Note: The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation that touches on themes of caste, class, gender, and sexuality. We have tried to contextualise the views we share within this conversation, and link to further readings in the transcript wherever appropriate. Any mistakes are our own. We welcome all feedback.
Recommended reading / viewing on caste and food:
Other recommended perspectives:
'Geeli Pucchi': The joy of finding a Bengali, Dalit, queer woman like me on screen
Caste on your plate: Where is the Dalit food in popular culture?
Lastly, spoilers ahead.
WARM-UP & BANTER
Shreya: I did want to ask you, before we get started, how is the test-tasting going for that Bombay restaurant you’re thinking of opening?
Raghav: It’s going well, yaar. I mean the pandemic kind of pushed it out a little bit. We can't really do anything right now, because we're just at home. So we get on calls every day. We try to do as much thinking as we can.
Everyone in our team is vaccinated now, so that's good. The plan is to eventually come to Bombay, when it’s safer, and eat here for a couple of weeks. Eat at places that offer the same or similar things as we do, and just see what the taste is like, what we can do better, what we're already thinking or not thinking of, etc., etc. Then go to Bhopal for two months and run a test kitchen from there for about a month. Get all our bad ideas out.
Shreya: This is so exciting. It's also so crazy, like, how much of opening a restaurant is not cooking and feeding people. It's thinking.
Raghav: I was actually just having this conversation the other day with someone who runs a brewery. I was joking with him, saying that, you know, I'm just having such a difficult time organizing the supply chain. We're trying to source sustainable organic produce, so it becomes even more difficult, because no one's really charted that territory out.
The person told me it took them a year to figure it out when they started. They said it's more like a process, and that I’ll probably have to spend a lot of time making a lot of mistakes. And just be like, very, very pissed off at a lot of people. And myself. So yeah, I'm kind of excited for that.
Shreya: Yeah! I mean you're like, one of the first movers, so if it's easy, then what are you doing?
Raghav: If I get my visa on time, then I’ll probably go to Denmark for two weeks [for the biennial Symposium hosted by MAD Academy, a Copenhagen-based educational institution for students in the hospitality industry]. That should be fun. But I mean, that depends on if I get the visa. Denmark has banned travel right now. But I'm going to write an email to the embassy.
Shreya: Special exceptions for a culinary genius, please.
Raghav: I’m going to write a very emotional email --
Shreya: “I’m just a boy from a small town!”
Raghav: -- yeah, yeah. That, this is what all of this has amounted to, my life depends on this conference. I’m opening my restaurant and if I don't get these people to come, if I don’t get to talk to these people, my life of 24 years will have no meaning. And maybe they give me a visa after that. You never know.
Shreya: I’m imagining a bureaucrat opening your letter. One single tear rolling down his cheek.
Raghav: Danish men are supposed to be very emotional! So I’ll reference a lot of Danish culture, maybe put in my personal experiences.
Shreya: The more emotional a population is, the better the food. I feel like there’s a correlation with food.
Raghav: Of course, of course. I mean the thing is if you go to Western Europe, the effect of religion is lessened. We're like, oh, why is Sweden so happy? Why are Iceland and Greenland so happy? It’s because they don’t have religion, not in an institutionalised sense. So of course people are more happy. Because all that matters is being happy and spreading happiness. I’m so excited to go to Denmark. I've only read about these things in books and heard about them in restaurants.
I’ll probably visit Uttar Pradesh right after. Just for the stark difference.
Shreya: I’m excited to get the Raghav Manifesto after all your travels. All your hypotheses on why the Danish are so happy. “It's got nothing to do with religion, guys. They use really good lubricant during sex.” Something like that.
Raghav: Maybe! Or maybe they’re just drunk all the time, that’s possible too.
INTRODUCING RAGHAV
Shreya: So, we’re going to talk about the narrative and emotional role of food in a short film we both saw very recently, Geeli Pucchi, directed by Neeraj Ghaywan. It’s one movie in a longer anthology called Ajeeb Daastaans on Netflix.
I have no real authority to really talk about this, other than the fact that I like watching movies and inflicting my opinions on others.
But Raghav! I hate to use the term, but you are a bonafide movie buff. You have a degree in hotel management, you've worked at restaurants such as Eleven Madison Park in New York, you are on your way to becoming an entrepreneur in sustainably-sourced food -- something you’ve written about eloquently when you argued why the Indian hospitality industry needs to support the farmer’s protests -- and, most recently, you won The MAD Academy Scholarship!
Do you have anything to say in the face of your accomplishments?
Raghav: This is the first time I’ve actually listened to someone talk about me for this long. I mean, for someone who had almost no accomplishments till he was like, 20 or 21, this feels like a good place to be at 24.
Shreya: Yeah. It's a wonderful place. I watched the film with noob eyes, and I’m genuinely excited to get your take on some of the stuff that they've shown. But first I wanted to start by asking you a question.
SETTING THE CONTEXT
Shreya: A lot of the way that I read this film and tried to understand its food-related subtext was from this brilliant article you shared a while ago, ‘There is No Dalit Cuisine’ that appeared on Popula.com, written by Sharanya Deepak. One thing that struck me about the movie is that there is a lot of food -- it is about food, in many ways -- and it is about being Dalit. But it’s not quite about Dalit food. I don’t know if you felt similarly.
