Water (2005)
Water
The production of Water is the stuff movie history is made of. With the Hindu right shutting down the movie’s initial production in Varanasi a few years ago, Deepa Mehta finished filming in Sri Lanka and recruited new actors to take the place of her initial cast. In 2000, I met Shabana Azmi in her bald avatar as she handed away prizes at LSR on Founder’s Day. She was preparing or filming for Water and I was very taken in with the idea of the movie. This was primarily because Azmi was gorgeous even when she was bald and I faithfully began heroine worshipping her because she seemed so very aware and powerful.
Water is the third in Deepa Mehta’s trilogy, the previous two films being Fire and Earth respectively. Audiences were stunned or scandalized with Fire, and Earth got a mixed reception. The movies have been loosely described as feminist. I am not quite sure what that means because I found Fire somewhat insulting to women and lesbians in particular. Fire argued that women chose to enter same sex relationships only when they were deeply dissatisfied with their existing relations with men. Lesbianism was viewed as a final choice after a woman had been pushed into a corner. I thought Mehta did an average job of exploring women’s sexuality. I was perplexed by how lesbianism as an active first choice exercised by a woman was not considered natural. Women became lesbians trembling in fear, annoyed with their dissatisfying or cheating husbands and knowing that they could not explore the option of a heterosexual extra-marital affair because of societal rules and mores. In this way lesbianism was seen as an unnatural rebellion by women not a natural course adopted by women who sought satisfaction only with other women. Further, the movie explored lesbianism only on a physical plane and never addressed the mental or emotional relationship between two women, apart from stating that they turned to each other because they were abandoned and alienated within the family.
Earth was more about a looming and scary political landscape and religious groups rather than a story about women. It was a well-narrated and interesting movie, and it took pot shots at religion. Earth is clearly a misfit in this ‘feminist’ trilogy and therefore, I prefer to read the movies independently of each other. Perhaps the fact that all protagonists of the movies have been women has led people to misread these movies as being universally feminist.
Perhaps the only thread that links all three of Mehta’s movies is the confrontation between a deeply religious society and a free human conscience. This is perhaps best explicated in Water. Water is banned in India for its obvious anti-caste Hindu polemic. It shows some Brahmins in 1938 in a poor light and elevates Gandhism to the level of a messianic dogma, which could end social evils in India.
Chuyia (Sarala) is a 7-year-old girl who has been widowed when the husband she has never met dies. Her family abandons her in an ashram for widows in Varanasi (according to the original script). We find out it is actually a place called Rawalpur in the end. The ashram has its own social dynamic. The oldest widow, Madhumati, exercises control. Seema Biswas plays a strong-willed, pious widow torn between religion and conscience. We find out that the ashram isn’t exactly holy at all. Madhumati sends Kalyani (Lisa Ray) to prostitute herself before the Brahmin gentry across the river. This is how the ashram makes its bread and butter. Running interference for the ashram is Gulabi (the eunuch and local pimp played by Raghubir Yadav).
We are introduced to a modern thinker cum Gandhian social reformer, Narayan (John Abraham). He chides his very anglicized friend for his British ways and thinks of himself as a nationalist or Gandhian. He meets Kalyani and falls in love promising to take her away to Calcutta. When he breaks the news to his mother (Waheeda Rehman) she is horrified. Widows are bad news, you see! However, Narayan prevails and BIswas helps Kalyani escape from the ashram and find her future. On the way to his family, Kalyani discovers Narayan’s father is one of the exploiting Brahmins and goes back to the ashram only to flee again, one final time.
In Kalyani’s absence, the evil Madhumati sends the young Chuyia with Gulabi who lures her away with promises of sweets and playmates. Biswas finds out too late and we know Chuyia has lost her innocence. Biswas rushes to the station where Narayan has gone to throw in his lot with Gandhi and the nationalists and hands Chuiya over to him, saying, “Give her to Gandhi”. We are left hoping the little girl has found a better future.
Water is not an obscure social critique. It is clear in what or who it targets and why. However, very honestly, I found the movie annoying. This is partly because Mehta should know better than to let models do an actor’s job. Ray and Abraham are both too contemporary, too pretty to be a part of the murky setting. They don’t become the characters; they wear their characters as window dressing barely cloaking the supermodels they are.
The photography and direction is pretty good too. But nothing in the movie makes a deep impression. Perhaps someone who is not aware about the plight of Hindu widows will find this deeply moving or shocking – like most of the West. Since I don’t have much to say about the actual movie itself, I will confine myself to discussing the context of the movie and the metaphors it uses.
