Gene Poole
2006-06-16 02:46:39 UTC
Clean Enough for Yuppies to Drink: Deepa Mehta Filters Ganges Water
Sightings 6/15/06
Clean Enough for Yuppies to Drink: Deepa Mehta Filters Ganges Water
-- William Elison
Long before its U.S. release this spring, Water, Deepa Mehta's movie about
Hindu widows living in seclusion on the banks of the Ganges, had already
become a cause c?l?bre. Mehta is based in Canada, and her films, which
rely on international financing and talent, are exercises in a distinctly
hybrid style of cinema, a fusion alluded to by the title of a 2002
feature, Bollywood/Hollywood. She had planned to complete the feminist
trilogy that began with Fire (1998) and continued with Earth (1999) by
shooting Water in 2000. The location she had chosen was also the film's
designated setting: the North Indian holy city of Varanasi.
Fire, which deals with a lesbian relationship between sisters-in-law in
contemporary Delhi, met with controversy upon its release, violent
demonstrations having been mounted at theaters by militant groups that
decried its love story as un-Indian and anti-Hindu. (God, nation, and a
patriarchal model of the family are habitually collapsed onto each other
among Indian no less than American right-wingers.) And in due course,
advance word of Water's theme -- coupled with the filmmaker's reputation
as a feminist provocateur -- likewise fired elements of the Hindu
chauvinist right. When a mob organized by the hardline Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, destroyed the sets that had been built in
Varanasi, Mehta, who had also received death threats, withdrew to Canada
and turned her attention to the more lighthearted Bollywood/Hollywood.
In 2004 she recast Water and quietly shot it on sets that had been
fabricated in a North Indian architectural idiom on the banks of a river
in Sri Lanka. The shift to an ersatz Varanasi has liberated her project
not only from the opposition of Hindu militants but also from a host of
visual and narrative challenges: The film's look relies on cool
compositions of blues, greens, and grays, a controlled palette that would
have been difficult to isolate on the crowded and vibrant Varanasi
riverfront. The film's fictional city is called "Rawalpur," said to be
located on the Ganges somewhere in Hindi-speaking North India.
The austerely garbed widows who live out their vows of poverty by the holy
river have long featured as a defining image of Varanasi, but Mehta's
Rawalpur is conspicuously wanting in the other elements that have
circulated over the centuries of Varanasi's fame as a center of religious
pilgrimage (and thus of tourism): sacred bulls, holy men, boat traffic,
the silk trade. What has been gained, along with compositional and
narrative clarity, is a certain manicured prettiness, a glamorous sheen
mediated through the transnational idiom of upscale tourist imagery. For
all its archaic social injustice -- the film is set in the 1930's --
Rawalpur has the look of the kind of lush retreat where you can get a
really soothing Ayurvedic massage. The packaging effect is underscored by
the casting of the romantic leads: Lisa Ray and John Abraham are
light-skinned model-actors strongly identified with advertising campaigns
and both well known for their chests.
Throughout her elemental trilogy, Mehta has used her female protagonists
as vehicles for critical perspectives on South Asian gender norms,
examining varied but -- within the context of Indian feminist debates --
rather conventional topics: in Fire, the straitened sexuality of
middle-class housewives; in Earth, the erotics of the India-Pakistan
Partition; in Water, the harsh code of conduct enjoined on widows by Hindu
scriptures, which mandates modesty in the image of self-denial (in matters
of clothing, diet, toilet, sexuality, and sociality) and of shame (at
surviving the husband). Yet her films are not known for well-rendered
character portraits. In the absence of psychological depth, Mehta's
audiences (arthouse patrons in the West, primarily metropolitan elites in
India) look to cues she deploys from conventional Bollywood cinema, such
as established character types or impressionistic music-video-style
numbers, to anchor the text in the kind of cultural rootedness that would
endow its critique with authority.
Ultimately, as I have suggested, Water's claim to this kind of
anthropological thick description does not deliver much more than the
clich?s of tourist brochures; at best, the picture is complicated by the
self-exoticizing irony of images marketed to Indian yuppies, and the
liberal impulse to romanticize poverty that animates the contemporary
phenomenon of Western "poorism" in countries like India and especially
sites like Varanasi's riverfront.
