spaces within themselves, within their Third World brown bodies. Like Spivak who was not claiming to give Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri a voice when she represented her and wrote her to be read, Nair was not aiming to give Mina, Kinnu, Aditi, Ria, Pimmi or Alice a voice, but she was giving them a resistant, controversial, confrontational marginal space in which to find their own.
themselves. While Nair found her space in „accented‟ filmmaking, her characters found theirs within themselves.
Chapter Three 3.1 Introduction
In this chapter, as in Chapter Two, the theoretical frameworks of analysis established in Chapter One will be appropriated in a reading of Deepa Mehta‟s female characters in the films Fire (1995) and Earth (1999).
Mehta‟s films are openly critical - she pointedly challenges hegemonic practices in India in order to give expression to the (preferably) untold and unheard stories of Indian people, and Indian women in particular43. Mehta‟s filmmaking has garnered criticism and sparked much controversy44 amongst Indians living in India. She has been accused of desecrating the Indian culture with the inclusion of a lesbian relationship in Fire (1995), of re-visiting a best forgotten traumatic period in Indian history in Earth (1999), and of depicting Indian culture, tradition and religion in negative light by revealing the ostracisation suffered by Indian widows in the 1930s in Water (date unknown)45. Subsequently, Fire (1995) was banned in India for the violent reaction it caused and Earth (1999) was subjected to heavy censorship laws but was approved with a single cut for profanity. Production for Water (date unknown) had to be stopped when religious political parties destroyed the film sets. Even though the Indian Prime Minister intervened allowing the filming to continue in West Bengal as opposed to Varanasi (where the practice of widow houses still existed), Water (date unknown) was still in production in 2003.
The most noticeable non-conventional aspect of Mehta‟s filmmaking46, as discussed in relation to Nair in Chapter Two (pg 39) is her creation of resistant narrative spaces for Indian women using the very same nationalist discourses that have previously been - and in some
43This relates, in a sense, to Spivak‟s notion of the unheard „subaltern‟ (Chapter One, pg 35). Mehta‟s characters are not all subaltern, but do suffer at the hands of oppression in some form or other. Mehta, however, makes great effort to ensure that the stories of the women in her film are heard. She achieves this through the construction of her characters with personal and political agency.
44Refer to article, “Deepa Under Fire” by Uma Prakash (2000) in Indigo, p. 16 – 20; and website insert, “Deepa Mehta” by Morli Desai (2001) at http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Mehta.html.
45 The production of Water has been riddled with disruptions and apparently remains incomplete (Chapter One, pg 21).
46Mehta‟s films have often interchangeably been categorised under „art‟ or „alternative‟ filmmaking. Even though each of these terms are very distinct in their definition, it can be argued that Mehta‟s filmmaking exhibits a combination of each of their characteristics. While „art‟ cinema refers to “films where the director […] clearly exercise[s] a high degree of control over the filmmaking process […] thus [allowing] the films [to] be viewed as a form of personal expression” (Knight in Nelmes, 1996: 395), „alternative‟ cinema “[p]rovides an alternative to the codes and conventions of mainstream, narrative cinema, often both thematically and visually” (Nelmes, 1996: 229).
instances, continue to be - used as representational tools that symbolically oppress and silence Indian women. Mehta, however, appropriates Indian nationalist discourses to a point at which she can confront and reject the symbolic representation that they encourage. As a result, she constructs Indian women as metaphors for the resistance of nationalist ideals as opposed to constructing Indian women as symbols of nationalist ideals. This unique approach relates to Naficy‟s argument (2001) surrounding the ambivalent relationship that „accented‟ filmmakers experience and maintain to their homeland. This ambivalent relationship is usually characterised by the production of ambiguity and doubt about the taken-for-granted values of the home society. In Mehta‟s instance, living outside of India, as will be discussed further in this chapter, has allowed her to interrogate the values inscribed in India‟s history and religious myths, and the manner in which this contributes to the constructed notion of Indian womanhood.
This chapter assumes the same structure as that of the previous one. After a brief biography discussing Mehta‟s career in film and the impact that her diasporic status has had on her filmmaking, the chapter will proceed into a section titled “Telling „Her‟-stories in the Accented Style”. This section reveals how Mehta tells the histories, and not just the stories, of women through the weaving of the discourses of Hindu mythology and Indian history into the layers of Fire (1995) and Earth (1999) respectively. Naficy‟s notions (2001) of the plurality of identity, journeying, border-crossing, tactile optics and structures of feeling discussed in Chapter One (pg 17 - 29), that characterise the experience of home and body in the films and protagonists of „accented‟ filmmakers, will be applied to the readings of Mehta‟s female characters.
The final section of the chapter titled “Resisting Time: The Articulation of Postcolonial Feminisms” argues that Mehta‟s subject construction of Indian women not only allows them a resistant, expressive space but reveals that these Indian women, even though they have suffered with history and myth having been inscribed on their bodies, have the power of choice. This choice is made possible through the re-definition of the meaning imbued (1995) in their bodies and sexuality in the private (the home, religion and myth) as in Fire (1995) and the public sphere (the land, religious political rivalry and history) as in Earth (1999). This section, as done so in Chapter Two, will appropriate Mohanty and Spivak‟s postcolonial feminist notions of representation, Third World narrative potential, marginal resistance and the significance of nation and gender in the understanding of Third World women‟s struggles,
in order to engage in a comprehensive reading of Mehta‟s characters in relation to one another.