How Sweet Kaaram Coffee sacrifices reality for a feel-good experience

Several years ago, when I was teaching Indian cinema to international students, one of them, who was from Iran, asked me a question that was difficult to answer. He said that while one could get a fair sense of the US by watching Hollywood, it was virtually impossible to get a similar sense of the actual India from our popular cinema.

I thought about it for a while and replied that it was because Indian cinema, by and large, showed you how things should be — rather than the way they were. The ideal could be a moral one (right action) or a material one (the right amount of wealth) but whatever is portrayed is still not real and entirely a construct.

Where a conservative film might present us with the ideal family in which there is togetherness, a Marxist film could make working-class solidarity the ideal. In advertisements for SUVs we see families driving cheerily along sylvan country roads to spend quality time together till the rush at the filling station lessens. But, if there were so few cars on our roads as to make ‘going for a drive’ a pleasure, there wouldn’t be such a rush at the filling stations.

Feminine solidarity

The yearned for ideal could be political, like gender parity in the armed forces, or from life — like reaching a hospital and actually saving a life — but most Indian film stories are constructed around it. The Tamil OTT series Sweet Kaaram Coffee idealises, for instance, feminine solidarity — when a widowed grandmother, a harassed mother and her daughter (an aspiring cricketer) embark on a road trip across India (Chennai to Dharamshala), leaving the men to fend for themselves.

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The first symptom of the broad statement about women that Sweet Kaaram Coffee seeks to make is the absence of caste markers. If, in films about the travails of the minorities (Pedro’ 2021), we rarely see the protagonist practising his or her religion and religious markers are obliterated, the same is true of caste as a presence in most other films. I took the family in the OTT series to be a Brahmin one but its caste is never actually denoted.

This creates the impression that the condition of ‘women’ is essentially the same regardless of social group. Economic status is more difficult to conceal but there is little to clarify that women from the less comfortable classes would face different pressures from those faced by these women.

While the series shows a straining of the male-male relationships, the women are together and their disagreements are small. Friendships between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are a good thing but is it a norm? Dowry deaths are often on account of the mothers-in-law who, despite being women, act as agents of patriarchy. I am not proposing that Sundari (Lakshmi) and her daughter-in-law Kaveri (Madhoo) should quarrel — in the interests of realism — but that peace could have been negotiated; the same is true of Kaveri and her daughter Niveditha (Santhy Balachandran).

No room for conflict

Conflict is unavoidable in such relationships but Sweet Kaaram Coffee is simply wishing it away in the interests of a family ideal.

The series is structured like a road movie, with the trio encountering those with whom they immediately bond, including a white man Robert and his would-be-wife, Julia. They intended to drive to Goa but Sundari manoeuvres them towards Pune and they now enter Madhya Pradesh. Sundari is a fun-loving diabetic and this again is an ideal (‘light-hearted even when ill’) reminiscent of Rishi Kapoor in Kapoor and Sons (2016), who rushes from major heart surgery to a party, in a wheelchair.

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Illness is debilitating and an uninterrupted capacity for such ‘fun’ is more a marketing ploy by the medical profession than an actuality. In Sweet Kaaram Coffee, daily medicines are spurned by Sundari as though a road trip lasting months did not entail health hazards to an elderly person of over 70. She is briefly interned at a hospital but resumes the trip after that as if uninterrupted.

When the trio runs into the other people we never see these other people burdened with unnecessary cares and they are all eager to keep the women company, introduce them to local cultural peculiarities and fun. My argument here is that the three women and their family have been picked out as the subjects of the narrative because they are typical in some way: i.e., their conditions reflect those in a patriarchal society. But if no one they meet is burdened socially by comparable pressures and ‘it’s all in the mind’, wouldn’t it mean that the conditions of the three women are actually exceptional and not typical at all?

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After all, one doesn’t escape patriarchy by stepping out of the domestic enclosure. ‘It’s all in the mind’ is a chant that supposes that one may choose to do what one wishes, something that Robert and Julia also profess on their travels, but does that not imply that modern living has not imposed severe restrictions on one’s existential freedom? Roads have become toll roads, air travel imposes security checks and one needs to prove one’s identity at every step. In literature, one reads of people who travelled on tramp steamers but there is a strict visa regime operating everywhere today and that one can only travel as a paying tourist.

Back to square one

In between their adventures the women are given interludes where they are reminiscing about the past. But these are inevitably associated with their past romances: for Kaveri it is the early days of her married life, and for Niveditha, her recent romantic entanglements. Sundari’s past is kept a mystery and is only revealed in the last episode of the series. 

But the suggestion at the conclusion is that the women will go back to their old lives and to the same pressures — with the expectation that the domestic space will be more amenable to their newly-found free natures. They agree to keep their experiences secret but keeping transformational experiences ‘secret’ is perhaps tantamount to not being transformed.

The trouble with constructing a world around a meaning instead of depending on the world to yield its own meanings is that it trivialises important issues. That Sweet Kaaram Coffee elaborates on a matter that is essentially trite is evidenced by the three women protagonists returning to the conditions they have determinedly left behind and in the process of doing this it, makes audiences ‘feel good’, i.e., it affirms that the world will miraculously rearrange itself to suit oneself, if one simply opts for a brief change of scene.

(MK Raghavendra is a writer on culture and politics)

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