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Today, chefs have become celebrities and social media is full of ‘reels’ by people demonstrating culinary skills; recipes can be accessed at the touch of a computer or phone key, but Tarla Dalal was one of the first cookery gurus. She was popular not for her slavish deference to traditional norms of cooking, but for her imaginative tweaking and simplifying of recipes.
Piyush Gupta’s biopic Tarla extends the ridiculous theory that being a gifted cook is a woman’s path to freedom from domestic chains, when the opposite is the case, more often than not. The film starts when Tarla is grown up, dreaming of doing “something” not knowing what that might be. To deflect an arranged match with Nalin Dalal (Sharib Hashmi), she puts red chillies in his carrot halwa when he comes to see her. The man is charmed, nevertheless, and they get married.
The film fast-forwards through a song, to her happy marriage and three kids, and all college era ambition forgotten. Like most homemakers, she is a competent, though not particularly adventurous cook. Accidentally catching her husband relishing non-veg food from a co-worker’s tiffin, the vegetarian Tarla is disgusted, but that also encourages her to experiment with spices and gravy used in non-veg food for vegetable dishes.
What puts her on the road to culinary stardom, is teaching her neighbour’s (Bharati Achrekar) daughter to cook before her wedding. She is inundated with requests from mothers of young daughters to tutor their girls too, so that they can impress their husbands and, more importantly, mothers-in-law. Cooking for pleasure is not even on the agenda. Men in her housing society, however, put an end to her thriving enterprise.
Laid off from his engineering job in a textile factory, Nalin is able to type up Tarla’s recipes and help compile and publish her first cookbook. He and the kids are the tasting guinea pigs for Tarla to perfect her recipes. The story of how the book was sold with the help of a raddiwala is far more interesting that what really happened– an offer from a publisher.
The success of the books lead to a TV show, and a rift in her marriage, when she is accused of neglecting her children. Nalin, who had promised to always stand by her, starts resenting her fame and the time she spends away from home.
The film is simple to the point of blandness, mainly because the Dalal couple seem to exist in a vacuum. There is no attempt to place her work within a larger culinary and publishing space or even given a social context. The viewer is expected to believe that everything Tarla touched in the kitchen turned to culinary gold. There must have been other cookbooks and famous chefs before her, why and how did she become such a legend?
Huma Qureshi – she doesn’t resemble Tarla Dalal, so why the false buck teeth?—is stymied by the flat character graph, so Sharib Hashmi shines in the more complex role of the man who believes he is supportive, but realises how his attitude has really been “typical.”
Still, on OTT, it is an interesting watch, even though the making and savouring of food is not given its much importance. What is better is that the streaming space giving female achievers their due. Tarla Dalal was a part of the day-to-day lives of many women of a certain generation, and her story deserved to be told.
Tarla
Directed by Piyush Gupta
Cast: Huma Qureshi, Sharib Hashmi,
On Zee5
