Carceral Kitchen, Culinary Labour and Cumulative Trauma: A Reading of Arati Kadav’s Mrs.

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_24How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Culinary Labour; Cumulative Trauma; Food Studies; Affect Theory; Domestic Space; Gendered Violence; Psychological Suffering

Abstract

Within the tapestry of Indian culture, the domestic space of the kitchen has always been viewed as an area of caregiving and nourishment. While early Indian cinema has largely showcased this view, offering a counter-narrative is the 2024 Hindi film Mrs. by Arati Kadav. It dismantles the romanticised notion linked with food and cooking while reimagining it as a site of psychological violence and trauma. The film follows the story of Richa, whose marriage to Diwakar forces her into the stifling environment of the domestic kitchen. The endless cycles of culinary labour gradually make her lose self-worth and erase her identity, leading to physical exhaustion and psychological wounding. The paper thus reimagines the domestic kitchen which is culturally associated with care and nourishment, as restrictive space that causes gradual psychological violence and trauma. It construes how domestic culinary labour can become a source of profound psychological distress. The study tries to examine how relentless and unacknowledged culinary labour can manifest into cumulative trauma, which is a form of psychological injury arising from everyday stressors. Drawing upon Trauma Theory and Affect Theory, the paper attempts a close reading of the film’s visual and aural landscape in order to chart the protagonist’s gradual psychological deterioration. It further interprets the film’s climax of throwing filthy kitchen water as a moment of cathartic rupture and reclamation of self. The study thus offers a critical perspective within the scholarship of Food Studies by analysing domestic kitchens as confining and restrictive spaces that can cause psychological harm. It also questions the romantic notions attributed to culinary work and highlights how it can cause deep emotional and gendered trauma, calling for greater attention to the emotional realities of women’s domestic lives.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Mansea Pandit
AU  - Anoop Kumar Tiwari
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/30
TI  - Carceral Kitchen, Culinary Labour and Cumulative Trauma: A Reading of Arati Kadav’s Mrs.
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Emerging Food Studies: Intersections of Culture, Science and Sustainability (ICEFS 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 254
EP  - 266
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_24
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-583-6_24
ID  - Pandit2026
ER  -