Why are so many women in India still saddled with kitchen chores? Vinay Kumar, who teaches a critical reading and writing course in Bengaluru, writes about the experience of watching ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’ with his class.
Towards the end of The Great Indian Kitchen, Nimisha Sajayan’s character finally resorts to an act of defiance against her husband and his father. In that instant, the seminar hall of nearly 300 students transformed into a film theatre, with hoots and screams that we weren’t quite expecting. My colleagues and I—professors at a university in Bengaluru—were glad that they had enjoyed the film. But had they understood our intentions for screening it?
We consume countless images daily, and knowing how to read them is essential, if not crucial. This was both the introduction and logic that I had offered my class for reading a film in a writing class. I teach a course called Critical Reading and Writing to first-year undergrads at Azim Premji University in Bengaluru. Since the programme attempts to fuel the students’ critical thinking skills, we consciously brought social realities, like caste, class, and gender, into the picture.
Set in Kerala, The Great Indian Kitchen was the perfect vehicle to ignite and anchor conversations around the kitchen, gender roles, labour, and the complicated world we inhabit. The Malayalam film, directed by Jeo Baby, revolves around a newly married woman’s struggles in a conservative and patriarchal family.
The class I teach is principally diverse, and brings together 30 students across caste, class, gender (with women outnumbering men), and regions. The first unit introduced them to writing styles, and articulating their opinions into clear thoughts, a stepping stone to the next unit of critical film reading. The academic discourse remained integral, with the theme of food at its helm—and for this, The Great Indian Kitchen proved to be an asset.
We had spoken about gendered expectations before. Two weeks prior to the screening, the class had read and discussed a multi-authored paper, ‘It’s Just Easier for Me to Do It’: Rationalizing the Family Division of Foodwork’, which looked at how “women continue to do the lion’s share of foodwork and other housework, [and how] they and their families perceive this division of labour as fair”. It studied multiple family members and their implicit gender roles, from three ethno-cultural groups (one of them Indian) in Canada, and worked well as a statistical supplement to ground the film.
The students weren’t surprised by this information. That many families believe it’s the women’s responsibility to cook, clean, and care for their well-being is no eye-opener. Instead, the discussion intended to introduce them to the kind of rigour and thinking that goes into academic research.
After the film’s screening, the students were asked to bring an emotion that they strongly felt, or the film evoked, to help frame their critical response. The women in class expressed anger and annoyance, and resonated with the freedom the wife eventually chose, but were understandably bothered by how the husband got away, with such little consequence. Would this nudge the men in my class to reflect on the ease with which they navigate life and society, as opposed to how hard the women have it?
The class also had to think of the film intertextually—shaping a text’s meaning by another text—to further their critical engagement with the film. For this, we juxtaposed Neeraj Ghaywan’s Juice and the academic paper on domestic labour with The Great Indian Kitchen. (Juice is a short film set in a Hindi-speaking urban Indian household that powerfully captures how women’s labour is taken for granted in homes.) The students were struck by and observed the mundane and repetitive nature of domestic labour, unquestioned male entitlement, and how the kitchen is a space of extreme inequalities.
And so, when their 1,000-word critical response eventually reached me, I knew how much of what I had thrown at them had stuck.
The students were struck by and observed the mundane and repetitive nature of domestic labour, unquestioned male entitlement, and how the kitchen is a space of extreme inequalities.
Most students picked up on the film not naming the husband (played by Suraj Venjaramoodu) and wife, which was a reference to its universality. Some of them pushed the boundaries of the assignment. For instance, an intertextual reading between The Great Indian Kitchen and Robert Browning’s poem My Last Duchess. The comparison to Browning’s poem drew on parallels of men trying to control women’s narratives, and how “prestige and honour are shackles holding women”.
Since the discussions couldn’t escape words such as masculinity, oppression and feminism, we made a list of all these words. Could the students avoid these terms when making their points? These often tend to limit one’s engagement, and by taking these phrases away, the students had to think harder and deeper about how to express themselves.
They had to identify and articulate what ‘toxic’ and ‘gendered’ meant, and why ‘masculinity’ was the first word they used to talk about the film. The objective was to push them to think beyond the limits they had built for themselves. It wasn’t so easy for them to step out of the comfort that these terms offered.
The students referred to the ‘oppressive’ nature of the kitchen and household chores because they didn’t know how to replace the word. The conversations were sprinkled with anecdotes of male family members cooking while someone else ‘prepped’ and cleaned after them. The acceptance of kitchen work as a traditional practice, which invariably fell on women, was glaring. Words like tradition and culture have been peddled to these students through their lives. So we broke it down—what does it entail to be traditional in India, and what does ‘Indian culture’ even mean? What parts of it are for the woman, and what is the man’s role in maintaining traditions
The academic paper quoted one of the respondents in the survey: “We just do all the kitchen labour in the household to avoid conflict.” Many students related to this. If women, who did most of the kitchen work, asked for it to be distributed more equally, there would be consequences because of the power equations within households. This fear held them from breaking the patterns of gender inequity in the kitchen.
Words like tradition and culture have been peddled to these students through their lives. So we broke it down—what does it entail to be traditional in India, and what does ‘Indian culture’ even mean? What parts of it are for the woman, and what is the man’s role in maintaining traditions?
There were moments when the class went quiet. The women, I think, were exhausted from repeating themselves, or by another ‘useless’ exercise that was unlikely to change anything tangible. Some male students sank into their chairs. But discomfort is not a bad thing to experience in the classroom; engaging with discomfort offers us certain hard truths, and makes us more empathetic.
“Are we talking too much about gender?” I asked. A boy in the back nodded vigorously, indicating that we were. A couple of women students in the front row also agreed. But then one of them quickly added, “But where else do we talk about all of this?”
I learnt about the unjust ways of the world through my own experiences as a student in the classroom. So as a teacher, I try to ensure that my class has sufficient opportunities to engage with ideas of equality and justice. The classroom has to be a safe space for all students to air their thoughts and beliefs without fear or worry, and be treated respectfully. Only then can they initiate their unlearning; the entirety of education as liberation hinges on this unlearning. The purpose of holding these conversations is also for them to carry it beyond the classroom, and for it to percolate into their daily lives.
Vinay Kumar teaches at Azim Premji University when he’s not writing or reading. He’s written about Indian cinema, pop culture and food for Indian publications. He’s also a photographer and translator.
A team designed this course (and handed it down over the years) to ensure that it gets the first-year undergrads to look at the world through the lenses of gender, caste, class and justice along with teaching them to read and write critically. The current version was designed by a team led by Dr Sonali Barua.
