Digging Deepa

The eyes have it: Filmmaker Deepa Mehta. Photo Steve Carty.

There are countless ways for a filmmaker to portray human degradation, some more subtle than others. In her powerful new film Water, Deepa Mehta manages the feat with the seemingly harmless act of a haircut.

Water takes place in an ashram, or widow colony, in 1938 India. According to one patriarchal reading of Hindu gospel, upon the death of their husbands, Indian women must be forcibly separated from their families and sent to an ashram, where they live out their days in monastic simplicity, deprived of familial contact and most other worldly pleasures.

Halfway through Water, a young widow named Kalyani (Lisa Ray) expresses her desire to remarry. As a pre-emptive punishment, Madhumati (Manorma), the ashram’s tyrannical mother figure, stampedes into Kalyani’s cell with a pair of shears and proceeds to cut — no, hack off — her hair. Kalyani’s black tresses are reduced to a hideous patchwork. With one vicious deed, Madhumati at once defiles Kalyani’s beauty — thus lessening her appeal to a suitor — and utterly debases her. Reminiscent of images of Jews being shorn in Nazi concentration camps, the act is as appalling as a dismemberment — which, in a way, it is.

“I thought it was a powerful visual statement, because it is a reality,” says Mehta in an interview at the CBC Broadcast Centre. “I have seen women getting their heads shaved. Three of them in [the holy city of] Varanasi. It was heartbreaking. It’s so visual. It was the quickest way, and the most economical way, of showing what happens, whether you’re a child or a young woman or an older woman, when you go from being a part of society and are physically completely transformed and become an outsider.”

All of the widows in the film walk around with stubbly crew cuts, their physical conformity an emblem of their compliance with a misguided religious ideal. The reason Kalyani managed to keep her hair for so long is that she is a prostitute (pimped out by Madhumati); her earnings keep the ashram from falling into utter penury.

The Hindi-language film is the final instalment (after 1996’s Fire and 1998’s Earth) in Mehta’s elements trilogy, and the Canadian director’s most devastating cinematic statement to date. A potent censure of patriarchy as well as an ode to female resilience, Water follows three women at different stages of their internment: Kalyani; Shakuntula (Seema Biswas), the middle-aged woman who governs the colony; and Chuyia (Sarala), eight years old and already a widow. Chuyia is, from the get-go, a destabilizing force, questioning not only her own confinement but the logic of sequestering widows.

Wading game: Sarala as eight-year-old widow Chuyia. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

“[Children] teach by example, because they have a curiosity of spirit, which is not tainted by judgment,” Mehta notes. “We [as adults] get jaded as we grow older, and we get prejudiced, and they are entirely without any prejudice.”

The backdrop of the film is the rise of Mahatma Gandhi, who not only agitated for India’s independence from Britain but also sought to improve the lot of Hindu widows. Colonies like the one depicted in Water aren’t nearly as prevalent in modern India, but according to Mehta, they do still exist. Through advocacy and activism, however, Hindu widows have become more independent.

“Some of them are becoming aware, slowly, that there is a world outside,” says Mehta, “and realizing that they won’t be rejecting their religion if they step outside the prescribed part. Because religion has nothing to do with it — it’s a misinterpretation of the religion that’s led them there, not the religion itself.”

Water’s backstory is the stuff of nightmares. During the initial shoot in Varanasi in 2000, Mehta and her crew were set upon by religious fundamentalists who alleged to have seen the script and deemed it anti-Hindu. Pieces of the set were thrown into the Ganges River; Mehta was torched in effigy and received death threats. The protest was a symbol of increased conservatism in Indian society; more immediately for Mehta and her crew, it represented a mortal danger. As a result, the production was shut down.

It took the Indian-born filmmaker a long time to assimilate what happened. While stewing over the controversy, she forged ahead with two diversionary projects: Bollywood/Hollywood, an upbeat comedy/musical, and The Republic of Love, an adaptation of Carol Shields’s novel. There was never any doubt that Mehta would return to Water — but with one proviso.

“I promised myself that I would not do Water again until I stopped being angry,” Mehta says. “I could feel it: I would look at the script and I would get that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach, of being attacked — like someone knocking you in the solar plexus and taking the breath out of you. When I could think of Water and not miss a breath, I knew the feeling of anger had gone.”

Ray of light: Lisa Ray as Kalyani. Courtesy Mongrel Media.

Production started anew in 2004, this time in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. (Because Sri Lanka is primarily Buddhist, Mehta had to recreate a Hindu temple in the shooting locale.) There was also a slight personnel shuffle: Nandita Das, who played the lead in both Fire and Earth and was originally cast as Kalyani, was replaced by the younger Ray (the Toronto native who starred in Bollywood/Hollywood).

Like the other films in Mehta’s trilogy, Water immerses audiences in the lush colours and customs of Indian culture while delving into some less salubrious aspects of its past. Mehta worries that some viewers might be so consumed with liberal outrage that they miss the universal message.

“I can understand if [viewers] feel compassion, because compassion is what [Water] should evoke. But when people say, ‘How barbaric,’ I get really upset,” Mehta says. “When I first came to Canada, what I thought was totally barbaric were the amount of old people’s homes here. For me, the thought of sending your parents off so they can live in one room and wait for your visit, and if you don’t visit them once a week… I’ve heard such horror stories, and even seen these places and some of them are just dismal. For me, that was barbaric and continues to be barbaric.”

Mehta claims Water has provoked heartfelt confessions from a wide cross-section of people. “A woman came up to me in Vancouver. She was Jewish, and married outside her culture. Her father was in mourning for seven years and broke all the mirrors and covered them in black and tore all his clothes. That’s what the film reminded her of. A lot of Catholic people have come up to me, a lot of Americans; they talk about Christian fundamentalism happening in the States.”

Mehta concedes that Water is a call to action — but not in the way you might think.

“We are very good, as different nations and different cultures, to have a collective amnesia about our own [problems],” says Mehta. “[Water] is about three women trying to break that cycle and trying to find dignity, and trying to get rid of the yoke of oppression, and if it inspires people to do something in their own culture, that’s what’s important.”

Water opens Nov. 4 in Toronto and Vancouver.

Andre Mayer writes about the arts for CBC.ca.