Unpacking ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’: What Cinema Reveals about Gender, Domesticity, and Labour
● Online | 30 April 2026 | 5:30–6:30 pm
About the Session:
As part of the Local Food Club’s theme for the quarter of April-June 2026, The Labour Behind Food, this online discussion was centred on The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), a film heralded for laying bare the patriarchal structures prevalent in an oppressor-caste home in Kerala. Directed by Jeo Baby, it has brought to the screen the grinding labour that women are expected to perform in order to feed their families.
From its representation of the subservience assumed of women towards the tastes and preferences of the men in their households to deftly handling the perceived disgust around menstruating women forbidden to cook, the film calls on us to realise that these nuances are not as hidden or invisible as they seem to be.
Meet Our Panellists
Jeo Baby, Director, The Great Indian Kitchen
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Jeo Baby is a director, writer, and musician working in the Malayalam film industry. His film The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) won the 51st Kerala State Film Award for Best Film as well as Best Screenplay.
Know more about Jeo Baby’s work here.
“There is no closing for the kitchen—[the work] goes on 24 x 7.”
Jeo Baby threw light upon the film’s back-end processes, including screenwriting, film production, and distribution. He shared that the film is a collection of moments from his own experiences as well as those of his sisters and women friends. He shares one such eye-opening instance, when his wife, Beena, was studying full-time, leaving him responsible for the household chores. This time made him cognisant of the patriarchal chokehold within households, and how it is sustained from one generation to the next. He attempted to convey these feelings through the film. “There are a lot of static shots, and we repeat them again and again. [We planned that] in the screenplay to make the audience feel the persistence of domestic labour,” he said.
Vijeta Kumar, Professor and Writer
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Vijeta Kumar is a professor and writer from Bengaluru. She teaches Communicative English and Creative Writing at St. Joseph’s University.
Check out Vijeta’s blog here.
“It rests with us, more than the film, to see this as an opportunity—to see at what points can we get caste and gender to confront each other.”
Vijeta Kumar brought nuance to the discussion by focusing on how an audience viscerally feels and makes meaning from a film. To her, The Great Indian Kitchen can be seen not only from a feminist perspective, but also one of caste, thus broaching the pertinent question of intersectionality. By interrogating the repulsion towards waste and leftovers that the housewife was left to handle, she questions whether this scene, and the responses towards it, come from a caste-conscious perspective: “Why don’t you want to watch or why don’t you want to eat when you’re watching this scene of the woman […] cleaning? We don’t want to eat because her hands are full of things that she’s cleaned and she’s repulsed. You’re both calling her out for being repulsed, and you’re also repulsed.”
Shubhra Chatterji, Filmmaker, Researcher, and Co-founder of SAYB and Tons Valley Shop
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Shubhra Chatterji, who moderated this session, is a researcher and storyteller working across film and immersive theatre. Her work sits at the intersection of food and food systems, gender, identity, and place.
She has created the television series Lost Recipes, directed the drama series Rainbow Rishta, and written New India Lodge, a theatrical dining experience.
Know more about her work here.
Discussion
- The diegetic sounds of kitchen activity—of hands chopping, grinding, grating—captures the intensity and incessantness of kitchen labour. Several characters remain nameless, which Jeo Baby expressed as intentional, choosing to reserve this convention for characters doing something revolutionary. Vijeta Kumar, meanwhile, saw their namelessness as a possibility for audiences to relate to this story: Could those be the untiring hands of the women they know from their own lives?
- Leisure—or lack thereof—offers a critical point of inquiry. From unsettling depictions of quotidian housework to the character of the father-in-law, who lounges outdoors at length, while the women labour endlessly, audiences are prompted to question the persistence of domestic labour and the structures that invisibilise it.
- While patriarchy is a primary concern in the film, several characters and scenes present an opportunity for its caste-consciousness to be closely examined: is the character’s repulsion coming from a caste-conscious disgust with leftover food? And what do the viewers’ feelings of repulsion reveal? By probing themes surrounding repulsion and waste segregation further, viewers can arrive at a deeper understanding of the inextricable link between feminism and caste.
Learnings
- Media plays a crucial role in perpetuating and normalising stereotypes and social injustices that occur within the blurred lines of private and public spaces.
- Cooking, when done by mothers and grandmothers, is often romanticised in mainstream narratives. However, the conditions under which the cooking occurs, and their agency within these structures, are seldom acknowledged.
- There is a critical need for education surrounding patriarchy, how it manifests within households, and the need for a feminist perspective to be introduced and fostered from a young age.
Beyond the Plate is an initiative by The Locavore where we engage in meaningful conversations, live events, and dining experiences that look at food beyond the sum of its parts. It is our attempt to narrow the divide between what’s on our plate, where it comes from, how it’s produced, and the deeper stories around it.
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