There is no question that the tactics of the mob that demolished Water's
sets are reprehensible, and the program of its leaders both obscurantist
and deeply cynical. Given the historical centrality of the campaign to
reform widows' conditions to the formulation of both a modern Indian
nationalism and a modern Hinduism in the colonial period, nothing in the
film's narrative could reasonably be construed as an insult to heritage or
creed. Indeed, according to Mehta, none of the rioters had even read the
script. I'm sure she's correct, but I can't help noting that the very
dismissal of the script suggests a different point: More concerned with
visual than narrative representation, the Varanasi militants may well have
been venting, in part, their rancor for the constant, postcolonial
re-imaging of their lives and sacred spaces by tourists with cameras.
Perhaps no place in the world has been celebrated simultaneously as the
locus of filth and transcendence as Varanasi has. The irony is that in
denying their city -- in all its messy surplus of meaning -- a chance to
expand Mehta's lens, its self-appointed guardians have done not only her
and her audience, but also themselves a disservice.
William Elison is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Religions at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
----------
The Religion and Culture Web Forum for June features "Religious Identities
of Latin American Immigrants in Chicago: Preliminary Findings from Field
Research" by Andrea Althoff. To read this article, please visit:
http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml,
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago
Divinity School.
Submissions policy
Sightings welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that seek to
illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist society.
Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for
acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to issues
related to religion and public life.
Attribution
Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the
author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Contact information
Please send all inquiries, comments, and submissions to Jeremy Biles,
managing editor of Sightings, at sightings-***@listhost.uchicago.edu.
Subscribe, unsubscribe, or manage your subscription at the Sightings
subscription page.
----------
--
Faithfully,
Gene Poole
http://grace.break.at
God is still speaking
http://www.stillspeaking.com
=============
Remove your hat to e-mail me.
Sightings 6/15/06
Clean Enough for Yuppies to Drink: Deepa Mehta Filters Ganges Water
-- William Elison
Long before its U.S. release this spring, Water, Deepa Mehta's movie about
Hindu widows living in seclusion on the banks of the Ganges, had already
become a cause c?l?bre. Mehta is based in Canada, and her films, which
rely on international financing and talent, are exercises in a distinctly
hybrid style of cinema, a fusion alluded to by the title of a 2002
feature, Bollywood/Hollywood. She had planned to complete the feminist
trilogy that began with Fire (1998) and continued with Earth (1999) by
shooting Water in 2000. The location she had chosen was also the film's
designated setting: the North Indian holy city of Varanasi.
Fire, which deals with a lesbian relationship between sisters-in-law in
contemporary Delhi, met with controversy upon its release, violent
demonstrations having been mounted at theaters by militant groups that
decried its love story as un-Indian and anti-Hindu. (God, nation, and a
patriarchal model of the family are habitually collapsed onto each other
among Indian no less than American right-wingers.) And in due course,
advance word of Water's theme -- coupled with the filmmaker's reputation
as a feminist provocateur -- likewise fired elements of the Hindu
chauvinist right. When a mob organized by the hardline Rashtriya
Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, destroyed the sets that had been built in
Varanasi, Mehta, who had also received death threats, withdrew to Canada
and turned her attention to the more lighthearted Bollywood/Hollywood.
In 2004 she recast Water and quietly shot it on sets that had been
fabricated in a North Indian architectural idiom on the banks of a river
in Sri Lanka. The shift to an ersatz Varanasi has liberated her project
not only from the opposition of Hindu militants but also from a host of
visual and narrative challenges: The film's look relies on cool
compositions of blues, greens, and grays, a controlled palette that would
have been difficult to isolate on the crowded and vibrant Varanasi
riverfront. The film's fictional city is called "Rawalpur," said to be
located on the Ganges somewhere in Hindi-speaking North India.
