Water is the last film in the famous (or notorious) trilogy by Deepa Mehta, a trilogy which has spanned a decade now, beginning with Fire, a story about two sisters-in-law who give up on their husbands and end up in a lesbian relatioship, followed by Earth, a story about ethnic riots during the 1947 partition. When I caught the long-awaited movie in the cinema last week in a very limited run, I had forgotten details of the previous two movies. But I do carry a memory of them being powerful stories and I expected no less from this latest (actually from 2005). The director has summed it all up herself long ago in an interview: "The trilogy is about elements on one level that nurture and destroy us. They are very tangible elements. Fire is about the politics of sexuality, Earth is about the politics of nationalism and Water is about the politics of religion." In terms of the visuals, she said that the scripts evoked certain colours, in Fire it was orange, white and green, whereas in Earth it was terra cotta, red and yellow. Well, for Water, you can easily guess that the predominant colour is white, a symbol of purity, as the Ganges river at Varanasi - which is the story setting - would evoke, but above all purity in a specific sense that is demanded very much of women and little of men.

The first few scenes of the movie already set the tone for the depressing movie, set in the 1930s. It starts with a girl who becomes a widow at the mere age of 7 or so and is sent to a house for widows in Varanasi, to live an ascetic life wearing white, abstaining from tasty food and avoiding contact with other folks in the city, spending the days praying and doing penance at the river. The earlier part of the movie concentrates on how how the little girl is bullied by the mean ones among the elderly widows, and how she strikes up a friendship with a kind old widow who would reminisce on the delicacies she used to enjoy as a child, as she does not even get to eat something as simple as a ladoo now . But the story's main character turns out to be a young and fair widow who falls in love with a charming young man. It is a forbidden love, obviously, but that said, the romance ends in a tragedy so cruel, you feel like questioning the film's creator whether it's absolutely necessary. You may also find the intended cultural cliches in the movie not to your taste, though you know what the director is getting at. For example, the lover played by Jon Abraham quotes Kalidasa's Meghdoot, the famous fantasy of sending love messages through clouds. (When asked how one could believe in such fantasies, he replies: how do people believe a statue can answer prayers?) He even plays a flute while waiting for his beloved to meet her at night! (Lord Krishna comes to mind.) For me, I have to say it just feels like a movie cliche when the young woman lights up a lamp to go out in the night and you hear a song going "piya ho...". (Music of the film is by A.R. Rahman, incidentally.) But sometimes a cliche can be used effectively, and that's what I feel about that powerful scene where one of the widows carries the child widow in her arms and rushes to the train station where Gandhi is giving a speech; in the background you hear a specially arranged version of Vaishnava Janto - Gandhi's favourite bhajan, of course. Amidst the crowd, she is desperately running after Gandhi like he is some deity, hoping for the child to be saved by him...

One criticism made by Indian critics on the movie is that it is historically inaccurate. I find that simply trivial, just as I find it amusing to hear western critics proclaim the movie as a 'majestic epic'. To me, I would call it a poetic work, but I won't have time to argue whether it should be named one of 5 best movies of the decade or one of 50 best. It's just a movie for goodness sake, you should look at what its messge is ultimately, which is spelt out at the end of the movie: there are 34 million widows in India according to a 2001 census, and many of them still life in the same way today ascribing to 'religious' rules set out 2,000 years ago - all this despite liberal ideas propagated by Gandhi about 60 or 70 years ago. I think Deepa Mehta has made her point cleverly with constant references to Gandhi throughout the movie. To add sarcasm, she has also created the comic character of an educated 'brown Englishman' who enjoys singing European classical music and quoting Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but sees no need for change in the status of women in India.

There ought to be more movies with social consciousness like this. The only thing unfortunate about Deepa Mehta is that she has become known for provoking religious sensibilities, for example by giving the characters in her lesbian story Fire the names Sita and Radha. Maybe that is why critics call her a 'self-hating Indian' and her film set in Varanasi was destroyed by a mob and thrown into the Ganges when she attempted to film Water in 2000 initially, so she had to film it later in Sri Lanka instead. There are actually other themes in the movie which need to be seen independently of the religion controversy, for example child abuse, which is something also touched on in movies like Monsoon Wedding. I would like to mention here that child prostitution is a very real issue. A study has shown that girls under 14 years of age constitute 30 per cent of 900,000 prostitutes in India. In absolute figures, India has the highest number of children exploited by prostitution in the world, followed by USA and Brazil. Now that's something an ideal world should be cleansed of.