SANYA MALHOTRA COOKING UP A STORM

After setting the Internet on fire with her sizzling dance moves in a music video, the versatile actor is now winning hearts for her poignant performance in Mrs as a freshly-minted housewife strapped with kitchen duties, whose dreams get crushed under the pestle of patriarchy

- Ananya Ghosh

Sanya Malhotra’s filmography is replete with nuanced portrayals of various shades of the modern Indian woman—one who is educated and refuses to let patriarchy throttle her voice. But the ‘modern woman’ of her movies is not the loud, alcoholic, abuse-spouting, male-bashing stereotype that has today become a Bollywood staple. Be it Dangal, Pagglait, Meenakshi Sundareshwar, Kathal or her recently-released movie Mrs, she plays women who are rooted and relatable; their struggle, like that of most middle-class woman of today, is to find the fine balance between tradition and modernism; they reclaim adjectives like ‘strong’, ‘fearless’, and ‘bold’ from being gendered as inherently male qualities; they refuse to ‘fight like men’. Instead, they fight like women and win.

In Mrs, a movie that dropped last month on Zee5, she plays Richa—a trained dancer and dance teacher who has recently got married. As she tries to cope with her new responsibilities, which mostly revolve around kitchen chores—kneading dough, scrubbing utensils, hand-grinding spices with a mortar and pestle—her passion and dreams also start getting reshaped, crushed, and eventually they are scrubbed clean. The constant noise of cooking and grinding slowly becomes a metaphor for her grating life. The kitchen slowly starts to feel like a pressure cooker—the pressure keeps mounting but the vent weight on the tightly-shut lid refuses to go off, there is no escape. Until one day it bursts.

Sanya, who has time and again proved her mettle as a capable actor and excels in quieter moments, gives a nuanced performance as Richa. It seems being a trained dancer has helped her relate to Richa’s plight and feel her pain more intensely. Or maybe it is just her brilliance as an actor. We try to find out as we sit down for a candid chat. Excerpts:

Did you watch the The Great Indian Kitchen before being offered this film, it’s Hindi remake? How did you react to the film as an audience?