their rotis puffed like fulkas instead of flat like chapaatis, and their clothes and footwear out of cupboards, ready to wear.
Richa is passionate about dancing and used to be part of a dance troupe before she was married. She sees her best friend (also a dancer) go places, and feels like she as if her own aspirations are lagging. In an attempt to feel like she has a life beyond household chores, she applies for the position of a dance teacher at a school. When she tells her father-in-law Ashwin (Kanwaljit Singh) about this, he reminds her of the fact that his wife has a doctorate in Economics, despite which she has always prioritized her family and kids—almost as if, for women, focusing on career is secondary. Ashwin’s wife Meena (Aparna Ghoshal) is their ‘ideal’ woman: she grinds the chutney with a silbatta, manually unclogs the sink, and does not complain once. In the Malayalam original, it is the mother-in-law who encourages Richa’s nameless counterpart (played by Nimisha Sajayan) to apply for the job. and when the men complain of her less-traditional ways, she tells them to adjust.
Meena is an intriguing character on her own. For most of the film, she is away, looking after her pregnant daughter, another reminder of the household responsibilities women are assigned to even as they grow older. While she wears sarees at her own house, she dons salwar-kurta at her daughter’s place (also only in the Malayalam original). This seems to be the only change in her daily routine, as she continues to look after people.
Richa’s own mother is hardly different: Often on a call with her, she tells Richa of the perfect Kadhi Pakoda recipe or “Yeh sab toh seekhna padega na Richu” (You have to learn these things) when she complains of the plethora of household chores.
Richa eventually leaves her husband to perform to the tune of freedom, in front of hundreds. Her husband, Diwakar (Nishant Dahiya), however, only replaces her with another ‘domestic’ woman, with his mother giving her company in the kitchen. So even as the bahu (daughter-in-law) changes, the neo-matriarch saas (mother-in-law) retains her role in the kitchen and the household. The pages of her PhD thesis turn yellow with dust and time, perhaps lying somewhere in a cupboard.
Another film that explores women leaving—and staying back—is Anubhav Sinha’s Thappad (2020). Amrita (Taapsee Pannu) is a housewife (a content one, at that) who starts to realize how undignified her position in the household really is when her husband slaps her in the middle of a house party. She decides to divorce him after this incident, and in doing so, comes across varied reactions from her mother and mother-in-law. Both suggest that she adjust and let go of the slap, as if the slap wasn’t a catalyst for Amrita to realize how she was reduced to a slappable entity.
In one scene, Amrita’s mom tells her feminist husband that she wanted to be a singer and sing for All India Radio. “Mann maar na pada. Ghar sambhalti, bacche paalti ya gaane gaati?” (Should I have taken care of the household, raised the kids, or sung my songs?) Her husband is hit by the stark realization that his progressive politics don’t reverse the harsh reality of deeply-ingrained patriarchy is. “Ghar samet ke rakhne ke liye aurat ko bardasht karna padta hai,” she says, A woman must suffer to keep the household stable. She knows, perhaps, that the majority of women of her generation have had to live this way, passed on like a recipe from mothers to daughters to their daughters.
The mothers on both sides of Amrita’s family reflect about their own lives as Amrita fights for her dignity. When a spike in sugar gives her a near-death experience, Amrita’s mother-in-law tells her husband: “Mar bhi jaungi toh kisiko kya faraq padta hai? Ab toh khana bhi naukar banate hain” (What difference would it make even if I died? Now even the food is made by the servants).
Even Amrita’s high-profile lawyer, who is very unhappy in her marriage of convenience with a prominent journalist, frees herself after taking inspiration from Amrita. At first, she counsels Amrita, “Har rishta flawed hota hai. Usko jod ke rakhna hota hai” (Every relationship is flawed, it must be kept assembled). But later, Amrita responds to her and says, “Jod ke rakhni pade koi cheez toh matlab tooti huyi haina?” (Anything that needs assembly means that it’s broken).
Another film that features a woman serving as a catalyst for the liberation another woman is Nagesh Kukunoor’s Dor (2006), where a Muslim-Kashmiri Zeenat (Gul Panag) ends up freeing an oppressed Hindu widow from remote Rajasthan, Meera (Ayesha Takia). The final shot of this film has the two women recreating the famous train sequence from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge: Meera grabs Zeenat’s hand, and thus grabs the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to escape her colorless widowhood.
