No Spices for Empowerment (my article in the magazine, The Rally)

Yes! The story has magic in it. Of course it is about the supernatural powers of one single woman! So what? Everything is fine if the story has been woven with intellectual stuff to deliver human values and the importance of independence that women really deserve. And so is Chitra Bannerjee Divakaruni’s novel “The Mistress of Spices”. It is the story of an Indian woman, Tilotamma, named after the spice sesame seed, owning a shop called ‘Spice Bazaar’ in California, who has magical powers to talk to spices and solve the problems of others through these spices. However, the story does not give the reader a “fairy tale” feeling or the feeling of reading an immature piece of work on some supernatural powers. In other words the book is intellectually heavy in its own terms for it deals with the story of a woman called Lalitha who suffers the domestic violence of being raped every night by her own husband and chooses later to fight against the brutality of her husband with the help of spices to live on her own. It is also the story of another young NRI woman, Geetha, who lives an independent life in America only to be disowned by her parents and an old fashioned and typically chauvinistic grandfather who thinks that his granddaughter is unwomanly and uncharacteristic of an Indian woman to lead her own life as per her whims and most of all to fall in love with a Mexican man. And there is Jagjit, a teenager Punjabi, who is friendless and lacks confidence and courage and Haroun , a taxi driver who suffers the worst of racial discrimination that is more commonly prevalent in post 9/11 US. How Tilo, the mistresss of spices, helps them to recover from their pains and empower all these sufferers forms the crux of the story! Beyond all these is her passion and desire for a white man in a foreign land, which is against all the rules of her magic world, as she should not love anyone or for that matter not even touch any outsider. But the assertive and strong willed Tilo goes in her own ways to get what she wants and desires. And thus it ends up as a story of a courageous woman who isn’t deterred by the conventional rules of the magic world and goes unflinchingly to achieve the goal she has been desiring to have.
But all these flavours of independence, courage, assertiveness and equality have been brutally destroyed in the movie version of the novel! The movie directed by Paul, husband of the famous director Gurinder Chaddha, has not transformed well on the screen. The screenplay written by Gurinder Chaddha and Paul lacks the fervour and poetical touch that the book has as it mainly focuses on the romantic affair of Tilo with the white man leaving out the importance of other characters in the book! Surprisingly and shockingly, the character of Lalitha has been deleted in the movie. This is the height of injustice to the book as the story of Lalitha in the book unfolds as a voice against the cruelties to women like domestic violence and rape that most of the Indian housewives in America face. It is very much true that most women after marrying immigrant men become victims of domestic violence in the alien land. Lalitha’s story brings out that brutality realistically to the readers and emphasizes the immediate need of empowerment of women and protection against such cruelty. Ms. Chitra Banerjee herself being a President of a helpline of South Asian women, MAITRI, has presented the problems of such women realistically without exaggeration and also the need for women to be courageous enough to come out of such “inhuman marriages” where women are not only treated as just sexual objects but also been deprived of all the basic rights a human being ought to have. The author, writes in her book, to all the victims of domestic violence:“No man, husband or not, has the right to beat you, to force you to a bed that sickens you”. She talks about the rights a woman deserves. She talks about the happiness and dignity a woman deserves no matter where she is or what she is. And she talks about the empowerment of women through the characters of Lalitha, Geeta and Hameeda. In her narrative, She gives satirical comments about status of Indian women in our society. She talks about how they are brought up without being used to say the word ‘NO’, how they have been pushed to accept whatever comes to them and not rebel against any such things and how they are brought up to be just perfect wives for their husbands and not themselves. She has not even spared the male chauvinistic idols of Hindu mythology like Rama because she comments on the injustice done to the Goddess by Lord Rama by saying “Who shall I ask to bless me? Ram, who banished poor pregnant Sita to the forest because of what people might say? Even our gods are cruel to their wives”. This is the original essence of the book! Giving an identity to the women breaking the stereotypes! The essence of individuality and independence of women! But the movie, ironically, does not bother to deliver this essence to the audience which is the real need of the hour, because not so many know the real status of women married to an immigrant in a foreign land. Even Geeta’s character, played by Padma Lakshmi, who rebels against the conventions of Indian marriages, does not attain its full form on the screen. But the director and the screenplay writer have taken pains to leave out on all these important issues but just to present the movie as one of the feel-good-movies, something of a Hollywood type not knowing that they have failed in that attempt too because the movie never makes you feel good and definitely not for the people who have read the book already. The director has been keen only on showing glam and romance on screen; the basic reason for Aishwarya Rai doing the role of Tilo makes it clear. She is a great injustice to the role as she has not brought out the vibrant and assertive Tilo alive on the screen. Moreover in the book, Tilo is not a young woman but an old woman (ofcourse an young woman trapped in a old woman’s body!). Modifying the character of old woman to young woman proves that the director is not interested in showing an old woman on the screen. He just wanted youth and beauty to be splashed on the screen. And in the book, even the young Tilo is not as beautiful as she is portrayed in the movie. This proves that the director has been very careful that he does not break the conventions of the tinseldom that presents heroines as mannequins. When would the movie world come out of chauvinistic stereotypes like showing women as such beautiful dolls? Does only beauty speak for women? Let women have their originality , individualty, independence and dignity ! To scale down such promising characters from a powerful novel to painted dolls in a movie amounts to a mindless mangling of values and character!
The movie about the magical spices, has the spices of superficialities like romance, passion, beauty and glamour. But the real spices of intelligence, independence, assertiveness, courage and dignity that formed the basis of a good novel are pathetically missing. And significantly, the basic reason for disappointment and angst is that there are no spices for the empowerment of women in the movie version which is the bottomline of the novel!
K. Deepan Kannan
Student Editorial Board
kannadeepan@yahoo.com