I love watching movies. I have seen thousands of movies in my life. However, I would have hardly thought about their issues once they ended. Therefore, seeing a movie like “Fire” by Deepa Mehta was no different when I saw it for the first time a few years ago.
A few days ago, I decided to do my blog assignment on “Fire” because I knew that it challenged the traditional Indian culture and a patriarchal society and so it would be a good topic for a women and gender studies course. On top of everything, I knew for a fact that this movie had been a very controversial movie back in 1996, which also happened to upset many political parties. I thought there must be something that the audience did not like and opposed instead of being passive recipients like me (Hall 103) and so I decided to watch it again.
As I was watching “Fire” the second time keeping in mind the course content, I realized the truth; the truth that upset the traditional male patriarchal society of India. The fact that two women decide to leave their husbands because they find support and attraction in each other is that truth which pricked the Indian male audience, who then decided to oppose the issue completely. It was probably fear that kept male audience from seeing the empowerment issue behind Deepa Mehta’s movie. The fear was of women gaining control over their bodies, their choices, and their relationships. The fear then lead politic parties, such as the religious political party of Shiv Sena, to destroy theatres playing “Fire”, threaten its filmmakers, threaten its actors, and so on (Levitin et al. 280).
In order to further discuss the movie “Fire” in light of Indian traditions and patriarchy, it is important to give a brief synopsis of it. “Fire” is definitely about 2 lesbians. However, lesbianism is not the issue of it as I see it. Lesbianism is just a form that Deepa Mehta tries to tackle in order to encode the hidden women subordination and exploitation, as it is present in the Indian society (Chakrapani 94). In addition, such issues of women are not only limited to the Indian audience but they demand wide international appeal since it shows women’s empowerment and challenge to the opposite dominant sex. It shows the success of those women who are neglected by their husbands or even exploited in terms of sexual desires. For example, Radha, who is the eldest of the lesbian couple, has not experienced sex in years because her husband has decided to follow sexual abstinence. Sita, sister-in-law and lover of Radha, on the other hand, has a husband involved in an extra marital affair and who married Sita due to pressure from his society to marry a traditional innocent Indian girl. Sita’s husband visits her at night only for sexual intercourse; otherwise, he does not provide Sita any emotional love or support. Therefore, out of frustration, the two women, Radha and Sita, find both love and sexual support in each other and decide to run away from their present lives of degradation in the hands of their selfish husbands.
Deepa Mehta encoded women empowerment in “Fire” at several instances. For example, kitchen is normal a site of oppression and women’s sacrifice for their family. However, Radha and Sita make kitchen their site of love, which further made the male audience uncomfortable in their positions. Deepa Mehta also encodes the silent traditional society through the character of Radha and Sita’s mother-in-law, called as Biji. Biji is unable to walk or talk due to her old age. She is silent and helpless, while she carefully notices everything going around in the household. For example, she cannot react to her servant’s masturbation in front of her. She is helpless as a symbol of the Indian society, which only goes with the flow of its people’s behaviours and actions. Therefore, Deepa Mehta’s character Sita is the form of hope for society as modern and in opposing light of Biji.
Due to the sexualized nature of the movie, there are definitely some sexual scenes between the two lovers. This is what Shiv Sena argued that the lesbian sexual encounters are not part of the Indian culture because "if women's physical needs are fulfilled through lesbian acts, the institution of marriage will collapse and the reproduction of human beings will stop,” and this is how they decide to justify their aggression over female challenging the male (McAllister par. 5). In reality, Shiv Sena meant that a lesbianism movie is unacceptable because it strengthens or provides an opportunity to innocent Indian women against male patriarchy and the notion of hetero-normative families. Shiv Sena, and such parties, tried to stop the encoded message of Deepa Mehta to be reached to the audience in fear that it may be decoded and accepted by their Indian women.
The message of the movie is idealized in the childhood picture of Radha that appears at the very beginning of the movie. The movie opens to an idealized image of Radha’s family that includes her father, mother, and herself. The scene shows Radha’s mother narrating a story to her daughter in which she tells that a tribe had never seen a sea because of which they were sad but tells that there is no reason to be sad as they could still see the sea without looking. This is extremely significant in Deepa Mehta’s career of filmmaking as it actually narrates the purpose of all Deepa Mehta’s movies for her audience. She stresses upon the capability of “seeing” by which one can discover the true self and choose to live accordingly no matter how much struggle it requires. “Fire” is, therefore, the demand for women’s choice to a life lived by own rules and desires. However, this is not how the male political audience of Fire perceives it. This can be explained in terms of Stuart Hall as “the degrees of symmetry” (94). The distortion of Mehta’s message is due to the difference between objectives and knowledge shared by Shiv Sena, and male patriarch, against women. Hall mentions, “the dog in the film can bark but it cannot bite!” (94). Similarly, the lesbians in the film are not real, neither do the couples of Radha and her husband or Sita and her husband aim to reproduce children, but the message aimed through the story barked the bark which Shiv Sena and other oppositions tried to shut (BBC News).
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| Goddess Sita proving her innocence to God Ram in a scene in "Fire" |
Deepa Mehta has proven to be a director who spreads her message by fighting against the negative publicity, which could affect her career adversely (Levitin et al. 281). The reason behind all controversies surrounding “Fire” is the moral standards of traditional Indian culture, which are centered on a woman’s full submission to her husband of both body and choice, as seen in ancient Hindu scripture in which Sita walked over burning fire to prove her faithfulness towards her husband, God Ram. However, “Fire” challenges this relationship of husband and wife because of the ideologies held by Mehta as seen in the “seeing” analogy of a tribe’s desire to see. The Indian morals tried to limit the decoding process of Deepa Mehta’s film “Fire.” At the end of the day, “Fire” became a successful and critically acclaimed film because parties as Shiv Sena could not stop its screenings nationally and internationally, neither could they stop the appreciation of film’s audience, both male and female, since Mehta reached audience beyond India and gained a reputation there although Mehta said in an interview that “I didn't make Fire for the section of audience who can't understand the film and just talk about sex; there are audiences in India who will understand Fire. India is not a monolithic society. Fire is about choices, the choices we make in life, which may lead to alienation. By the bisexuality theme in the film, i have just shown an extreme choice" (Rediff).
"Curiosity is what motivates me generally, curiosity about the oppression of women in particular." -Deepa Mehta
References
Chakrapani, S., and S. Vijaya Kumar. Changing Status and Role of Women in Indian Society. New Delhi: M D Publications PVT. LTD., 1994. Print.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding, Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: Routledge, 1980. 128–138.
Levitin, Jacqueline, Raoul Valerie, and Judith Plessis. Filmmakers: Refocusing. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2003. Print.
McAllister, Ashley. Bitchmedia. 24 May. 2010. Web. 2 Aug 2011. <http://bitchmagazine.org/post/adventures-in-feministory-deepa-mehta>
“Shooting of Indian Film Banned.” BBC News 7 February 2000. South Asia. 2 Aug. 2011 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/634324.stm>
Verma, Suparn. Rediff. 4 Oct. 1997. Web. 2 Aug 2011. <http://www.rediff.com/entertai/oct/24deep.htm>
