The Churning Mind Of Deepa Mehta

In the Fight to Film 'Water,' Director Confronted Elemental Forces in India

Deepa Mehta, the Indian-born writer and film director, vividly remembers what it was like to receive death threats and be burned in effigy.

"Your throat's always dry," she says not altogether coolly, even six years after the fact. "Your fists are always clenched, and your teeth are clenched, because your body's getting ready to fight something."

What Mehta was fighting in the holy city of Varanasi were Hindu fundamentalists who thought that her film "Water" -- which Mehta and her crew had barely begun to shoot on the stone steps into the Ganges -- would surely insult their faith. (The film opens here Friday.)

The movie, set in 1938 India with Gandhi's independence movement on the rise, depicts the harsh existence of widows isolated in ashrams. In Mehta's beautifully fluid but hardly tranquil story, the central widow, Chuyia, is only 8. The child bride fights against the tradition into which she is being immersed for the rest of her life, a tradition that dictates that when a woman's husband dies, half of her dies as well.

Thus the widows -- those who don't immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres or marry a brother of the deceased -- live in the austere ashrams, awaiting the purification of death. And some, like the lovely young woman played by Lisa Ray in "Water," are exploited as prostitutes to help relieve the incredible poverty there.

"One meal a day," says Mehta, 55, who spent months researching widows' houses before writing her script. "One piece of cloth, begging, singing hymns for eight hours at a stretch."

Mehta had been through a public ordeal with "Fire," the first movie in her "trilogy of elements." "Fire," which involved two women who gradually develop a lesbian relationship, inflamed Hindu fundamentalists. Protesters trashed theaters when the film opened in 1997.

Yet Mehta's next installment in the trilogy, "Earth," was thoroughly embraced by her native country. Based on Bapsi Sidhwa's "Cracking India," the film chronicles the ethnic violence that emerged during the 1947 partition of India that created Pakistan. That movie was so highly regarded that India -- which has the busiest film industry in the world -- submitted "Earth" as its entry in the Oscar race.

"I'm telling you," Mehta says with a deep, smoky laugh, "India's very confusing."

So naturally she felt she'd at least be able to shoot "Water" on the Ganges, in Hindi.

"Of course," she says over the gentle hubbub of lunch at an Indian restaurant in downtown Washington. "It was four years later. In between, 'Earth' had happened, I'd been celebrated for 'Earth,' and if 'Fire' had its detractors, it also had its supporters."

Mehta adds that the officials in India, where scripts are vetted by censors before shooting begins, "knew exactly what the subject matter was. They said: 'It's about time. India's becoming a powerful economic force, and this is the time we can actually look at ourselves.' "