The austerely garbed widows who live out their vows of poverty by the holy
river have long featured as a defining image of Varanasi, but Mehta's
Rawalpur is conspicuously wanting in the other elements that have
circulated over the centuries of Varanasi's fame as a center of religious
pilgrimage (and thus of tourism): sacred bulls, holy men, boat traffic,
the silk trade. What has been gained, along with compositional and
narrative clarity, is a certain manicured prettiness, a glamorous sheen
mediated through the transnational idiom of upscale tourist imagery. For
all its archaic social injustice -- the film is set in the 1930's --
Rawalpur has the look of the kind of lush retreat where you can get a
really soothing Ayurvedic massage. The packaging effect is underscored by
the casting of the romantic leads: Lisa Ray and John Abraham are
light-skinned model-actors strongly identified with advertising campaigns
and both well known for their chests.
Throughout her elemental trilogy, Mehta has used her female protagonists
as vehicles for critical perspectives on South Asian gender norms,
examining varied but -- within the context of Indian feminist debates --
rather conventional topics: in Fire, the straitened sexuality of
middle-class housewives; in Earth, the erotics of the India-Pakistan
Partition; in Water, the harsh code of conduct enjoined on widows by Hindu
scriptures, which mandates modesty in the image of self-denial (in matters
of clothing, diet, toilet, sexuality, and sociality) and of shame (at
surviving the husband). Yet her films are not known for well-rendered
character portraits. In the absence of psychological depth, Mehta's
audiences (arthouse patrons in the West, primarily metropolitan elites in
India) look to cues she deploys from conventional Bollywood cinema, such
as established character types or impressionistic music-video-style
numbers, to anchor the text in the kind of cultural rootedness that would
endow its critique with authority.
Ultimately, as I have suggested, Water's claim to this kind of
anthropological thick description does not deliver much more than the
clich?s of tourist brochures; at best, the picture is complicated by the
self-exoticizing irony of images marketed to Indian yuppies, and the
liberal impulse to romanticize poverty that animates the contemporary
phenomenon of Western "poorism" in countries like India and especially
sites like Varanasi's riverfront.
There is no question that the tactics of the mob that demolished Water's
sets are reprehensible, and the program of its leaders both obscurantist
and deeply cynical. Given the historical centrality of the campaign to
reform widows' conditions to the formulation of both a modern Indian
nationalism and a modern Hinduism in the colonial period, nothing in the
film's narrative could reasonably be construed as an insult to heritage or
creed. Indeed, according to Mehta, none of the rioters had even read the
script. I'm sure she's correct, but I can't help noting that the very
dismissal of the script suggests a different point: More concerned with
visual than narrative representation, the Varanasi militants may well have
been venting, in part, their rancor for the constant, postcolonial
re-imaging of their lives and sacred spaces by tourists with cameras.
Perhaps no place in the world has been celebrated simultaneously as the
locus of filth and transcendence as Varanasi has. The irony is that in
denying their city -- in all its messy surplus of meaning -- a chance to
expand Mehta's lens, its self-appointed guardians have done not only her
and her audience, but also themselves a disservice.
William Elison is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Religions at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
----------
The Religion and Culture Web Forum for June features "Religious Identities
of Latin American Immigrants in Chicago: Preliminary Findings from Field
Research" by Andrea Althoff. To read this article, please visit:
http://marty-center.uchicago.edu/webforum/index.shtml,
----------
Sightings comes from the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago
Divinity School.
Submissions policy
Sightings welcomes submissions of 500 to 750 words in length that seek to
illuminate and interpret the forces of faith in a pluralist society.
Previous columns give a good indication of the topical range and tone for
acceptable essays. The editor also encourages new approaches to issues
related to religion and public life.
Attribution
Columns may be quoted or republished in full, with attribution to the
author of the column, Sightings, and the Martin Marty Center at the
University of Chicago Divinity School.
Contact information
Please send all inquiries, comments, and submissions to Jeremy Biles,
managing editor of Sightings, at sightings-***@listhost.uchicago.edu.
Subscribe, unsubscribe, or manage your subscription at the Sightings
subscription page.
----------
--
Faithfully,
Gene Poole
http://grace.break.at
God is still speaking
http://www.stillspeaking.com
=============
Remove your hat to e-mail me.