202: Gender, Religion, and Resistance: A Feminist-Postcolonial Reading of Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen

 

Gender, Religion, and Resistance: A Feminist-Postcolonial Reading of Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen

Assignment of Paper 202: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

Academic Details

• Name: Krupali Belam
• Roll No : 13
• Enrollment No : 5108240007
• Semester: 3
• Batch: 2024–26

• Email: krupalibelam1204@gmail.com

Assignment Details

• Paper Name: Indian English Literature – Post-Independence

• Paper No.: 202

• Unit: III – Final Solutions 

• Topic: Gender, Religion, and Resistance: A Feminist-Postcolonial Reading of Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen

• Submitted To: Smt. Sujata Binoy Gardi, Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

• Submitted Date:  7 November 2025

Table of Contents

1. Abstract 

2. Keywords 

3. Research Question 

4. Hypothesis 

5. Introduction 

6. Theoretical Frameworks: Feminism and Postcolonial Feminism 

7. Cultural and Religious Patriarchy in India 

8. Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: Religion and Gender in Communal Space 

9. Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen: Domestic Space as Religious Discipline 

10. Silence, Speech, and Resistance 

11. Intersectionality of Gender, Class, and Religion 

12. Acts of Liberation and Possibility of Change 

13. Contemporary Relevance and Media Parallels 

14. Conclusion 

15. Works Cited / References 

Abstract

This paper explores the intersection of gender, religion, and resistance in Mahesh Dattani’s play Final Solutions (1993) and Jeo Baby’s Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), using the twin frameworks of feminist and postcolonial theory. Both texts reveal how patriarchal ideologies, often disguised as religious and cultural norms, shape women’s identities and dictate their domestic and social roles in post-independence India. The study examines how religion and ritual perpetuate systemic gender oppression while simultaneously offering spaces for subversive resistance. Through close textual and visual analysis, supported by feminist critics such as Simone de Beauvoir, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Judith Butler, the paper argues that Dattani and Baby expose the gendered hierarchies inherent in religious institutions and transform silence, empathy, and bodily labour into acts of rebellion. By connecting dramatic and cinematic representations, the study illustrates that feminist resistance is not only an act of political defiance but also a process of reclaiming subjectivity and dignity in the postcolonial Indian context.

Keywords

Feminism, Postcolonial Feminism, Gender, Religion, Patriarchy, Mahesh Dattani, Jeo Baby, Resistance, Indian English Drama, Domestic Space, Female Agency

Research Question

How do Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions and Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen reveal the interconnectedness of gender and religion, and in what ways do they represent female resistance within patriarchal and postcolonial structures?

Hypothesis

Both texts portray religion as a socio-cultural mechanism that enforces patriarchal discipline, yet they empower women by transforming silence, empathy, and domestic labour into vehicles of resistance and self-assertion.

1. Introduction

In post-independence Indian literature, writers and filmmakers have continuously grappled with the intertwined questions of identity, religion, and gender. The long-standing influence of patriarchy within Indian society has often been sanctioned by religious codes and traditional customs, which subordinate women under the guise of cultural purity and morality. Against this background, both Final Solutions (1993) and The Great Indian Kitchen (2021) present incisive critiques of patriarchal and religious power.

Mahesh Dattani, one of India’s leading contemporary dramatists, exposes the hypocrisy and internal contradictions of the urban middle class, revealing how communal politics infiltrate domestic spaces. His Final Solutions dramatizes Hindu–Muslim tensions in post-Partition India through the story of three generations of women Hardika, Aruna, and Smita each of whom negotiates faith, gender, and inherited prejudice differently.

Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen, though belonging to a different medium, mirrors Dattani’s thematic concerns. The film portrays an unnamed woman’s life within a conservative, upper-caste Kerala household, where daily rituals and religious practices systematically devalue her labour and autonomy. Both creators transform ordinary spaces the home, the kitchen, the prayer room into political arenas where women’s silent endurance turns into resistance.

By situating both works within a feminist-postcolonial framework, this paper contends that gender oppression in India cannot be detached from religious and cultural conditioning. The comparative analysis not only demonstrates how religion polices women’s bodies and voices but also how women negotiate agency through empathy, rebellion, and self-definition.

2. Theoretical Frameworks: Feminism and Postcolonial Feminism

2.1 Feminism

Feminist theory seeks to challenge patriarchal systems that privilege male authority while marginalizing women’s voices. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) articulates a foundational idea for this paper: “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” This suggests that femininity is socially constructed through cultural conditioning rather than biological destiny. Similarly, Judith Butler’s concept of gender performativity (Gender Trouble, 1990) argues that gender is not innate but performed through repeated acts gestures, rituals, and roles that society enforces as “natural.”

