article on shipra khanna mc2 winner

Exactly one year ago, Shipra Khanna says she was living a life unfortunately led by thousands of young Indian women: a slave of her husband and in-laws, ministering to every arbitrary whim, suffering dowry abuse, and being physically and mentally tormented by a husband who used to sneer, whenever Khanna threatened to leave, that divorce would impoverish her, finish her and "strip her of the respect of society".

He wasn't to know that all the cooking she did for his family during their 10-year marriage would be her salvation, nor that it was her love for cooking that kept her sane during bouts of mental torture that regularly punctuated her routine at their home in Agra, the home of the Taj Mahal. Nor that, within a year of leaving him, his wife would win the popular television reality show MasterChef India.

This is the popular Indian version of the original UK television cooking game where the contestants have to win difficult challenges over several weeks to emerge as the winner. Khanna was given a great New Year's gift by being announced as the winner on January 2 in Mumbai where the programme, watched by 2.6 million viewers every episode, was filmed.

Khanna, a 29-year-old economics and psychology graduate, was different from the other 12 contestants. She is engaged in a bitter custody battle and divorce involving charges of dowry abuse against her husband, a factory owner, and his family. Married off at the age of 19 by her middle-class parents, she was expected to cook all the meals.

"Cooking was the best therapy for me," she says. "As long as I was cooking for my kids and making them happy, I was able to manage."

Most of it was traditional Indian food. After the birth of her daughter Yadavi, who is now seven and has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy, she honed her skills further by trying to make what her daughter liked, such as pizzas, Chinese dishes, different breads, pasta and cookies.

"The doctors said she couldn't eat food from outside in case she got an infection from unhygienic food. Since she can't walk, we have to keep her weight down so I began making healthy versions at home of whatever she couldn't go out to eat," she says.

In time-honoured tradition, whenever she confided in her parents about her mistreatment, they replied: Adjust. Adjust to him. Adjust to the in-laws. Adjust to the malevolent brother-in-law. Only adjust and it will be fine. Anything to avoid the disgrace and certain social death that divorce would bring.

So Khanna stayed on. In time, her second child, a son, Himannk, five, was born. "My husband and in-laws took no interest in my kids. He used to hit them. I wanted to take my daughter out to the park and to birthday parties but he told me she was an embarrassment and should be kept indoors."

Whenever Yadavi was naughty or broke something, Khanna says the family used to blame her and hurl insults at her. "They'd say, 'It's your fault she's disabled. You're responsible for inflicting a defective child on us'," she recalls.

Apart from her passion for cooking, there was little to distinguish Khanna's experiences from those which, for countless Indian women, seem as preordained and ineluctable as the monsoon rains.

Khanna insists it is a fixed script that many women are conditioned to believe they cannot deviate from: have an arranged marriage, discover the husband and in-laws are cruel, suffer torture over demands for more dowry, bear children (parents urge this as a "solution" to the marital hell, saying children will "humanise" the husband), confide in your parents, parents say "adjust", get kicked out from the marital home, and then spend years in dingy court rooms fighting for custody of, or access to, your children. These stories are embedded in the statistics. India's National Family Health Survey in 2010 revealed that 37 per cent of married women experience domestic violence. Statist

She's still going on & on about her sad sad personal life 🥱 She's used every episode of season 2 to inform us in minute detail about her married life. Don't have sympathy for her any more. (Sorry if I come across as harsh, but I've seen people with worse tragedies emerge winners without whining to every stranger they come across every single time!)

They could argue that she couldn't support the kids as she didn't have a reliable source of income.

Also, someone told me that in the Indian legal system, after 7 yrs of age the kids are handed over to the father

I hav'nt seen her FB page, I always felt she was using her personal sob story to move ahead in the competition (more melodrama when eliminations were round the corner). A person who in every episode kept on sobbing "i need my kids back, i am doing it for my kids" in front of national tv now does not even bother to mention if she has got her kids back or not? If she had not publicized so much nobody would have known her story anyway. What is the point in making it public throughout the MC contest and now after the name and fame ignoring the topic? She only wanted fame. It appeared she is from quite well to do family who supported her decisions and I had read somewhere it was her mom who encouraged her to participate in MC. Dosnt make sense if she says she had no support from anyone.