Water: drenched in 'colonial benevolence'
Kamal Arora, Saydia Kamal, and Usamah Ahmad
With Vancouver International Film Festival tickets in hand, the three of us waited in a ridiculously long queue to enter a film that was five years in the making: Deepa Mehta's Water. The hype has been intense because filming was shut down in India, forcing the production team to relocate to Sri Lanka. No doubt, we thought, the lineup represented interest in the controversial stances Mehta has made in past films, and we were eager to watch her latest instalment in the element trilogy that included Fire (1996) and Earth (1998). Unfortunately, we were disappointed - and at times offended - with both the film and our theatre experience.
Water is set in 1938 colonial India. It follows the life of a recently widowed child, Chuyia (Sarala), who is sent to a widows' ashram near the Ganges River in Varanasi. Chuyia befriends Kalyani (Lisa Ray), the resident beauty of the ashram who falls in love with Narayan (John Abraham). Athough marrying a widow was taboo in segments of Hindu society at this time, Narayan's Ghandhian thinking transgresses this boundary. However, their love cannot blossom because of plot twists and fateful circumstances.
Although the film attempts to illustrate issues facing women in late colonial India, Mehta falls into orientalist imagery. She endorses notions of "colonial benevolence" that helped rationalise the British administration of India. Imperialists have used the plight of the "oppressed Eastern woman" to justify their exploits. Sati (widow burning), the oppression of widows, and child marriage were examples used to show the backwardness of indigenous culture, and show that European morals were needed to civilise these people. We are not arguing that the traditional Hindu system is not discriminatory against women. Mehta, however, simplifies its complexity and ignores how the "women's cause" was manipulated by the Empire. First-wave feminists also maintained a wounded attachment to sati to justify their need to be partners in the Empire as civilising agents. Water does nothing to challenge notions that victimised Indian women lack a means of resistance within the context of past and current imperialism.
The women of the ashram are represented as meek lambs who lead miserable lives due to the backward nature of Hindu tradition. They are seen begging, being scolded by passers-by who fear being polluted, turning to prostitution for livelihood, and visiting a Brahmin priest to learn about their degraded incarnation as women.
One character, Shakuntala (the strongest performance in the film, played by Seema Biswas), begins to question her situation. This avenue is fully unexplored. Why does Mehta essentialise the women's role as that of "victims" instead of highlighting their roles as struggling women? We are not being apologists to certain Hindu conventions around widowhood, but Mehta could have questioned why their lives represent hopelessness rather than active struggle for survival, spiritual growth, and the enlightened renunciation of material needs.
Mehta constructs widows as being so vulnerable that they are forced into prostitution. She denies them agency: why does Kalyani's life lead to an ultimate demise due to shame surrounding prostitution? Why can Mehta not have a character that actively chooses to be a prostitute instead of leading a life in the ashram?
Though circumstance can lead women into unwanted professions, Mehta emphasises "tradition" and "culture" as the roots for these situations and decontextualises them from colonial dynamics. This is irresponsible given how the image of victimised Eastern women has justified (and justifies) imperialism.
Furthermore, Mehta constructs a male saviour, Narayan, as the route for redemption for these women. At one point in the film, Narayan and Kalyani discuss the changing nature of tradition and how to retain "good" traditions while casting away the "bad." When Narayan poses the question as to who will decide which traditions are to be kept and which ones are to be discarded, Kalyani answers, "You." Here we see a male, educated within the colonial system as a lawyer, come to save the tragic beauty from the backwardness of tradition; a male who, once again, holds decision-making power. Gandhi occupies a similar position in the film: he is a colonial-educated lawyer who comes as a saviour, preaching Hindu reform and national unity while also touching the heart of Shakuntala. Both Narayan and Gandhi represent enlightened, educated men rescuing the oppressed from Hindu culture.
In the question and answer period, we were in the presence of Deepa Mehta herself. She said her intention in making the movie was to "move people." This goal appeared to be fulfilled when an audience member asked, "What can we do for them from here?" The question is the result of representing women as being so helpless that they need outside help. Mehta's story is crafted in such a way that no response other than paternalistic concern could be expected. Luckily, Mehta replied that it is important first to fix "our world" before treading out to sea.
Another person asked how Mehta chose the cast. Mehta specifically stated that she had selected Lisa Ray to play Kalyani because she was "pure," "fragile," and "vulnerable." This characterisation is problematic, as here Mehta is reinforcing the stereotype of docile, demure, and pristine femininity as the ideal form of South Asian womanhood. Though it may be coincidence, there are questionable associations between Kalyani's supposed purity and her very fair skin. Upon seeing Kalyani for the first time, Chuyia exclaims in awe that she is an "angel." It is no surprise that this fair-skinned beauty is also the coveted prostitute whose wages keep the ashram alive. Mehta thus does not engage with feminist concerns surrounding the dominant conventions of beauty, colour, and feminine roles; rather, she reinforces them.
We nervously asked Mehta how she negotiates making a film about themes so easily adopted by the discourse on "benevolent colonialism" when, in today's context, Eastern womens' causes are similarly manipulated for the imperialist agenda. She did not offer a real response, just that she felt we gave her an "essay on Edward Said." She claimed her film was not about colonialism but rather Hinduism and that has nothing to do with colonialism. We were unimpressed: she made a period film set in colonial India; how can she claim that Hinduism in that period was untouched by colonialism?
Perhaps our response to this contradiction was exacerbated by our experience in the theatre itself. Given our history as colonised people, sitting in a room with many, many white gazes forced us to embody this historically subjugated experience within the politics of the theatre. Throughout the showing of the film, we were bombarded with audience members around us clucking their tongues and making other sympathetic noises. In the act of making a film about colonial India, Mehta adopted the role of the "native informant" who exposes to the Canadian audience the reality of our "backward" culture. We held an awkward position in that room: although we were represented on film, many around us sounded like they wished to save us from ourselves. In that space, we, like the characters in Water, became subjects of colonial benevolence.
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