The buzz in South Asian circles is all about a movie called Mrs. A remake of a Malayalam film called The Great Indian Kitchen, it takes the ordinary everyday act of preparing daily meals and the numerous little tasks that make up the running of a household to make a telling comment on the inherent patriarchy which dictates the role of women in the family matrix. Even the Malayalam film was much-discussed but the Hindi film being watched by a larger audience has led to considerable dissonance in opinions.
Although the film paints the male characters of husband and father-in-law as unseeing and entitled, many women believe that their worst enemies are… other women. Mothers and sisters of one’s own as well as on the in-law side and aunts who have clear and unwanted opinions about how one runs one’s own life are bad enough. But when that escalates, like it does in the film, with the hypereducated mother-in-law enforcing patriarchal norms, it is doubly difficult.
One oft-repeated argument is that ‘it is an exaggeration and no longer happens that way’’. Really?
I’d like to point you to a YouTube clip of an interview given by Pepsico superwoman Indira Nooyi not so long ago where she credits (discredits?) her mother with teaching her to always put her womanly duties to the family first.
The example she gave was of coming back home from a difficult but triumphant day in the office to find her child running a fever and being packed off immediately by her mother to buy the Panadol – even though her husband had been home all the time but had not been asked to step up and do the father’s duty.
The takeaway is not that she was wrong to buy the meds – it is that a woman’s corporate triumph was considered unmentionable in front of domestic responsibilities. Whereas Narayana Murthy, the founder of tech giant Infosys, is often praised, even by his loquacious wife, Sudha, for having been so busy at work that he barely had time to be a father. Sudha Murthy often boasts that she brought up their two children as a ‘single parent’.
Which brings me, as it always does in this column, to conditions in Bahrain. I cannot claim any fly-on-the-wall info about family hierarchy and politics but I find the smug patriarchy and condescending mansplaining that happens in social and club circuits baffling and irritating.
One case I remember is when the oldest expat women’s group was jovially lectured to by a prominent male guest on how to conduct its affairs – despite the fact that his club never has a woman member on its board of directors. And, it’s not just social clubs – spiritual groups tend to delegate kitchen duties to their ‘women’s wing’, with the women emerging sweating and satisfied for the final Hallelujah so that everybody could feast on their kitchen work.
Household work is thankless and carries no monetary credit. By foisting it upon women, men are simply escaping drudgery. Women need to step away from this trap and also arm future generations by teaching their sons what women really, really want and tell their daughters it’s OK to say no to cooking the curry!
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