BACKGROUND OF THE FILM

It was once rumoured that Bal Thakery was quoted as saying that the person he hates most in the world is Deepa Mehta. Thakery is the leader of Shiv Sena, one of the most powerful right wing Hindu fundamentalist groups in India and is reputed to have a stranglehold on everything that transpires within the massive metropolis of Bombay. This is a powerful and dangerous adversary and one must wonder what it is that Mehta did to raise the ire of the man who was named by a judicial inquiry as the provocateur of frenzied Hindu mobs that in 1992 burned Muslim homes and businesses and killed 1,200 in Bombay. The answer is simple: she made films which questioned the interpretations which current Hindu leaders were giving to the Sacred Texts and in particular as they related to the treatment of women.

Mehta’s first run in with Thakery came during the release of Fire, the award-winning first film in her trilogy of the elements, which was followed by Earth in 1998 and finally by Water, which was completed in 2005. Using a politically correct mix of men and women and alerting the news media beforehand, Thakery’s so-called Shiv Sainiks (i.e. members of Shiv Sena) rampaged through a matinee show of Fire in Bombay smashing glass and burning posters. The next day, theatres in New Delhi, Pune and Surat were similarly hit. “Is it fair to show such things which are not part of Indian culture?” Bal Thakery, Shiv Sena’s leader, asked in a magazine interview. “It can corrupt tender minds. It is a sort of a social AIDS.” Thakery was referring to the lesbian relationship between the two main female characters in the film, relationships which he claimed did not exist in India. Every newspaper in India and many around the world including the New York Times carried coverage of these events and thus Thakery achieved his objective of being seen as the protector of the Hindu faith. In spite of the fact that the Supreme Court ordered that troops be mustered to protect the theatres and armed guards be provided for director Mehta, the theatre owners were too intimidated to re-open Fire to the public. Fire became the highest selling pirated DVD in India.

Mehta’s next battle with the fundamentalist element did not occur until 2000 when a rioting mob of 2,000 attacked and burned the sets of the production of Water and issued death threats against the director Mehta and the actresses Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das. This confrontation was organized by the RSS, another Hindu fundamentalist faction closely aligned with the Shiv Sena and the cultural arm of the BJP party, who were in power in New Delhi at that time. The Indian government publicly decried this effrontery to free speech and provided 300 troops to protect the production and heavily armed security for Mehta. This did not hinder the well-organized opposition to the film who, it was alleged, had a mole in the production office and found a way of tapping the cell phones of the producer and director. For two weeks the production held on in Benares, soliciting support from the local religious authorities and government, but to no avail. Mehta’s’s effigy was being burnt in cities across the country daily, in each case covered broadly by the Indian media feeding onto the objectives of the perpetrators. Finally, following an attempted suicide jump into the Ganges in opposition to the filming, the local government shut down the production under the issue of “Public Safety.” During this period support pored in from around the world, including a full-page ad placed by George Lucas in Variety encouraging Deepa to continue the fight. None of this unfortunately had any impact on the radical fundamentalists or the local government.

It took almost five years to put the production of Water back together and it was finally shot in Sri Lanka under an assumed name and strict code of secrecy.

Water is set in a house for Hindu widows in a Holy City in 1938 India and it assumed by many that the living conditions of the characters in the film are not found in present day India. This is sadly untrue and the desire of the right wing fundamentalist elements to partially hide this explains the vicious attacks on the production and the director.

The film is now complete but the struggle with the fundamentalist element is not. Ms. Mehta continues to receive calls from unknown men and women who offer “friendly advice” that she not release this film in the West as audiences there will not understand the complex religious and social order of India.