Skip to main content

The Great Indian Wife


 I happened to watch the Malayalam movie The Great Indian Kitchen on TV. The movie has been discussed much and in great detail by almost everybody who is a somebody in Kerala. Let me add my little bit too to all that. 

First of all, I endorse the cause espoused by the movie: women's liberation. Liberation from the kitchen, from man, from religion, from traditions. 

None of these - kitchen, man, religion, traditions - is necessarily bad. On the contrary, all of them could be good and great. But the movie shows an ordinary woman married into a rigidly traditional household where the man is the boss and the wife is a slave. Religion and traditions become useful tools in the hands of the boss to ensure the woman's perpetual slavery. The climax of the movie is a brilliant scene in which the woman's rebellion takes the form of the dirty kitchen water which she hurls on the faces of her husband and father-in-law before walking out of her slavery with bold steps. 

Secondly, I loved the way certain traditions - especially those endorsed by religion - are questioned in the movie. Why is a menstruating woman considered filthy? Why can't women enter certain temples like Sabarimala? Why can't women even express their opinions on such issues freely? The movie raises these questions very powerfully. And they are very pertinent questions too. 

When the Sabarimala controversy broke out some time back in Kerala, I supported the women who fought for their rights to enter the temple. But soon I fell silent because my right to speak on the issue was questioned on the basis of my supposed religious affiliation. One of the saddest things that has happened to India in the past half a decade is this contamination of every argument, every debate, with religion. You are necessarily a Hindu or a Christian or a Muslim. You are not a human being!

Worse, I found most of the women to whom the issue should matter [read Hindu women] were in favour of the traditions which restricted their liberties. I'm speaking about women whom I know personally and with whom I had occasions to discuss the issue. Was it because they were religious? Or was it because their minds have been poisoned by the communalism that has come into vogue in the past half a decade? I'm convinced the latter is the case. My observations lead me to that conclusion. It shocks me to see women who are post-graduates or with higher educational qualifications have terribly narrow understanding of religion as well as politics. 

The worst tragedy that has hit the nation is this circumscription of minds

There is a scene in the movie where the man of the house, the male protagonist of the movie (the female protagonist is the real heroine), is touched by his wife in the period of abnegation preceding his Sabarimala pilgrimage. She touches him because he has fallen from his scooter and she has rushed to help him. Her love, her concern, her goodness is what is shattered to smithereens by the indignation of the hidebound husband. And what is the remedy for this defilement by a woman's touch? A ball of cowdung or some cowdung solution in water! There we are - in contemporary India that has been taken back to the savage Vedic times.

The movie ends with the heroine finding her emancipation, earning her dignity, and living a happy independent life. The conclusion also shows that the man has married again and the new wife is treated exactly the same way as the old one but the new one is happy being a slave. That is another tragedy: people don't want liberty; people enjoy their slavery. That happens not just in movies. Look around and you will see a billion examples. 


Comments

  1. Well-articulated. I've got to watch this movie. I hope I can find subtitles.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I want to watch this movie. I had a major argument with a woman who was a director of operations for the Indian branch of an MNC. She was a chartered accountant and wrote an article on her blog supporting the rule that women should not be allowed to enter the Sabarimala temple. I lost my temper after reading the article and tried to knock some sense into her in the comments section of her blog post. We argued back and forth in the comments section and finally agreed to disagree. Some times even educated people have stupid notions.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I remember you writing somewhere in support of women's entry at Sabarimala and being questioned by a woman herself. How ironical! The movie's conclusion is right: it is women who defeat themselves though they may love to throw the blame on men.

      Delete
  3. I like the way you have described the movie and your observations, makes me want to watch the movie. Hopefully, ill find one with subtitles.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure you'll get a version with the subtitles. After all Malayalam movies are watched by the Arabs too.

      Delete
  4. The biggest problem with our tradition and religion is that it isn't ready to accept it's failings and wouldn't do a thing about it. On the contrary we immediately get into the self defensive mode if questioned

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What I don't understand is that self-defence. Why do we need to do that even now? Haven't we grown up enough to face the given present realistically?

      Delete
  5. What started as a complementary biological roles in society has morphed to something of an entitlement and demanded for. Hence, the friction!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

War and Meaning of Victory

In the summer of 1999, while the rest of India was soaked in monsoon and Cricket World Cup, the country’s soldiers were clawing up frozen cliffs daring the bullets that came shooting from above. India’s incorrigible neighbour had sent its soldiers and militants to capture the snow-covered peaks of Kargil. It was an act of deception, a capture of India’s land stealthily. The terrain was harsh and hostile, testing the limits of human courage with every jagged step. The Kargil War was not just against a human enemy, but against peaks of stones and snow where the air itself was an adversary. Three months of bitter conflict and subhuman killing ended in India’s victory over the invading Pakistan. Victory! July 26 is celebrated ever after as Kargil Vijay Diwas by India. What is victory, however? Philosophically, I mean. We are supposed to be rational (philosophical) creatures, after all. “ W ar does not determine who is right,” Bertrand Russell said famously, “but who is left.” Every...

Dine in Eden

If you want to have a typical nonvegetarian Malayali lunch or dinner in a serene village in Kerala, here is the Garden of Eden all set for you at Ramapuram [literally ‘Abode of Rama’] in central Kerala. The place has a temple each for Rama and his three brothers: Lakshmana, Bharata, and Shatrughna. It is believed that Rama meditated in this place during his exile and also that his brothers joined him for a while. Right in the heart of the small town is a Catholic church which is an imposing structure that makes an eloquent assertion of religious identity. Quite close to all these religious places is the Garden of Eden, Eden Thoppu in Malayalam, a toddy shop with a difference. Toddy is palm wine, a mild alcoholic drink collected from palm trees. In my childhood, toddy was really natural; i.e., collected from palm trees including coconut trees which are ubiquitous in Kerala. My next-door neighbours, two brothers who lived in the same house, were toddy-tappers. Toddy was a health...

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...