Constitutional Review -- Opposition From the Opposition

How long has it been now, two months, since the controversy of the filming of the latest political schlock by Deepa Mehta hit the newsstands? You have to give it to the political savvy of the madam from Toronto for knowing what attracts controversy, and what keeps it going. Two mediocre movies in her oeuvre already, and she was panting to add Water to quench the thirst of her bored but angry Western/female interlocutors. With the patronage of Jyoti Basu she could still complete the "pot-warmer", though it would be ironic that this "critique" of the treatment of Hindu widows in the 1930s would be shot on the banks of the Hoogly, from whose environs come the present denizens of the ashrams for widows in Varanasi and Mathura. Says something about a state that has been ruled by the Communists for at least the last thirty years! Ms. Mehta should hopefully find out after her shooting stint in Calcutta that Marxism ain't the cure for solving the plight of Hindu widows.

The big "to do" till now has been the protests by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and other like-minded groups protesting the making of such a film, and the making of it in Varanasi especially. Ashok Singhal of the VHP has vowed that his outfit would try and disrupt the making of the film anywhere in India. What would you say to such a "single-minded" purpose of the VHP? Get a life? Whatever may be the worth or the lack thereof in the project of Ms. Mehta it is disturbing that political parties and social organizations in India spend so much effort and time on such piffle. If only the energies of the country could be channeled to constructive purposes with such single-mindedness! "Look the Muslims protest whenever there is anything even remotely negative said about Islam or Muslims, and they get their way. They banned Satanic Verses didn't they? They have banned the works of Taslima Nasreen, haven't they? They nullified the Supreme Court verdict in the Shah Bano case, didn't they? They give in to the Muslims, but whenever we Hindus protest, they mock and deride us", argues the Singhal brigade. Yup, but what else is new, and will such protests against the filming of Water achieve anything positive?

A strange myopia befuddles the whole country. The affiliates of the RSS should know that this is the time to back their government fully, create the least trouble for its functioning, and bide their time till the BJP could get the country's economy strengthened, and put some effective people in high places who could see to it that law and justice prevails in the country. But no. They are in a tearing hurry to shoot their own foot! And in the act of doing so they give enough ammunition to the predictable opponents in the country and elsewhere to shoot at the BJP and weaken its morale and undermine its functioning.

But back to the back-waters of Ms. Mehta's "oh! Pus!" What is all the fuss about this film, or this "film to be"? Non-political movie critics have panned the earlier two of Ms. Mehta's trilogy, Earth and Fire. Politically inclined critics have praised or shredded her work (See my review of Fire on the website Indiastar.com). Ms. Mehta's "work", before she launched on filming her trilogy, consisted of one movie which basically was some kind of a matrimonial ad for her brother!

This is the background in movie-making that this graduate in Indian philosophy and Toronto denizen has. To give her credit, she realised that while she had little clue about movie-making she had a lot of insight on how the feminist/politically correct/arty-farty crowd weighed in with their politics and their "tastes". Look at any of the publicity photographs for either Fire or Water, and you will find only the pictures of Shabana Azmi, Deepa Mehta, and Nandita Das. There are no men in Mehta's movies. Don't take this literally. There are some male characters. But they are weak, emasculated, confused, or cruel. They are in the background. The women characters are the "strong" ones, and they are the ones around which the films revolve. Why not, you might say. But this is strange "tit" for tat. If this is the face of Indian feminism, then it is blatantly Western, and knee-jerk nonsense.

Have you seen those photographs in newspapers and magazines? If you haven't let me describe them to you. In one you have the bald, blousy Shabana Azmi gazing lovingly into the eyes of her dusky co-star Nandita Das, close to bald, and posing somewhere in the lobby of the fanciest hotel for rent in decrepit Varanasi. Or you see that shot from the "muhurrat" of the film, the three women staring into the camera, with Deepa Mehta looking wild and glassy-eyed and with a splash of red on her forehead, and with her arms around her two "stars", who played lesbian sisters-in-law in Fire and are now slated to play sad, exploited widows in Earth. These pictures, these portrayals, and these posturings are for the consumption of a particular breed of the elite: feminists and feminist activists in India, women students in women's study courses in the U.S., and that strange amalgam of political and religious animals who could be, for want of a better term, called "Hindu-baiters". Hindu haters would be too strong and the wrong term to use in this context and for these people.These pictures are "framed" politically. They are meant to tell that particular elite that these movies are "women's" movies, that the photographs are a way of giving the finger to the male world: the world that is "oppressive," "paternalistic," which "subjugates" women, and which makes women "objects". Now, I wouldn't at all mind the political coloring if at least the movies were well-made and the stories they told were complex and nuanced. Instead, what we have got till now from Ms. Mehta are caricatures, superficial nonsense which push the "right political buttons". Ms. Mehta claims she is an artiste. I suppose if one can throw elephant dung on canvas and call it art, one can surely indulge in simplistic political pamphleteering and call it cinema.