Raghav: Right. I mean, first, just to set the context. Neeraj Ghaywan, the writer and director of this film, is probably one of few independent and strong Dalit voices in a film industry like ours that is otherwise dominated by privilege. He’s made a film about a Dalit queer woman protagonist, which is not a very common story. It’s a story about Bharti and Priya. Bharti, played by Konkana Sen Sharma, is a Dalit factory worker. Priya, played by Aditi Rao Hydari, is a Brahmin woman hired as a data analyst at the same factory. It’s a job Bharti has wanted for a while, and she’s angry when it goes to Priya. Things get complicated when Priya wants to become friends.
I don't really feel that Ghaywan wanted to make a movie about food. Maybe everything in the movie boils down to the fact that he just loves food a lot.
Raghav: I didn’t enjoy Geeli Pucchi as much as you did. What threw me off was -- because my only comparison is to Masaan [also directed by Neeraj Ghaywan], which according to me is the best film of the decade. I’ve seen it so many times. Before I saw Masaan, I didn’t know movies could be made like this. I always thought that there's a particular way in which Indians make movies, and that's, you know, two protagonists fall in love, etc., etc. There’s some sort of conflict, and the film ends.
The film was for 18+ audiences, and it was the first film I saw after I turned 18. I actually have the ticket for Masaan in a shoebox somewhere.
So when I compare this to Masaan, Masaan was, less is more. There are so many great moments, because Masaan is not telling me how to feel. With Geeli Pucchi, there’s so much exposition and dialogue. Just that first scene with Bharti and Dashrath, Bharti’s elderly co-worker. He starts that conversation by saying, “Hum log Dalit hai.” [We are Dalits.] I mean, no one would talk like that at a canteen. And then there’s that background score when Bharti’s feeling bad, and there’s just all these noticeable things -- O.K. He's telling me how to feel.
I feel this has something to do with the fact that the movie is technically produced by Karan Johar. It’s meant for an audience, that kind of --
Shreya: That needs to be knocked on the head, a little bit?
Raghav: Yeah, maybe, I mean otherwise it’s difficult to get these small touches across. But Karan Johar also remade another of my favourite movies of the past decade, Sairat. The whole point of Sairat was the caste conflict, which he sanitised into this upper class-lower class thing. So trust Karan Johar to take any good film or concept and just like, ruin it. But kudos to Neeraj Ghaywan -- you need to be a really good writer and director to bypass that kind of pressure.
Shreya: Must help if you have a Cannes award in your pocket.
Raghav: Of course, of course. But to return to your question, I don’t think Neeraj Ghaywan made a film about food. There are so many themes in this film. But what threw me off the second time I saw it is that there is food in every bloody premise.
Shreya: Exactly! Every frame!
CANTEEN SCENE #1
Raghav: I actually wrote it down, the film sort of starts with this shot of the factory canteen, and there’s this thing written on the wall, ‘Anna hi bhagwan’ [Food is God]. Ghaywan takes off onto this road where, though that’s written on the wall, food is an important form of discrimination in that in that factory. All the workers have lunch in the canteen, and Priya and all these upper-caste management people --
Shreya: Eat in their air-conditioned office cubicles.
Raghav: Yeah. I may be reading too much into the film, but the first time Priya is shown coming into the canteen, you have ‘Anna hi bhagwan’ on the wall. That was meant to be in there, and for Ghaywan to say that food is source of discrimination in this cinematic universe.
But yeah, every scene has food or a reference to food.
Shreya: It's insane! When we first discussed talking about this film through the lens of food, I went back to see it for a second time -- my Hindi is weak, so I didn’t catch ‘Anna hi bhagwan’ -- but I did notice that food as a narrative device is everywhere. It’s a way for people to come together, to gossip. It’s a way to show humiliation, to preserve social standing. Ghaywan has used food in such a versatile way.
To go back to your discontent, I get what you're saying about the movie telling and not showing, but I do think that’s a function of its duration. It’s trying to pack a lot into a short time. Even with this food theme, there’s so many layers to it -- but okay, let’s get into the analysis. That first canteen scene, where Bharti is introduced to Priya.
Shreya: I think one of Bharti’s co-workers puts it this way, it’s like Priya is literally descending from the clouds into the canteen. Right away she's marked as The Other, upper-caste and privileged, and in contrast to Bharti, the more traditionally beautiful and feminine woman.
And the canteen as well is interesting. It’s so homogenised, everyone is taking food from the same large buckets, a bit of salad, roti [flatbread], some kind of sabzi [vegetable curry]. What I found interesting was that Bharti -- and maybe this speaks to her independence? -- but she has her own little steel tiffin. She’s not eating what her male co-workers are eating -- and she is the only female worker there -- and I think that, again, speaks to how she is set apart from everyone else, too.
Raghav: Absolutely. That’s the thing that I noticed, too. Like I said, there's a good possibility we’re reading too much into whatever's happening, but I feel like -- if we were talking about any other movie, with a director who wasn’t as accomplished as Ghaywan --
Shreya: And as intentional.
Raghav: Right right. That’s why I don’t mind reading into a movie like this. I know if I watch it for the sixth or seventh time, there’ll be new layer that I hadn’t caught before.
