She is large and frumpy, and much of her day is spent bargaining with auto drivers, waiting for the dal to cook and packing lunch boxes. She is Class 12 fail. She has never held a job, but comes second in the lemon-and-spoon race in her son’s school, an event recorded by her proud husband on his phone camera. She has never heard of Simone de Beauvoir and couldn’t care less about Andrea Dworkin. But Sulochana is one of the most delightful feminists I’ve seen in recent times.
Real change rarely comes from the ivory towers of university campuses and lecture halls. To succeed, it must happen in middle-class homes and autorickshaws and vegetable markets. And this is the oh-so-familiar milieu that Tumhari Sulu lovingly recreates, with the immensely talented Vidya Balan as Sulochana, a small-time housewife with big-time dreams.
It’s a simple film. Sulochana and her husband Ashok, played phenomenally well by theatre artist Manav Kaul (thank God, Bollywood has finally understood casting) live with their young son and an ancient Maruti in a tiny flat where they have to send their precocious son out on imaginary errands if they feel the urge for romance. Ashok works for ₹40,000 a month as manager of a tailoring unit. Sulu is a sunny chatterbox who dreams of glamorous jobs but can’t find any. She, however, regularly wins flasks and tea sets in radio contests. One day she visits the radio station to collect a pressure cooker and decides to apply for a job as RJ. She gets it. What happens after is the film.
It’s a seemingly simple story but what it does is sneakily dismantle patriarchal tropes. Sulu’s straitlaced sisters might object to her working at night, but her husband supports her. When she wakes late, he gets the son ready for school. She wins their arguments. He gets angry when he hears dirty “Sulu bhabi ” jokes, but doesn’t stop her working and his anger lasts just one night. All this is done matter-of-factly, not in a family of intellectual hotshots but one that barely reads books and whose big dream is a new TV set.
That’s the important thing. When cinema, one of the most important cultural mediums, builds in feminist underpinnings not to self-consciously ‘arty’ but popular storylines, it propagates an image of the self and of society that then becomes normative. I love that it’s a Sulu who is taking charge of her life, with her plastic basket and tiffin carrier and wrong handbags. That she isn’t a trouser-wearing, English-speaking woman slaying those don’t-talk-to-strange-men demons.
Equally, it’s brilliant that Maria, played so well by Neha Dhupia, is not a clichéd Westernised vamp, but has the empathy to give another woman a leg-up.
Tumhari Sulu is important also because it understands Ashok’s anguish, his coming to terms with not just his wife’s job but her new friends, interests and excitements that don’t necessarily involve him, something most husbands find incredibly hard.
A Facebook friend recently forwarded the link to the Tamil short film, Lakshmi , another excellent work. Lakshmi, too, is a middle-class woman whose soul-killing drudgery is worsened by a surly, uncaring husband who is cheating on her. A chance meeting with a young artist opens her mind to not just fresh ideas, but a fresh look at herself. It is astonishingly rare for a woman in a Tamil film to be allowed an extramarital affair (the actress has been abused online for it), but this film treats it casually, like it was meant to be.
It’s not coincidental that these two films, or others like Lunchbox, have taken understated but dramatic stands that are grounded in the ordinariness of lives bound by cooking and kirana stores, and the price of brooms and the child’s homework. That’s what makes them so important, possibly helping them achieve more than a hundred academic treatises. Because they allow feminism to be craftily installed and taken for granted within the boundaries of a family and chores and a husband and in-laws and children, and this is vital.
Ultimately, these are the battle trenches — the sitting rooms and kitchens — where society fights for and builds its value systems. And if more of cinema continues to get it right, chances are we will too, sooner or later.
Where the writer tries to make sense of society with seven hundred words and a bit of snark.
