Right-wing Hindu fundamentalist forces in India have long been outspokenly opposed to Canada-based Deepa Mehta’s humane vision and to her questioning of some outmoded traditions. Water is set in Varanasi, though the original 2000 filming took place in Benares. It was so violently attacked, the sets burned and destroyed, accompanied by death threats to the stars and director, that Mehta postponed filming for four years “until (my) anger had passed”. She filmed secretly in Sri Lanka with a fictitious name given to the production, resulting in a setting that is lusher than the actual Varanasi, yet serving to counterpoint the aridity and deprivation of the lives of widows, required by then-tradition to be sequestered in ashrams for life and spend their time begging or praying. 

Apart from an opening reference to ‘the woes of widows’ in the Laws of Manu (1500 BCE), Ch 5, Hindu traditions regarding widows are not fully explained outright but unfold within the story in an organic way. Eight year-old Chuyia (an impish, liquid-eyed Sarala) is on her way to an arranged marriage with an ailing elderly man when he dies. Her long hair is shaved off and her father deposits her at the widows’ house, his face distressed at what he knows will be her life from this point on. The widows live lives of enforced asceticism, atoning for the bad karma that has killed their husbands. Their unadorned white saris and shaved heads mark them for all to see as inferiors. Apart from the rapacious, grossly fat and tyrannical 70 year-old Madhumati (Manorma), who runs the house, there are three inmates on whom Mehta concentrates. They represent three aspects, and three ages, of widowhood. Chuyia rebels and chafes under her unwanted new existence, sleeping on the ground, having one meal a day with no sweets. In her 30s, Shakuntala (Seema Biswas, The Bandit Queen) does her best through sincere devotional practice to conform to her religion’s dictates. The beautiful 18 year-old Kalyani (Lisa Ray) is kept apart for other purposes. 

Apparently the house does not receive any financial support from widows’ families who have so conveniently abandoned them. Madhumati, with pragmatic logic, uses the offices of her best friend, an odious transvestite pimp, Gulabi (Raghuvir Yadav) to push Kalyani into prostitution, ostensibly taking her earnings for the widows’ upkeep. Kalyani’s status allows her to keep her magnificent long hair and separate sleeping quarters above the courtyard, where she also secretly keeps a contraband puppy. Chuyia and Kalyani become friends, but one of the film’s main threads is the effect of both young Chuyia and Kalyani on Shakuntala, who unlike any of the other women, can read. Being educated also means Shakuntala can think for herself. It’s a fortuitous situation most Hindu women are traditionally denied, as they are also denied inheritance of their dead husbands’ wealth. 

Apart from young Chuyia’s arrival, the main catalyst for change is in the person of intellectual Narayan (John Abraham), who falls in love with Kalyani, and she with him. Though it is traditionally frowned upon to marry a widow,  he asks her to marry him. Narayan is a clear-eyed, independent-thinking man who recognises the economic bases for many ostensibly ‘religious’ teachings, while his father and mother are traditional high-caste Brahmana for whom the shame of marrying a widow is a cogent force, despite the father’s utilising those same economic inequities for his own benefit. For Kalyani and Shakuntala, the possibility of happiness for a widow is a nebulous shining bubble, an elusive concept, and one which upsets the household in unpredictable ways.  

There’s an inexorable force within the screenplay which leads both to a tragedy and subsequently to an unexpected act of determined optimism, utilising the hope for a new, more humane future for India represented by Mahatma Gandhi. Much in the movie also functions symbolically. There are aspects of India personified in each of the main characters. 

The presence of water in this film is a ubiquitous metaphor for something ever-changing and ever the same, as well as a powerful presence as a life-giving, and –taking, element. The film is beautifully filmed and scored by the same team from both Fire and Earth, cinematographer Giles Nuttgens and composer Mychael Danna. Romantic sentiment softens provocative social criticism in Water and so it resonates more deeply as a heart-felt representation of inequities long taken for granted as dubiously sanctioned by religious teachings in an India of seventy years ago. There are echoes today, underlined by the final caption, in the lives of the 34 million widows whose social, cultural and physical deprivations are still affected by the sacred texts of Manu, as well as in those fundamentalist factions which would silence Deepa Mehta.