Mrs: What Arati Kadav gets right in the Hindi remake of The Great Indian Kitchen

But as Richa — and the viewer — soon realise, that promise of a happily ever after is denied to her as she slowly starts acquainting herself with the patriarchal mores embedded in the house of her in-laws. Richa and her pliant mother-in-law toil in the kitchen the whole day so that the two men of the house can love “simple, home-cooked food.” They prepare elaborate meals (appliances are frowned upon, everything that the men consume need to be made by hand) in record time for the men, clean up after them, and only when the male appetite is satiated, can the two women sit down to eat leftovers.

Then, they have to repeat it two more times in the day — the men of the household enjoy “simple, home-cooked food,” only when it is freshly prepared for every meal, as per their whims. The men retire to bed after dinner but the women stay up for hours after, washing utensils and cleaning every part of the kitchen. Every day is a new day and the same day all over again. Any protest is quickly whittled down. “The kitchen is the solution to every problem,” Diwakar tells Richa on their first night together. As the days pass, a new picture emerges: Richa’s married life isn’t as much of a new beginning as it is a life-sentence.

Drawing on invisibilised domestic labour

A Hindi remake of Jeo Baby’s cutting Malayalam-language The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), Mrs is a polished but effective rendition of invisibilised domestic labour. Kadav and co-writers Anu Singh Choudhary and Harman Baweja trade the simmering rage that permeates every frame of The Great Indian Kitchen for a language of female loneliness. The Malayalam film was built on the micro-aggression committed against women. Jeo Baby eschewed narrative drama, relying instead on moments of silence and repetition of labour to reiterate the gradual dehumanisation of women in Indian society. The film’s realism felt almost documentary-like in approach (the characters in The Great Indian Kitchen for instance, had no names), as it immersed viewers within the confines of a kitchen while simultaneously trapping them there along with the film’s protagonist (played with a devastating ferocity by Nimisha Sajayan).

Also read: ‘The Great Indian Kitchen’ opened up roles for me in Hindi cinema: Nimisha Sajayan

Mrs is subdued in its indictment, which falls in line with Kadav, Choudhary, and Baweja envisioning Richa as a quieter personality. So for much of the film, Malhotra’s Richa registers the little hurts that stack up each day on her face. Whereas Sajayan’s anger lay writ large on hers. Mrs also urbanises the story, setting it across two middle-class households in Delhi. The deviation allows the film’s makers to question the veneer of progressiveness that patriarchy is often disguised under — the connection between education and conservatism is one worth noting in India. For instance, when they’re visiting Richa’s friends for dinner, Diwakar offers to clear up the plates only when he notices her friend’s husband doing it. At home, he refuses to enter the kitchen to even fetch medicines for his wife — a result of witnessing his father behave the same way, believing in the idea that caregiving is only the domain of women.

In that sense, Mrs has more room to delve into the fragile male ego that makes a hostage out of a woman’s self-worth. Kadav highlights the hypocrisy wonderfully: The men in the family seem to always have a say in how a dish should be prepared — whether meat should be cooked in a pressure cooker, the recipe for a great shikanji — without ever entering the kitchen themselves. But the women are supposed to have no complaints of their own. That is visibly evident when Richa protests to Diwakar about the mechanical sex they have. Just the mere mention of her desires being overlooked puts Diwakar on the offensive. As if a life of pleasure is only the domain of men.

The gentleness: A desire to reach a wider audience?

Similarly, by staging a karva chauth scene in the film (an equivalent for the Sabarmati temple debate in The Great Indian Kitchen), Kadav skillfully underlines the insidious ways that Indian men have come to romanticise women’s suffering as tradition. One minute Richa, who hasn’t eaten all day, is crying alone in the kitchen after Diwakar yells at her and the next moment, she is duty bound to touch his feet.

The idea being that it is women’s calling to serve men — just the very possibility that a woman can have interests that don’t revolve around caring for men, is a sign of disrespect. It is visible in the way the makers imagine Richa’s father-in-law and the precise subtlety that actor Kanwaljit Singh brings to the performance, layering his controlling and abusive tendencies under a cloak of concern. If anything, it foregrounds a language of subjugation that is immediately recognisable — one that rests on men somehow deriving pleasure from keeping women in check.

Perhaps, that marks the biggest difference between the two iterations: Mrs seems to take it upon itself to be more accessible in its storytelling. But then again, the film’s tone is entirely indicative of the maturity of the audience it is catering to — in the age of bombastic period epics and action thrillers, Hindi film watching audiences definitely rank the lowest in that regard. The Malayalam audience in comparison, is far more receptive to varied cinematic traditions and storytelling styles.

Watch: Watch: Jeo Baby interview: I make films to express my feelings through art

It is a fact that The Great Indian Kitchen was one of the breakout films of 2021 but it is also a fact that a large chunk of Hindi-speaking audiences will be introduced to the film because of the existence of Mrs not because Malayalam cinema is inferior, but because a majority of our population is cinema-illiterate. In that context, it is easy to make sense of the gentleness of the Hindi remake, perhaps a product of the desire to reach wider audiences.

Indian kitchen: An inherently political site

If the reactions on the internet since the film’s release on Zee5 is any indication, both these things have proven to be true. The percentage of Hindi audiences who had watched the Malayalam film is miniscule. It is also why the reaction to the film’s themes have been so vociferous. Most female audiences are seeing the film as a proof of lived reality — propelling them to recognise the sinister ways even the most progressive households reinforce gender divide. But Mrs has certainly triggered the other half of the population. Men have chosen to indulge in whataboutery. The common refrain is this: Is there really a problem when a man is expected to have a job and a woman is expected to manage the kitchen but it is the woman who complains?

There are two ways to read these reactions. One, that Kadav has succeeded in proving her point with Mrs — that a large section of men believe till this day that there is nothing wrong with the kitchen being the designated place for women. And second, that in the eyes of men, domestic labour continues to hold no monetary value. Neither the contention of women or the film is the fact that women should never cook but rather, that they should do it out of their own accord, not because decades of patriarchy has mandated it to be so.

Rather, the contention of the film is that caregiving largely remains a gendered act; that married women face absolute loneliness in the Indian family unit; that men derive their self-worth only when they control women; that men have imagined a society that instantly dismisses women’s passions; that men continue to demand that women strip themselves of all desires and dreams once they get married. But most important of all, that almost every man in this country has been a beneficiary of this very divide — and has, to some extent, practised it themselves. That a male audience misses this very point is proof that the Indian kitchen will always be an inherently political site.