Review of "The Great Indian Kitchen"

Really good film, though somehow describing it makes it sound dreary and dull. Oddly the poster makes it look like it's a Bollywood romance, which much be someone's idea of irony. The film starts with a wedding, but after that there's little romance, though there is some unpleasant sex.

It's about a young Indian woman who marries into a middle-class family in Kerala, and the way that they are everyone else she knows expect to her accept a life of absolute servile drudgery. Interesting on several levels - in some ways her life was not so different from my own mum's. My dad thought of himself as modern and progressive, but helping around the house (let alone doing a share of the housework) was not his thing, and was not something that my mum ever seemed to expect. My mum expected no more of me or my brother, and always seemed at least bemused by the fact that we did housework in our own homes. Still, the men in this film do take it to another level; among her duties is putting toothpaste on her father-in-law's toothbrush. 

Worth noting is that this is a Hindu family - Muslims and even Orthodox Jews are often singled out as the epitome of patriarchal religion, but as the film makes clear Hinduism at least as depicted here has just as many taboos about contact with menstruating women, who are regarded as unclean and to be shunned. And these are middle-class, educated people in progressive Kerala - at one point towards the end of the film the woman walks past a mural of Che Guevara.

Made me realise the extent to which my favourite Indian foods (and most of my favourite foods are Indian) are labour-intensive, and not possible without either the unpaid labour of women or the underpaid labour of restaurant workers.

Watched on Amazon Prime.