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| Feb 14, 2000 | ||
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| WATER
CONTROVERSY Fire Over Water Deepa Mehta's new film has the Sangh Parivar doing the war dance. But gets a second life.
Jyotsna Srivastava only reaches for her handbag. She pulls out not a gun but two sheets of A4-sized paper and conspiratorially hands them over to you. "Some of us managed to get the script," she whispers, "read it and you'll see how they're insulting Varanasi." The papers -- entitled "Water film se sambandhith tathya" (Facts related to the film Water)" -- claim to contain vile portions from the script of Deepa Mehta's new film.
Shakuntala (a widow): "Panditji have you read Hindu scriptures carefully? Do they ask us to treat widows so cruelly?" Mansaram (the pandit): "In our spiritual texts there are only two alternatives for widows. Either they renounce the world or they burn themselves when their husbands die." As you finish reading the "script" -- later dismissed by the Water crew as largely fictitious and in parts, to quote producer David Hamilton, "picking up one or two stray pieces from an earlier draft of the script" -- you wonder what the furore is about. Srivastava, 60, a former teacher who was elected BJP MLA from Varanasi South in 1991 and 1993 is not finished yet: "Deepa Mehta has focused only on the negative aspects of Banaras. She could have shown the nice things." Like what, you ask. A moment's thought and then comes the answer, "She could have shown art, the fine arts institute. The making of Banarasi saris." Before you can ask if Deepa Mehta is making a Films Division documentary, Jyotsna -- Ghoshal before she married Harish Chandra Srivastava, now Uttar Pradesh finance minister -- delivers the coup de grace. "This film is not just anti-Hindu," she concludes, "it is also anti-Bengali. It shows widows becoming prostitutes. And the widows are dressed like Bengali widows." You pinch yourself. This woman is a scream. She's quite polite actually, offering you tea and sandesh like the archetypal Bengali mashima (maternal aunt) but the wall of the sparse living room at her Shivaji Nagar house in Varanasi says it all. There hang, side by side, portraits of two inspirations of the mofussil matriarch's life: Deendayal Upadhyay, ideologue of Hindutva, and Netaji Subhas Bose, icon of all Bengalis everywhere. Even those whose families have "lived in Banaras for four generations". The Srivastava couple are among the principal political backers of the "20 to 30" organisations seeking to muddy Water. Chief among them are the Mehta-specific Kashi Sanskriti Raksha Sangharsh Samiti (KSRSS), the Vishva Samvad Kendra and Sanskar Bharati, the cultural wing of the RSS. On January 30, an angry mob attacked the film's sets at Tulsi Ghat, destroying property such as carefully created pillars. The immediate damage, as Mehta and her band put it, amounted to just about "a few lakhs". The real problem was "it would take 10 days to rebuild the sets". More important, shooting was cancelled. This left a 120-member crew -- mainly Indian but including professionals from the US, Canada, Australia and Hungary -- twiddling their thumbs. It also left the producers paying Rs 10 lakh every day for no gainful output -- not counting the "$600,000 (Rs 2.5 crore) already spent" on the film. The Water ship was down. On January 31, Mehta flew into Delhi for three days of hectic lobbying, confabulation and negotiation with an Information and Broadcasting (I&B) Ministry that had already given her film the green signal. It was to the ministry that some months earlier the Canada-based Mehta had sent the script -- written by her in English and translated into Hindi by Varanasi-born Anurag Kashyap (claim to fame: Satya, Shool). Any film project with foreign funding, actors or technicians is similarly vetted by the I&B Ministry. Once permission comes through, the film team is free to shoot anywhere in the country and has the option of consulting or not consulting local authorities. In Water's case, Alok Kumar, Varanasi's dm, was initially all help. Then came the mob fury. The dm cited possible law and order problems, revoked permission to shoot and referred the matter to Lucknow. After brave statements -- "The film's script should be discussed with religious leaders," said Urban Development Minister Lalji Tandon -- the buck was passed right back to the Centre. As Mehta waited for the I&B minister to return from an overseas visit, the media circus was in full swing in Varanasi. Water is set in a widow's home in the 1930s. Life is placid till a seven-year-old child widow, played by a little girl called Urvi, comes to the home. As Nandita Das explains, "Her questions have a childlike innocence. 'How long will I be a widow?' 'Are men also widows?'" Das herself plays a young widow called Janaki, forced into prostitution by the home's caretaker to fund its upkeep and save the widows from "desperate penury". Das' eyes light up at the mention of the script. "I believe in it," she says, "it's progressive", even as you ponder how she sacrificed her lovely long tresses for the close crop the role demands. Eventually Das finds love in a "Gandhian idealist played by Akshay Kumar". Shabana Azmi is the film's other heroine, Shakuntala, a somewhat bitter widow. She's sporting a bald pate now and carrying it with the imperiousness of a diva. The controversy and the frustrating wait have got in the way of her craft though. "We forget we're doing a film," she mutters. "Once shooting starts Nandita and I have to get away from this PRgiri. We even thought of going to Sarnath to be alone." Not that they would have been allowed to. The police posse at the hotel refused the two women permission to visit the city "without clearance from the dc, dm, SSP and SP". Life is hard in a gilded cage, especially when the bars are shaped by lie, innuendo and rumour. According to Shyamdeb Roychowdhury, BJP MLA, Varanasi Cantonment, better known as "Dada", the good people of Varanasi woke up to the evil among them on the "morning of January 25". At "dawn" that day "Shabana Azmi was seen emerging from the river wearing a see-through, knee-length sari". The cameras were rolling, adds our man, and the I&B Ministry's liaison man on location was not informed. The inference? This "semi-nude scene was shot for foreign audiences, to depict Hinduism in bad light". Ask Shabana this and she smiles. Like another lady we've already met she tugs at her handbag and pulls out a Jet Airways boarding pass. "Read this," she exclaims, "I got to Banaras on the afternoon of January 25." Postscript: On February 2, I&B Minister Arun Jaitley, in consultation with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Home Minister L.K. Advani, cleared Water with five minor changes to the script, obviously a facesaver for the hidebound KSRSS. Mehta flew back the next day to her "one passion: filmmaking". Varanasi had seen pride and prejudice. It was now time for sense and sensibility. |
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The
extracts -- provided they are there in the script in the first place --
are patently out of context. One of them goes thus: