Some days I get up and wonder why I am still on fire about the liberation of women. Why would it be so important to me and clearly not of much interest to the people in the market, on the TV, driving on the freeway? I think I am just a nudge and imagine people sighing, "oh that Zoe is at it again." Then I just fold it in and go to the movies.
Of course I would choose to see Water, written and directed by Deepa Mehta. This is her third in the series, Earth, Fire and Water. This is the story about the lives of Hindu widows, who are believed to be half dead as the other half died with their husbands. Their heads are shaved, they are shunned into living in stark communities (ashrams), sustained through begging. Even if a girl is married at the age of seven, even if she never meets her husband, she must live the life of a beggar and the most she can hope for is to be bought for the nightly pleasuring of a man from the Brahmin class.
The movie is set in 1938, ten years before the assassination of MK Gandhi when he was working to lift both women and untouchables (Harijan, as Gandhi called them, which means Children of God) out of entrenched and scripture endorsed oppression. Mehta shows us Gandhiji stopping at a train station, speaking about his discovery ~ that it is not that God is truth but rather, Truth is God. After 2 hours and 30 minutes of laughing, crying, weeping and appreciating that it is not 1938, a paragraph appears on the screen explaining that today, in India, 34 million widows live in poverty, suffering these same terrible injustices.
It took over five years to make Water, as when Mehta began filming in 2000, angry right-wing Hindu fundamentalist mobs burned her sets and threatened her life. You may recall that this same group bombed theaters in Bombay and New Dehli when Fire, a film about lesbians, was being shown. As you can guess, Mehta lives with death threats daily .
This movie is utterly fantastic. The women will make you throw open your hearts. The scenery is brilliant, all along the Ganges with roaming cows, wild dogs, bright saris and vendors cooking food in open pits. (Shall we just not mention that the US poster has a man [handsome but not central] featured in the foreground?) You will mourn for a little girl who wants to go home and be amazed at how easily the culture has made it all seem okay, not just okay but proper. What do we accept as if it is okay?
I love this movie, this writer, this director. And, in case you think I forgot, I can't stop being a nudge.