The Evaporation of Water

Sexuality, Nationalism & Religion: the politics of controversial filmmaking

Moska Najib

It has been over six weeks now that the Bollywood success, Rang De Basanti, has raised much upheaval! Not only has the film ranked in the Box Office as the second highest grosser, but also its story has inspired cases such as the Jessica Lall Murder & Narmada Dam Controversy(?) .

While Omprakash Mehra’s Rang De Basanti has sparked a social awakening to take law unto our own hands, its success could also be sensed as a tragedy to independent filmmakers who continue to struggle and strike an impact; the saga of Deepa Mehta’s last trilogy is a an exemplification of this scuffle, whereby Hindu fundamentalists had shunned its filming in the ancient holy city of Varanasi and parched its essence and vitality.
In February 2000, Mehta’s battle with fundamentalism augmented when a rioting mob of 2,000 attacked and burned the sets of the production of Water and issued death threats against the director, as well as the cast and crew. The angry mobs were led by three main political & religious parties, which consisted of the BJP, VHU (?)  and the KSRSS, a party formed overnight from the RSS and specifically targeted Deepa Mehta, claiming to be the guardians of Varanasi’s culture.

Even though the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting had cleared the film’s script, this did not hinder opposition parties to scrutinize Mehta for using “foreign money to make a film, which shows India in poor light because that is what sells in the west” [The Week magazine, India, 13/02/2000]. Unfortunately, following a protester’s attempted suicide jump into the Ganges, the local government shut down the production under the issue of “public safety.”

It has now been six years since the disruption of Water, but for Deepa Mehta it was a passionate journey. Although in 2000 the Indian-origin/Canadian director felt incomplete for the uncertain fate of her last elemental trilogy, Mehta nevertheless managed to finish the project; however, in a different location, with a different cast, and under a different name!
The film was put back into production in 2005 with a strict code of secrecy; it was relocated to Colombo, Sri Lanka, and completed within 45 days under the working title River Moon; the original cast members Shabana Azmi & Nandita Das were also replaced by prominent Bollywood figures Seema Biswas & Lisa Ray, with John Abraham being part of the new casting as well. Yet despite these key alterations, the essence of Water continued to remain at its core depth, i.e. to divulge the abandoned predicament of more than 2,000 widows whom their families have ostracized and who have swarmed on the banks of the Ganges River to seek refuge.

Water depicts a 1938 Colonial India that is deeply rooted in its rigid traditions yet threatened by the idealism of a Gandhian future. Through the eyes of Chuyia, an eight-year-old widow, Mehta reflects on the ashram-bound women who are plagued by the pathos of dereliction, dispossession and prostitution. The burning ghats and the waters that flow from them symbolize the ashes-and-embers of Mehra’s brutally transparent tale. Mehta utilizes her elemental trilogy to address the societal exploitation that religious scriptures of more than 2,000 years of age have set upon the existence of widows; sadly, while they suffer a social death in the guise of tradition, many blame their bad luck on karma.

According to sacred Hindu texts [Dharamshastras], a widow, labeled as worthless without a husband to measure herself by, should be “long suffering until death, self-restrained and chaste; a virtuous wife who remains chaste when her husband has died goes to heaven; a woman who is unfaithful to her husband is reborn in the womb of a jackal” [The Laws of Manu, Chapter 5 verse 156-161]. Ensuing the death of her middle-aged husband, Chuyia is deposited in a two-story desolated house where she would spend the rest of her life, in renunciation.

Here, Chuyia would meet 14 other widows, among them Madhumati, the pompous and corrupt 70-year-old prison warden; Kalyani, the only long-haired widow forced to prostitute and bear the financial needs of the ashram; and the emotionless, reserved Shakuntala, whose years of widowhood and deprivation has questioned her faith in Hindu rituals. While Madhumati has plans for her newest recruit, Chuyia, to join Kalyani as a sex slave for wealthy businessmen, the focus of Mehta’s provocative story is primarily devised around the politcs of religion and its bearing on an ill-fated romance, a dissipating Hindu devotion and the hope for a Gandhian revelation.

Even though Mehta has continuously been critisized for demeaning Hindu traditions, in actuality it is the extremist interpretation of religion that the theme of Water is set upon and the perpetual misrepresentation of women which Mehta’s controversial film has aimed to depict. Women and widows have always been represented as dependent on men and their sexuality dangerous to the stability of society unless controlled within marriage; moreover, they are forced to selflessly sacrifice their desires for the sake of their families, the nation or a higher spirituality. By having focused on Gandhi’s advocation of Sarvodaya, Mehta cleverly uses the Father of India as a mechanism to empower the status of women within a paternal society. It is this reminder of Gandhi’s legacy and manifesto, which Deepa Mehta highlights as the means to end the continued exploitation of women and widows in India.

If the purpose of Mehta’s passionate films are to remind people to fight for injustice, to defend and see what we know, then perhaps such powerful messages can be better addressed from a national level; ever since its release in 2005, Water has received many awards and been acclaimed as the curtain call of International Film Festivals. Yet, this recognition has ceased to put forth an action on the conditions of the 34 million widows who feel defeated and abandoned along the steps of the Ganges River.

Whether Hindu fundamentalism and religious censorship has scarred the social message that an artisitic film endeavoured, it is a question that raises doubts among Mehta’s critics, who perceive her controversial filmmaking as an instrument for free publicity and a quick buck at the Box Office. Thus, while the essence of Water was fluidity in an oppressive culture, due to its bad karma, it has become another stagnant puddle, polluted with controversy, drowned beneath negligence and a rigid prescription of religious politics. What may happen to the plight of the Hindu widows? Perhaps White Rainbow, a similar themed film will instigate the element that Deepa Mehta sought after, or perhaps it’ll evaporate… just like Water has!