An Intersectional Analysis Of The Film Water
Water is established as a transnational film through its combination of Indian and Canadian filmmaking and qualities. This essay will provide an intersectional analysis of Mehta’s diasporic film, Water as it is a film that considers elements of intersectionality: culture, politics, gender and class which create an interdependent overlapping system of discrimination to a certain group of individuals. In Water, these individuals are the Indian Hindu widows at the ashram. Focus will be placed on an intersectional analysis of the widows’ oppression and the corrupt nature of saffronisation.
Water is a powerful metaphor and medium in Mehta’s film, and it aids the viewers into an introduction of the cultural norms and issues. The film opens onto an expanse of stagnant water; an image that the director associates with life “as it was prescribed by a religious text more the 2000 years old”. An instrumental song plays on the soundtrack that is remarkably similar to “Amazing Grace, ” establishing an aura of messianic anticipation even as Mehta sets out to critique the salvational logic of organised religion. In the background, a man fetches water and a horse-drawn cart rumbles through the rural landscape. Suddenly, the camera lights shine on a pair of tiny feet decorated with anklets that jingle as they dangle off the back of the cart. They belong to Chuyia, an eight-year-old child bride whose husband, unbeknownst to her, is dying, before the marriage can be consummated. Shots of Chuyia enjoying a stalk of sugar cane and playing with the dying man’s feet heightens her youth and innocence, both of which will be savagely compromised in the ashram. That night, Chuyia’s father awakens her to ask if she remembers getting married. When she says no, he tells her “you’re a widow now” (00:03:43). Her reply is, simply, “for how long, father?” (00:03:49). Later, to the outrage of those within earshot, Chuyia asks a village holy man “where is the house for men widows?” (00:32:10).
Mehta’s screenplay is embedded with Chuyia’s penetrating responses to life-abnegating conditions. This extreme economy of dialogue works in comparison with Mehta’s strategic use of the close-up, a device heralded by filmmaker Bela Balazs as the means through which we can see the resistance to patriarchal norms and a foreshadowing of her future. The art-house style of the film contains an eclectic hybrid film style and establishes acculturation. Throughout Water, Mehta’s manipulation of camera distance is especially pronounced in relation to Chuyia, whose face functions as a kind of envoi, for what Balazs describes as a “silent soliloquy”. Conveyed through “microphysiognomy, ” or virtually imperceptible movements of the facial muscles, the silent soliloquy is nothing less than “a drama of the spirit”. This ontological drama begins for Chuyia when, in preparation for admission to the ashram, her mother breaks the delicate glass bracelets that adorn her wrists and her father subjects her to a barber who aggressively cuts off all of her beautiful long hair.
The camera movement adapts to the mood and political message that Mehta conveys. As Chuyia’s hair falls in ragged clumps down her naked back and shoulders, the camera draws increasingly closer until we see a “mute play of features” whereby Chuyia is curious, bewildered, resentful, and afraid. Between close-ups, Mehta inserts an ominous establishing shot of the barber’s hands whetting a razor blade; as he proceeds to scrape away at the back of Chuyia’s head, the camera cuts away to a reaction shot furnished by the child’s toes, which curl along the dirty floor in a silent confession of pain. The pain of widows here is reflected early, from childhood which displays the severity of cultural oppression. Once she is completely bald and dressed in a crude white sari, Chuyia looks like an infant, beatific and imploring. But Mehta does not allow the spectator to linger over the shiny perfection of her head or the symmetry of her face. Instead, the camera’s fetishistic fascination with proximity is repeatedly frustrated by Mehta’s use of low-key lighting, which casts Chuyia’s features in a ceaseless binary dance of light and shadow. Endowing Chuyia’s face with an intermittent luminosity, Mehta seems intent on establishing a protective glow around her, even as the camera chronicles fourteen shots of her devastating transformation from bemused child to untouchable. With all but the thinnest contour of her face in complete shadow, she offers a “silent soliloquy” on the total eclipse of her humanity. The way that she is subdued to feel through the camera lens expresses the distortion of culture.
Mehta’s low-key lighting in film noir is used to create a mysterious, sinister atmosphere in which the partiality of the visible induces suspicion about what cannot be seen, to display the socio-cultural lifestyle of the widows. Mehta employs this technique within a mise-en-scène bathed in indigos, a colour palette that refers self-reflexively back to the film’s title, tempering extreme contrasts with a subdued ambience associated more with sorrow than with menace. With the exception of the widows’ white saris, virtually all the costumes, interiors, and exterior locations are drenched in deep blues that materialise the despair of the widows, whose emaciated frames are eternally bent and stooped in postures craving death. When Chuyia is first brought to the ashram by her parents, Mehta uses a blue filter to inflect the scene with an overbearing, almost claustrophobic heaviness, as if to prepare the new initiate for the purgatory that awaits her. Indeed, there is a distinctly malevolent, “indigo noir, ” sensibility that remains hidden from Chuyia, until her own body becomes black and blue. Mehta’s Water examines the marginalisation of forgotten Hindu widows trying to survive in conditions of extreme poverty and misery. Water presents unforgettable images composed with sensitivity and subtlety to create beauty and emotion. The mute pain of the Hindu widows, represented by striking images, engages the viewer in a dialectical exchange. This elucidates the way in which the director manages to create a film with meaning and an extremely important social text. Indeed, as a film she documents the repressed histories of a female underclass that has been silenced for more than two thousand years by religious fundamentalism, state-sanctioned gender oppression, catastrophic neglect, and sexual abuse. Water engages in the urgent practice of “counter-memory”.
