The untouchable

When Deepa Mehta's film "Water" challenged the traditionally harsh fate of India's widows, enraged Hindu extremists rioted. The director talks about fundamentalism, desire and the "long-suffering Indian housewife."

By Priya Jain

Read more: Movies, Arts & Entertainment

Deepa Mehta and Lisa Ray

April 29, 2006 | When "Fire," the first film in Deepa Mehta's elements trilogy, came out in 1996, it was a landmark moment. For my Indian parents and their friends, it was the first time they could walk into a multiplex in Atlanta and see a film in Hindi. The fact that it was by a female Indian director -- a very rare breed -- made it even more exciting. But "Fire" wasn't an easy film for most Indians to love; it was about two women in unhappy marriages who enter into a lesbian relationship with each other -- a subject that delighted a few but disturbed many. In India, Hindu fundamentalists attacked theaters playing the film, and "Fire" was eventually banned there and in Pakistan.

And so Deepa Mehta became one of India's most visible and controversial filmmakers. Although in the 1970s she emigrated to Toronto, where she shot her first two feature films, her return to India to make "Fire" established her reputation. Now "Water," the third installment in her elements trilogy -- the second was "Earth" (1998), about the nationalism that led to the 1948 partition of India and Pakistan -- is proving to be Mehta's most controversial film to date.

"Water" takes place in 1938 Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, in an ashram where widows are sent to live out the rest of their days as ascetics. Widows' ashrams are hidden places in India that serve both a religious purpose -- according to Hindu text, a wife is half her husband, and when he dies she herself becomes half-dead -- and a practical one: Families get to unload a burdensome and unmarriageable female member. It's a spare and desperate existence; the women's heads are shaved, they are allowed to wear only white, and if they're lucky, they get one meal a day. It's a fate preferable to committing suttee -- an old custom in which a widow immolates herself on her late husband's funeral pyre -- but only slightly.

Two things shake up the ashram in "Water": The first is the arrival of the 8-year-old Chuyia, played by a magnetic Sri Lankan girl named Sarala. Before she even realizes that she's been married off, Chuyia's husband dies, and her father drops her off at the ashram. Her inability to accept the religious concept behind the widows' bleak lives wakes up the ashram's tenants, particularly Kalyani (Lisa Ray), a young beauty who's forced into prostitution by the head widow in order to finance the ashram, and who falls in love with an idealistic law student who doesn't care that she's a widow. At the same time, Gandhi, who believes that widows should be able to remarry, is gaining a strong following and bringing hope to young idealists all over India -- a part of the film that is depressing given that widows' ashrams still exist today.

"Water" is a lovely, atmospheric film, and its depiction of daily life on the Ganges -- where women bathe and wash their laundry as funeral pyres burn on the banks -- is fascinating to watch. And though Mehta (who both wrote and directed the film) is clearly criticizing the treatment of widows as untouchables, it's not a film that's trying to be overtly controversial. Which is why it's surprising that "Water's" shooting was plagued by death threats and riots.

Religious fundamentalism, rising around the world, dominated Indian politics in the late '90s. By the time Mehta began filming in 2000, in Varanasi, India's fundamentalist Bharatiya Janata Party was in full power, and the government's cultural arm, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, was working to transform India into a Hindu nation. Although the BJP had approved Mehta's script, finding that it did not violate its censorship rules, the more powerful RSS was working to undermine the film. Fake excerpts of the script started circulating in the newspapers, and protesters chanted outside the set and burned Mehta in effigy. After the film's sets were burned to the ground, production on "Water" was shut down. Mehta returned to Canada to make the comedy "Bollywood/Hollywood" and "The Republic of Love," based on Carol Shields' novel. Four years after she dropped it, Mehta picked up the script for "Water" again and headed to Sri Lanka, where she built her own Varanasi, recast the film, and managed to complete "Water" in a country twisted by its own politics but at least unfazed by hers. (Happily, the BJP was voted out of power in 2004, while Mehta was shooting in Sri Lanka.)

Mehta's daughter, Devyani Saltzman, accompanied Mehta on the film shoot and wrote a memoir of the experience, "Shooting Water," out now from Newmarket Press. Saltzman's story adds another layer to the film, making "Water" not just about Indian widows, but about the rise of Hindu fundamentalism in the late '90s and the particular difficulty of being any kind of outsider in India.

When I met with Mehta recently in New York, it was immediately clear how tough life has made her. Sitting erect in a black Nehru jacket, her long black hair parted down the middle, the 55-year-old director is quiet and intense when she talks about the protests that shut down the film, passionate while discussing how Indian women are treated, and happiest, it seems, when talking about filmmaking.

You made "Fire" and "Earth" not too long before "Water," but you didn't have problems shooting those, did you?

I had problems with "Fire," but not with shooting. I had no problems with "Earth." "Earth" did really well in India. It went through the censors, and played all over, and in fact it was India's entry in the Oscars. "Fire" had problems after it was released in Mumbai and Delhi, but it continued to play everywhere else. So what happened with "Water" came as a big shock.

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