Dir. Deepa Mehta , Canada/India , 2005, 117 mins, subtitles
Cast: Sarala, Lisa Ray, Seema Biswas, John Abraham
Review by Carol Allen
If you’ve seen the previous two films in Mehta’s “elemental trilogy”, Fire (1996) and Earth (1998) you will have high expectations of her latest one…and you will not be disappointed. Like its predecessors this film explores an emotionally gripping aspect of India’s culture and history with particular reference to women. The story this time deals with the plight of India’s widows, condemned by tradition to a life of poverty and incarceration in an institution or ashram.
Mehta is Indian born but now resident in Canada. And although the story is set in 1938 the subject is still a controversial topic in India, as Mehta discovered, when she started filming there in 2000 and was forced by death threats from Hindu fundamentalists and the burning down of one of the film’s sets to abandon the shoot. She eventually completed the film five years later in Sri Lanka.
The situation and the story Mehta creates around it is a powerful and engaging one from the very opening sequence of an eight-year-old girl Chuyia (Sarala) being stripped of her hair, her jewellery and her future because of an arranged marriage with an old man, who has now died and with whom she’s never lived and cannot even remember. One wonders about the twisted logic which regards a child as a widow, when she has never slept with her husband and was therefore never truly a wife. The cruelty is appalling. As one of the characters later points out, it’s all about money.
Bewildered little Chuyia is then dumped by her family in the House of the Widows on the banks of the Ganges, where she is befriended by the devout and serious Shakuntula (Biswas) and Kalyani (Ray), herself a former child bride and now a beautiful young woman. Kalyani is the only widow, who has been allowed to keep her long hair, as she has been forced into prostitution by the elderly woman who runs the ashram in order to finance the house.
Despite her bizarre situation Chuyia remains a lively and mischievous child and her spirit moves both Shakuntula and Kalyani to rebel against the injustice of their situation, in Kalyani’s case by falling love with wealthy young lawyer Narayan (Abraham).
The story is enthralling and also infuriating in terms of the injustice – no woman or indeed man with a shred of feminist or simple human sympathy can fail to be angered. It is also surprisingly funny in places and an interesting study of the relationships among the women, all of whom are vivid and engaging. As well as the main characters there’s the gross but not unsympathetic homemother, the eunuch she uses to pimp Kalyani and the old woman, who’s been in the house virtually all her life and still craves the wedding sweetmeats , which are all she remembers from the childhood nuptials that caused her incarceration. The political background of the times specifically the rise to prominence of Gandhi is well sketched in, the resolution of Kalyani’s story and what happens to Chuyia as a result is chilling and the ending of the film is both moving and uplifiting.
