Another problem was that Sri Lanka did not have the carved stone steps, that lead down to the Ganges, the purifying site of daily Hindu prayers and cremations. But Dilip Mehta, the film's production designer, recreated the steps on a stretch of a deserted river bank just south of the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo. The steps were essential to a film that uses water as a symbol of both purity and death.
Mehta, 55, is no stranger to Hindu protests. Her 1996 film about a lesbian relationship, Fire, the first in a trilogy, enraged fundamentalists in India, who burned down movie theaters. Her 1998 film, Earth, about the 1947 partition of India, caused no controversy, but it did contain scenes of the butchery that occurred between Muslims and Hindus at the time.
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 steps 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 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," 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."
Water has been screened in New Delhi and at the Kerala and Mumbai film festivals, and there are also plans for Water to open in July at 90 theaters in India, riots or no.
"I don't want to think about it," Mehta said. "I hope it all works out."
RSS