Unlike good/well-made political films, Ms. Mehta's projects have done little to change people's perception of or responses to the "problems" posed in them. Try and imagine Hindu housewives telling themselves, "My husband is ignoring me, and I am not satisfied with the sex I am getting in this marriage, and so I will sleep with my sister-in-law, and later run away with her to a mosque to break away from the bonds of this Hindu marriage!" That was the gist of Fire. Very few in India watched the movie, and if they did it was those men who sought to be titillated by Shabana Azmi caressing Nandita Das' breasts or kissing her. It was a lousy movie, and quenched neither political nor aesthetic thirsts. However, it has made the director and the two actresses "stars": they have talked to students at Harvard, lectured in New York city, held seminars may be in every one of the Ivy League universities in the U.S., and darn it, even George Lucas has stepped in to take out advertisements in Hollywood trade journals in support of the filming of Water! George Lucas: come to think of it, has he made any "political" film?!

Water, when made, will be just another political vehicle like Fire. The majority of the five thousand or so Bengali widows living in Vrindavan's ashrams for widows have said that they are totally against the making of the film because they feel the film is not going to change their situation in life one bit. In a newspaper report, one Ahalya Devi, a widow from Bengal who has been living in Vrindavan for the last 20 years said, "the script of the film anyway caters to the elitist perception of the life of the Bengali widows, and the film should only be made if it changes the course of our life for otherwise it will just be a commercial venture on the part of Deepa Mehta". The astute woman also said that if the makers of the film had gone to Vrindavan they would not have needed any professional actresses to do the part of a neglected widow as there were many real ones roaming on the streets. But what she failed to understand was that these "professional actresses" are needed to conduct those seminars for angry women around the world, and surely a real widow could not do that, could she?

According to that newspaper report, many of those widows in Vrindavan discounted reports of sexual exploitation of the widows at the hands of priests and the locals, one of the basic themes of the film. They said that sexual exploitation might have occurred in the 1930s, the era in which the story of Water is based, but now with people becoming more aware and educated, such cases were rarely heard of.

A "politically correct" professor of history at the Jamia Millia University, Seema Alavi, wrote in the Indian Express weighing in on the matter. It was her chance to say something critical of that dreaded "Sangh Parivar", a catchall "devil term" that now is flippantly used by lazy reporters and politically compromised academics. For her Benares/Varanasi is not just a "holy" Hindu city but a composite, civilisational centre. She ignores the history of the city, mentioned as it is in various Hindu scriptures, and instead launches into that strange mumbo-jumbo that constitutes fashionable academic verbiage. So she lectures: "But how 'Hindu' is the city of Benares? Is that its only identity? ...the civilisational methods of the city were never monolithic 'Hindu'. The entire region remained an epitome of cultural tolerance, accommodating waves of diverse ethnic groups that settled in the area.... Indeed, when Akbar, the Mughal Emperor, took over, not only did the Rajputs of the region serve him but he also patronised the city as a chief centre of learning.... The present projection of the city and its people as Brahmanical Hindu suits the political ideology of the Sangh Parivar, but amounts to perpetrating an injustice on its history" she lectures. Of course, the good professor fails to note that one of the three holy sites that the VHP wants to reclaim for Hindus is that of the Vishweshwara temple in Varanasi (The other two are in Ayodhya and Mathura).

What about the proposed film? What is the story that is sought to be told? There are all kinds of rumors afloat about the film, and newspaper reports coyly shy away from giving any synopsis of the movie. A recent e-mail I received said that the film centered around a "Widows House" in Varanasi in which Madhumati, Shakuntala, Bindu, Janaki, Suhasini, and other widows live. The "lady" of the house is Madhumati. There is supposedly a male servant in the house, Hariharan, who is under the total control of Madhumati. This dormitory is a widows' home only in name. In reality it is a den for prostitution where the widows either themselves indulge in prostitution or are dependent on the earnings from prostitution. Madhumati behaves like a 'Madam' of any other prostitution den and bosses over other widows. Ganja intoxicated, she provides the young widows for prostitution through Hariharan. Given these kinds of "rumors" it becomes easy for the local politicians or the leaders of the VHP to whip up the sentiments of people. But there must be more to these rumors. N. Gurumurthy, one of the BJP's ideologues, compared the script of the movie to Katherine Mayo's infamous Mother India, which Gandhiji had criticized as a "drain inspector's report". A recent column by Pritish Nandy on Rediff.Net had a similar take on the attitude and values of Deepa Mehta.

Strange isn't it? The film isn't even begun. We don't know what the final product will look like. Yet already hundreds of reports have appeared on it, scores of thoughtful writers have weighed in on the issue, and thousands have wasted their time and energy protesting the making of the film. Round One to Ms. Mehta. She may finally end up shooting the film in Toronto if Singhal keeps his word. But that is OK. For after all, if a blousy, beef-eating, twice-married, Muslim can play the role of a hapless Hindu widow, then Lake Michigan can replace the Ganga.

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