Why Unlearning Patriarchy Begins at the Dinner Table

The Spoon on the Dinner Table
How Three Books Rewrote My Male Gaze
By Partha Sarathi Das

There are some evenings that arrive without grandeur. They slip into the room like second thoughts. The ceiling fan spinning, the dinner is warm, the familiar voice of a dubbed movie drifts in low waves from the television, and between two mouthfuls of dinner and silence, a spoon is requested.

That was all she asked for. A spoon.

We had been married for just a few months then. We were living in my father’s house, where mornings did not begin with temple bells but with the rustle of wings. Birds gathered in the front yard, chirping and clambering over one another for the crumbs my mother scattered just after sunrise. My father sat in the verandah doing his breathing exercises, his back straight, his palms open to the morning air. Later, he would be handed his black tea—ginger steeped, unsweetened, and warmed to the exact temperature his quiet ritual demanded. The small town outside continued with its own rhythms, but inside, everything obeyed a gentler order. The food had its pathways. The chairs, their hierarchies.

And I had grown up watching it all.

She, too, had begun to learn these rhythms. As a newly married woman, she had already slipped into the house’s routines with a grace that was both quiet and constant. There were relatives dropping by with betel nuts and advice, neighbours arriving with invitations, cousins lingering over late lunches. Between the pleasantries and the hosting, she had learned how to offer tea, arrange plates, greet with modest laughter. So when she asked for a spoon at dinner one evening, seated at the dining table beside me, it felt ordinary. Natural, even.

I rose without thought and brought it to her.

It should have ended there. But it didn’t.

The scene returned again. And then once more. Same table. Same request. Same gesture. But by the third time, something shifted. Not in her voice. In me.

A breath I held a second longer.
An unspoken sigh.
A quiet, untraceable irritation.

She could have fetched it herself, I thought. She was sitting just as close to the kitchen as I was. She had two hands. I, of course, had conveniently forgotten that she had spent the better part of the evening preparing dinner for nine—slicing, stirring, setting the table in quiet rhythm, while I lingered elsewhere, unburdened.

Still, I brought it.

And that was the beginning—not of the moment, but of the mirror.

Patriarchy is not a castle of men with swords and fire. It is subtler. More insidious. It is the invisible architecture of what we assume is normal. It does not announce itself. It disguises itself in habits, in rituals, in silence. It lives in the hands that never reach for the broom, in the thali that arrives without being asked, in the expectation that women rise first and eat last.

I used to believe I was different. After all, I listened. I supported. I encouraged. I stood beside the women in my life. But these books whispered another truth.

Equality is not standing beside.
It is stepping back.
It is stepping aside.
It is knowing when not to speak.

The first whisper came from Lady Doctors. A slender volume with its muted cover and luminous portraits. I thought it would be a gentle chronicle of six pioneering women in colonial India. Instead, it was a thunderclap, soft, precise, relentless.

Kavitha Rao writes with the grace of a seamstress threading stories through skin. Each chapter is a needle. Anandibai Joshi, Kadambini Ganguly, Rukhmabai Raut, Haimabati Sen, Muthulakshmi Reddy, Mary Lukose—names once buried beneath the rubble of empire and patriarchy. These were women who did not ask for spoons. They reached for scalpels. They asked for space in anatomy halls filled with British men in frock coats. They endured ridicule, exile, and erasure. Yet they healed. Not just bodies. A nation.

As I read, I could hear the laboured rhythm of Anandibai’s breath, shallow with tuberculosis, still writing letters to America for a chance at medical school. I could see Rukhmabai refusing a child marriage in a courtroom where every voice spoke against her, except her own. These women did not simply break ceilings. They restructured the roof.

And I, who once prided myself on “helping out” in the kitchen, suddenly saw the absurdity of that phrase. Their stories tore that illusion down.

But it was The Day I Became a Runner that left me breathless. I read it after dinner, legs folded on the divan, as my wife folded clothes in the adjacent room. Her hands moved methodically. Mine held the book. I did not offer to help.

Sohini Chattopadhyay’s prose is not loud. It pulses with something deeper. She profiles women runners, yes, but what she is really mapping is the terrain of the body in public. Women’s bodies. In motion. In resistance. In flight.

Running, in her book, is not about fitness. It is about presence. Visibility. Defiance. Each woman who takes to the track, or the field, or the dusty village road, does so against a backdrop of doubt. They are told to be less. To be smaller. To stay home. To stop.

And yet they run.

Santhi Soundarajan wounded me the most. A Dalit woman, an athlete, a national champion. And yet stripped of her medal, humiliated, gender-tested, thrown into the shadows. What right did I have, I thought, to call myself an ally if I had not even educated myself about such cruelty?

My male gaze, I realized, was not just looking. It was framing. It was interpreting. It was expecting.

Wifedom by Anna Funder was the final nail, not in a coffin, but in the rusted gates of my old beliefs. Funder’s excavation of Eileen O’Shaughnessy’s life, the wife of George Orwell, was the most intimate betrayal I have read in years. Not of Eileen’s faith, but of history’s fidelity.

Orwell, the great chronicler of totalitarianism, could not see the dictatorship inside his own home. Eileen typed his manuscripts. Held his household together while he gallivanted for truth. And yet, she disappeared from the margins of his fame.

