Putting a spotlight on plight of Hindu widows

“Nobody should be a stranger to love,” Mahatma Gandhi once said. For writer-director Deepa Mehta, the Indian independence leader’s mournful sentiment imbued a seven-year professional journey -- the making of her latest film, “Water” -- with solemn purpose.

In 1996, Mehta (“Fire,” “Bollywood/Hollywood”) was walking through the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in northern India when she came upon a frail 80-year-old woman blindly looking for her lost glasses along the banks of the Ganges. Upon escorting the woman, Gyanvati, back to her home, Mehta stumbled onto a hidden world she had heard about but never witnessed: ashrams where Hindu widows, dressed in plain white saris and with shaved heads, are sent to live the rest of their lives in economic, familial and romantic deprivation following their husbands’ deaths.

“My heart sank,” Mehta says.

A few years later, as Mehta again stood above the Ganges in Varanasi on the second day of filming “Water,” she found herself facing 12,000 angry Hindu fundamentalist protesters chanting “Death to ‘Water!’ Death to Deepa!!” In the midst of the riot, her sets were burned, destroyed and pushed into the river because of the alleged blasphemies of her screenplay, in which she dared to build a narrative around the despondent residents -- ages 8 to 80 -- of one of these holy “widow houses.”

A best foreign language film Oscar nominee (Canada’s entry), “Water” follows a rebellious girl of 8 who is widowed and sent to an ashram in Varanasi in 1938, just as Gandhi’s civil disobedience liberation movement is gaining power. There, the child encounters the longtime inhabitants of the widow house, including a pretty young woman named Kalyani who is prostituted to high-caste men across the river and who falls in love with a budding social revolutionary named Narayan (a sacrilege since widows who remarry cannot go to heaven).

Mehta’s tragic and moving film is full of images both beautiful and sad, and she ultimately weaves a thread of hope into the misery.

“For me, screenplays are all about details,” Mehta says. “So I write everything, and then I slash 90% of the dialogue and see how I can use cinematic details to convey the words. So the story is paramount and the situation is paramount, but whenever I can avoid people talking to me, especially when you’re touching on subjects that are hairy and don’t sound real if people say them, it’s much better to show it.”

Before filming began, fundamentalists got their hands on 10 pages of Mehta’s script and stirred up a mob by rewriting them and circulating thousands of copies. In a fascinating cultural twist, the detractors had not objected to Kalyani’s prostitution -- as well-known as this practice was, it was not likely to anger anyone. Instead, they changed the script to make Kalyani the high-caste Brahmin and Narayan a low-caste. This forbidden love, Mehta says, was what made her script seem incendiary. (Once her sets were demolished, Mehta spent four years refinancing a smaller, secret production in Sri Lanka with new actors and a dummy title, “Full Moon.”)

“It’s about the choices that we make -- the choices between our conscience and our faith,” Mehta says. “This is a question as a human being that really has always intrigued me, coming from the country that I do, where religion plays such a strong part -- whether it’s Islam or Hinduism.... Fundamentalism -- any kind of fundamentalism -- has become such a force in our lives, that you have to stop and say, ‘Do we listen to this force? What does my conscience say?’ ”

Mehta sees a kindred filmmaking in similarly controversial films such as Peter Mullan’s “The Magdalene Sisters,” about Irish women forced into cheap labor in Catholic laundries, and Phillip Noyce’s “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” about the “stolen generations” of mixed-race Australian children.

Mehta herself was exposed to the practice of isolating women in widow houses, and the Hindu laws in the Manusmriti holy texts that sanction it, only through the literature and philosophy she read at college during her upbringing in New Delhi. (She now divides her time between there and Toronto.) To research the cloistered world of “Water,” Mehta spent six months studying books such as “Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India” by Martha Alter Chen, speaking to and observing widows, and traveling to ashrams around the country. (“They spring like mushrooms, it’s quite tragic,” she says.) Some she was able to enter only after bribing the priests who run them.

