Hindu Widows' Pain is CNN'$ Gain

CNN.com has a story -- posted today -- about the plight of Hindu widows in India. The link and title are given below.

Shunned from Society, Widows Flock to City to Die

http://www.cnn.com/2007/WORLD/asiapcf/07/05/damon.india.widows/#cnnSTCText


It's another episode of gross generalization and profit-making in the name of producing news. Hindu widows' pain is certainly CNN's monetary and political gain, and nothing else.

CNN and mainstream U.S. media have often followed this gross stereotyping. It fits their familiar pattern of undermining the non-Western, "Third" world.

I remember I spoke a few years ago about a 60 Minutes docu-news done by Christiane Amanpour, on untouchability in India. It was another distorted, biased, generalized account of the problem, where the country, its history and peoples' struggle were undermined, excluded and lied about.

In the context of oppressed Hindu widows, the recent Deepa Mehta movie "Water" fits the CNN-Amanpour paradigm. Below is a short review I wrote on Water. Hope you have time to read it. Feedback welcome.
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Water

A film by Deepa Mehta

February, 2007

Director Deepa Mehta and her crew filmed Water, an Indian story, in Sri Lanka because Hindu fundamentalists stopped the original shooting in Benaras by the holy river Ganges. Right wing Vishva Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council) drove the filmmakers out because they believed the movie was to disgrace the Hindu religion in front of a global audience.

Zealots often clamp down on free speech, and exercise their bigotry and muscle power; the attack on Water was therefore a familiar pattern. However, the new-generation “Indian” director and her Canadian producers, in their attempt to expose the oppression and misery of Hindu widows, painted the picture with a simplistic broad brush, without studying its complexity and history.

Water, with its beautiful cinematography with stark, eerie resemblance to famous Satyajit Ray shots, instrumental music and credible acting, has thus become another "pleasant" film, apparently with an important aim to please a naïve, Western, liberal audience. Eulogizing Gandhi as the sole emancipator of Hindu widows resonates well with this audience. Historically, however, pre-Gandhi Indian activists and leaders who fought a hundred-year-long independence struggle against the tyrannical British imperialists brought about revolutionary social changes such as abolition of the Sutee (immolation of the widow), re-inception of voluntary remarriage of the widow, equal or near-equal inheritance rights for women, abolition of “untouchability” in many places, etc. Raja Ram Mohan Ray, one of the driving forces behind the celebrated Bengal Renaissance, was mentioned cursorily by Mehta, strangely obliterating one century’s temporal line between him and Gandhi, but others such as Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar were conveniently forgotten. It was Vidyasagar, a Hindu Brahman scholar, who stood up against the Hindu orthodoxy and spearheaded a pro-widow-remarriage movement in late nineteenth century, easily half a century before Gandhi's arrival from South Africa. Much of the liberation struggle and social reform movements in India had already happened by then.

Moreover, Hindu widows with their plight have never been a homogeneous group; even in Water’s chosen 1938 – a too-modern era for the story – widows were diverse in their societal treatment. Besides, one might argue that the problem has often been more about economic exploitation and deprivation, rather than the religion itself. Well-to-do Hindu widows with a supportive family were, and are, far less victimized. Putting them all in one basket, however, helps both the filmmaker to bypass inconvenient complexities, and the otherwise appreciative yet ignorant Indian and Western spectators to avoid “distractions.”

Additionally, painting such a simplistic picture without narrating the history of political, social and religious struggles by Hindu progressives gives the non-Hindu supremacists and bigots another tool to blast Hinduism, a religion already misinterpreted, tainted and scandalized by Hollywood and other center-right media.

At the end of the day, other than creating sensationalism in the West courtesy a “coveted” Oscar nomination, Water fails to rally either the Hindus in India or the diaspora worldwide to take up on the noble cause of liberating the poor widows from the shackles of oppression.

P.S. -- Revisiting the blog now in September, 2009, can we mention a single improvement on the issue since Water came out?

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