A woman with greying hair silently walks into her kitchen. She instinctively makes two cups of tea, then counts and grinds ten cloves. In Sulagna Chatterjee’s Olakh (Identity), the woman remembers only as she is about to pour the tea that her husband is dead.
This moment establishes almost everything the 21-minute short film wants to say about grief and the identities women build around other people. The woman’s house, too, is full of evidence of a life lived in relation to others: wedding photographs, memories of raising children, and the many traces of a socially prescribed family life. Yet Mansi Joshi, played by veteran actor Suhasini Mulay, is suddenly alone in this home.
Olakh, which had its world premiere at the Indian Film Festival of Melbourne on August 20, follows Mansi, a recently widowed woman, and Divya Paswan (Nikita Grover), her domestic worker, over the course of an afternoon in Mumbai. The women occupy very different worlds. Mansi is older and middle-class; Divya is younger, works in her home, and comes from a different caste and class location. But Chatterjee is interested in the intimacy between the two women, who discover the same wound in each other: they have changed to the point where they can no longer recognise themselves.
Food then becomes the film’s central metaphor. When Divya talks about a recent breakup, she initially insists that her life has not ended. It is something she needs to convince herself of. But Mansi sees the pain beneath her denial and asks her to sit down and have tea with her rather than rush through her work.
When food becomes identity
The domestic routine gradually gives way to emotional intimacy. As Divya takes clothes off the line, dusts cushions, and scurries around the house, Mansi tries to reach her through several knowing questions. A conversation about why Divya wants to look like a ‘model’ finally helps the viewers step into the younger woman’s relationship with her body and how she was often misunderstood.
Eventually, the two women move into the kitchen, where Divya reveals that she stopped eating meat for a man who still considered her undesirable because of her weight. Soon, caste enters the conversation. Divya has effectively distanced herself from her caste identity, and she has forgotten how her mother cooked.
Thus, in Olakh, as in the world at large, food becomes inheritance, and a record of who a woman was before she began modifying herself to become acceptable to somebody else.
Mansi has her own version of that erasure, too. She opens a dusty trunk containing old memories, which includes a notebook of recipes. She puts on her reading glasses and hurriedly writes down the ingredients Divya needs to buy. And in the kitchen, the two women continue remembering themselves.
As they cook, they admit that they have both missed meat. They remember and name their mothers. They joke about how much chilli powder to use and what all those spices might do to their stomachs, but keep adding them anyway. Olakh knows that reclamation can sometimes look as simple as a palmful of slit green chillies being tipped into the kadhai despite knowing it will be the next morning’s regret.
The film’s politics become more nuanced as the women make their way to the dining table. Divya has already placed a steel plate for herself and a glass plate for Mansi. But today, Mansi stops her, and she asks Divya to bring another set of plates so that they can eat from the same kind.
A shared plate, an unequal world
Olakh mostly avoids simplistic gestures of equality because the difference between the women never disappears. Divya is still Mansi’s domestic worker. Their caste and class positions remain unequal. What changes, however, is the way they look at one another. The shared food does not erase structural issues, but it creates a temporary space in which neither woman’s hunger needs to be ranked above the other’s.
There is also something wonderfully mischievous about the way the film lets food become an act of rebellion. As the women taste, laugh, and sweat through the heat of the spices, the pleasure of eating is evident, physical.
Then Divya picks up her phone. ‘Aapka woh mutton wala recipe aap bhejo na ek baar (Send me that mutton recipe of yours, please),’ she shyly, lovingly demands from her mother. She wants to make her mother’s recipe so that her employer, and now confidante, can taste the food from her childhood.
The film’s short runtime inevitably means some of these ideas are not fully explored. Caste and class, particularly, could sustain a much longer examination than the film allows. Divya’s relationship with food and her mother’s cooking is emotionally legible, certainly, but this thread is not fully explored.
Yet the film’s scale is also part of its charm. Rather than attempting to explain every form of oppression women encounter, Chatterjee focuses on what can happen over one afternoon.
Reclaiming what was given away
The resulting intimacy is strengthened by Mulay’s performance. The irony of casting her as a woman whose life has been deeply shaped by marriage and widowhood is not lost on viewers. Mulay herself married for the first time at 60. Mansi, however, is not Mulay. Her character confronts who she is now that her role as a wife is over.
Chatterjee, meanwhile, says that while growing up in Kolkata and later Mumbai, she frequently saw women negotiate their bodies, desires, ambitions, and relationships with food.
70-80 per cent of Olakh’s production cost was raised through crowdfunding over four months from more than 220 patrons. It was, quite literally, made by people choosing to believe in it. And perhaps there is something fitting about that: identities that have been diminished collectively can also be reclaimed collectively.
The central chicken dish, cheekily named ‘natkhat‘ (mischievous), lets the mood in the kitchen waft accordingly. By the end, at the table, Mansi closes her eyes as she tastes the food, and memories come in all their flavour. Tomorrow, they promise each other, they will cook mutton as they start thinking about what comes next.
And these choices, for once, are fully their own.
About the author(s)
Sohini (they/she) hails from Calcutta and loves to explore and write about all things society, culture, gender. With a background in journalism and English literature - they have finally been able to make having heartfelt conversations a huge part of their life outside of boxes.
