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Shooting Water
by Devyani Saltzman
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Our Price Rs. 295.00
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*USD 6.32
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Shooting Water came into being after I arrived back from working on the set of Water in Sri Lanka, 2004. I always wanted to write creative non-fiction and was inspired by Philip Gourevitch’s book on the Rwandan Genocide. Gourevitch had been a staff writer at the New Yorker at the time, and he managed to infuse an intense political subject with humanity. That inspired me.
Water – which is about Hindu widows in India in 1938 – was shutdown while we tried filming in Varanasi in1999. Finally when the shooting of the film was revived four years later in Sri Lanka, I thought this was a powerful story, which needs to be told. The international press had covered the shutdown, but nobody had gone into depth about Hindutva and the experience of filmmaking. I was on the ground both in India and Sri Lanka, and I realized that this was the perfect line for a memoir. I also knew that the real backbone of the book was going to be my own emotional story of reconnecting with my mother, and growing up as a child of divorced parents. In a way, I think it’s the mother-daughter experience, which proves to be the universal aspect that readers can connect to.
I went away to write Shooting Water and rented a small apartment in a city I had never visited. The lack of distraction and the freshness of place, allowed me to search into my memory and recreate the four years. I worked from news clippings, interviews and some diary entries. The challenge was to balance the political, personal, and cinematic aspects of the story.
The book was first published in Canada, and came out with Penguin in India a few months later. In 2006, I was very happy to do a reading at Oxford Bookstore, New Delhi especially since the film had not yet been distributed in India. The fact that the film had still not been screened for the public in the country it portrayed continued to disturb me. And as I move forward with writing, I realize I’m attracted to subject matter, which involve an aspect of social justice. Although my parents work in the medium of film, their work (from Fire to my father’s involvement in the civil rights movement in Mississippi) also reflects this attraction. It rubbed off.
My next book is fiction, and focuses on a young woman civilian peacekeeper. I’ve always been fascinated by the motives of people who go into conflict situations that are not their own. I want to examine the grey area of what leads someone to make that choice. In between Shooting Water and the novel, I like to write shorter articles and essays. They keep me out in the world and in practice. Recently I’ve written for The Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, and Marie Claire India. The piece I’ve most enjoyed working on of late is a short story on nannies and domestic caregivers, which will appear in an anthology of new Toronto writing this spring.
Spanning three continents and four countries, Shooting Water is a remarkable story of love and redemption.
In February 2000, Devyani Saltzman, daughter of international award-winning film-maker Deepa Mehta, travelled to Benares to work with her mother on Water, the final film of the Elements Trilogy after Fire and Earth. Since her parents’ divorce when she was eleven years old, Devyani had spent her life navigating between two religions, two traditions, two cultures, and two people belonging to both and to neither at once. Water would be mother and daughter’s second chance.
But after only a week of shooting, the film about the oppression of Hindu widows became the target of a series of politically motivated attacks by Hindu fundamentalists. Protestors destroyed the sets, burned effigies of Deepa, and made threats on her life. Water was shut down. What began as a journey to heal deep wounds from the past turned into a five-year odyssey to complete a film. (As it turned out, the odyssey would end with Salman Rushdie proclaiming Water a ‘magnificent film’.)
Transformative and inspiring, Devyani’s remarkable story chronicles her life-changing experience in India, the struggle to produce a film, and, through that struggle, the emergence of a deeper love between mother and daughter.
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Devyani Saltzman was born in Toronto, Canada. She received a degree in Human Sciences at Oxford University. She works as a photojournalist and freelance writer. |
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