TOILET: A LOVE STORY. Director Shree Narayan Singh. Players: Akshay Kumar, Bhumi Padnekar, Anupam Kher, Sudhir Pandey, Divyendu Sharma, Subha Khote. Hindi w/ Eng. Sub-tit. (Viacom).
The lack of indoor plumbing in some rural areas of India, and more specifically the lack of indoor toilets in many rural Indian homes, has been singled out as a key roadblock to India joining modernity. Not having such facilities at home is often a practice carried over from an era when a large agrarian populace spent longer hours in the field than in towns or offices. What do we do? In comes Toilet: A Love Story. While visually striking, romantic and even funny, the movie falls short of fully exploiting the complexities and nuances demanded by the lack of indoor facilities as indicative of a larger social gap.
Bad news often travels in pairs. For Keshav Sharma (Kumar), pining away running his father’s small business in a village in northern India, calamity strikes on two fronts. On the one hand, at thirty something, he is yet to find a suitable bride. That reality is only exacerbated by his second problem. As luck would have it, after meeting the woman of his dreams, the outspoken beauty Jaya Joshi (Padneker) and marrying her, the other shoe drops. Because Keshav’s household lacks indoor facilities, his vivacious new bride refuses to use outdoor facilities and threatens to move back to her parents’ house unless Keshav installs an indoor toilet.
This story is from the September 2017 edition of India Currents.
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This story is from the September 2017 edition of India Currents.
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