In Final Solutions, Dattani dramatizes these performances through Aruna’s religious piety and Hardika’s inherited prejudice. Their gestures ritual purity, temple observance, avoidance of “impure” contact illustrate Butler’s notion of gendered and religious performativity. The Great Indian Kitchen literalizes this performance within the domestic sphere, where repetitive acts of cooking, cleaning, and serving become rituals of obedience.

The convergence of Beauvoir and Butler illuminates how both authors depict women not as passive victims but as subjects aware of their roles within these performances and ultimately capable of disrupting them.

2.2 Postcolonial Feminism

Postcolonial feminism, articulated by scholars like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, critiques Western feminism for universalizing women’s experiences while ignoring the cultural, religious, and class-specific realities of the “Third World.” Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) questions whether marginalized women those doubly oppressed by patriarchy and colonial legacies can represent themselves within dominant discourses. Mohanty’s “Under Western Eyes” (1984) emphasizes the need to situate women within local histories and power relations rather than treating them as a homogeneous category.

Applying these frameworks, Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen both depict women as subaltern subjects their oppression justified through religion and tradition. Yet, their resistance emerges precisely from within these structures. Smita’s moral questioning and the unnamed wife’s eventual defiance embody Spivak’s “subaltern speech”: a breaking of silence that reclaims subjectivity without rejecting cultural identity entirely.

Postcolonial feminism thus bridges both works it reveals how gender, class, and religion intersect to define womanhood in India, and how women rewrite these definitions through everyday acts of agency.

3. Cultural and Religious Patriarchy in India

Religion has historically functioned as one of the primary instruments of social organization in India. While spiritual texts often advocate moral equality, the interpretations and ritual practices derived from them have reinforced gender hierarchies. The concept of purity, central to both caste and gender systems, has been used to confine women within domestic boundaries and to justify their subordination. Scholars such as Uma Chakravarti and Nivedita Menon argue that patriarchal religion transforms women into carriers of community honour and moral virtue, regulating their sexuality and labour through religious codes.

Post-independence literature, particularly by Indian English dramatists and filmmakers, reflects an increasing concern with this tension between spiritual idealism and gender injustice. In both Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen, religion becomes a performative social mechanism a ritualized practice that masks domination as devotion.

In Final Solutions, Aruna’s obsession with purity, reflected in her insistence on “washing the pooja thali thrice” or avoiding physical contact with Muslim neighbours, demonstrates how religion structures everyday behaviour. Her religiosity is not personal faith but a culturally imposed discipline that maintains patriarchal order.

In The Great Indian Kitchen, Jeo Baby translates this control into visual language: the camera lingers on the wife’s hands as she washes dishes, grinds spices, and scrubs floors acts that appear sacred but symbolize servitude. Through these portrayals, both creators expose how religion, rather than liberating, perpetuates patriarchal domestication under the guise of righteousness.

4. Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions: Religion and Gender in Communal Space

Mahesh Dattani’s Final Solutions remains one of the most powerful explorations of communal identity and gendered consciousness in Indian drama. The play interweaves public and private histories, showing how religious intolerance and patriarchal hierarchy coexist within the same social framework.

4.1. Women as Mediators and Mirrors of Prejudice

The three central female figures Hardika (Daksha), Aruna, and Smita represent generational shifts in Indian womanhood. Hardika’s memories of Partition expose how trauma becomes inherited prejudice; she confesses, “We had to leave everything because of them [Muslims].” Aruna, her daughter-in-law, embodies ritualistic religiosity strict in observance but blind to empathy. Smita, however, challenges these inherited notions: her friendship with Javed and Bobby, both Muslims, forces her to confront the moral emptiness behind religious discrimination.

4.2. The Home as a Political Space

Dattani turns the domestic setting into a microcosm of national identity. The house’s physical divisions the drawing room, prayer room, and terrace symbolize India’s divided conscience. The communal violence outside echoes the moral divisions inside, where the walls separate generations, genders, and religions.

Aruna’s prayer rituals are juxtaposed with her inability to show compassion; her spiritual piety does not translate into ethical humanity. The play suggests that patriarchy hides behind ritual, and that women like Aruna unconsciously perpetuate the same system that oppresses them.