Wifedom is not just a biography. It is an accusation.

It asked me: how many Eileen’s have you ignored? How many have you silenced by saying nothing?

I looked back. At my mother. At my aunts. At my wife.

I remembered the spoon.

And I apologized.

What these three books did was not monumental. They did not teach me what I did not know. They reminded me of what I refused to admit.

That I am not a feminist because I say so.
I am not equal because I cook.
I am not kind because I do not hit.

I am only as good as the space I do not take.
The stories I amplify.
The silences I learn to hear.

Feminist literature does not just expand our imagination. It interrogates our inheritance. It loosens the thread of our conditioning, one paragraph at a time.

Now, on most evenings, I still sit beside her. The same dining table. The same home. The same inherited roles hanging silently in the air.

Sometimes she asks for a spoon. Sometimes I do. And neither of us thinks twice.

The spoon is not the point.
The pause is.

I do not remember when I stopped interrupting her.
Not in speech.
In thought.

There was a time when, even as she spoke, my mind would construct replies.

Defences.

Clarifications.

Justifications masquerading as conversation.

But now, when she speaks, I listen. Not to respond. But to absorb. And perhaps, if the moment allows, to understand.

I return again and again to Eileen. How she stitched herself into Orwell’s world only to be edited out. Her letters, her wit, her time—sacrificed not to love but to a man’s myth. It made me think of every time my wife gave up a quiet afternoon, a portrait she never painted, a call to her sister she postponed, simply because I needed her then—or because my mother needed something, or because my father preferred a certain order.

Love, I have learned, is not in the grand gestures.
It is in the ledger of time.
Who gets to rest?
Who gets to rise without guilt?

The Day I Became a Runner told me that feminism does not only belong in rooms of discussion. It belongs on fields, in sweat, in pain, in race tracks where dust rises behind the feet of women who have no one cheering from the sidelines.

I met girls who ran barefoot in towns where women are not meant to be seen running. They ran past boys who laughed, past fathers who warned, past mothers who prayed they would stop before shame caught up. But they did not stop. Their bodies, once monitored and denied expression, became vehicles of protest.

Reading them, I remembered my college years, when we boys loitered on benches and gazed casually—no, criminally—at girls who passed by. Back then, we called it harmless. Just looking.

But now I know: there is no such thing as just looking. The gaze, too, is a power. A space taken without permission. A moment stolen from a woman’s right to be unseen, if she chooses.

I remember the story of Pinki Pramanik, a national champion made to prove her womanhood through humiliating gender tests. She won medals for India, but was repaid with suspicion. Her body became evidence. Her identity, a debate.

What does one do with that knowledge?

One does not look the same way again.

If these books were not just stories, what were they?

Maps.
Mirrors.
Warnings.

They taught me that patriarchy is not always cruel. Often, it is kind. Affectionate. Even charming. It smiles as it imprisons. It gives flowers on birthdays, does the dishes once a week, and speaks the language of sharing while retaining control of the script.

I had been that man. The kind one. The progressive one. The reader of fine books. The supporter of “her choices.”

But I also interrupted. I expected. I sulked when she wanted to talk late at night. I believed in feminism—but one that did not inconvenience my rhythms. Or my parents’. Or the schedule of the house I was raised in.

This is hard to admit. But these books do not let you leave easily. They are not for comfort. They are for confrontation.

Sometimes, at night, I stare at the ceiling fan, and I remember stories from Lady Doctors. Anandibai coughing into a kerchief on a Philadelphia street. Rukhmabai pacing the floor of a courtroom, alone. Kadambini, her saree damp with monsoon rain, walking into a hospital ward where every patient doubted her simply for being a woman.

And I wonder what I would have done if I had met them.
Would I have supported them?
Or judged them?
Or doubted them, just a little, just enough, because they did not smile when they were expected to?

History is not only made by the brave.
It is also made by those who did not dare.
By the men who stayed silent.
By the teachers who dismissed.
By the husbands who said, “I’ll help today,” and called it love.

There is a phrase I once heard from a teacher:
“The revolution begins in the most domestic moment.”

I think of that often.

A gesture unnoticed.
A foot on the starting line.
A wife reading a draft behind the curtains.
A daughter watching her parents eat dinner.

These are revolutions.
Quiet.
Steady.
Uncelebrated.

I now watch my daughter play with her dolls. Sometimes, I sit beside her and listen. She has made one a doctor. Another a poet. Sometimes, they argue. Sometimes, they hug. Outside, the same birds gather in the front yard, just as they did when I was a boy—wrestling for breadcrumbs, their wings catching the gold of morning light.

She once asked me, “Baba, why do the boys always get the swords?”

I had no answer that evening.
But later, as I watched her sleep, I whispered into the dark,
“Not anymore.”

To every man who reads this, I offer no lesson. Only a turning.

A turning inward. A turning beside. A turning toward.

Let the words of women linger a little longer than comfort allows. Let them loosen something you thought was yours. Let them make you gentler, not just wiser.

I have learned this slowly.

That change does not shout.
It listens.
It remembers.
It places the spoon before it is asked.

And in that small, unnoticed moment—when no one claps, no one watches, no one even speaks—it is enough.

It is the beginning of another kind of love.

Related Reading: What Lady Doctors Taught Me About Resistance