How women are revolutionising commercial kitchens in India against all odds

Evidently, women’s culinary exploits are otherwise encouraged only when they are unpaid

There’s seemingly nothing revolutionary about a group of women cooking up a storm in the kitchen. After all, that is where women are said to belong in the grand scheme of patriarchy, until, of course, those kitchens become a source of earning a livelihood for them, only for men to take over. 

A study by Statista in March 2023, titled Work and Home Divided Among Gender Lines in India, investigated 1,40,000 urban and rural households in India and their activities over a 24-hour period. The results show that only 18.4 per cent of Indian women engage in paid work in a single day, while 81.2 per cent of them carry out domestic work, which includes cooking and working in the kitchen. For men, 57.3 per cent have employment or related activities scheduled, while only around a quarter do household work, according to the study.

Evidently, women’s culinary exploits are encouraged only when they are unpaid, as is delineated in this report by Nickeled and Dimed—the official research platform of the Centre for New Economics Studies (CNES), a research centre at the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities (JSLH), OP Jindal Global University, Sonipat. It mentions that “the percentage of women chefs in India was pegged at approximately 10-15% in 2018, (as) the marginal female participation in this field is fraught with more complexities than just a generally low female labour force participation rate (FLFPR).”

So when 26-year-old Akhter Jaan, a resident of Kashmir’s Ganderbal, joined forces with 34 other women to cook the Wazwan—a Kashmiri multi-course feast—that has traditionally been prepared only by men at weddings or other social occasions, people did not take it kindly. “But our families eventually came around and were supportive,” says Jaan. The women are yet to cook at a wedding, and they started off by making small batches of food for pilgrims on the Amarnath yatra in 2021. Soon after, encouraging village folks invited them to cook the Wazwan at engagements, which also helped them earn and gain more financial mobility. They met through the Jammu and Kashmir National Rural Livelihood Mission (JKNRLM), a government initiative that helps women in the state earn  livelihoods.

Despite functioning within an orthodox society, Jaan and her women friends never questioned the value of their intent and labour. “We are doing God’s work and feeding people. Initially, there was resistance but we wanted to do something with our lives and do it well,” shares Jaan, adding that they are open to more work if their communities are willing to open their minds a little more.

An elaborate, largely meat-based nosh-up, the Wazwan is a feat difficult to master. The ladies, besides learning from traditional male Wazwan chefs, have also undergone training organised by NRLM in Solina, Kashmir. The irony, however, lies in the nomenclature where the women, colloquially, continue to be referred to as cooks, while the men wear the “chef’s” hats.

Female cooks versus male chefs

The gender-based discrepancy in the nomenclature is largely driven by the paradoxical expulsion of women from a sphere, which, ironically, squarely falls on their shoulders when supplanted into a domestic domain. As the report by Nickeled and Dimed mentions, the structure of the gastronomic field is founded on undermining domestic, “feminine” cooking in order to legitimise the training and skills of the professional “masculine” chef in the commercial restaurant kitchen.

Even etymologically, the terms “cook” and “chef” have always had distinctly different connotations. The latter is the shortened version of the French “chef de cuisine,” which literally means “head of the kitchen,” alluding to an individual with more formal training in the discipline of food preparation. On the other hand, the term “cook” is more generic, and refers to anyone who makes food, whether professionally or domestically. The fact that these terms are now gendered has been accepted as the norm, and even though no one can possibly deny that women across the world own culinary skills and creativity, what prevents  them from attaining the same recognition as their male peers, is anybody’s guess.

Nilza Wangmo, chef and founder at Alchi Kitchen in Ladakh, started the outfit formally in 2016. It was Ladakh’s first all-women-run open kitchen, a novelty then frowned upon in the province, as only men were allowed in the public eye. It took Wangmo months, even years, to convince women and their families to allow their girls to work in her kitchen. However, she can now see the gears shifting. “There are more such women-run kitchens in Ladakh today, who followed our example when we started. Families are becoming more open to sending their girls to work, once they are convinced it’s safe for them to do so,” says Wangmo.

Ever since, Wangmo has expanded her efforts by taking traditional Ladakhi food outside of the state to pop-ups across the country. However, the Nari Shakti Puraskar 2020 awardee, who was honoured for her endeavours to uplift Ladakhi cuisine by empowering women, says that she has to constantly remind herself that she hails from the “top of the world,” and shouldn’t feel inadequate about her capabilities, especially among her male peers. “It does feel a little daunting, but then I have very big goals and I remind myself that I am no less than them,” she says.

The great gender divide

For beginners, women are more committed and better at seeing a plan through, from start to finish, explains Wangmo. “I have seen so many men start with an idea and then give up midway; not so with women,” she says. Moreover, men find it difficult to not only take orders from women, but also trust their integrity.

Delhi-based Chef Anahita Dhondy, former chef-partner at Parsi restaurant chain SodaBottleOpenerWala, who has also worked on an all-women cooking TV show called Femme Foodies (2017) that aired on Living Foodz, remembers the scepticism she was met with from men when she started out. “They would think that women would use their gender to wriggle out of work. In older times, cooking was done in bulk so it was a lot of manual labour to feed bigger communities. The work wasn’t pleasurable, so women weren’t deemed fit for such roles. When I started hiring for SodabottleOpenerwala (in 2013), barely any women would interview,” Dhondy says. As a result, to make the ecosystem more attractive for women, she had to ensure there was better infrastructure and guidelines in place that would make it an equal workspace for all genders.

“There weren’t even proper washrooms for women staff earlier in many such establishments. All of those gaps had to be addressed. I don’t know why men felt so insecure about having women in the workspace. They would even refuse to call me ‘chef,’ so I spent a lot of my time in the initial phase of my career working doubly hard to prove that I won’t use my gender to get out of taking responsibilities,” says Dhondy. But that also meant that when she became an employer in this field, she had to ensure that women too would stay back long hours—a common requisite in the culinary space—like their male counterparts, or for as long as they were required to, to complete their tasks. 

Home and the world

The evolving culinary landscape in India has also meant that women are now setting up commercial enterprises within their own homes, with a proliferation of home kitchens and bakeries fuelled by e-commerce. This has largely enabled more and more women to monetise their labour by using the same kitchen to not only run the household, but also their business. 

Noida-based chef and entrepreneur Nitika Kuthiala, who originally hails from Himachal Pradesh, has taken the food native to her home-state beyond its borders through her home-kitchen Pahadi Patthal. What’s special about her venture is that she is among the first Himachali women to cook the traditional dham, a saatvik vegetarian platter otherwise traditionally prepared by brahmin men called ‘botis’ making it a space that is strictly inaccessible to women. Therefore, when she started in 2019, and wished to observe the process of preparing the dham up close, Kuthiala was reprimanded for trying to invade a boys’ club. “They would ask me what I am doing there, but eventually, some of them appreciated me and recognised my efforts. I can safely say I am the first woman to have cooked the dham,” Kuthiala says.

Today, Pahadi Patthal also hosts pop-ups that have only granted more mileage to a lesser known culinary treasure of Kuthiala’s native state, a feat that may not have been achievable had it continued to be gatekept by its male custodians. Besides, “women are just better multitaskers, work better under pressure, and aren’t verbally abusive in the kitchen,” says Dhondy, leaving us with the question: “Why wouldn’t we want more women in commercial kitchens?”

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