4.3. Female Resistance and Reconciliation

Despite internalized patriarchy, women also embody the potential for healing. Hardika’s confession and Smita’s empathy bring catharsis to the narrative. Dattani avoids offering simplistic “final solutions,” instead emphasizing dialogue and compassion. The female voices, particularly Smita’s, initiate reconciliation between faiths and generations. Through her, Dattani aligns feminine empathy with postcolonial recovery, echoing Gayatri Spivak’s idea that the subaltern can “speak” only when empathy replaces hierarchy.

5. Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen: Domestic Space as Religious Discipline

Jeo Baby’s The Great Indian Kitchen exposes patriarchy not through loud dialogue but through repetition, sound, and silence. The film unfolds almost wordlessly, relying on montage sequences of domestic labour chopping vegetables, serving food, cleaning utensils that gradually become instruments of entrapment.

5.1. Domesticity as Discipline

The protagonist’s daily routine reflects Michel Foucault’s idea of disciplinary power the regulation of the body through minute, repetitive actions. Each ritual reinforces submission. Her husband, who lectures on morality, never helps in household work, embodying what feminist theorist Silvia Federici calls the “invisible labour” of women that sustains capitalism and patriarchy alike.

Religion sanctifies this discipline. Scenes of temple visits and menstruation taboos reveal how spirituality is weaponized to control women’s bodies. As one critic from The Hindu notes, “the kitchen becomes a temple, but a temple where only the woman is the priest and the prisoner.”

5.2. The Aesthetics of Repetition and Revolt

Cinematically, the film’s use of sound—the rhythmic chopping, clattering of dishes, dripping of water creates a sense of suffocation.  The turning point arrives when the wife, after enduring humiliation during menstruation, refuses to serve food and leaves. Her act of departure, devoid of confrontation, becomes an existential rebellion.

5.3. Resistance through Absence

Unlike conventional cinematic protests, Jeo Baby frames resistance as withdrawal. The woman’s silence and physical absence speak louder than any argument. Judith Butler’s notion of performative resistance helps interpret this gesture: by refusing to perform her gendered duties, the wife destabilizes the very norms that define her. Her rebellion echoes Spivak’s subaltern assertion not through speech, but through action that disrupts the system’s continuity.

6. Silence, Speech, and Resistance

In both Dattani’s and Baby’s works, silence becomes an ambiguous but powerful tool. Traditionally, silence has been viewed as a mark of women’s subjugation; however, feminist theory redefines it as a strategy of endurance and protest.

6.1. Silence as Subjugation

In Final Solutions, Aruna’s silence during her husband’s discussions and Hardika’s hesitance to share her trauma reflect generations of silenced women. They are shaped by social decorum “good women do not argue.” Similarly, in The Great Indian Kitchen, the wife’s silence at the beginning signifies internalized obedience.

6.2. Silence as Rebellion

Yet, by the end, silence transforms into defiance. Smita’s refusal to perform communal prejudice and the wife’s refusal to serve food both illustrate what postcolonial critic Leela Gandhi calls “ethical resistance” an act of quiet non-cooperation that questions power without replicating violence.

Gayatri Spivak’s question, “Can the subaltern speak?” finds its cinematic answer here: even when women do not speak in language, their actions articulate resistance in the grammar of the body. Dattani’s dialogue and Baby’s silence converge to reveal that resistance is not always loud it can also be the silence of refusal, the absence of compliance.

7. Intersectionality of Gender, Class, and Religion

Feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality (1989) emphasizes that women’s oppression cannot be understood by isolating gender from other structures like class, caste, and religion. This framework is crucial to both texts.

In Final Solutions, communal identity intersects with gender: Hindu and Muslim women alike inherit patriarchal expectations shaped by religious difference. Smita, a modern educated woman, faces pressure to conform to her mother’s orthodoxy, while Javed’s sister, though unseen, is mentioned as a victim of similar control within her own faith community.

In The Great Indian Kitchen, class compounds gender oppression. The protagonist’s in-laws hire a maid from a lower caste who performs the dirtiest tasks. The contrast between the upper-caste wife and the lower-class servant reveals what Mohanty describes as the “hierarchies among women” within patriarchy. The film subtly exposes how upper-caste women are both victims and enforcers of a system that privileges ritual purity over human dignity.

The obsession with purity in upper-caste homes is not merely about hygiene; it is about preserving social hierarchy through women’s bodies.” Both Dattani and Jeo Baby transform this critique into art: by linking religious orthodoxy with class-based control, they reveal how deeply patriarchy is woven into India’s socio-religious fabric.

