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How long has it been now, two months, since the controversy of the filming of the latest
political schlock by Deepa Mehta hit the newsstands? You have to give it to the political savvy of
the madam from Toronto for knowing what attracts controversy, and what keeps it going. Two
mediocre movies in her oeuvre already, and she was panting to add Water to quench the thirst of
her bored but angry Western/female interlocutors. With the patronage of Jyoti Basu she could
still complete the "pot-warmer", though it would be ironic that this "critique" of the treatment of
Hindu widows in the 1930s would be shot on the banks of the Hoogly, from whose environs
come the present denizens of the ashrams for widows in Varanasi and Mathura. Says something
about a state that has been ruled by the Communists for at least the last thirty years! Ms. Mehta
should hopefully find out after her shooting stint in Calcutta that Marxism ain't the cure for
solving the plight of Hindu widows.
The big "to do" till now has been the protests by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other like-minded groups protesting the making of such a film, and the making of it in Varanasi especially.
Ashok Singhal of the VHP has vowed that his outfit would try and disrupt the making of the film
anywhere in India. What would you say to such a "single-minded" purpose of the VHP? Get a
life? Whatever may be the worth or the lack thereof in the project of Ms. Mehta it is disturbing
that political parties and social organizations in India spend so much effort and time on such piffle.
If only the energies of the country could be channeled to constructive purposes with such single-mindedness! "Look the Muslims protest whenever there is anything even remotely negative said
about Islam or Muslims, and they get their way. They banned Satanic Verses didn't they? They
have banned the works of Taslima Nasreen, haven't they? They nullified the Supreme Court
verdict in the Shah Bano case, didn't they? They give in to the Muslims, but whenever we Hindus
protest, they mock and deride us", argues the Singhal brigade. Yup, but what else is new, and
will such protests against the filming of Water achieve anything positive?
A strange myopia befuddles the whole country. The affiliates of the RSS should know that
this is the time to back their government fully, create the least trouble for its functioning, and bide
their time till the BJP could get the country's economy strengthened, and put some effective
people in high places who could see to it that law and justice prevails in the country. But no.
They are in a tearing hurry to shoot their own foot! And in the act of doing so they give enough
ammunition to the predictable opponents in the country and elsewhere to shoot at the BJP and
weaken its morale and undermine its functioning.
But back to the back-waters of Ms. Mehta's "oh! Pus!" What is all the fuss about this film, or
this "film to be"? Non-political movie critics have panned the earlier two of Ms. Mehta's trilogy,
Earth and Fire. Politically inclined critics have praised or shredded her work (See my review of
Fire on the website Indiastar.com). Ms. Mehta's "work", before she launched on filming her
trilogy, consisted of one movie which basically was some kind of a matrimonial ad for her brother!
This is the background in movie-making that this graduate in Indian philosophy and Toronto
denizen has. To give her credit, she realised that while she had little clue about movie-making she
had a lot of insight on how the feminist/politically correct/arty-farty crowd weighed in with their
politics and their "tastes". Look at any of the publicity photographs for either Fire or Water, and
you will find only the pictures of Shabana Azmi, Deepa Mehta, and Nandita Das. There are no
men in Mehta's movies. Don't take this literally. There are some male characters. But they are
weak, emasculated, confused, or cruel. They are in the background. The women characters are
the "strong" ones, and they are the ones around which the films revolve. Why not, you might say.
But this is strange "tit" for tat. If this is the face of Indian feminism, then it is blatantly Western,
and knee-jerk nonsense.
Have you seen those photographs in newspapers and magazines? If you haven't let me
describe them to you. In one you have the bald, blousy Shabana Azmi gazing lovingly into the
eyes of her dusky co-star Nandita Das, close to bald, and posing somewhere in the lobby of the
fanciest hotel for rent in decrepit Varanasi. Or you see that shot from the "muhurrat" of the film,
the three women staring into the camera, with Deepa Mehta looking wild and glassy-eyed and
with a splash of red on her forehead, and with her arms around her two "stars", who played
lesbian sisters-in-law in Fire and are now slated to play sad, exploited widows in Earth. These
pictures, these portrayals, and these posturings are for the consumption of a particular breed of
the elite: feminists and feminist activists in India, women students in women's study courses in the
U.S., and that strange amalgam of political and religious animals who could be, for want of a
better term, called "Hindu-baiters". Hindu haters would be too strong and the wrong term to use
in this context and for these people.These pictures are "framed" politically. They are meant to
tell that particular elite that these movies are "women's" movies, that the photographs are a way
of giving the finger to the male world: the world that is "oppressive," "paternalistic," which
"subjugates" women, and which makes women "objects". Now, I wouldn't at all mind the
political coloring if at least the movies were well-made and the stories they told were complex and
nuanced. Instead, what we have got till now from Ms. Mehta are caricatures, superficial nonsense
which push the "right political buttons". Ms. Mehta claims she is an artiste. I suppose if one can
throw elephant dung on canvas and call it art, one can surely indulge in simplistic political
pamphleteering and call it cinema.
