Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen is a film of 1 hour 40 minutes length that admirably brings alive the hustle and sounds of a typical Indian kitchen. It is a story of two generations of Indian women whose world revolves around the kitchen. The film is evocative of this piece of dialogue from Ibsen’s feminist play A Dolls House: “I’ve been your doll-wife here, just as at home I was Daddy’s doll-child” (Act III.) She departs and her thud at home initiated a revolution in the West. This film is a similar critique that could have a radical impact on the Indian society. The story is centred around a newly married woman. In an aristocratic Hindu family she sweats it out on routine chores like cooking, washing plates, sweeping and cleaning. She soon gets consumed by the slavish ordeal. The boredom of the kitchen is broken only by the sounds and images of patriarchy. Her husband and her father-in-law litter leavings of food on the dining table. Her father-in-law will not have chutney ground in a mixer grinder; he will only have it if it is made the old way using a hand operated grinding stone. He wont use dress washed in a washing machine; his dress should be washed in the traditional way with hands. He will brush his teeth only if the tooth brush and paste are brought to him by his devoted wife. Men will only eat freshly cooked vegetarian food during the days of traditional observance for the Sabarimala pilgrimage. During monthly periods, she should alone out of her usual bed. Taboos and traditions torment the newly-wed woman to no end. She applies for the job of a dance teacher, but the men deny her permission to join it. And finally she explodes. She breaks the shackles and escapes to freedom. But it causes not even a whimper. The man takes a new wife. He is lucky this time around to find a comely docile girl. And the family moves forward as if nothing has happened.
In the absence of a background score, the sounds of the kitchen ring loud and clear. Dialogues are confined to the occasional orders of men and the woman’s responses. Language withdraws in the absence of a scope to talk. There prevails in the kitchen the forced silence of the prison or the mental asylum or the military barrack. The daughter-in-law is not made a participant in decision making conversations. She is subjected to the violence of benevolent seclusion in the kitchen. And when she walks out, it is an exodus from a suffocating culture of patriarchy, for which she will ever remain an outcaste.
There is satire in the very title of the film. Its ultimate goal is to deconstruct male domination. Hanna Arendt says philosophy is cultural politics. She sees freedom “as an inner capacity of man is identical with the capacity to begin, just as freedom as a political reality is identical with a space of movement between men.” The woman is denied basic human freedom, and she has no way of regaining it. She is showered with profuse eulogies like ‘goddess’ and ‘light of the home’ as compensation. In the film, the characters don’t have a name. That has been purposely done to deconstruct the cultural models that would explain the diversity of human experience in terms of the ideals of rationality and universality. The patriarchal culture is fragmented and unjust. Derrida defines fragmentation as a function of the ‘freeplay’ of language that ‘excludes totalization’ or the wholeness of meaning and thereby leads to an indeterminacy. Ibsen deconstructed Nora as a doll in his play even in the way she had been brought up by her father, where he just fed her his opinions and was entertained by her as if she were a plaything. And when she married, history repeated itself. Nora also treats her children like dolls. Indian patriarchy continues with its unquestioned hegemony of domination and subjugation of centuries. “I was, just as before, your little song-lark, your doll that you would carry in your arms twice as carefully hereafter, because it was so fragile and weak,” Nora acknowledges. Such deconstruction must take place in every culture and community so that the culture holds everyone in the authority of rationality of dialogue and justice. Justice Ramana did his part as a member of the judiciary.