The widow houses are still very much alive, but Mehta remains hopeful now that activists are teaching the widows skills that will liberate them from economically dependent and degraded lives that reduce them to begging, prostitution and, in some cases, chanting hymns for eight hours in order to earn a mere handful of lentils and rice.

She sees only limited potential for her movie to be an indirect part of that movement.

“Films can’t provoke change,” Mehta says. “If you’re lucky they can provoke a dialogue, and with dialogue can come change. I certainly don’t think of myself as an activist. I’m a storyteller.”

A ray of sunshine for writers guild

The spotlight was finally on the writers.

Two weeks before the Academy Awards are bestowed upon hopefuls in all the creative and technical fields, the screenwriting stars of television and film attended a black-tie gala Sunday night at the Century Plaza Hotel for the annual Writers Guild Awards, which are designed to celebrate what host Robert Wuhl described as “writing so good not even a gifted director could hurt it” (a quip Wuhl then pointedly and properly credited to playwright Ira Levin, from “Deathtrap”).

Not televised, the event was appropriately steeped in equal parts solidarity and self-deprecation.

As writer-director-producer Greg Daniels of “The Office” and “The Simpsons” deadpanned, it made him nervous to think of the millions of people who would see this ... at the Writers Guild Shavelson-Webb Library ... over the next 5,000 years.

Other presenters such as J.J. Abrams (“Lost”), Marc Cherry (“Desperate Housewives”), Diana Ossana (“Brokeback Mountain”) and Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) gave out a mixture of awards to television and feature writers.

Steve Carell, who won an episodic comedy award for “The Office,” prompted the biggest laughs and applause when upon reaching the microphone he droned a list of producers, agents and executives who, “ ... had nothing to do with the writing of this episode. I wrote it. None of them helped. Tonight I am here in celebration of me.”

The climactic award of the evening was best original feature screenplay, which went to Michael Arndt’s little-movie-that-could “Little Miss Sunshine.” In an irony lost on no screenwriter in the room, it was the efforts to temper the script’s originality during development that nearly banished Arndt’s quirky road trip story about a family of damaged characters struggling to accept their failures to that bemoaned stack of novel screenplays that never make it into production.

Focus Features, where the screenplay was originally set up and developed, at one point fired Arndt and brought on Steven Conrad (“The Pursuit of Happyness”) to rewrite “Sunshine” in a way that would make the story less ensemble-driven (and therefore easier to cast). Richard, the father, ultimately played by Greg Kinnear, and suicidal Uncle Frank, played by Carell, were the most likely choices to break out as a more definitive protagonist (at one point Robin Williams was interested in the script, so it would have been tailored to whichever of those parts he wanted to play).

The project finally stalled and went into turnaround, until it was saved from oblivion by incoming President of Production John Lyons, who revived Arndt’s original script -- a move favored by several of the producers. The film was eventually financed independently and then sold at Sundance to Fox Searchlight for a festival record $10.5 million in 2006. (There is one sequence left from Conrad’s draft -- Richard’s side trip to see book agent Stan Grossman.)

Arndt alluded to all of this upon winning his WGA award, when he specifically thanked the three producers of the film who were in attendance -- Marc Turtletaub, who financed the film, and early champions Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, who worked closely with Arndt and brought on the directors, Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton. (The Producers Guild of America determined that Yerxa, Berger, Turtletaub, David T. Friendly and Peter Saraf all deserved a credit on the film, but the academy, which limits best picture producers to three, lopped Berger and Yerxa from the list should it win its Oscar nomination for best film.)”They spent five years trying to protect this script from executive notes and studio rewrites,” Arndt said with palpable emotion, while legendary screenwriter Robert Towne (“Chinatown,” “The Last Detail”), who had presented the award, towered nearby. “And then they took a huge gamble on producing the film independently so that it could be shot as it was written. I don’t think any writer in this room got into writing to win awards or even to make a lot of money. The No. 1 thing we want as writers is to see our words, our characters, our images up on screen uncompromised and undiluted. That is the best gift a screenwriter could get.”

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Scriptland is a weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. For tips and comments, e-mail fernandez_jay@hotmail.com.