Unlike good/well-made political films, Ms. Mehta's projects have done little to change
people's perception of or responses to the "problems" posed in them. Try and imagine Hindu
housewives telling themselves, "My husband is ignoring me, and I am not satisfied with the sex I
am getting in this marriage, and so I will sleep with my sister-in-law, and later run away with her
to a mosque to break away from the bonds of this Hindu marriage!" That was the gist of Fire.
Very few in India watched the movie, and if they did it was those men who sought to be titillated
by Shabana Azmi caressing Nandita Das' breasts or kissing her. It was a lousy movie, and
quenched neither political nor aesthetic thirsts. However, it has made the director and the two
actresses "stars": they have talked to students at Harvard, lectured in New York city, held
seminars may be in every one of the Ivy League universities in the U.S., and darn it, even George
Lucas has stepped in to take out advertisements in Hollywood trade journals in support of the
filming of Water! George Lucas: come to think of it, has he made any "political" film?!
Water, when made, will be just another political vehicle like Fire. The majority of the five
thousand or so Bengali widows living in Vrindavan's ashrams for widows have said that they are
totally against the making of the film because they feel the film is not going to change their
situation in life one bit. In a newspaper report, one Ahalya Devi, a widow from Bengal who has
been living in Vrindavan for the last 20 years said, "the script of the film anyway caters to the
elitist perception of the life of the Bengali widows, and the film should only be made if it changes
the course of our life for otherwise it will just be a commercial venture on the part of Deepa
Mehta". The astute woman also said that if the makers of the film had gone to Vrindavan they
would not have needed any professional actresses to do the part of a neglected widow as there
were many real ones roaming on the streets. But what she failed to understand was that these
"professional actresses" are needed to conduct those seminars for angry women around the world,
and surely a real widow could not do that, could she?
According to that newspaper report, many of those widows in Vrindavan discounted reports
of sexual exploitation of the widows at the hands of priests and the locals, one of the basic themes
of the film. They said that sexual exploitation might have occurred in the 1930s, the era in which the story of Water is based, but now with people becoming more aware and educated, such cases
were rarely heard of.
A "politically correct" professor of history at the Jamia Millia University, Seema Alavi, wrote
in the Indian Express weighing in on the matter. It was her chance to say something critical of
that dreaded "Sangh Parivar", a catchall "devil term" that now is flippantly used by lazy reporters
and politically compromised academics. For her Benares/Varanasi is not just a "holy" Hindu city
but a composite, civilisational centre. She ignores the history of the city, mentioned as it is in
various Hindu scriptures, and instead launches into that strange mumbo-jumbo that constitutes
fashionable academic verbiage. So she lectures: "But how 'Hindu' is the city of Benares? Is that
its only identity? ...the civilisational methods of the city were never monolithic 'Hindu'. The
entire region remained an epitome of cultural tolerance, accommodating waves of diverse ethnic
groups that settled in the area.... Indeed, when Akbar, the Mughal Emperor, took over, not only
did the Rajputs of the region serve him but he also patronised the city as a chief centre of
learning.... The present projection of the city and its people as Brahmanical Hindu suits the
political ideology of the Sangh Parivar, but amounts to perpetrating an injustice on its history" she
lectures. Of course, the good professor fails to note that one of the three holy sites that the VHP
wants to reclaim for Hindus is that of the Vishweshwara temple in Varanasi (The other two are in
Ayodhya and Mathura).
What about the proposed film? What is the story that is sought to be told? There are all kinds
of rumors afloat about the film, and newspaper reports coyly shy away from giving any synopsis
of the movie. A recent e-mail I received said that the film centered around a "Widows House" in
Varanasi in which Madhumati, Shakuntala, Bindu, Janaki, Suhasini, and other widows live. The
"lady" of the house is Madhumati. There is supposedly a male servant in the house, Hariharan,
who is under the total control of Madhumati. This dormitory is a widows' home only in name. In
reality it is a den for prostitution where the widows either themselves indulge in prostitution or
are dependent on the earnings from prostitution. Madhumati behaves like a 'Madam' of any other
prostitution den and bosses over other widows. Ganja intoxicated, she provides the young
widows for prostitution through Hariharan. Given these kinds of "rumors" it becomes easy for
the local politicians or the leaders of the VHP to whip up the sentiments of people. But there
must be more to these rumors. N. Gurumurthy, one of the BJP's ideologues, compared the script
of the movie to Katherine Mayo's infamous Mother India, which Gandhiji had criticized as a
"drain inspector's report". A recent column by Pritish Nandy on Rediff.Net had a similar take on
the attitude and values of Deepa Mehta.
Strange isn't it? The film isn't even begun. We don't know what the final product will look
like. Yet already hundreds of reports have appeared on it, scores of thoughtful writers have
weighed in on the issue, and thousands have wasted their time and energy protesting the making
of the film. Round One to Ms. Mehta. She may finally end up shooting the film in Toronto if
Singhal keeps his word. But that is OK. For after all, if a blousy, beef-eating, twice-married,
Muslim can play the role of a hapless Hindu widow, then Lake Michigan can replace the Ganga.
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