Hindu Movie - Water

 As this weeks prayer within community we have been watching the film “Water”. Set in 1938 in the holy city of Benares, India, it focuses on the deprivations experienced by Hindu widows, still an issue together in a country with 33 million widows. When Mehta started making this movie in benares, Hindu fundamentalists protested, claiming that the film was anti-Hindu. She was forced to shut down the production and start over a year later in Sri Lanka. 

The Manusmriti, an ancient Hindu text, says that in life a woman is half her husband and if he dies, she is half dead. A widow has a three choices; she can throw herself on his funeral pyre and die with him; she can marry his younger brother, if one is available; or she can live out the rest of her days in isolation and seclusion. If she chooses the latter, the ascetic path, she enters an ashram, shaves her head, wears white as a sign of mourning, and tries to atone for her husband’s death. 

In the film, Chuyia (Sarala), an eight year old, has just been widowed. Her marraige, which she doesn’t even remember, was arranged by her family for financial reasons. But no matter what her circumstances, Hindu law says she must now leave society, and so her father takes her to a decrepit ashram where widows of all ages lives together. The little girls’s hair is clipped, and she is dressed in a white robe. She sleeps on a thin mat in a room wither older and infirm women whose lonely lives have been spent in renunciation. They sing religious hymns everyday and beg on the streets for money. People avoid them like the plague many Hindus believe that if they hump into a widow, they will be polluted and must do rituals of purification. 

Chuyia wants to return to her family and doesn’t really understand what has happened, she begins to adapt to the dreary rhythms of her days. Shakuntula, a devout Hindu, takes the little girl under her wings. Chuyia meets Kalyani a beautiful young widow who has been forced into prostitution by the head of the ashram, Madhumati. She is the only one who has been allowed to keep her long hair, and the other widows shun her. But the money she brings in keeps the place afloat. Kalyani regularly goes to the homes of rich Hindu gentry, many of whom are married. 

The story line continues with love tale, a law student from a wealthy Indian family who is an ardent believer in the civil disobedience campaign of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi had started to speak against the harsh treatment of women and the caste system, angering Hindu fundamentalist. But to the widows and other outcasts, his is a beacon of hope. 

After watching this film, we sat making one sentence comments. I listened. I felt a large awareness of the lack of context to which we were interpreting what we had just watched. The awareness of the culture, of Hindu, of India, of the pure history of how the film came to be. The surface story invites labels like ‘trafficking’ ‘broken structures’ ‘women rights’ yet this is more. I held breath as in truth I do not fully know the community nor clear how to communicate the injustice we, the viewers were doing, to pass comment, to give any justice to the story that Deepa Mehta was inviting us into. 

Deeper Mehta stated: “Water can flow or water can be stagnant. I set the film in the 1930s but the people in the film live their lives as it was prescribed by a religious text more than 2,000 years old. Even today, people follow these texts, which is one reason why there continues to be millions of widows. To me, that is a kind of stagnant water. I think traditions shouldn’t be that rigid. They should flow like the replenishing kind of water.” 

For me person, watching this film I feel a little unable to connect to the underlying larger touchstone messages that are being spoke with awareness I am just viewing from a very European place. I can though connect to the human spirit that is oppressed due to the religious rule and texts that are treated as sacrosanct. The inhumane treatment of widows in India by Hindu fundamentalists is similar to the subjugation of women by fundamentalist Christians, Jews and Muslims elsewhere. To see religion used to deny the dignity and rights of anyway is upsetting.

If you have the opportunity watch, yet recommend that you have a little background to be able to accept the invitation to go beyond the surface storyline and understand, engage with what Deeper Mehta is telling, challenging and exposing.