The World In Film:
Deepa Mehta’s Water
Affects of traditional customs on women and girls in India

-- Leah Otto Johnson

Imagine you are 8 years old again. Perhaps you’re learning to count or to ride your bike. Maybe you’re not even allowed to cross the street.

Chuyia, on the other hand, the 8-year-old girl depicted in the film Water, is a widow. She can only count to 10, has been forced to live in an ashram (spiritual institution) and can’t even remember getting married.

Water, written and directed by Deepa Mehta (Bollywood/Hollywood), is a period piece set in the holy city of Varanasi, India during Mahatma Ghandi’s rise to power in the late ‘30s. The film focuses on the social conditions and depravation of widows, and gives a glimpse at the circumstances surrounding child marriage — both issues that persist in India today.

While on location in Varanasi 10 years ago for an unrelated production, Mehta, originally from India and a Hindu herself, visited the Ganges River. She wanted to familiarize herself with the holy city that attracts pilgrims from all over India, said Mehta in her director’s notes to Water.

One image that stayed with her from that visit to the Ganges River was that of a Hindu widow. "Bent like a shrimp, her body wizened with age, white hair shaved close to her scalp, she scampered on all fours furiously looking for something she had lost on the steps of the Ganges [River]," said Mehta.

"Her distress was visible as she searched amidst the early morning throng of pilgrims. She was paid scant attention to, not even when she sat down to cry."

According to the 2001 national census in India, out of a population of over 1 billion people, 34 million are widows. That’s 34 percent of the entire county of India — a total nearly California’s entire state population.

The United Kingdom COI Service, who according to their Web site exists to provide information on asylum seekers’ countries of origin, published their fact finding report on women in India in December 2004. The report stated that widows in India were found to be marginalized and subject to social exclusion, economic deprivation and physical and psychological victimization.

According to the film, a widow is considered so ill-fated that even her shadow is cautioned not to fall on a married woman. Widows are often viewed as evil women who caused the death of their husbands, said Dr. Mohini Giri, Guild of Service chairperson, in an interview with Women’s eNews. "Without a man by her side a woman has no respect in Indian society. It is part of a patriarchal culture."

Water reveals Hindu widows subjected to ritual humiliations, including having their head shorn, their body wrapped in a white sari and their red sindoor (traditionally worn by married women in the parting of her hairline) replaced with ash from their forehead to their nose.

Mehta roots these cultural rituals to such Hindu Dharmashastras as the Vishnu-smirti, which states the duty of a woman after the death of her husband is to preserve her chastity or to willing cremate herself on the funeral pyre of her husband; the later, called suttee, was outlawed in 1829.

"Traditionally and according to the Hindu Shastras, a woman is half her husband’s body when he’s alive," said Mehta. "And when he dies, she becomes half his corpse."

Water also reveals that widows receive one meal a day after they spend several hours in religious devotion. Some might even be forced to beg or prostitute merely to survive.

Through education, non-government organizations like Women for Human Rights, Guild of Service and Widows’ Rights International are working in India to end the social injustice and depravation that widows, even young widows like Chuyia, face today.

Though the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 prohibits marriage for girls below the age of 18 and for boys below the age of 21, in 2003 the US Department of State reported that each year in April, thousands of child marriages are performed during the Hindu festival of Askhay Tritiya. Water briefly touches on this issue when a Hindu priest in the film states that "traditionalists ignore laws that don’t benefit them."

That child marriage like 8-year-old Chuyia’s in Water continues in India today is further supported by an Office of the United Nations Resident Coordinator report from 2001. From a sample of women in India between the ages of 20-24 years old, nearly 60 percent said they were married when they were still adolescents.

The main conditions behind child marriage include poverty, economics and traditional customs, according to the 2003 International Center for Research on Women policy advisory report on child marriage.

UNICEF found that child marriage causes the denial of childhood and adolescence, the curtailment of personal freedom and the opportunity to develop a sense of selfhood, according to their Web site. Additionally, child marriage causes the denial of psychosocial and emotional well-being as well as reproductive health and educational opportunity.

A Prevention of Child Marriage Bill was introduced to Rajya Sabha, the Parliament of India, in December 2004 proposing more stringent punishments to those involved in illegal child marriages. According to the National Human Rights Commission, the bill is presently under consideration.

"Chuyia, the child widow [in Water] is the voice of innocence, an uncorrupted voice and eye who says it as she sees it," said Mehta in an interview with Hillary Maganzine.

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving sexual situations and for brief drug use, the award winning Water is available Aug. 29 on DVD (subtitles in English and Spanish).

To view a photographic essay of widows living in Vrindavan, India, visit http://www.white-shadows.com. For further information about child marriage and women in India, visit http://www.icrw.org.

Send film comments and suggestions to ottole@go.metrostate.edu.