But yeah, as soon as you cut into the cafeteria scene, there's a visual differentiation. Priya is on the first floor, and these guys are eating on the ground level. So she’s literally coming down the stairs, and that's, you know, the slow burn. Which is so good.
Priya brings her own bottle, and that bottle is capped by her own glass. Which means that she’s not drinking the water these guys are drinking. I mean, in a normal canteen you have one water cooler and everyone uses the same glass and drinks from there. And then the tiffin boxes both of them have. Bharti has a plain metal tiffin box, and just the one. Priya has a proper fancy zip-up one, there are two boxes, the different parts are properly compartmentalised.
Raghav: The first time Priya looks at Bharti and the food she’s having, which is some form of curry and rice, it is almost with a sense of disgust. And she offers her bhindi [fried okra] -- almost as if to say, God, what are you eating? It could be a friendly gesture too, but I don’t know.
But that is Hydari’s character. She's asserting so many things in the form of being nice and friendly, and not realising how discriminating she’s being. And that’s why she plays the character so well, because she is like that. She’s cast in that kind of role everywhere.
Shreya: Aditi Rao Hydari, if you’re reading this. Now you know what Raghav thinks of you.
Raghav: I mean, I just saw Psycho, by one of my favourite directors, Mysskin. Hydari is in that one, and she’s very good. But yeah, the first canteen scene sets the standard for what the movie is going to be.
Shreya: I think you're so right. One of the big things that scene does is contrast the characters of Priya and Bharti. To go back to what you were saying earlier, and Dashrath and Bharti’s conversation where he says, “Hum Dalit hai”, there’s a line where he tells Bharti to give up on that data analyst position. He says, they’ll let us sit at the same table as them to eat, but they’ll never let us work at a table. Which speaks to the caste-based segregation within the modern workforce.
And it’s funny, because I think he ends up being wrong about the first thing too -- even when they formally allow you to sit at the same table to eat, there are so many little barriers constructed between what they’re eating and what you’re eating. Dashrath is right that he and Bharti share the canteen with upper-caste factory workers, but towards the end of the movie, Priya is strongly advised by her boss to not eat in that space.
When Priya passes Bharti the bhindi, I didn’t read it the way you did, which is like, she's looking down at Bharti. What I found noticeable was her reaction when Bharti said, no, thanks -- it was very like, what? No to bhindi? It was, as you said, about those little moments and genuinely not being able to understand someone else's preferences, because you're so naïve and deeply sunken into your own worldview.
Shreya: The other thing that I found interesting was the way the canteen is a communal space. It’s a way to socialise, which is important when you’re in a factory and you need to look out for your fellow workers, in the way Dashrath does for Bharti. And he’s less able to do this for Bharti as the movie goes on, because Bharti is increasingly having her food with Priya at the office cubicles.
And the flip of that is, it’s also a space where the whip can be cracked -- where everyone is put in their place. The confrontation between Bharti and the sexist co-worker, who is policing the way she behaves outside her gender role, also happens in the canteen -- and Bharti punches him.
Raghav: And, just to add to that from a film-making view -- after Priya comes and sits with Bharti, and they have their meal, and the bhindi is offered and rejected, there’s already a lot of discomfort there for the viewer. And then Ghaywan brings in another layer of discomfort.
Shreya: Just cranks it up!
Raghav: With that guy coming in, and being like, “Priya Madam aap yahaan neeche kyun aaye, ladkiyan yahan kaam nahi karte” [Priya madam, why have you come downstairs, women don’t work here], with Bharti sitting right there.
Shreya: It’s the same guy who, in the very first scene when Priya is touring the factory floor in her kurta and dupatta and make-up, tells Bharti, “Seekh lo Priya se” [learn from Priya].
Raghav: Right. And this is why I watch Ghaywan’s films. If he is directing something, he will take things to the next level.
BHARTI’S FLAT SCENE
Shreya: So, then, I think, after that first scene, we figure out some context behind Bharti’s steel tiffin box, which is that she lives alone in a small house. And her companion is basically her dog! That was another interesting way of bringing food into this relationship with this dumb dog, where she’s chiding him for shitting on a neighbor's lawn, and she's like, all you want is food isn't it? Well fine, I'll feed you. It’s a way of showing she’s a solitary person, but also again, this idea of food as a way to extend warmth and affection and connection to another being. It’s a very minor bit, but I thought it was nicely done.
Raghav: There’s also a scene where Bharti’s drinking alone in her living room. And that's how I feel personally when I drink alone, so that was relatable.
I feel like those are Hindi cinema’s go-to scenes to capture loneliness. Have the protagonist drinking alone out of an Old Monk bottle, or show their friendship with a dog. Those are basically the two markers of loneliness.
Shreya: The third one is looking at photos of your exes. And crying.
Raghav: And crying yourself to sleep, yeah. All of these are true, so.
DAHI VADA SCENE
Shreya: So the next big place we see food is a huge step-change in their relationship. Priya says to Bharti -- and this is the most self-aware thing I think she’s said about herself up until that point -- ‘You’re afraid I’m going to stick to you, but I just want to drop you home on my scooter’. And they go and they have street food.
