Video Page: Chutney

In a seemingly unassuming (and relatively affluent) North Delhi neighbourhood, two women chat on the terrace of a two-storey house. One is a ‘docile’ housewife who hails from Ghaziabad – her ‘humble’ Ghaziabad roots indicating that she’s a misfit in a locality where the other, more ‘polished’ wives like to patronise her for being from a different class background – and the other, the much younger mistress of her husband. And the male domestic help becomes the unlikely bystander to this tableau. What follows, in the short film Chutney, is a conversation – full of eerie, evocative storytelling – which not just sheds light on the class hierarchies in the middle to upper-middle class Indian household, but also the anxieties surrounding sexuality and sexual repression within it.