1. The movie is reminiscent of Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura. In Kanthapura a young Gandhian comes back to his Brahmin village in South India and challenges the social order by mixing with Harijans. Kanthapura is a fantastic take on how nationalism reaches a small village in the south and throws the existing order off its axis. The novel talked about the interface between the Raj and the colonial state apparatus at local levels and even between education and its challenge to tradition. Gandhi was only ‘heard of’, never seen and this itself made him an epic figure in time. In Water, Mehta employs what I call the Kanthapura model – subversion of the existing order in a subaltern setting by an agent influenced by mainstream thinking. She does this poorly. Narayan is not inspiring; he is just powerful in a mob, not alone. He stands up to his father in a most dissatisfying manner and seems to be a mama’s boy.
2. Mehta uses Gandhism without problematizing Gandhi’s politics. I have a huge bone to pick with movies that present Gandhi uncritically (like Lage Raho Munnabhai). Gandhian thought has its own contradictions – for instance Gandhi never talked about inter-marriage, only inter-dining. His idea of trusteeship could have ended up benefiting the landlords all over again. At the same time as Gandhi, there were other social reformers like Ambedkar who wrote and acted extensively on behalf of the Untouchables. At the First Round Table Conference, lower caste groups had written in support of Ambedkar to England, not Gandhi. Further, all of Ambedkar’s efforts to secure separate electorates for Untouchables were stymied by Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference when he asked for an adjournment when the issue came up. Some politicians in England had also remarked how Gandhi seemed unprepared and did not know enough about the plight of Untouchables in India. The issue of separate electorates was resolved only in 1932 (Poona Pact) when Gandhi got Ambedkar to agree under duress by going on his fast unto death.
3. Even before Gandhi, there had been social reformers who had fought for widow remarriage like IC Vidyasagar. Bengal had an act as early as 1856, which apparently formed the basis of the current act as well. The movie does not tell us this. It instead seems to attribute progressive laws for women as the handiwork of the British Raj, not Indians themselves. Not only is this a gross misreading of history, but also eclipses how the Raj enacted laws, which diminished the status of Hindu and Muslim, women in terms of property and divorce. A discussion of this is found in Flavia Agnes’ work on law and gender in India where she traces the manner in which Hindu law and the Shari’ah interacted with Anglo-Saxon law to give Indian women the worst possible legal deal.
4. I am not saying, Water is a bad movie. I’m merely saying it has a lot of problems and fails to make a contemporary point. We are left feeling relieved that those days are over. No more children are being banished as widows, such ashrams may not exist anymore and thank god for modern laws. In doing so, the movie is able to say that things got better with Independence and especially because of Gandhi. Is this really the case? As recently as 2004, MP Chief Minister went to a bal vivah ceremony where she blessed children being married off. Being a widow is still a social stigma in many parts of the country, women are still being forced into prostitution in other ways, women in some villages in Rajasthan have to undergo painful virginity tests, rapes are still hard to establish and prosecute. Things may have become a little better, but the problems are far from over. I would therefore have preferred it if Mehta’s film making skills had been used to make a commentary or critique of an existing problem for women. Given the fact that film is a powerful medium to get international attention, why waste resources on a period film where everyone assumes the problem is so old, it must have been resolved by now. Compare Water with Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi! Which one is more successful as a social critique, if that is what these filmmakers are endeavoring?
Of course, this is all a matter of personal taste. Some of you may like the movie, some of you may not. I just found it problematic. I think movies that try and make a statement should make a relevant or a timeless statement. The same movie could have explored current tensions between religion and the human conscience by addressing a persistent women’s issue instead of a dead one. The movie turns out to be a vendetta against Brahminism, instead of a champion of women’s human rights. The purpose of the movie is less widow liberation and more about challenging the Hindu hierarchy. Yet paradoxically, the agent that challenges this Hindu hierarchy is Gandhi, who drew on the very same Hinduism and interpreted it differently. Therefore, is subversion within an existing discourse by a reinterpretation of that discourse, any subversion at all?
Widows are simply the agents of this larger subversion, if we can call it that. I choose to. Yet, the subversion isn’t for them. It is for a larger group - the Untouchables, the Indians versus the Raj. Yet these same widows are also protectors of patriarchy and only a couple of them change their minds about whether the existing situation is right. Most of their thinking is done for them by men. Narayan thinks for Kalyani, Kulbhushan Kharbanda thinks for Biswas. Biswas however, does show an independent streak by setting inmates free, but only after her philosophical mentor has asked her to problematize the situation for herself. In the final analysis, widows are accidental beneficiaries of a larger tussle between the British and the nationalists. Their idea of liberation is to get married again and therefore re-enter the patriarchal family that has excluded them. Some liberation that!!!
