The beautiful new film Water by director Deepa Mehta is a powerful one, so powerful that mobs of fundamentalist Hindus mobbed her film sets and torched them. Four long years later she started filming again, this time with a different cast in Sri Lanka, far from her previous location in India and the Ganges River.
The film, set in 1938 tells the story of a young girl who is married off at pre-school age yet still lives with her parents. When she’s a few years older her husband dies making her a widow before she has even met him. When this happens in this society she is sent to a house for widows where she is expected to live the rest of her life away from society. According to old Hindu law a woman is ‘half dead’ when her husband dies and is segregated so as not to ‘pollute’ society. In many places in rural India this practice still exists today. In a NY Times article:
The film has provoked far more than that. In January 2000 Ms. Mehta was forced to shut down production of “Water” in Varanasi, one of India’s holy cities on the banks of the Ganges, after Hindu nationalists protested that the film was anti-Hindu. Some 500 demonstrators took to the streets, ransacked the set and burned Ms. Mehta in effigy. She appealed to the state government for help, but fearing more violence, local officials asked the film crew to leave.
Today there are about 33 million widows in India, according to the 2001 census, and many in the rural areas are still treated like the outcasts in the film.
I can’t stress how beautifully made this film is, the images are intoxicating. The stories of the women are moving and the film has lovely humor and moments of intense beauty and humanity as well as a sense of deep pain in places. Here is an example of film sweeping you away to an exotic time and place that has real relevance to everyone’s life. Cheers to Ms. Meehta for an exquisite film.
