Freedom watered down

JANUARY 31: Deepa Mehta's talent for filmmaking may be questionable but it does not detract from the condemnation the attack on her sets a...

JANUARY 31: Deepa Mehta8217;s talent for filmmaking may be questionable but it does not detract from the condemnation the attack on her sets at Varanasi deserves. As a foreign filmmaker, she had obtained the necessary permission from the central government to shoot her film Water in India. As was customary, an official of the government was even attached to the film crew to ensure that there was no deviation from the script cleared by the government.

But all this did not prevent the newly-formed Kashi Sanskriti Raksha Sangharsh Samiti, led by three senior BJP leaders including a party legislator, from descending on the sets of Water and causing destruction. Not only that, threats are held out that shooting of the film in Varanasi or anywhere in India would not be allowed. It is a clear defiance of the law of the land and it calls for stringent action against the arsonists.

At this juncture, arguments aga-inst the quality of the film and the subject chosen are not germane to the issue of whether a group ofpeople, ho-wever politically well-connected they may be, can be allowed to function as the unofficial culture police of the country. It was for this very reason that the Shiv Sainiks8217; action in disrupting the show of her earlier film Fire in Delhi and elsewhere evoked widespread condemnation.

At the root of the problem is the artist8217;s right to expression. That when Pakistan refused permission to shoot her film Earth in Lahore, its natural locale, she did not have any problem in creating a Lahore8217; in Delhi and shoot her film tells a story of its own. In the end, Earth did not set the Sindhu on fire, leaving egg on the face of the Pakistani establishment which refused her permission. Similarly, Fire would have flopped at the box office if the dozen or so Shiv Sainiks had not struck, giving the film a new lease of life.

These incidents also brought to the fore a new trend whereby the threat that such attacks on the artist8217;s freedom of expression is overlooked by harping on other secondary issues. Thus whenplaywright Antony8217;s Kristuvinte Aram Thirumurivu The Sixth Sacred Wound of Christ was under attack from the orthodox Christians in Kerala, like Tasleema Nasreen8217;s Lajja in Bangladesh and M.F. Husain8217;s nude drawing of Goddess Saraswati in Mumbai and Baroda, there was quibbling over the artistic and literary merits of these works, when the issue was the violence against the people concerned.

The argument that filming destitute widows in Varanasi would cause disrepute to the country or Hinduism is as ancient as the charge that Satyajit Ray8217;s Pather Panchali affected the prestige of the country as it depicted poverty. At a time when TV channels, Indian and foreign, beam incidents as weird as the suicide pact of three sisters whose parents could not marry them off incidents from the heart of the country into drawing rooms all over the world, why should anyone be concerned about a mediocre filmproducer choosing a subject as hackneyed as the widows of Varanasi? Let no one deny Deepa Mehta her right to producea film, for India is not a fundamentalist nation which feels threatened by such artistic ventures. The right place for the self-appointed culture police is behind bars.