My rating: 3 noddies.
The production of Water is the stuff movie history is made of. With the Hindu right shutting down the movie’s initial production in Varanasi a few years ago, Deepa Mehta finished filming in Sri Lanka and recruited new actors to take the place of her initial cast. In 2000, I met Shabana Azmi in her bald avatar as she handed away prizes at LSR on Founder’s Day. She was preparing or filming for Water and I was very taken in with the idea of the movie. This was primarily because Azmi was gorgeous even when she was bald and I faithfully began heroine worshipping her because she seemed so very aware and powerful.
Water is the third in Deepa Mehta’s trilogy, the previous two films being Fire and Earth respectively. Audiences were stunned or scandalized with Fire, and Earth got a mixed reception. The movies have been loosely described as feminist. I am not quite sure what that means because I found Fire somewhat insulting to women and lesbians in particular. Fire argued that women chose to enter same sex relationships only when they were deeply dissatisfied with their existing relations with men. Lesbianism was viewed as a final choice after a woman had been pushed into a corner. I thought Mehta did an average job of exploring women’s sexuality. I was perplexed by how lesbianism as an active first choice exercised by a woman was not considered natural. Women became lesbians trembling in fear, annoyed with their dissatisfying or cheating husbands and knowing that they could not explore the option of a heterosexual extra-marital affair because of societal rules and mores. In this way lesbianism was seen as an unnatural rebellion by women not a natural course adopted by women who sought satisfaction only with other women. Further, the movie explored lesbianism only on a physical plane and never addressed the mental or emotional relationship between two women, apart from stating that they turned to each other because they were abandoned and alienated within the family.
Earth was more about a looming and scary political landscape and religious groups rather than a story about women. It was a well-narrated and interesting movie, and it took pot shots at religion. Earth is clearly a misfit in this ‘feminist’ trilogy and therefore, I prefer to read the movies independently of each other. Perhaps the fact that all protagonists of the movies have been women has led people to misread these movies as being universally feminist.
Perhaps the only thread that links all three of Mehta’s movies is the confrontation between a deeply religious society and a free human conscience. This is perhaps best explicated in Water. Water is banned in India for its obvious anti-caste Hindu polemic. It shows some Brahmins in 1938 in a poor light and elevates Gandhism to the level of a messianic dogma, which could end social evils in India.
Chuyia (Sarala) is a 7-year-old girl who has been widowed when the husband she has never met dies. Her family abandons her in an ashram for widows in Varanasi (according to the original script). We find out it is actually a place called Rawalpur in the end. The ashram has its own social dynamic. The oldest widow, Madhumati, exercises control. Seema Biswas plays a strong-willed, pious widow torn between religion and conscience. We find out that the ashram isn’t exactly holy at all. Madhumati sends Kalyani (Lisa Ray) to prostitute herself before the Brahmin gentry across the river. This is how the ashram makes its bread and butter. Running interference for the ashram is Gulabi (the eunuch and local pimp played by Raghubir Yadav).
We are introduced to a modern thinker cum Gandhian social reformer, Narayan (John Abraham). He chides his very anglicized friend for his British ways and thinks of himself as a nationalist or Gandhian. He meets Kalyani and falls in love promising to take her away to Calcutta. When he breaks the news to his mother (Waheeda Rehman) she is horrified. Widows are bad news, you see! However, Narayan prevails and BIswas helps Kalyani escape from the ashram and find her future. On the way to his family, Kalyani discovers Narayan’s father is one of the exploiting Brahmins and goes back to the ashram only to flee again, one final time.
In Kalyani’s absence, the evil Madhumati sends the young Chuyia with Gulabi who lures her away with promises of sweets and playmates. Biswas finds out too late and we know Chuyia has lost her innocence. Biswas rushes to the station where Narayan has gone to throw in his lot with Gandhi and the nationalists and hands Chuiya over to him, saying, “Give her to Gandhi”. We are left hoping the little girl has found a better future.
Water is not an obscure social critique. It is clear in what or who it targets and why. However, very honestly, I found the movie annoying. This is partly because Mehta should know better than to let models do an actor’s job. Ray and Abraham are both too contemporary, too pretty to be a part of the murky setting. They don’t become the characters; they wear their characters as window dressing barely cloaking the supermodels they are.
The photography and direction is pretty good too. But nothing in the movie makes a deep impression. Perhaps someone who is not aware about the plight of Hindu widows will find this deeply moving or shocking – like most of the West. Since I don’t have much to say about the actual movie itself, I will confine myself to discussing the context of the movie and the metaphors it uses.
1. The movie is reminiscent of Raja Rao’s 1938 novel Kanthapura. In Kanthapura a young Gandhian comes back to his Brahmin village in South India and challenges the social order by mixing with Harijans. Kanthapura is a fantastic take on how nationalism reaches a small village in the south and throws the existing order off its axis. The novel talked about the interface between the Raj and the colonial state apparatus at local levels and even between education and its challenge to tradition. Gandhi was only ‘heard of’, never seen and this itself made him an epic figure in time. In Water, Mehta employs what I call the Kanthapura model – subversion of the existing order in a subaltern setting by an agent influenced by mainstream thinking. She does this poorly. Narayan is not inspiring; he is just powerful in a mob, not alone. He stands up to his father in a most dissatisfying manner and seems to be a mama’s boy.
2. Mehta uses Gandhism without problematizing Gandhi’s politics. I have a huge bone to pick with movies that present Gandhi uncritically (like Lage Raho Munnabhai). Gandhian thought has its own contradictions – for instance Gandhi never talked about inter-marriage, only inter-dining. His idea of trusteeship could have ended up benefiting the landlords all over again. At the same time as Gandhi, there were other social reformers like Ambedkar who wrote and acted extensively on behalf of the Untouchables. At the First Round Table Conference, lower caste groups had written in support of Ambedkar to England, not Gandhi. Further, all of Ambedkar’s efforts to secure separate electorates for Untouchables were stymied by Gandhi at the Second Round Table Conference when he asked for an adjournment when the issue came up. Some politicians in England had also remarked how Gandhi seemed unprepared and did not know enough about the plight of Untouchables in India. The issue of separate electorates was resolved only in 1932 (Poona Pact) when Gandhi got Ambedkar to agree under duress by going on his fast unto death.
3. Even before Gandhi, there had been social reformers who had fought for widow remarriage like IC Vidyasagar. Bengal had an act as early as 1856, which apparently formed the basis of the current act as well. The movie does not tell us this. It instead seems to attribute progressive laws for women as the handiwork of the British Raj, not Indians themselves. Not only is this a gross misreading of history, but also eclipses how the Raj enacted laws, which diminished the status of Hindu and Muslim, women in terms of property and divorce. A discussion of this is found in Flavia Agnes’ work on law and gender in India where she traces the manner in which Hindu law and the Shari’ah interacted with Anglo-Saxon law to give Indian women the worst possible legal deal.
4. I am not saying, Water is a bad movie. I’m merely saying it has a lot of problems and fails to make a contemporary point. We are left feeling relieved that those days are over. No more children are being banished as widows, such ashrams may not exist anymore and thank god for modern laws. In doing so, the movie is able to say that things got better with Independence and especially because of Gandhi. Is this really the case? As recently as 2004, MP Chief Minister went to a bal vivah ceremony where she blessed children being married off. Being a widow is still a social stigma in many parts of the country, women are still being forced into prostitution in other ways, women in some villages in Rajasthan have to undergo painful virginity tests, rapes are still hard to establish and prosecute. Things may have become a little better, but the problems are far from over. I would therefore have preferred it if Mehta’s film making skills had been used to make a commentary or critique of an existing problem for women. Given the fact that film is a powerful medium to get international attention, why waste resources on a period film where everyone assumes the problem is so old, it must have been resolved by now. Compare Water with Manish Jha’s Matrubhoomi! Which one is more successful as a social critique, if that is what these filmmakers are endeavoring?
Of course, this is all a matter of personal taste. Some of you may like the movie, some of you may not. I just found it problematic. I think movies that try and make a statement should make a relevant or a timeless statement. The same movie could have explored current tensions between religion and the human conscience by addressing a persistent women’s issue instead of a dead one. The movie turns out to be a vendetta against Brahminism, instead of a champion of women’s human rights. The purpose of the movie is less widow liberation and more about challenging the Hindu hierarchy. Yet paradoxically, the agent that challenges this Hindu hierarchy is Gandhi, who drew on the very same Hinduism and interpreted it differently. Therefore, is subversion within an existing discourse by a reinterpretation of that discourse, any subversion at all?
