P Cort

Water (2005) The staging of Water (2005), a film by an Indian director of the Diaspora, Deepa Mehta, was filmed basically in Varanasi, near the Ganges River, a traditional place for religious rituals and relevant to Hindu culture. Along the river, Mehta, transmits through Mise-en-scene some of the common characteristics of Hindu traditions, such as cremations, purifications and weddings, with vivid colors and natural landscapes, the river water is glistening, it seems as pure as sacred. The movie is set in 1938, being still under British occupation, that’s why the clothing is very conservative, since it seeks to demonstrate how values are pursued and established as usual rules. The colors are very important, as well meaningful, white for instance reflects the purity a widow must keep until death to be accepted in heaven, other way she will reborn in the womb of a jackal. This kind of linguistic contraptions are common in traditionalist ideologies that seek to control the female gender and other vulnerable people, to hegemonized and perpetuate unfair practices. Then, colors diversity and inclusion of natural tones are a magnificent combination to set the aesthetic expectative, hand in hand with its intrinsic meanings. The combination of the images of an ancient India with bright colors that seem as vivid as the current ones. It generates a timeless sensation and moves us to space at the time of the British occupation in India, in which Chuyia (Sarala Kariyawasam, first Sri Lankan child actress in an international debut), a girl of eight years old is obligated to follow the wildest practices of widows of her village. The most important turning point, to me, is that which refers to the freedom of widows. On tenterhooks to independence, a historical fact that remarks Water is that once Gandhi freed from British, his political party, National Congress of India, managed to approve a new law, and it ruled that widows would be able to remarry. The Astra, sacred texts, the laws of Manu (Manusmriti), decrees that the widow has three options; one is to burn with her deceased husband, second: lead a selfless life, or third: marry again with the younger brother of the deceased husband, if the family allows it. The first reform to these texts politically accepted, focused on material belongings but not on the ideological and tractional factors that appeal and imply being a widow in India, even today with 34 million widows according to the 2001 census, was the Hindu widows' remarriage act, enacted on 25 July 1856, where it legalized the remarriage of Hindu widows in all jurisdictions of India drafted by lord Dalhousie. The initial belief of this sacred Hindu text says also: “a woman is half her husband and if he dies, she is half dead,” this is only in the spiritual and moral aspect which dwells widows consciences in a patriarchal society.