‘Praise is not a national secret, it can be…’: Shefali Shah gives voice to the invisible work and quiet frustrations of Indian women

There are things every Indian woman knows but rarely says. She knows the difference between the floor and the laundry basket, even when the person whose towel is on the floor does not. She knows that a dinner plate does not have legs and will not walk itself to the kitchen. She knows that the seven-course meal she spent hours preparing will be met with a burp and silence rather than two simple words. At Spoken Fest 2024, actress Shefali Shah stood on a stage and said all of it. Out loud. Without apology. With humour sharp enough to cut through years of accumulated quiet frustration. And the audience, filled with women who had been carrying these exact thoughts for years without quite knowing how to articulate them, laughed, nodded, and felt something release.

The bag she carries, and everything in it

Shefali Shah’s piece begins with an image every woman immediately recognises. The bag. Not just the physical bag, though that alone is its own story, a portable command centre containing keys, medicines, snacks, chargers, wipes, receipts, and approximately seventeen other things that nobody else remembered to bring. But the metaphorical bag. She is the one that holds the responsibilities, the emotions, the expectations, and the mental load of everyone around her. Keys, responsibilities, emotions, expectations, everything somehow ends up with her.She is the Doraemon of the household. The one everyone comes to. The one whose bag, literal and figurative, contains exactly what is needed at exactly the moment it is needed because she thought about it ahead of time, the way she thinks about everything ahead of time, the way she has been doing since before anyone thought to notice or thank her for it.

The meal, the silence, and the burp

Here is where Shefali Shah’s performance becomes something more than comedy. She describes preparing a seven-course meal painstakingly; lovingly; with time and effort and care; and then asking the question every woman who has cooked for people she loves has asked at some point. “Baby, how was the meal?” The answer, she says with perfect comedic timing, is a burp. “Obviously burping is the right form of appreciation.“The room laughs. But underneath the laughter is the truth that makes it sting, the reality that an enormous amount of what women do every day goes unacknowledged. Not because the people around them are malicious. But because somewhere along the way, it became expected. Invisible. The air that the household breathes without ever stopping to think about where it comes from. “Praise is not a national secret,” she says. “It can be uttered.” Four words. Said simply. And yet for how many women does that sentence land like a revelation?

She wears what she feels good in, not the other way around

One of the most quietly powerful moments in Shefali Shah’s performance is when she talks about clothing. She says she cares not necessarily about the way she looks or the clothes she does not fit into. She wears what she feels good in. She will sit in her house in her worn-out kaftan rather than dress up and go out just to be seen. In a world that constantly tells women how they should look, what they should wear, how much space they should take up, this is a radical act of self-possession.And then comes the line that stops you completely. “I know I have stretch marks. But then, well, so does the sky.” The sky. With all its vastness and beauty and unapologetic presence, the sky has stretch marks too. And nobody looks up and finds the sky lacking for it.

She is not just a role

At the heart of Shefali Shah’s performance is a truth that the piece circles back to again and again. A woman is not just a role. Not just a mother. Not just a wife. Not just a daughter or a homemaker or a caregiver or a cook. She is a person, with dreams and opinions and moods and an identity that exists completely independently of what she does for other people. She goes through biological changes that reshape her body and her experience of the world. She handles a career and children and the thousand invisible tasks that make a household run. She is asked to hold everything together, and she does, almost always, even when she is exhausted, even when she is not okay, because that is what she has been taught.But the most important thing Shefali Shah’s performance captures what comes after all of that. She is finally learning something powerful. To choose what fits her life, not what society forces on her. Just like shoes: you do not change your feet to fit the shoes. You choose the shoe that fits your feet. A woman is not made to fit roles. Roles should fit her.

Why this performance matters

Shefali Shah did not say anything at Spoken Fest 2024 that Indian women do not already know. That is exactly the point. She said the things they know but have not been given a stage to say. The things they have thought at the kitchen sink at 11pm, at the laundry basket, and at the dinner table where their meal is eaten in silence. The things they have swallowed because saying them out loud felt like complaining, like being difficult, like asking for too much.She said them. On a stage. With humour and precision and the full authority of someone who has lived every single line. And in doing so, she gave every Indian woman in that audience, and every woman who has watched the performance since, the extraordinary gift of feeling completely, entirely seen. The towel is still on the floor. But at least now, the whole room knows it.