Narrative Persuasion and the Politics of Unpaid Labour: Feminist Resistance in Mrs. (2024)

Stories have the power to reshape beliefs and attitudes by immersing the audience in a narrative world, leading to a phenomenon called ‘transportation’ (Green & Appel, 2024). The Bollywood film Mrs. (2024) is an adaptation of the Malayalam film The Great Indian Kitchen (2021). It portrays Richa, a professional dancer who copes with the demands of marriage and undervalued housework with resilience until she encounters an existential crisis and chooses to walk out of the restrictive, socially defined role of a submissive ‘wife’. The narrative deftly foregrounds gender disparity in the division of unpaid work in India. Richa’s transition marks a moment of feminist awakening and resistance against male supremacy and self-destructive exploitation in the guise of family commitment. Empirical studies reveal that more than 16 billion hours are devoted to unpaid domestic and care work (UDCW), most of which is carried out by women—equivalent to 40% of the global GDP (ILO). Citing key feminist thinkers, this paper probes how Mrs. (2024) contributes to the discourse on wages for housework and critiques unpaid domestic labour as a form of economic exploitation in patriarchal traditional Indian families. The paper concludes that such cinematic portrayals can transform attitudes, facilitate women's participation in the workforce, and advance gender equality in both private and public spheres.