Water

Written & Directed by: Deepa Mehta
Produced by: David Hamilton
Cast: Sarala, Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, John Abraham, Waheeda Rehman, Manorama, Raghuvir Yadav and Vinay Pathak

Water is the third film in Deepa Mehta’s trilogy, after ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’. The film has been reviewed extremely well internationally and also boasts of an Oscar nomination. It was initially planned to be shot in Banaras (the story is set in that town) but was cancelled amidst stiff and violent protests. Water was eventually filmed in Sri Lanka with a changed cast and a different and a tacky working title, River Moon. The decision to shoot in Sri Lanka, visibly so different from Banaras, could not have been easy. The film avoids mentioning the name of the city or the river, but the setting is supposedly Banaras with a character referring to the popular saying that if you manage to avoid the pimps, bulls, stairs and ascetics, you will enjoy Kashi (another name for Banaras). A revered Hindu pilgrimage, Banaras is integral to the story of Water. Deepa Mehta wanted to tell a story about the condition of Indian widows in general but with a focus on those who were forced to spend their lives in Banaras. It is said and commonly believed, that Kashi ensures salvation (moksha) to all who die there. The title is a reference to the river Ganga and establishes a point at the very outset, for to call what flows in holy Ganga, just ‘water’ would be considered heresy by the brahminical orthodoxy. It is clear that Mehta wanted to take a ballsy and irreverent approach to the oppressive conditions for widows in pre-Independence India.

The difficulties of creating a Banaras in Sri Lanka can only be imagined, and hence one should perhaps overlook a landscape that is poles apart, with another river replacing Ganga. In fact, I suspect Mehta deliberately left some of the markers in her film as a reminder of the price she had to pay (e.g. Sri Lankan attires and architecture). However, I imagine, the change in location made the filmmaker also rethink her priorities. Instead of making the film she had planned and letting it find its audience (like in the case of ‘Fire’), she seems to have identified the audience first and let that guide her treatment of this film. The most obviously affected element is the language in the film (if location was not under her control, language certainly was). With the target audience expected to depend on the sub-titles, little research or effort seems to have gone into the dialogues. Not only is there an absolute absence of local dialects or accents, the dialogues sound stilted at many places with a fair inclusion of clichés from Bollywood films. To compound the problem the two main leads (played by Lisa Ray and John Abraham) speak with a modern, urban accent (with dialogues like ‘Aap log kahan rehte ho?’) that sounds as misplaced as the actors themselves.

The viewership issue also seems to have affected the treatment of the core issues in this film. The narrative axis being Chuhiya (Sarala), a seven-year old child widow conveyed to this widow ashram in Banaras by her father, the film sets to expose the squalid existence of half a dozen widowed women living in this ashram. This assortment has mostly older women who seem to be living in a daze. These women are a homogenous lot – undifferentiated and without any individual history whatsoever. This widows’ ashram in 1938 India seems to be more democratic than the India of today. There are no caste hierarchies shown or cultural differences pointing to the politics that must have existed in these ashrams. The widows have been deserted by their families but their loneliness is not delved into. All the problems that these women face are economic in nature – they get to have only one meal a day, beg outside the temples for survival and cannot even save for their own cremation. If these women are suffering it’s not because they are socially ostracized, pushed into invisibility but because they are poor. This is trivialization of the real issues women in these circumstances would have faced. Women were poor elsewhere too, and many were forced into prostitution, so was there then no difference between them and these widowed women in Banaras?

What was contemptible about the treatment of widows in India around that time was not just that they were stripped of their material possessions (for then, a poor man’s widow would be no worse for being a widow), but that their very existence was rendered ‘invisible’. They were denied the basic status of individual human beings. Once sent to Banaras, they were struck off not only the family list but also the society register. They were practically untouchables, using a separate ghat on the Ganga and not allowed to be even seen on auspicious occasions like weddings (so the incident where Gyanvati comes to fill water while a wedding ceremony is on, would be incorrect).

Also, the society did not quarantine its widows only to acquire their share of the property or to avoid feeding them. A widow’s sexuality (now that her husband, who was supposed to keep a tab on it, was gone) was a potential threat to a society used to containing women’s desires. A man would not have wanted his wife to look attractive after he was dead; the society would not have wanted to deal with an attractive woman whose ownership was disputed. So she was de-sexed. Her head was shaved and colours were denied to her. Her sexual energy was contained by an austere (and physically difficult) life and religious strictures. This is evident from the very quote from Manusmriti that Mehta chooses as her epigraph. Since the film shows no awareness of what was expressed in the lines, allow me to quote-

“A widow 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 women in ‘Water’ have no desires (except Bua’s hunger for laddoos and Chuhiya’s desire to go home). The only woman (Kalyani) who has any sexual experience is a victim, forced into prostitution. The only man-woman relationship that is not forced (between Kalyani and Narayan) is so romanticized as to make it completely sexless. If the filmmaker sees these widowed women as asexual beings, and the film denies them their sexuality, then the two are doing no better than the society of their time.

Moreover, whatever the nature of these women’s problems in ‘Water’, there is no culprit to be seen (quite literally). If these women are shown as ‘victims’, there must be a ‘perpetrator’? It is not a man/men, for you see an ever so gentle father delivering 7-year old Chuhiya at the ashram. And there is Narayan, of course. The perpetrator is not religion either, for its only representative, a hindu priest (Kulbhushan Kharbanda) is played by a kind and ‘progressive’ man (he is the one who informs Gyanvati about the Widow Remarriage Act). It can not be the society, for there is not much of it seen in the film. The reference to culpability is always vague. The man who ‘exploits’ Kalyani remains hidden above the winding staircase. The paedophile who rapes young Chuhiya is a man behind a veil. However, the one perpetrator who is shown clearly throughout is Madumati (played delightfully by Manorama), a hulk of a woman who runs the ashram. She is insensitive towards Chuhiya, she eats better food than the rest, she exploits Kalyani, and she is the one who sends an unsuspecting Chuhiya into the clutches of a daemon. So it is true, what has been repeated for long now, that women are the worst violators against women!

The treatment of other relationships – that between effeminate sons (Narayan and Rabindra) and their virile fathers, or between mother and son (Narayan and his mother) remains superficial. What somewhat saves the film (and I suspect earned its Oscar nomination) is a shocking twist (young Chuhiya’s rape), and a grand resolution where Mohandas Gandhi with a backlight-supported aura offers hope, and Gyanvati hands over the future, symbolically and literally, to Gandhi and his followers. The film owes the Bombay film-veterans, Seema Biswas and Raghubir Yadav for performances that support the narrative despite its many weaknesses.

Water does not do justice to its subject either in addressing the core issues or in its treatment. This weepy, period tale about an exotic land showcasing poverty and exploitation of widows was shocking enough for some to laud the film as Oscar worthy, but who did the film fool? Deepa Mehta’s previous film ‘Hollywood Bollywood’ was far more honest, for the treatment matched the theme. However, Water remains shallow and disappointing, coming from the director of ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’.