These examples are rare. The majority of the women in Bollywood films stay back—despite their PhDs or the ghungroos in their closets. When they get a whiff of freedom, very few of them follow it, and fewer rabidly chase their dream. Tara Khanna from the Prime Video series Made in Heaven leaves the husband she married for his money and status, but continues to be the good ex-bahu, who stays in touch with the mother-in-law, looking after her when she loses her husband. But Tara is not a regular Bollywood female protagonist: money was her ultimate goal. She plots and conspires to make sure her alimony is good enough. After her son cheats on his wife, the saas—probably worth a fortune herself—tells Tara, “Men are stupid. Hum sabke saath hua hai (This has happened to all of us). You just have to carry on.” It turns out the recipes to adjust are passed on to daughters and daughters-in-law in all parts of the city, posh and poor. Beyond the clear misogyny, a lot of shared understanding of being a woman goes in these tellings and recipes, of letting some of their dreams live as skeletons in the closet, even as some are followed.
“Ghar samet ke rakhne ke liye aurat ko bardasht karna padta hai,” she says, A woman must suffer to keep the household stable. She knows, perhaps, that the majority of women of her generation have had to live this way, passed on like a recipe from mothers to daughters to their daughters.
Often, motherhood and age seem to hold women back. The more a woman advances in her marriage, through time and childbirth, the more she must reconsider before breaking free and living her dream. This is why the mothers of Jaya (Panga), Shashi (English Vinglish), and Richa’s mother and mother-in-law (Mrs.) stay—while and Richa, Shruti, Amrita, and Tara do not. The expectation of perfect motherhood is heavy on women’s shoulders, and society does not like to allow them to falter. It is not acceptable for them to love their passion as much as their children, if not more.
Only men are allowed to have that luxury, of leaving ‘raaj-paath grahast-sansar’ to attain enlightenment under a tree and become Buddha. The Bhakti princess-saint-poet Meerabai writes, or rather sings “Family, honour, word of scorn, I care not for these one jot.” For her, bhakti towards a cow-herder deity is her passion—and it is something for which she pays a hefty price.
In leaving and in letting go of this concept of perfect motherhood, women also end up becoming the villains in their children’s life. In Tribhanga (dir. Renuka Sahane, 2021), Nayantara (Tanvi Azmi) the feminist, free-spirited author on the verge of dying left her restrictive husband and family to write and live life on her own terms. She drinks and dates multiple men throughout her life—one of whom ends up sexually assaulting her daughter. As a result, the daughter goes on to resent her mother. Peace is made at the end, but we wonder what and what not to forgive our mothers for: For following their dreams, or for killing them?
In Mrs., Richa grabs the car keys and walks barefoot to drive out of her unhappily married life. In the Malayalam original The Great Indian Kitchen, Sajayan’s character walks out of the house as the chants of an all-male Sabarimala ceremony fade in the background. Soon, all we hear is the sound of the ocean hitting the shore, as Nimisha walks on the adjacent road. The Malayalam protagonist is nameless, perhaps to suggest how this could be any woman; What’s in a name? The film’s title is a clever pun on how truly not-so-great the Indian kitchen is, seems to say that the romanticization and glorification of kitchen as a space has to be about the fact that it feeds people; female guests should not have to leave the men sitting in the drawing room to mingle, with the women dispensed to the kitchen.
Marriage as a social institution which—particularly in India—thrives on the debris of female sacrifice and servitude. And when they choose to discard it (before or after experiencing it), in films and in real life, they face a deluge of criticism: from men’s rights activists calling it feminist propaganda, from unmarried women being hit by the stark reality of the majority of Indian marriages, from married women resonating with Richa through their phone screens. My own mother found the ending of Mrs. too pessimistic, and the men too unredeemable, as if she, too, did not clean the mess in the kitchen until near midnight for half of her marriage.
But as long as there is chatter, and art like Mrs. continues to be made, there will be hope for women choosing to reject a life in the not-so-great kitchen, hope for women to walk out of a toxic marriage.
***
Sarthak Parashar is an alleged cinephile (even though he has neither watched Nolan or Scorcese), freelance journalist, unapologetic lover of art, and Lata Mangeshkar fanboy. The lovechild of Chanda from Anurag Kashyap's Dev D and Tara Khanna from Made in Heaven, he finds solace in films, the literature of Jhumpa Lahiri, ghazals sung by women, and gossip from r/BollyBlindsNGossip. Based in Delhi, you can find him on Instagram @curlsandmockery.
