Desperate Housewife:
It is sad but true, that many women watching Mrs will relate to the lead character; and men won’t understand what the fuss is all about. A less brutal version of Jeo Baby’s Malayalam film, The Great Indian Kitchen, the Hindi film (on ZEE5) directed by Aarti Kadav, captures the life of a young woman in an arranged marriage with an educated man from an upper class family.
Dance teacher Richa (Sanya Malhotra), marries an outwardly charming and romantic doctor, Diwakar (Nishant Dahiya), but she soon sees the veneer rub off. Like his father Ashwin (Kanwaljeet Singh), he expects his wife to be devoted to home and kitchen. Diwakar’s mother (Aparna Ghoshal), does everything, including placing her husband’s footwear by his feet. He likes chutneys ground by hand, his shirts hand washed, and the home dust free (he is allergic) so she became a willing slave, after doing a PhD in Economics. Pampered by his mother, Diwakar too, wants hot phulkas and dishes made just like the way she cooked them. When the kitchen pipe leaks, he cannot be bothered to arrange to have it changed, because he does not have to mop the dirty water. In spite of being a gynaecologist, he goes by the archaic belief that women must be isolated during their period.
When the mother-in-law goes to help with her daughter’s delivery, Richa is left to put up with the demands of father and son—the former couches his instructions in soft tones, but immediate obedience is expected. Because her mother-in-law was a perfect housewife, Richa is expected to give up on her career dreams and become a kitchen drudge. The meticulous food preparation is shot beautifully, and could give the impression that women enjoy or take pride in well-presented dishes—and some undoubtedly do—but it is also an uncomfortable slog, if the wife is not all that passionate about cooking.
At first Richa is eager to please, but when there is absolutely no appreciation of her efforts, or no consideration towards her needs, a certain resentment starts to set in. Diwakar who started out saying that he loved the aroma of the kitchen, tells her when she is caught up with domestic chores, that she stinks of the kitchen. When she points out how painful the sex is, he tells he feels no desire towards her. This is a film, so there is a cathartic escape, but the point that the original film made, and the remake does too, is that men take women’s work at home for granted, and believe that they should be taking joy in serving the man because he is the breadwinner. In the man’s demands there is a kind of cruelty, which he is not aware of because Indian mothers raise their sons to be dependent on women, and some wives take pride in how helpless the husband is without them, not realising that they are chained by this reliance on their unpaid labour. If one woman refuses, there will be another to pick up after the husband, because women are raised to believe that marriage is their goal in life.
Films The Great Indian Kitchen and Mrs manage to raise some awareness, but real change is still a long way off.
(This piece first appeared in seniorstoday.in)