By “overwriting” dominant cinematic codes and “writing back” against the twin forces of empire and systematic gender oppression. The resistance of patriarchal norms is an unspoken subtext; a very sensitive political issue in India. Many sensitive political issues are brutally exposed in the film from the very beginning. “The film is set in the 1930s and is about the politics of religion and its impact on ordinary people…”. The cultural awareness was prominent. Even Jutra stated that he remained faithful to his "sociological and cultural reality" within Mon Oncle Antoine, similar to Mehta’s approach. The corruption that follows is increasingly devastating, particularly for the storyline of Kalyani and Narayana. The union between a high-caste Brahmin and a socially impure widow is anathema to conservative Hindu opinion as well as threatening the ashram’s income. The important message here is a need for change, a reform in culture. Hence, cultural-political issues like this are highlighted throughout the film. The subject matter in itself is quite taboo in conservative Indian culture; as widows are treated differently, often ostracised and are placed in a misogynistic place in society. This is explicit in the film, with the politics of religion being criticised. The other women are not allowed to keep their hair because they are widows.
Another scene that displays the raw immorality and abusive mentality is when Madhumati forces Kalyani into prostitution and uses the profits to cover the ashram’s expenses. The film elucidates the harsh conditions in which women are forced to live each day. Political engagement, as Johnston argues, is a central feature of an “oppositional cinematic practice”, a commitment that rises to the level of a mandate in Water. Throughout the film, Mehta embeds her critique of the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party), as well as the elite Brahmin caste, in subtle details of the mise-en-scène. The rise of Hindu nationalism under the BJP has been referred to as “the saffronisation of India, ” a euphemism for the ascendant Hindu theocracy (Hinduvta) that advocates aggression against Muslims, a return to scriptural law, and the replacement of scientific education with Hindu mythology. The class system highlights the corruption within the culture and the religion. However, a positive transgression of these boundaries occurs towards the end of the film when Gandhi’s visiting procession allows the widow Shakuntala (Seema Bisawas) and the child widow Chuiya to mesh with the crowd at the railway station. Therefore, it is evident that the location of the shoot within the frame of the diasporic film, push it towards a political revolutionary film. Mehta is quick to identify the treatment of Chuyia with this fundamentalist agenda when Shakuntala, rubs bright yellow turmeric paste into Chuyia’s burning scalp to relieve her pain. A reminder of the beautiful long hair that flowed casually down her back, Chuyia’s saffron-coloured head visually links her oppression to the saffronisation movement, offering a silent soliloquy on the relationship between nationalistic fantasies and their inscription on the bodies of women as the privileged site of the law’s legibility. This is especially the case with Kalyani. Kalyani has an otherworldly beauty that leads Chuyia to mistake her for an angel; a perception that Mehta reinforces with a high angle shot of Kalyani looking down at the startled initiate. Rather than using a night fire as a backlight, the camera sculpts Kalyani’s face with more subtle shadows furnished by the sun through the trees, a technique that overexposes portions of the frame to give her the appearance of radiating light rather than being merely illuminated by it. Rewarded with permission to keep her long hair, Kalyani is punished for her attractiveness, as Madhu sells her nightly to the Brahman patriarchs on the other side of the Ganges. The women who speak out against this are depicted as religious radicals, to silence and diminish their voices. Under ancient Hindu tradition widows all across India are secluded and are considered bad luck, as well as being blamed for their husband’s death. Albeit, this is still occurring in Hindu fundamentalism in both the film and present-day Indian society. Feminist philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes that religions have repeatedly endangered the basic rights of all women. She affirms that “religious discourse is often powerfully coloured by issues of political power”.
In one particular scene, Chuyia is dragged through the doorway of the ashram, which is inscribed with a pair of swastikas on either side of the entryway. A symbol identified as good luck in the Hindu tradition, the swastikas prompt the spectator to associate the plight of India’s modern-day widows who are subject to a kind of genocide-by-neglect, with the horrors of Nazi Germany. Indeed, in the film’s final title card, Mehta clarifies the fact that despite Water’s setting in 1938, the story is a disturbing allegory of the present. More importantly, the more local meaning of the swastikas is aligned with Mehta’s critique of the right-wing Hindu nationalist party known as the BJP, the fascist party that forced her out of India during her first attempt to shoot Water.
To conclude, Water offers a critique on aspects of intersectionality, particularly gender, politics, culture and class. The cultural politics within the film and surrounding the film is still omnipresent and is the main allegorical message from Mehta. It is clear that Water sparks a need for reform in Hindu culture, whereby women and widows are equal to everyone else, and are not secluded or abused in India.
