Opinion The incomplete feminism of ‘Mrs’ and ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’

Mrs. relies more on Sanya Malhotra’s expressiveness to convey the unfairness of the situation. One of its beautiful additions to the original plot is a lovely dancing sequence where Malhotra’s character Richa tries to make her situation inventive by playing around in the kitchen, only to be interrupted by her father-in-law who views everything she does to make her life easy as a threat to status quo.

At the heart of the films, though, lies a problematic worldview. This can be seen in the difference in how the films view cooking and how they view cleaning. In both films, there is a running sequence of a clogged sink and a leaking drain pipe. This plot point is very important to the film’s climax, but the imagery it relies on to evoke our disgust is troubling. Our sympathy towards the protagonist comes from the fact that we do not think she should be the one doing this work. In fact, early on in Mrs., Richa tells her mother-in-law that she could leave the kitchen work for the “kaamwali” who will come to work in the morning. Would it have been okay if the underpaid domestic worker did this work?

As the film proceeds, smell and touch become important. We watch extended sequences of the upper-caste protagonist unclogging the sink, touching the overflowing dustbin and frantically washing her hands (almost up till her elbows in The Great Indian Kitchen) in order to rid herself of the smell. She is disgusted that she has to touch waste. “I smell of shit,” she says at some point. The smell and visuals of garbage haunt her when she is forced to have painful sex with her husband. Beyond the immediacy of plot, cinematic images have a history and life of their own. Washing your hands up till your elbows reminds one of similar practices in upper caste families preoccupied with contamination and “purity”. How can this image evoke anything but caste in a caste-based society?

Contrast this with how the films view cooking. Through striking images, both films beautifully demonstrate that there is nothing inherently exploitative about cooking. It can be intricate and a sign of love and care. It becomes a problem only when it is not shared, valued and consented to. What stops us from extending the same perspective to waste? Just like cooking is not inherently exploitative, waste disposal too is not inherently dirty or polluting. Garbage disposal can be made less burdensome with technological innovation and given dignity by freeing it from a casteist worldview. There is a functional system associated with it and the people who do the work do it with care even though they are neither justly paid nor provided necessary protection. The disposal of waste is essential to production, like death to life. One cannot work without the other.

Perhaps this is why both films appear confused when they try to comment on the position of the domestic worker who comes to the rescue when the protagonist is menstruating. A brief conversation about how she does not stop working even when she is on her period is in danger of romanticising the domestic worker’s exploitation. To be fair, The Great Indian Kitchen is courageous enough to make links with the Supreme Court judgment on Sabarimala which broke with tradition by ending the exclusion of women from the temple. And Mrs. acknowledges the presence of caste through dialogue that mentions regressive ideas of “chuachut” (untouchability) followed in the house. Yet, neither film can escape its limited view of caste. A feminism that does not understand the mutually implicating link between labour, caste and gender will always fall short of imagining a truly equal world.

The writer is a film scholar and critic based in Delhi