8. Acts of Liberation and Possibility of Change

Resistance in both texts culminates in acts of liberation that redefine the feminine self beyond victimhood. Yet, these acts do not promise utopia; they reveal small ruptures in the social order that make change possible.

In Final Solutions, reconciliation begins when Smita insists that the Muslim boys, Javed and Bobby, should be treated not as “others” but as “human beings.” Her declaration “I don’t want to be like you, Ma” is not an act of rebellion against faith but against blind faith. Feminist critic “the emergence of individual morality over communal identity”. Smita’s courage lies in her ability to love and empathize across boundaries, an emotional revolution that destabilizes both patriarchy and communalism.

In The Great Indian Kitchen, liberation takes the form of departure. The protagonist, after enduring endless chores and ritual humiliation, quietly leaves the house, symbolically leaving behind generations of conditioned obedience. Her final appearance teaching dance her passion represents freedom reclaimed through movement. The film closes with her refusal to return, transforming exit into assertion.

Philosophically, both endings align with Judith Butler’s concept of agency within subjection: women act not outside systems of power but by reconfiguring them. Smita’s dialogue and the unnamed wife’s silence both perform the same function they create moral disruption. Change, therefore, begins in consciousness, not revolution; in refusal, not in confrontation.

09. Contemporary Relevance and Media Parallels

The significance of Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen extends beyond their literary and cinematic boundaries; both works anticipate the realities of contemporary India, where communal politics and patriarchal traditions continue to shape public discourse.

In an age of social media activism and digital feminism, Jeo Baby’s film has gained renewed relevance as a visual protest against unpaid domestic labour and caste purity. Campaigns like #MeTooIndia and #ShareTheLoad resonate with the film’s call for gender equality in domestic spaces. Similarly, Dattani’s portrayal of communal prejudice anticipates the polarised narratives of religion and identity visible in modern political discourse.

Contemporary OTT series such as Made in Heaven (2019) and Mrs. (2024) a Hindi adaptation of The Great Indian Kitchen continue this trajectory. Mrs. recontextualizes the same narrative for North Indian audiences, reaffirming the timelessness of women’s struggles against patriarchal sanctity. The adaptation demonstrates how feminist art crosses linguistic and regional boundaries, turning literature and cinema into forms of cultural resistance.

The continued popularity of such narratives confirms that feminist-postcolonial readings remain essential in understanding India’s socio-cultural evolution. As scholar Sharmila Rege notes in Writing Caste/Writing Gender (2006), “to question religion is not to abandon faith but to reclaim justice within it.” Both Dattani and Jeo Baby embody this ethical stance challenging systems without erasing their cultural roots.

10. Conclusion

The comparative study of Final Solutions and The Great Indian Kitchen reveals a shared vision of resistance that transcends genre and medium. Both works expose how religion, when interpreted through patriarchal structures, becomes an instrument of female subjugation. Yet, they also show that within these oppressive frameworks lie seeds of transformation.

Dattani’s theatre foregrounds the dialogue of conscience, while Jeo Baby’s cinema performs the politics of silence. One seeks reconciliation; the other, liberation. Both portray women who awaken to the realization that faith without equality is hollow, and that resistance whether through empathy or absence redefines womanhood beyond ritualized servitude.

Through feminist and postcolonial lenses, these works invite readers and viewers to rethink not only gender roles but also the ethics of belief and tradition. The women of Dattani and Jeo Baby become metaphors for India itself struggling between inherited piety and the pursuit of freedom. Their journeys affirm that the act of questioning is itself sacred, and that in every gesture of defiance lies the promise of a more humane faith.

Word Count : 3030

Images: 7

Works Cited 

Baby, Jeo, director. The Great Indian Kitchen. Mankind Cinemas; Symmetry Cinemas; Cinema Cooks; Neestream, 2021. Film.

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Vintage Books, 2011.

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990.

Chakravarti, Uma. Gendering Caste: Through a Feminist Lens. Stree, 2003.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

Gandhi, Leela. Postcolonial Theory: A Critical Introduction. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Kadav, Arati, director. Mrs. Baweja Studios; Jio Studios; ZEE5, 2025. Film.

Menon, Nivedita. Seeing Like a Feminist. Zubaan, 2012.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes Revisited.” Duke University Press, Dec. 2007, www2.kobe-u.ac.jp/~alexroni/IPD%202015%20readings/IPD%202015_5/Under%20western%20Eyes%20revisited.pdf. Accessed 7 Nov. 2025.

Rege, Sharmila. Writing Caste/Writing Gender: Narrating Dalit Women’s Testimonies. Zubaan, 2006.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 271–313.