Sophia Taylor Ali and Geeta Malik Talk Outspoken Women and Representation In India Sweets and Spices
In India Sweets and Spices, Alia upends her family’s orderly life when she returns home from college and uncovers a secret about her parents at a dinner party. It leads to questions, and ultimately a confrontation, about their relationship and what her mother was like when she was younger. I spoke with actress Sophia Taylor Ali (The Wilds, Uncharted) who plays Alia and director Geeta Malik about the inspiration for the film and what they hope viewers take away from it.
Director Geeta Malik pulled from her own experiences at elaborate Indian dinner parties when it came to telling this story. “It’s very much based on my own childhood growing up and going to these dinner parties with my parents when I was a kid. They were fun because you just hung out with your other kid friends. Then as I got to be a teenager I was expected to interact a lot more and I was expected to be a part of the parties,” Malik told me. “I think that's when I started realizing there was a lot more going on behind-the-scenes than I had realized when I was a kid.”
She used her own dual perspectives as a teen and later a mother to inform the story. “It began from the teen perspective and then I became a mom while I was writing the script because it took a really long time to finish,” she said. “So I had this other perspective from a mom looking back now and the teen looking up at the mom and saying, ‘Well, who were you before you were a mom?’ I wanted to explore the depth of character that came with that.”
What really drew Sophia Taylor Ali to the film was that ability to show a different perspective when it came to Indian women on screen. “[It was the] chance to represent the culture I grew up in in a way that I relate to. Because Alia is a very outspoken type and I don’t see Indian women being portrayed that way a lot. It was cool. I relate to that,” Ali shared with me. “I feel very outspoken. I’ve always felt like that, comparatively to my family and stuff. So to be able to portray that and especially in something written by an Indian woman was really, really cool.”
Malik hopes that India Sweets and Spices breaks stereotypes and boundaries when it comes to representation. “Indians and South Asians are not a monolith. We only see one type of arranged marriage portrayed. There are very happy arranged marriages too. There are very happy and unhappy love marriages,” she said. “I think representation is really important. We see Indians who live in the slums, we see the crazy Bollywood stuff. There are Indians in-between. There are a lot of South Asians in-between.”
“I hope that they [feel this] representation is helping us to be more authentic in Hollywood and in media, but I also hope, specifically from the film, [that] people feel empowered,” Malik said. “I hope people feel uplifted and take a little closer look at […] their own role in their community and their family and try to figure out how to break down those barriers, whatever hypocrisy, or whatever facade that they have up.”
India Sweets and Spices is available on VOD.