I wanted to ask you what you thought about this whole thing around Priya instructing the bhaiya [stall-owner] not to put ginger powder on Bharti’s dahi vada [fritters with curd]. Was that just Priya knowing Bharti’s preferences?
I did find this location interesting as an equaliser, where they can chill around and chat in a way that they can’t at the factory.
Raghav: I think that was what the scene tried to do. I don’t know if the ginger has a subtext here. The other way to look at it is that, right after they eat, they open up to each other -- so the ginger could be a way of showing they’ve already had a lot of conversations with each other, and their relationship has deepened.
I just love how food is there. It’s so beautifully done. It’s harmless. If you want to read into it, if you want to go into the layers, you have it. But if you just want to see how the scene is progressing, it’s also there for that.
Shreya: Hey, it sounds like you like this movie, Raghav. That’s what it sounds like to me now.
Raghav: I wouldn’t say -- I mean of course I liked this movie. I’ve been talking about it for this long. But -- I mean it's a personal thing, but I don’t like a lot of films that make me think too much. I prefer films where I can have fun.
Shreya: Wow. Drag Neeraj, just drag him. Tell him he doesn’t deserve any film award.
Raghav: I was actually watching a video a couple of months ago, where Neeraj was saying Martin Scorsese saw Masaan and wrote him an email about how much he loved the film.
Shreya: That’s so nice! He deserves it. I was watching a Film Companion interview with Anupama Chopra and Aditi Hydari Rao, and I was just struck by -- how cute he is? I was just like, wow, he is very good-looking.
Raghav: And he’s only 40.
Shreya: He’s only 40! It’s like sir, with that salt-and-pepper hair, you are activating all my DILF sensor nodes.
Raghav: I totally agree.
Another fun fact: Varun Grover, who wrote Masaan -- and the greatest cinematic scene about food, where Pankaj Tripathi offers kheer to Richa Chadha -- also wrote Sandeep Aur Pinky Faraar. It examines gender roles, and has Arjun Kapoor and Parineeti Chopra, who are surprisingly not ruining the film. Probably because the writing is so good.
Shreya: What are you talking about? Ishaqzaade was the height of cinema.
Raghav: I’m sure it was. I haven’t seen that film.
But the way Varun Grover writes about food -- these people love food so much that it comes into the narrative, one way or the other. There’s this beautiful scene in SAPF where Arjun Kapoor is making parathas, because Parineeti Chopra doesn’t know how to, though his family expects her to know. So they’re both in the kitchen, making the parathas, and then she serves it like she made it.
Even this dahi vada scene we were discussing -- what comes after that is the most emotionally triggering point of the whole movie. Priya reveals that she got the job Bharti wanted by reading the manager’s palm. Bharti gets emotional at that, but doesn’t reveal the real reason. She says she misses her mother, and Priya hugs her.
Shreya: Yeah. And though that is a fraught moment, that intimacy is facilitated by them sharing the street food. Priya cracks a joke, makes that innuendo, wipes the curd from Bharti’s face. Again, food as a device to make these moments happen.
Shreya: After that we’re shown a little montage of their friendship evolving, and we return to the canteen for a moment where Priya is serving Bharti pulao [steamed rice]. And she says there’s elaichi [cardamom] in this. Not a big moment, but shows us the privilege underpinning the use of different seasonings and spices. Many people can’t think about pulao without elaichi.
Raghav: Elaichi is an expensive spice, yeah. Even this whole meme on social media of how elaichi spoils the biryani, that whole joke -- and the narrative around things like badam [almonds] and other dry fruits. The ‘There is No Dalit Cuisine’ article talks about this -- there are food items that differentiate the cooking in upper-caste households from lower-caste households. Dairy, spice -- these are all statements of privilege.
Shreya: Yeah. It goes back to your fantastic observation of Priya’s character, that she’s always telegraphing these little things, she has no idea what her actions mean in a social context.
THE KISS SCENE
Shreya: Let’s go to the big scene, where they first kiss.
The lead up to that is Bharti’s been getting the house ready, she’s been cooking, Priya is late to their date. She’s cooking chicken. It’s not beef or pork, or any of those meats that would immediately scream ‘caste tension’.
Priya has chicken grease on her lips, which is where the title of the movie comes from -- literally, wet kisses. She kisses Bharti’s hands with those lips, she kisses Bharti with those lips. That felt so loaded to me. There’s so many caste norms around touching your mouth to food, and then touching other utensils or people. For them to do that -- that was a crazy moment.
Raghav: 100%. For someone like me, who’s grown up in a household like that where all these things matter a lot -- the idea of ‘jhoota’, that you can’t use the same utensil for something if it’s been served to someone else, all those restrictions.
But that scene is loaded because of what food is saying in the subtext. They’re accepting their sexuality in front of each other -- but they’re also doing something ‘wrong’. The Brahmin girl is eating chicken and kissing another girl.
Shreya: That’s so right. There’s two forbidden things going on in that scene.
Raghav: That’s the point from which I started viewing the film from a food lens. It really hit me, this scene. There are so many people who hide that they eat meat from their parents, and Ghaywan is using that to talk about sexuality.
Shreya: Which is a very fun analogy.
Raghav: Of course it is.
