Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal

ISSN: 2278-9529  |  www.galaxyimrj.com

Abstract

The paper intends to analyse the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen (2021), directed by Jeo Baby, as a cultural intervention addressing menstrual stigma in contemporary Kerala. It is read against the backdrop of the 2018 Supreme Court verdict permitting the entry of women of menstruating age into the Sabarimala temple and the wave of public protest, both progressive and reactionary, that followed it. The film’s unnamed protagonist, a newly married woman absorbed into an upper-caste Nair household, is shown navigating an unrelenting cycle of domestic labour. This reaches a climax with her ritual seclusion during menstruation. The film uses this sequence to link the unexamined, personal burdens of housework to the broader structures of Brahminical patriarchy. At the time of the film’s release, these structures were being openly challenged at Sabarimala itself. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s account of purity and pollution, Julia Leslie’s and Nicole Hembroff’s scholarship on orthodox Hindu attitudes to menstruation, R. W. Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity and emphasised femininity, Meena T. Pillai’s analysis of gender in Malayalam cinema, J. Devika’s account of housewifisation and neo-Savarna resistance in Kerala, and Dalit feminist theorisations of intersectional marginalisation, this article explores how The Great Indian Kitchen highlights menstrual stigma, depicting it as part of a societal structure that disproportionately burdens women, especially Dalit women, under upper-caste patriarchy’s views of impurity. The film advocates breaking the stigma around menstruation by featuring elements such as the absence of background music and character names, real footage, and an activist’s cameo, which together constitute a powerful cultural intervention in discussions of gender, caste, and religious authority in twenty-first-century Kerala.

Keywords

Menstrual Destigmatisation Sabarimala Brahminical patriarchy Caste and Gender Malayalam cinema Domestic labour

Article History

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How to Cite

K., Drisya. “Menstruating Against the State: Addressing Caste, Domesticity, and the Politics of Destigmatisation in The Great Indian Kitchen.” Galaxy: International Multidisciplinary Research Journal, vol. 15, no. 5, Sept. 2026, pp. 114–130. https://doi.org/10.66376/galaxy.v15.n5.7

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