"Water", widows and Manusmriti...

Meetu recently posted a review of Water (Deepa Mehta's movie) in which she said, basically, that a good topic has been wasted because the movie does not really create the impact that it should.

Makarand is more forceful in his condemnation of the movie, and has a bunch of interesting things to say about the issue in general:

Saw WATER.. Also read your review... Recalled the questions that you had raised in the stairwell.. and felt that I had to respond..

I think that the movie was pathetic... A very important and sensitive issue was not handed well.. The story line was jerky and some of the characters crass.. There were also issues related to appropriateness (south Indian style flowers in the hair and dress in Benares is difficult to swallow... ) References to Gandhi were sad, disjointed, inappropriate and irrelevant... All in all I don't think that Deepa Mehta has understood India. She has tried to pick a sensitive issue and make it sensational... reading the brief on the jacket you will know what I mean... The Bajrang Dal raising objections just proves that they too are ignorant and operating on misinformation... they just managed to hype up the film..

having said all that... the issue is important.. I have something to say on that as well...

The verses of Manu referenced in the film do talk badly of widows but they must be read in context of the time that they were written.. {Tukaram the great Maharashtrian saint and social reformer said 'be kind to slaves'... we cannot turn back 450 years later and say that Tukaram was evil because he condoned slavery! all he was doing was being realistic and HUMANE at that time}... Manu's laws are around 1500 BC... 3500 years ago... They may appear to be wrong today but may not have been wrong in the context of the time then... What was the position of women then? ... they had no rights to property, profession or even name (let alone identity).. Their identity and status came from the man in their life (father / brother or husband)... what happens to a young widow then? she has been married off and hence her father would have nothing to do with her... for her in laws she was a burden... she had no skill / no property and no means of supporting herself... what could she do? just what thousands of women are doing now... commercial sex work! (while saying this one must not forget that not all women had to do it... Those who had grown up sons were cared for... only a small portion ended up in Benares... that too was 'just a financial matter of not spending on her upkeep and not tradition / religion' as John Abraham says to Seema Biswas.. I am not condoning Manu... I just think that the laws are not relevant NOW... perhaps they were then... did you know that the first three US Presidents were slave owners?

The reference to the 34 million widows figure in the census of 2001 in context of the film and the situation there is just humbug.. Yes there are 34 million widows (probably an equal number of deserted / destitute and bigamous wives)... but their situation is not that of the widows shown in the movie... Times have changed and well... The statement is clever... It is not untrue... but it is not the whole truth as well.. After all the moment we don't allow widows to participate in haldi kumkum, do kanyadaan and perform other religious functions we are oppressing them socially and culturally. ... in reality the situation of widows is BAD but not as bad as the film (for instance only in some remote pockets of karnataka will you still find widows, all of them very old, with shaven heads)... They do have much more rights and awareness.. also society is changing and we will be where the Western world is in a few decades...

Deepa Mehta is posturing as a 'film maker with a social conscience and a votary of women's rights'... I think that she is just a shrewd film maker but not a good one at that... if she wanted to talk of the issue, she would have set in today's time and referenced back to the 1930s and earlier... The movie contributes nothing to social debate.. FIRE did that to a certain extent... FIRE ultimately did well more for its salacious content than debate... I hope that the movie does not get an Oscar.. it will be shameful..

Hope this was useful... pardon the rambling...

RISC: Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons

I found this rather interesting article on the Indian Economy Blog which talks about an initiative that is trying to prove that development does not necessarily mean urbanization. It first lays out the arguments as to why urbanization is "usual" path to development, and then goes on to suggest an alternative.

Excerpt: It is therefore argued that 'village-centric' development is not feasible because of resource limitations and because people naturally tend to migrate out of villages to cities. Furthermore, it not desirable since a vibrant economy depends on the aggregation of the population into units much larger than a small village. In short, investing scarce resources into villages is short-sighted and uneconomical.

Based on the above considerations, a model for rural development has been conceived called RISC – Rural Infrastructure and Services Commons. The RISC idea is to bring to the rural population the full set of services that are normally available only in urban locations. It works within the constraints of limited resources by focusing attention to and concentrating investments at specific locations to obtain economies of scale, scope, and agglomeration.

Link to full article


I asked Makarand what he thought of this, and this is his response:


I have had occasion to go through this mail (and the blog)... Nice one and thanx for forwarding it to me..

Interestingly this has been an idea that has been around for some time now... This is what the neo-Gandhians have been talking of when they talk of self sufficiency of a village. Gandhi had a concept that the village must be a self sustaining unit. He exhorted youth to go to the villages and work there.. I have some stories to tell you.. may be next time over coffee.. You may recall his famous speech in the Lahore Congress conference that "India Lives in her villages" and India is not a few under lawyers in Mumbai and Delhi..

The neo-Gandhians believe the same.. Only thing they say is that the villages must generate enough wealth within so as to enable them to talk on equal terms with other villages and fulfill the requirements that they cant fulfill within.. That means that a village may produce cotton and TRADE with another for onions if they don't produce any! That he called a 'village republic'...