Deepa Mehta's Fire, movie review

Daring, bold and unequivocally explicit; the movie Fire successfully ventilates issues of a largely passive Indian society that would rather let ‘taboo’ stay ‘taboo’. Several issues, ingrained in Hindu culture and innate to Indian society, such as ‘male chauvinism’ and ‘inequitable religious dogmas’ are broached and subsequently questioned in this movie. In doing so, the director uses a middle-class, joint-family setting where two wives, partly victimized by Indian tradition and partly by circumstance, find union between each other as the only outlet to their oppression and loneliness.

The two subjugated wives, Radha and Sita, are shown to be alienated from their traditional role as wives. This process is greatly catalyzed by their husbands’ neglect of their wives’ basic human needs: Radha’s husband Ashok joins a religious cult and embraces celibacy in frustration of Radha’s inability to conceive, accentuating his belief that all desire is evil and that copulation is meant only for procreation; on the other hand, Sita’s husband Jatin ‘openly’ extends his love affair with another woman even after his marriage with Sita. In the end, Sita and Radha loose the battle against tradition. The movie therefore ends with a new beginning - as the two wives are forced to leave their home and find refuge elsewhere.

A movie threatening age old customs and the status quo between husbands and wives was reason enough to stir up resistance in parts of India. The voice against Fire - condemned as a fabrication of Indian society - was most audible in the Indian state of Maharashtra, where Shiv Sena was the ruling party. This party finds most of its support from a Hindu nationalist faction within the Indian populace and is therefore ideologically based on fundamentalism, portraying the conflict as religiously unacceptable before viewing it as a threat to Indian society. The director of Fire, Deepa Mehta argues that the Shiv Sena party functions in a manner that is conducive only towards gaining greater political support; they target the illiterate masses, those easily espoused into religious extremism. Hence, the smooth running of Fire in cinemas and its possible ‘liberating’ effect on the Indian people - which would obviously weaken support for the Shiv Sena party - is what threatened the party and instigated a protest.

Soon after its protest against Fire, in 1999, the Shiv Sena party vandalized a cricket pitch in Delhi to prevent a cricket match between India and Pakistan. Shiv Sena translates to Army of Shiva, referring to Shivaji - founder of the Maratha Empire and hero to many Maharashtrians today. The party’s name, ‘Army of Shiva’ speaks for its conspicuous tilt towards using force as a means to voice its concerns, and its apparent commitment towards Hindutva.
Shiv Sena is one of many Hindu nationalist parties in India today that derive their ideology from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the first party of its kind, formed in Maharashtra in 1925. Hindu nationalist parties have often been crtiscized as Indian fascists in the media and although Fire’s release sparked agression seven years ago, the threat to Indian democracy from Hindu nationalism is glaringly evident even today.