Widows are simply the agents of this larger subversion, if we can call it that. I choose to. Yet, the subversion isn’t for them. It is for a larger group - the Untouchables, the Indians versus the Raj. Yet these same widows are also protectors of patriarchy and only a couple of them change their minds about whether the existing situation is right. Most of their thinking is done for them by men. Narayan thinks for Kalyani, Kulbhushan Kharbanda thinks for Biswas. Biswas however, does show an independent streak by setting inmates free, but only after her philosophical mentor has asked her to problematize the situation for herself. In the final analysis, widows are accidental beneficiaries of a larger tussle between the British and the nationalists. Their idea of liberation is to get married again and therefore re-enter the patriarchal family that has excluded them. Some liberation that!!!
My rating: 3 noddies.
posted by Vasundhara at 6:34 PM
3 Comments:
Wow stuff, Vasundhara. I saw the movie last summer and noticed perhaps only a few of the things you've pointed out (so, as a compliment to your critique, I'm ready for another viewing).
I still think movies like Water should be made, even if badly made. With so much tripe that passes for cinema in our country, it's refreshing when filmmakers try, however shoddily, to take a larger view.
Thanks for this review, and keep me posted of other things you came across and thought worth skewering!
That was a good review of Water however I think the movie was like any other bollywood movie and it dealt a little too less in the matter of widows. It is more like a love story where a man comes and falls in love with a yound beautiful girl not knowing she is a widow, and when she dies he escapes.
Perhaps the only good and lively thing about the movie is Chuhiya..
Hey Vasu!
This is the coolest review of water i have read so far!
Well to begin with i do agree with you that the movie does not deal with larger issues of gender empowerment. But my experience of real life situation through my work in the field of Care and Support in HIV/AIDS highlights these very issues tackled in the movie. A few years ago a movie like this would be a tabboo. The good thing is that today at least a Woman director like Deepa Mehta could make a statement however incomplete that was.
Besides issues of patriarchy it is also important to review such issues in a holistic perspective and their impact on socio-economic, psycho-social and health related factors to which our patriarchical society contributes to.
The movie does throw a light on the following facts:
1) Widows/ Women whether pre-idependence or post are exploited and will continue to be so until we educate and socio-economically empower them.
2) Widow/ any re-marriage ( even after divorce) should be reviewed as a choice of the woman rather than a reform as there is no guarantee that after a second marriage life will be hunky dory for a woman.Infact it is another way of the reforming man to emotionally dominate/abuse/control a woman by posing as a modern, caring and (all for reform) man.
3) The other issues to be highlighted are sexual needs of Widows and the freedom to express them.I feel we need to showcase and compare how a widower is allowed to lead his life vs that of a widow.
4) Gender in general was also highlighted in the movie by showcasing the plight of a transgender (Eununch) who also survives as a pimp in this social system. Woking with this population in my field has opened my mind enough to understand that we are zillions of light years away from any gender equality/ equity in the society be it East or the West.
5) The other issue is in the olden days Child marriage was a ticket to have sex with a virgin as it fuelled the myth that it cures Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI). Today even though most parts of the world and India condemn child marriage through legal reforms this practice has now taken ugly shape in the form of paedophilia for the same reasons as stated above.
6)Research has proved that most (60%) women globally are at a high risk to HIV/STI within a monogamous relationship.This again drives home a point that most society's are patriarchical and abusive of other genders and we are zillions of light years away from such reforms.
7) If the movie was made today the plight of Widows would have been worse. In my field i come across widows of HIV positive men who have either got infected by their husbands themselves or have children and they are thrown out of the house by the in-laws with no access to any financial security. Dig deeper and you will find this true even in other non-infectious diseases.
All these issues remind us that education and socio-economic empowerment are key to any gender. Most 'Other'genders are emotionally, financially and physically abused until and unless they are aware of their rights and a way out.
I also wonder whether God forbid any of us were going through such phases in life with all our education and empowerment would the situtation be any different or would we also have to fight tooth and nail to avail of what is rightfully ours even in this era!
Your review correctly highlights the character of Narayan as being a Mama's Boy. I find most Indian men Mama's boys even today! Even though they may be millions of miles away Mama's have this uncanny way of controlling their decisions and actions. Infact even some fathers fuel patriarchy in their sons by citing how it is important to keep your woman controlled and it doesnt matter if they are equal or superior in their educational and socio-economicqualifications to their partner.
However All Said and done such movies should be made to make people aware of the realities of life and i do agree that the director then shoould opt for making a timeless statement which is true for any era.
Regards;
dr.Vandana Bhatia Nag
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