Married to Barbaric Custom (The New York Post)
The Hindi-language film Water by director Deepa Mehta, released this week in New York, exposes the custom of child marriage and the traditional treatment of widows as outcastes. Though it's set during the rise of the Independence struggle in the 1930s, these practices are still prevalent, particularly (but not only) in rural areas--see links below. We don't usually offer links to the right-wing New York Post, but their critical review (see link above) happens to get the politics just about right.
See also:
The film's initial production in India was called off in 2000 in the face of government harrassment and attacks by Hindu-right thugs. It was finally made in Sri Lanka after a long delay. Read this excellent first-person account of the thwarted shoot: The Politics of Deepa Mehta's Water (Bright Lights Film Journal, April 2000).
And see:
Indian widows focus on devotion, fatalism (The Mercury News [San Jose], April 2, 2006)
A Young Woman Says 'No' to Rural India's Child-Marriage Tradition (The Washington Post, September 5, 2005)
India Child-Marriage Laws Ignored (CBS News, May 13, 2005)
Poignant writings on widowhood in Hindu society (The Tribune [Chandigarh, India]), September 29, 2002)
India's neglected widows (BBC, February 2, 2002)
Though Illegal, Child Marriage Is Popular in Part of India (The New York Times, May 11, 1998)
India's widows live out sentence of shame, poverty (CNN, November 6, 1997)
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