Deepa Mehta’s “Water” causes controversy.

I haven’t seen this movie yet, but I can’t wait since the other two in this series, Earth and Fire, are two of my favorites. Mehta knows how to piss off the Hindu Fundies for bringing up issues like (homo)sexuality, Muslim-Hindu conflict, and this time the politics of widowhood for women, in her ground-breaking, controversial and really pretty films.
via NYT.

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.”

I think films are a really important medium of communication and often times not only a starting point for discussion, but a starting point for activism. For example, Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price started a tremendous amount of organizing and just last week at the immigration protests the rally was called “A Day Without an Immigrant,” from A Day Without a Mexican .
Since I haven’t seen it yet, I don’t yet know what some of these bigger implications might be, but I am interested to see the difference in reception between Western audiences and those in India. In the last decade, the US in particular has gotten very much obsessed with stories from, about, surrounding South Asia and especially South Asian women. But little of it has been in a radical feminist (third world feminist) way where the West is attempting to understand and support a condition different from their own. More in like a now we have South Asian literature and film to add to our collection of multi-culti *ethnic* and *foreign* stories, (not in any way to discredit the oftentimes VERY feminist authorship of these cultural productions.) Or my favorite, “oh those poor oppressed Indian women…” or what I like to call the Oprah’s Book Club attitude.
Discussion, organizing and activism around the treatment of widows in India is an important one and has been on the top of the Indian feminist agenda for some time now. How will this story be received in the US? As a story of a young girl’s courage and the recognition for all the moments of feminist practice that go down within the historical context of a very patriarchal India or will it be another way for Westerners to view India as a backwards place?
Anyone seen the flick?