This paper tries to offer a brief insight into Deepa Mehta’s acclaimed film Water. This film bravely denounces the situation of deprivation and ostracism that widows face in India. In a patriarchal society in which tradition and religion play a key role, widows live in oblivion and fight for survival, both in economic and in spiritual terms. Water (2005), the third film of her trilogy—Fire (1996), Earth (1998)—is Mehta’s tribute to widows, mere ghosts confined to ashrams, forgotten in their own microcosm.
Deepa’s achievement lies in the way she blends delicacy and strength to endow widows with humanity and to show the poverty and hypocrisy that surrounds these women. The film depicts the abject of India, an underworld in direct conflict with our imagined India, a country of spirituality and sensuality. Water is a cry to resist the imposed order of things, a response to power, a reaction against the unfairness of the caste system and a song to the most deprived and weak. The protagonists of the film fight to get their freedom and escape from the rigid structures of a political and religious system that traps them.
Deepa Mehta invites us to be critical and reflect on the dangerous mechanisms of oppression that aim to atrophy and paralyse our minds, confine our bodies and deny our feelings and needs, being aware that they are present beyond the frontiers of the Other.