Title: They feel it
is simply more Water down the drain
Author: Press Trust
of India
Publication: The Indian
Express
Date: March 6, 2000
While Deepa Mehta, director
of the controversial film Water, is still searching for an apt locale for
shooting her film, the subjects on whom the film is based, are totally
against th6movie being made. Majority of the 5,000 Bengali widows living
in and around 85 widows ashrams in this pilgrim city feel "the film is
not going to change their situation for the better."
"Its script caters to
the elitist perception of the life of Bengali widows," says Ahilya Devi,
a widow from Bengal who has been living in Vrindavan for the last 20 years.
"Even though the controversy surrounding the film has publicised our plight,
the film, if and when it is made, is not going to help us much."
Agrees another widow
Malti Chatterjee. "Neither is the exodus of widows from Bengal and other
states to Varanasi and Vrindavan going to stop, nor will the treatment
meted out to us by the so-called saviours of religion get better if the
film is made. It is just a commercial venture aimed at making money by
depicting our plight," she says. She ended on a fatalistic note saying,
"we have to face any number of difficulties, the solution to which lies
only in death and not in film."
Many, in fact, discount
reports of sexual exploitation of the widows by priests and the locals,
one of the basic themes of the film.
"Sexual exploitation
might have happened in the 1930s. Vrindavan is such a small place that
everybody knows everybody here, with the result that we know everything
that goes on here. Such cases are unheard of nowadays," says Anusuiya Roy,
who manages the Amaar Bari Widows Ashram here. "Since I took charge here,
I have not heard of a single such case," she says.
"Also, though prostitution
exists in Vrindavan, singling out the widows is wrong as many women do
it, of their own free will," says Roy. The number of widows coming from
Bengal has also decreased down the years. Those few who come, do so either
in search of spiritualism or because of poverty or to escape their neglected
existence in their families back home.
She, however, makes one
pertinent point. "Some widows exploit their own situation. They come during
festival seasons to cam money by begging and selling the donated clothes
that they get."
Echoing her view, Jagannath
Poddar of Friends of Vrindavan (FoV), an NGO, says, "Sexual exploitation
might have been prevalent when the marriage of older men with young girls
was a common custom. After the death of their husbands, these girls in
their 20s used to come to Vrindavan and Varanasi to lead the rest of their
lives in the service of God," says Poddar.
A film on this aberration
of a custom will only serve to strengthen the urban perception that large-scale
prostitution is being carried out at these ashrams, Poddar, whose aunt
lived here as a widow, says.
Says Rupa Raghunath Dasa
of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), "There
might be an odd case once in a while, but the bigger problem plaguing the
holy place is acute water shortage and the local land mafias."
"We have got our priorities
all wrong. What Vrindavan and Varanasi need is a way to clean its environment
and a solution to the innumerable social and health problems of the people
living there," says Michael Duffy, Director, (FoV).
"There is a lot of poverty
in the country and the focus should be on its eradication, not on films
that generate controversy," he says.