On this whole chicken thing, I was reading somewhere that the last time a protagonist was shown eating pork was in 2013, and Nagraj Manjule’s film Fandry. You should watch it. Manjule of course is the guy who made Sairat, a very prominent Dalit creative voice. Both Fandry and Sairat have very loaded character moments like this one.
Shreya: Maybe Bharti does eat beef and pork privately. But to maintain the fiction of being a Bannerjee Brahmin she wouldn’t be able to cook that for Priya, even if does eat and enjoy that.
Raghav: Yeah. This scene really opens the doors into the characters. You understand so many things about their previous relationships, how they were with their respective partners. The fact that Priya says, “I gave you a wet kiss,” maybe that’s something she’s said to her ex-girlfriend too, and it gives a new perspective on her childish nature.
Shreya: Yeah. Also the fact that after she kisses Bharti and freaks out, Bharti is like, it’s okay, I understand. That calmness feels hard-won, like something Bharti has had to practise with women who freak out when they realise they’re attracted to her.
ON ACTING
Raghav: Kudos to the way Konkana Sen Sharma has played this, I mean, she is so bloody good. It kills me how good she is.
Shreya: She goes through the movie with this stuck-out jaw, and it says so much about the pride and humiliation she feels as Bharti. Just, the jaw. All the acting’s in that jaw.
Raghav: I’m sure all the directors want to cast her. I think at one of Irrfan Khan’s farewells, and I don’t know who said it, it might’ve been Vishal Bhardwaj, but they said, “Why would anyone make a film without Irrfan? It’s pointless to make a film without you.”
And that’s what I feel about Sharma. There’s a movie I saw called Ramprasad ki Tehrvi. It’s directed by Seema Pahwa. In that, Sharma plays a proper young bhabi [sister-in-law] who all the young men in the family are attracted to. She has a similar sexual energy in that film. And she pulls it off so well -- and then you see her in this film. Sharma comes from a privileged background, and for her to feel and act in this way -- that scene in the first part where she’s fighting that guy who calls her a man, she’s so fierce. It’s almost like she's been through it all. That's what great acting is. All the vulnerabilities that we see, when she's sitting alone and eating or drinking.
Another thing that I really liked about this movie, which we’ll come to at the end, is that the Dalit protagonist is not cast as someone who's been wronged.
Shreya: Right. She’s shown as someone with the agency to inflict hurt on others.
Raghav: There is a twist at the end, of course, but even before that scene -- at Priya’s birthday, and we cut to the scene where Bharti’s sitting and she tells Priya, you know what, you should have a kid. And there’s that look on her face, like, game’s on. She plans it so well. That’s what saves the movie for me.
Shreya: Yeah. I don’t know that I’d agree she planned it -- but I agree with everything else, because that reveal, that she had been married and had a miscarriage. That was such an insane twist to me, and put so many things into perspective. Exactly as you say, Raghav, it’s the way Sharma acts, there’s a quality behind her eyes as if she has been through a hundred years of existence. Like, she has been through this shit. That reveal made everything make sense, it backlit all the exposition that happened at the start. Which is why a second watch is really rewarding.
Small segue, but what did you think about Aditi Rao Hydari’s acting? I thought it was a really good performance. I thought in some ways it was the harder role to do.
Raghav: Really? I think it was well-casted. I was going over her filmography and I couldn’t spot a movie where she’s tried to step away from the roles she’s used to doing. I think I saw her in Rockstar which must have been released ten years ago. She had the minor role of a reporter, but she did it justice. Like, she wasn’t miscast, the way Nargis Fakhri was. She just -- like, the way Sharma is brilliant and demands your attention, like Fahad Fazil, sorry, I’m just a huge FaFa fan --
Shreya: I didn’t know Raghav. Tell me more.
Raghav: -- yeah, yeah. But yeah sometimes I have to watch scenes with Sharma in them twice, because I’m so consumed by the silences. If Konkana Sen Sharma is silent, that means she’s thinking about something.
Shreya: What I appreciated about Hydari’s performance, and this comes back to Ghaywan as a filmmaker and his ethos, I think he’s spoken about this in a couple of interviews, is that he dislikes having a clear antagonist. He thinks there’s a story to everyone, and you should humanise everyone, which is -- I mean, he’s excellent. I think a lesser portrayal of the Priya character would’ve been cloying. I think Aditi brings a naivety to the role that always feels authentic.
ON CASTE & GENDER
Raghav: I see a lot of myself from a few years ago in Priya’s character. I knew there was a lot of injustice around me, but I was so unaffected by it. I would just see it in passing. Raghav five years ago would behave exactly like Priya in this situation, and I’d sympathise with her. I’m sure a lot of people who are unaware of caste atrocities, or about what Ghaywan is trying to say, would also project onto Priya. And that’s what Ghaywan does so well, because she is also oppressed in that marriage.
I mean she's trapped by so many things, by her sexuality, she’s forced into having a child. Her father-in-law is a head priest, so she has to behave in a certain way, her friend circle has to be from a particular strata.
Shreya: Which is like a point Ghaywan makes really well, which is an economic reality, that Dalit women participate in the workforce at much higher rates than upper-caste women [while also disproportionately working low-paying jobs and facing wage discrimination]. Whereas upper-caste women are funnelled into marriage and household duties, work is seen as beneath and ‘impure’ due to caste-based restrictions. Ghaywan shows Priya’s struggles with her accepting husband and oppressive mother-in-law really well.
Raghav: Even that husband character is written so well. He’s a good husband.
Shreya: He’s a good husband! There’s a world where Priya can actually continue working and have a few freedoms, but Bharti’s intervention closes that off.
Raghav: Yeah. I’m sure the way the husband views himself is as a progressive guy, I’m letting my wife work. Another priest’s daughter-in-law would not have the freedom to ride out on a Scooty. There are so many layers here.
Shreya: And it’s not all heavy, the movie is slyly funny about these themes too. The part where Priya is crying about how nice her husband is, and how she still can’t love him, and she’s describing how he’s always shown as ‘typing’ on WhatsApp. So good. Just a movie with range.
CANTEEN SCENE #2
Shreya: The next scene touches on some of these things we’ve described. There’s a moment well into her friendship with Priya, where Bharti’s entering the canteen again. She’s on the staircase ledge and looking down, and says hi to Dashrath, who’s her one friend at work. And she gets a text from Priya. And then she leaves the canteen and has lunch with Priya.
Which is so interesting, because Priya thinks of this as girl-bonding. But for Bharti, Dashrath is her fellow Dalit comrade, and those workers are her real co-workers on the factory floor, not Priya, who works in a cubicle upstairs. The way Priya talks about them, oh the canteen is smelly, my manager told me not to go down there -- she sees the workers as lower than her. But somehow Bharti is an exception. And Bharti asks, what else did the manager say about us, and Priya doesn’t answer. But she does wrangle Bharti into attending her birthday party -- in part because it’ll help her case with her mother-in-law to keep working, if they knew more women work at the factory.
Raghav: That conversation actually cuts at a point where they both open their tiffins and offer food to each other. And then Ghaywan cuts it. That was very intense.
Shreya: His mind, though. Huge brain.
PRIYA’S BIRTHDAY SCENE
Raghav: The whole birthday scene that follows -- at Priya’s house, and at the office later -- it’s intense. It’s less intense at the house, because Bharti still has her Bannerjee identity to protect her. Priya’s husband brings out the barfi cake, and he’s like, “Cake mein anda hota hai” [cakes have egg], so he had to make a special cake to appease his dad.
And again, this scene -- if you think Ghaywan is not interested in food! Food is everywhere.
Shreya: And it's also the preparation, right, like the way the husband lovingly says, oh I stayed up all night, making this for you. And Priya bursts into tears -- and we only learn later at the ghat that’s because she’s thinking, fuck! He’s so nice to me and I can’t love him, there must be something wrong with me.
That was crazy. And the other thing is of course, they’re going around with paper cups of juice -- and that’s the last scene where Bharti drinks from the same utensil as everyone else in Priya’s family.
Raghav: The scene after that, where they’re sitting at the ghat and Priya’s crying -- Masaan also has a great ghat scene where Vicky Kaushal breaks down, like, “Yeh dukh sala, khatam nahi hota” [this bastard, Sadness, he’s never done]. I just love directors who are living in their own universe, “I set the rules,” you know.
Shreya: Great directors are like, I want a scene by a ghat, so I will have a scene by a ghat.
Raghav: Their cinematic universe is them. You look at Richard Linklater playing around with time, a lot of people think Christopher Nolan is the only director with an understanding of time, but Linklater made a trilogy of films that are about conversations between two people over a few days. And he made Boyhood, of course. His films either end after three days or 250 years.
But I mean, it’s these small things that make Neeraj Ghaywan a director to cherish. It doesn’t matter whether you like the film, or don’t like it -- you should be able to sit down and talk about the things he tried to do, the things that worked for you, didn’t work for you, and that’s what makes a great director. If both of us just agreed this film was good, or this film sucked, there’d be no point to the conversation we’re having.
Shreya: Correct. Correct.
So they’re at the ghat, and Priya’s crying, and Bharti comforts her and tells her there’s nothing wrong with being gay. And she returns Priya’s vulnerability by ‘coming out’ and telling Priya her surname is Mondal, and that she’s a Dalit -- except right after that moment, Priya gets an emergency text from her manager asking her to come to the office.
The whole next scene, where the emergency is revealed to be a surprise cake-cutting, is crazy. There’s the glass walls of the manager’s office, where someone like Bharti is always on the outside looking in; a worker observing management, a Dalit observing her Brahmin manager, who dismisses her in the very first scene by saying, get out of my office, I have to do pooja [prayers]. It’s an entirely exclusionary space.
When she sees Priya in that office -- Priya, who has barely put in the time into this factory that Bharti has, getting all of that warmth and camaraderie -- and is called in by another manager, not to share in the celebrations, as the viewer initially thinks, I mean, I totally thought she would -- but to be told “Cut the cake and distribute it.” God, what a gut-punch.
Again, the Dalit woman does the manual and ‘lesser’ labour, while the others feast.
Raghav: And it’s not just warmth and affection and cake. There’s a line where you hear the manager say he’s finally approved the construction of a women’s washroom. Just imagine what that would do to the psyche of a person.
