Anyone who has watched the pregnant Shabana Azmi and Naseruddin Shah herd their cattle through a river in spate in Paar has been forced to confront truths about India that they may have been in denial of. That is perhaps the role of a movie that purports to bear a social message.
Watching the expressionless John Abraham woo an equally bland Lisa Ray with verses from Meghdutam is a slap in the face of the destitute widows of the early 1900s, who were often forced into prostitution just to have enough to eat. With her unflappable serenity, au naturel makeup and gym toned body Lisa Ray makes widowhood of the 1930s look quite desirable. Mehta does not manage to provoke any visceral reaction from her audience. The music is too loud, often too modern, and almost entirely out of synch with the situation at hand. For her, there are lessons to be learnt about an effective background score even from The Tiger and The Brahmin.
Quoting from Manu Samhita out of context is a time tested way to horrify a Western audience and gain credibility as an authority figure on all things Hindu — Nirad Chaudhuri had always done it with great success, Mehta borrowing a page from his book is hardly surprising. Manu did not exclusively prescribe restrictions on widows and remarriage, he also laid out very meaningful laws for an ideal society in which no one group was completely disenfranchised.
As with any law, the interpretation by those in power left much to be desired and the widows of pre-independence India were one of its many victims. That said, Mehta's depiction of Manu Samhita as the binding religious sanction for the atrocities perpetrated on Hindu widows shows a very crude understanding of the religion. Manu Samhita is not the Bible of the Hindus. This set of rudimentary edicts is hardly the entirety of Vedantic philosophy and cannot serve as its proxy.
Article comments
1 - sudipto
Very well written article/ review. Though I am not too sure if I would spend so much time and energy on this film. There is a word I had always heard about but its full meaning dawned on me after watching Water - the word is Kitsch. Actually I didn't watch the complete film.
If I could please add to your exhaustive list - the picture of Gandhi that Narayan puts up in his room. I don't think Gandhi looked that old in 1938 !!
But then you know, this film is made for the foreign audience, who has perhaps seen the Taj or been to Dharamsala or the Osho Ashram in Pune or has taken a backwater cruise in Kerala or the camel ride in Rajasthan. They wouldn't know that the banks of Ganga in Varanasi wouldn't have coconut trees. Or that Gandhi didn't look that old in 1938 (if at all he was adulated with photograph on the walls of his followers in small town India). I am not even getting into the other complicated areas.
This film is not for you and me - dirty Indians, who send our child widows to Ashrams. We know these uncomfortable facts that would easily rank Deepa Mehta as part of Kitsch who hires eye candies like John Abraham and Lisa Ray to act in period films. And we are not part of the huge PR industry either that would call this film "sensitive".
I have one small question - did Salman Rushdie really say what he is quoted to have said in the Deepa Mehta website for Water? If yes, where? I am really curious.
I have another observation to make about these "Indian" films with an eye on the foreign market. Even top of the line film makers like Meera Nair are falling prey to this casual attitude to detail. Meera Nair's period film Namesake starts with a steel trunk on a coolie's head with a glowsign of IndusInd Bank behind. Do you think the Hinduja's financed that film? I don't know, but the backpackers aren't bothered really. We silly Indians are ......
2 - Anand
I'm sure that the author watched the film.
Hopefully placing this film next to Slumdog Millionaire allows for one to see the difference between sensationalist fiction and tragic reality.
Oh and read some Sam Harris while you're at it.
3 - HC
Anand - You are exactly right about Slumdog. I wrote a post about that movie after watching it...