Deepa Mehta’s Fire
This article was first published in the print edition of Manushi Journal. (Issue-109, Nov-Dec 1998)
Now that the heat generated by Fire has cooled down and the Shiv Sena’s antics have backfired on them, it is time to take stock of the film. Had I said one critical word about it while the controversy was raging, I might have been damned forever as a Hindu fundamentalist. Now that I have already passed my agnipariksha by defending, in public, the right of Deepa Mehta to screen such a film in India without threat of violence from the lunatic guardians of Hindu morality, I want to take the debate beyond the issue of censorship.
If I had seen Deepa Mehta’s Fire without first being subjected to the whole barrage of propaganda hype surrounding it, I would have simply dismissed it as a naive and boring film about two unhappy housewives compelled to seek emotional and sexual satisfaction from each other because their husbands provide none. The film depicts the growing friendship and eventual sexual intimacy between Radha and Sita, married to two brothers who are living in a joint family. The laboured attempt to exploit the lesbian aspects of the Radha-Sita relationship to the neglect of other aspects of their lives is both immature and schematic, indicating that the director lacks an understanding of family life and emotional bonds in India…