To go back to that dahi vada scene, where Bharti asks Priya, what did the interviewer ask you? And Priya shares, oh he didn’t ask me anything, he asked me what my hobbies were, when I told him I can read palms he asked for a reading -- Bharti has a smart callback to that too, later on -- but yeah, just think about what that does to the psyche of a person who is able and more than deserving of a job, of respect, but is outcast because she comes from a particular class or caste.
Raghav: And Ghaywan captures all of that with just a soiled napkin.
Shreya: Yeah. The moment one of the managers wipes his fingers with the napkin, puts it on the tray, and says to Bharti, go give the leftovers to your co-workers. And she has to pick it off the tray before she leaves, too. That was also crazy. Another reference to ‘There is No Dalit Cuisine’, but there’s a book by Omprakash Valmiki called Joothan which talks about the practise within certain Dalit communities to wait after ceremonies like weddings are over, and take the leftovers.
Raghav: From a cinematic point of view, I think it would’ve been better for the film to end here. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked the ending, the last ten to fifteen minutes -- but I knew the twist was coming as soon as Bharti told Priya, I think you should have a baby. I knew that Priya was going to get maternity leave and they’ll have no one else to cover, so Bharti will get the job. Or maybe I’m fucking up the chronology of the film. But basically somewhere there I think would’ve been more impactful.
FINAL SCENES
Shreya: Yeah, that scene comes right after this one. Bharti is in the locker room wiping her tears after the cake scene, and then Priya comes in, and Bharti tells her, you know why you’re feeling so untethered? It’s because you’re not a mom yet.
Raghav: Yeah, she reminds Priya of her old high school friend Kavita, and how Kavita has moved on, so Priya should too.
Shreya: On your point of where the movie should’ve ended, I agree, that would’ve been a powerful moment. I also think there's something Neeraj Ghaywan is trying to say about how some aspects of our identity erase others -- so the fact that Bharti is a skilled worker erases the fact for her boss that she’s a woman and needs a woman’s bathroom. That’s only made clear to him when Priya joins the factory. That happens in a lot of ways -- and I think I liked the ending of the movie and the drama of it, because in a way it was necessary to show a different dimension of Bharti, that she can also be deliberately cruel and leverage this aspect of Priya’s identity.
Raghav: She’s forced to become that.
Shreya: Out of self-preservation, right.
Raghav: Going back to the cake-cutting scene, it really reminded me of #MeToo. When the boss realises women need a washroom -- you only understand the pain of someone else when that person belongs in your ‘group’, and so you can share that grief, or understand what they might be going through. I mean it's almost impossible for him to fully understand, but there's a sense of empathy that only kicks in when Priya does not have the washroom.
Shreya: Yeah. Politically, that’s very interesting. You know my opinion on this in Sir -- my view is that Vivek Gomber’s character only realises, oh, Ratna is a human being, when he falls in love with her and then understands her challenges.
I think there’s a world in which, for instance, Priya can use her privilege to create a situation where it is not the zero-sum game that the movie ends on. It’s not Bharti’s fortunes versus Priya’s fortunes. And that’s a critique to be made of the movie, that it pits the women against each other without necessarily investigating the ways in which they could work together. Which, as a political optimist, I feel very sad about.
Raghav: I mean, it’s very easy for both of us to come to that conclusion. For both of us, coming from privileged backgrounds, having it easy, it’s easy to say that. But if we’d gone through that kind of discrimination and injustice throughout our lives -- I mean, as relatively affluent millennials, we’ve always been told you can have whatever you want, all you have to do is work hard. We’re expecting everything to just magically happen to us.
Shreya: And it does magically happen to us, right? There’s never going to be a situation where we fail in a way where we can’t recover.
Raghav: Right. And when we do experience small failures, and feel like, okay. This is the first time I'm not getting something that I really want. Why is this happening to me? And you realise that ah, there are people who go through this feeling their whole life.
Shreya: I agree with you. I mean that's just my view, as someone who loves propaganda, on what the ending I’d like to have seen.
Raghav: Oh, me too. All these things about people hating propaganda films -- I, for one, love a well-made propaganda film. Not if they’re Narendra Modi biopics. But yeah, otherwise I don’t mind them.
Shreya: Oh yeah. The World Before Her, all those Anand Patwardan films.
But yeah, you’re right, we are coming at it from a privileged point of view. I mean, the ending is -- Bharti has had to fight for every fucking inch, and she is asserting herself in the ending. It’s not an entirely empowering assertion. I think her relationship with Priya -- I don’t think it recovers from a move like that. I think that will impact her -- she is a lonely person -- and again, the new job will cut her off from her fellow workers and Dashrath. So it is a move that comes with costs. What is important is that she is making that move with all her agency, and knows what the costs are, and that is very interesting to see in a protagonist.
Raghav: That last scene, where they bring the chai [tea], and she’s being served in the steel tumbler. The family doesn’t realise -- the husband is so happy that he has a kid, the mother-in-law is happy, everyone’s happy, and the reason for that is Bharti. She’s the one who told Priya to become a mother.
Shreya: Again, such a double-edged thing! Bharti gives Priya all that pregnancy advice, while inadvertently sharing her caste and the family occupation of midwifery.
