The Great Indian Kitchen is a 2021 Malayalam family drama about the unequal distribution of work inside a household. Cooking, cleaning and caring are treated as the women’s responsibility, while men’s comfort remains the organising principle. The film shows how those expectations are maintained through habits described as culture and tradition.
A marriage that narrows a woman’s life
Nimisha Sajayan and Suraj Venjaramoodu make the central relationship painfully believable. She plays a woman interested in classical dance who marries a schoolteacher. The car and jewellery surrounding the marriage suggest celebration and security, but daily life soon confines her to the household’s demands.
Her time is consumed by cooking, cleaning and caring for others. What makes the situation disturbing is how ordinary the family considers it. The loss of her freedom happens through a routine that everyone around her expects her to accept.
The repetition is the point
Early in the film, the mother-in-law begins her day preparing food and ends it after cleaning the utensils. When she is away, the same work passes to the younger woman, with help from other women. The men continue with yoga, newspapers and their own routines.
Repeating these tasks on screen makes the unequal division of labour difficult to overlook. The work is essential to the household, yet the people performing it are given little recognition or choice. The film’s rhythm allows the audience to feel that imbalance instead of merely hearing it described.
Tradition used to restrict choice
Other scenes reveal the hierarchy more directly: a wife brings her husband’s footwear, menstruation leads to isolation and stigma, and the younger woman’s wish to work outside the home meets resistance. These are practices depicted and criticised by the film, not natural requirements of family life.
For me, The Great Indian Kitchen is a forceful challenge to the idea that love or tradition excuses inequality. By staying close to everyday domestic work, it asks who has freedom within a home and whose labour makes that freedom possible.
The film stressed the importance of customary morality cannot be a guide to modern life. Social dogma, Prejudices, and stereotypical norms created by society need to be erased from the social order to create an equitable and egalitarian world for everyone. Liberation of thought, belief, and faith is the need of the hour to uphold the values of humanity. Women's empowerment comes from their educational advancement, economic liberation, and leaving the regressive traditional practices in the modern era.