The buzz in Bollywood circles is that erstwhile actor Harman Baweja has bought the remake rights of Jeo Baby’s near-flawless Malayalam masterpiece The Great Indian Kitchen about a housewife coping with kitchen tyranny in her husband’s home.
The film has been unanimously applauded for its scathing critique on the deeprooted patriarchy which allows men to sit and badmouth the cooking while the womenfolk toil endless hours in the kitchen
The Hindi remake will apparently star Sanya Malhotra in a performance played to perfection by Nimisha Sajayan in the original.Arati Kadav who has earlier directed the very strange Carbon will take over the directorial reins from Jeo Baby.What baffles is this rush to remake South Indian films when in fact the original has already been seen by a pan-India audience, with subtitles on the OTT platform. No matter how sincerely the remake is done, it will be compared unfavourably with the original.
The original Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen is that breakthrough film on the fine art of cooking that Tarla Dalal and Vikas Khanna could have never imagined. It takes us right into the heart of the kitchen so close to the gas cylinder we can smell the onions sizzling in the saucepan as Nimisha Sayajan (simply billed as the anonymous ‘Wife’) toils over the meals endlessly. The nervous preparation is almost like an elaborate college exam every day. Her monotony and fatigue mean nothing to the men in the house, her husband (Suraj Vejaramoodu, brilliant ) and her father-in-law who are required to eat and litter the dining table with bones and morsels, with occasional burps of approval, mostly frowns. At one point, the father-in-law tells the wife to not prepare the rice in the pressure cooker.
“The flavor goes,” he mumbles and leaves.
Nimisha registers every flinch of her character with the volume of immersion that’s at once unparalleled and unplumbed. I wonder of how much of Nimisha’s angst and humiliation Sanya Malhotra can project.Kitchen tyranny is predominantly a scourge in traditional pockets of South India and in the cow belt of North India.
Like The White Tiger, the other recent masterpiece on casual social discrimination that has acquired a traditional sanctity in our society, The Great Indian Kitchen pulls us so close to the Wife’s tormented tedium that we feel her inescapable claustrophobia, made doubly unbearable as nobody around, men or women, see her predicament as anything but comfortable.
The remarkably scathing comment on gender discrimination shocks and repels. This is not an easy film to watch. In some ways, it is the ultimate horror tale where only the protagonist feels the walls closing in on her while the men around her are busy enjoying the fruits of her hellish labour.
Then there is the Wife’s menstrual break. The four days when she is isolated and forbidden from entering the kitchen. This is where director Jeo Baby, after denuding the culinary arts of all romance and enchantment, politicizes the plot by bringing in the issue of women not being allowed into the Sabarimala temple. While the Wife grapples with the wages of kitchen politics, on television news, women fight with police and politicians for the right to enter their place of worship.
The pattern of patriarchal persecution emerges in this fine, almost great, film with an intensity that will hit you hard in your solar plexus. Standing at the centre of the culinary chaos is Nimisha trying her best to be the docile cooking concubine, toiling in the kitchen all day and then making herself available to her husband for hurried unceremonious s*x in the night. When the Wife suggests some foreplay, the Man looks at her with naked contempt and replies with shriveling condescension.That’s when I knew. This is not a film that will let the Great Indian Patriarchy off the hook easily. It will make you squirm and wince. But what it says cannot be ignored.
No matter how diligently the remake is done(Hindi title Bharatiya Rasoi Ki Amar Kahaani?) it will fall way short. One hears Harman Baweja will play the husband. That would be ….ummmm….startling.