Again, it goes back to what you were saying about Priya’s naivety -- like, I don’t know if Priya shared Bharti’s exact caste with her mother-in-law. But she does share that piece of information, and the mother-in-law, with all her Brahmanical-patriarchal knowledge, obviously connects the dots. It doesn’t lessen her culpability! But god, is she naïve.
I'd like to believe that if Bharti told her, if you share this with your family, this is how they will treat me -- Priya might not have done it.
Raghav: But I also have a feeling -- totally unrelated, but both of us love romanticising, and connecting distant things to each other -- I was listening to this interview with Prashant Kishore after the West Bengal elections. I mean I really couldn’t care less about him, he’s now a liberal hero, but whatever.
He said something that was very interesting. He said that his data showed -- because BJP was trying to polarise the Bengal electorate -- he said there’s only 30-40% of the Hindu electorate you can polarise.
I feel like most of us are like Priya. Even though we have a Brahmanical upbringing that tells us to behave in a particular way. We still want to give make charitable assumptions of people, we want to believe we’re living in an age where scientific temper holds more sway than religious identity. I mean, I personally feel we have Priyas in majority, and Priya’s in-laws in the minority. But the way the power dynamics are, we always focus on the in-laws.
I mean, the way the film ends -- Priya is a good person, she wants to do the right thing. She wants to make Bharti feel good. But she can’t, because she’s bound by so many things.
Shreya: Right. And she just doesn’t have the consciousness! She doesn’t have the consciousness to identify, right, Bharti is in a bind because of these various social structural factors, and this is how I can offer help.
Like you said, a lot of the conversation focuses on Priya’s mother-in-law. But in a lot of ways it is Priya who is more interesting, because unlike her mother-in-law, who sees it and wants to keep hold of it, the caste privilege is invisible. She’s just not aware.
And yeah, I think one of the last shots of the film is Bharti really owning her Dalit identity, and tipping that steel tumbler in such a defiant way. And Priya’s just looking at her with dead eyes.
Raghav: Great ending. So well done.
Like I said, the film really started working for me in the last 10-15 minutes, and if he hadn’t ended the movie at the cake-cutting scene, this was the next best alternative.
WRAP-UP
Shreya: There you go, it met Raghav’s standards.
Raghav: I mean I don't have any standards, particularly.
Shreya: Treat the audience as smart people, I think that’s your standard. Which is a good standard.
Raghav: [skeptical sound] Really?
Shreya: Yeah! I feel like every criticism you’ve made is, ‘why are you dumbing it down from me’. Or ‘I knew the twist when she went on maternity leave’.
Raghav: I think Malayalam cinema has changed me.
Shreya: It’s the power of Fahad Fazil.
One thing I forgot to briefly touch upon was that nice two-minute bit before the final scene, which is like Priya puking in the newly constructed women's bathroom, and Bharti’s there to help. Priya turns, and it's a great reveal, because you see she’s heavily pregnant. I thought that was well-done, also because it's not morning sickness since it's towards the end of her pregnancy -- so it must be indigestion.
Not to read too deeply into that again, but. Food is not digesting well! What could that mean!
Raghav: Yeah. I mean the last shot of the film is Bharti having tea from the tumbler. Food is always present, it’s part of every single scene, every single frame, like we discussed.
I can’t wait to see what Ghaywan does next. Whatever he does, I’m sure it will be so interesting. I hope he makes another movie soon.
Shreya: Yeah. I know I started out this a call on a sort of wistful note, maybe I sounded like ‘Oh, I wish I Neeraj had said something about Dalit food’, but I think you've sold me on -- it's not about Dalit food, it’s about using food to show the journey of this Dalit protagonist.
Again, such a tragic, almost Pyrrhic ending, even though she's won something that she really wants. The steel tumbler is obviously defiance and victory. But I feel so sad for her.
Raghav: I mean, there’s no going back from here, right?
Even for Priya -- she could’ve given up her home life, and lived with a certain amount of guilt. But when she gives up her working life, chooses the kid, and all the complications -- she’s also lost her friend. There’s no going back from here.
And that is the biggest punishment one can receive. Having to live with yourself.
Shreya: Yeah, well said.
Good point to close the discussion on, I think. That was so fun, thank you. We were just geeking out!
Raghav: Yeah, it was fun. It’s been a long while since I’ve spoken about any movie, it was fun.
I went back and saw the movie from a different lens before this conversation. I tried to look at it critically -- but that was too difficult. I’m an easy viewer. You’d probably have to ask Nimish if the shot was good. For me it’s more about the acting, and whether I’m personally engaged.
I’m not a fucking film critic, so it doesn’t really matter if I like or hate the film. It’s not like 10 people are going to watch the film, or not, based on whether I like it. I just watch films.
The only good thing that has happened during lockdown is I’ve watched a lot of films.
Shreya: Bro, you are like my repository of film recommendations. I have a big backlog of like, 10 Films Recommended To Me By Raghav That Will Change My Life, But I’m Too Lazy To Change My Life Right Now.
Raghav: It’s okay, don’t. Don’t, right now. This is not the time to change your life.
Glad to see Bread Factory back! Food subtext is there in a couple of Pa Ranjith films too so you might be on to something. But it's far less frequently used and less subtle.