This is the disturbing India of the Hindu widow, a woman traditionally shunned as bad luck and forced to live in destitution on the edge of society. Her husband's death is considered her fault, and she has to shave her head, shun hot food and sweets and never remarry. In the pre-independence India of the 1930's, the tradition applied even to child brides of 5 or 6 who had been betrothed for the future by their families but had never laid eyes on their husbands.
Into this milieu now comes the director Deepa Mehta with "Water," a lush new film that opened on Friday, about Chuyia, an 8-year-old widow in the India of 1938. She has barely met her husband but is banished by her parents to a decrepit widows' house on the edge of the Ganges. Chuyia is left there sobbing, in one of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film, but she insists her parents will soon return for her.
Even as it becomes clear that they won't, Chuyia's spirited, rebellious streak shines through, and she begins to change the way the other widows in the house view the world, as the independence movement of Mahatma Gandhi swirls around them. Chuyia has a particularly powerful effect on two people: Shakuntula, who begins to question a Hindu faith that subjects women who have lost husbands to such degrading lives, and Kalyani, a beautiful young widow who has been forced into prostitution by the head of the widow house. As the film unfolds, Kalyani ignores the taboos to fall tragically in love with a handsome young Gandhi nationalist.
The sorrowful film is nonetheless a triumph of conscience over blind faith, and a powerful message about how much, and how little, has changed in India. "I think it's slightly naïve for me to think that films make a difference," Ms. Mehta, the director, said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where she lives half the year, when she is not in New Delhi. "But what it can do is start a dialogue and provoke discussion."
It has already provoking a response from Hindu fundamentalists who forced the movie crew to shut down in 2000 after protesters took to the street, burned Ms. Mehta in effigy, and cowed the local government into asking the film-making to be stopped. After four years they moved the set from India to Sri Lanka. Here is what Ms. Mehta says about how she got the idea for the movie:
Ms. Mehta said she got the idea for "Water" a decade ago, when she was in Varanasi directing a one-hour television episode of "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" for George Lucas. One morning on the ghats she was horrified to see a widow scampering on all fours searching for her glasses. When the widow couldn't find them, she sat down on her haunches to cry, completely ignored by the people around her.
"It wasn't shock, but I felt totally ignorant," said Ms. Mehta, whose father was a film distributor in the Indian city of Amritsar and graduated from the University of New Delhi. "Where the hell had I been?" Her own grandmother was a widow, but "she ruled the house," Ms. Mehta said. "She was the matriarch."
Today there are about 33 million widows in India, according to the 2001 census, and many in the rural areas are still treated like the outcasts in the film.
"All the traditions have eased, but they're still there," said Martha Chen, a lecturer in public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and author of "Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India," published in 2000. "I met widows whose main lament was that at the weddings of their own children, they had to sit in the shadows."
The Hindu treatment of widows is a classic example of an ancient cultural practice that gets embedded in a religious tradition, and of how religious fundamentalists confuse the obviously dated and now clearly offensive cultural practice with eternal religious truth. It's like reading a 2000 year old scripture on homosexuality and confusing the dated cultural understanding of homosexuality with religious truth. This is why we read scriptures in context.
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