DEEPA Mehta, the Indian-born writer and film director, vividly remembers what it was like to receive death threats and be burned in effigy. "Your throat's always dry," she says not altogether coolly, even six years after the fact. "Your fists are always clenched, and your teeth are clenched, because your body's getting ready to fight something.
"
What Mehta was fighting in the holy city of Varanasi were Hindu fundamentalists who thought that her film Water - which Mehta and her crew had barely begun to shoot on the stone steps into the Ganges - would surely insult their faith.
The movie, set in 1938 India with Gandhi's independence movement on the rise, depicts the harsh existence of widows isolated in ashrams (a Hindu hermitage). In Mehta's beautifully fluid but hardly tranquil story, the central widow, Chuyia, is only eight.
The child bride fights against the tradition into which she is being immersed for the rest of her life, a tradition that dictates that when a woman's husband dies, half of her dies as well.
Thus the widows - those who aren't immolated on their husbands' funeral pyres or married to a brother of the deceased - live in the austere ashrams, awaiting the purification of death. And some, like the lovely young woman played by Lisa Ray in Water, are exploited as prostitutes to help relieve the incredible poverty there.
"One meal a day," says Mehta, 55, who spent months researching widows' houses before writing her script. "One piece of cloth, begging, singing hymns for eight hours at a stretch."
Mehta had been through a public ordeal with Fire, the first movie in her "trilogy of elements'.
' Fire, which involved two women who gradually develop a lesbian relationship, inflamed Hindu fundamentalists. Protesters trashed cinemas when the film opened in 1997. Yet Mehta's next instalment in the trilogy, Earth, was thoroughly embraced by her native country.
Based on Bapsi Sidhwa's Cracking India, the film chronicles the ethnic violence that emerged during the 1947 partition of India that created Pakistan. That movie was so highly regarded that India - which has the busiest film industry in the world - submitted Earth as its entry in the Oscar race. "I'm telling you," Mehta says with a deep, smoky laugh, "India's very confusing.
"
So, naturally, she felt she'd at least be able to shoot Water on the Ganges, in Hindi. "Of course," she says, "it was four years later. In between, Earth had happened, I'd been celebrated for Earth, and if Fire had its detractors, it also had its supporters.
"
Mehta adds that the officials in India, where scripts are vetted by censors before shooting begins, "knew exactly what the subject matter was. They said, 'It's about time. India's becoming a powerful economic force, and this is the time we can actually look at ourselves.
'" Then Mehta - whose standby saying is a stoical "Who knows?" - shrugs. "No clue.
Walked right into it."
"The worst experience of my life," says producer David Hamilton, more dramatically. Hamilton tells of 100 media people in the hotel lobby every morning, with guards outside the rooms.
He didn't trust the guards. "Even though they were guarding us," he says, "when we tried to go to the set, they'd stop us." It was a paradox; the script had been greenlit by one arm of the government, but the shoot was being vigorously disrupted by another.
The controlled mayhem and misinformation on the street were something; word would spread that 10,000 people were rioting, but, in fact, only a small crowd would be burning Mehta in effigy.
"Not that that's not a horrific thing," says Hamilton, who has shared a hard-to-define personal relationship with Mehta since he produced Fire. (They recently bought a farm together outside Toronto, and, as for what that means, Hamilton lightly cracks, "Have you got a chapter or two to write on this?
'') "But it didn't seem to be a particular danger to our set."
Then came a protest via "suicide attempt," with the authorities warning Mehta and Hamilton that all bets were off if the hysterical man plunging into the river drowned. The attempt was a hoax, but cast and crew were duly rattled.
Hamilton says his fear peaked when people tried to make calls from the set and their mobile phones were dead. That suggested to Hamilton that there was formidable authority behind the high jinks.
There was more - a Jeep was blown up on their final night in Varanasi, and authorities tried to arrest Mehta at the airport.
But Hamilton paints a much more harried picture than Mehta does. "After that first day," she says with dismissive disdain, "it became what it was, which was a farce." But the anti-Water siege took its toll, and the two of them were physically unwell - he on the floor with back problems, she with hands that wouldn't stop twitching - for some time after they got home to Toronto.
Mehta hardly seems the provocative type. She has lived in the peaceable Great White North since marrying Toronto-born filmmaker Paul Saltzman in 1973. (They broke up when Mehta's first feature, Sam and Me, was being screened at Cannes in 1991.
) "She's a very straightforward, frank, transparent person," says Lisa Ray, who starred in Mehta's 2002 Canadian spoof Bollywood/Hollywood before appearing in Water.
The diminutive Mehta answers questions about everything from the film protests to her thorny divorce with languid gestures and composed aplomb. "For her, it's about stories," says daughter Devyani Saltzman, 26, who fused the politics of the Water troubles and her own reconciliation with her mother in a clear-eyed memoir, Shooting Water.
Fire, in fact, is much less about lesbianism in India than about the unhappy, duty-bound role any wife might be forced to play. "It came out of my marriage in Toronto,'' Mehta says. And Earth, partly triggered by the ethnic violence in Bosnia and Rwanda, was originally meant to be her mother's tale of the Indian partition.
But Mehta has a documentarian's eye, too - she has also made a film about domestic violence, Let's Talk About It. She was born into movies, having grown up the daughter of a film exhibitor and distributor in Amritsar. Films were the thing to do after school, and Sunday mornings were a ritual of dressing up for the weekly foreign movie - Ben-Hur, or something from Ozu or Bergman or Kurosawa.
"A church of cinema," Mehta says.
Less divine were the mood swings that came with the Monday morning box-office reports. "Which felt to me quite insane," Mehta says.
"If a film did well, we were rich, and if it didn't do well, we couldn't afford certain things...
I decided I didn't want to have anything to do with a profession that has that great sense of uncertainty."
So she took a university degree in Hindu philosophy. A long-time smoker, she reports this with a particularly husky laugh.
After graduation, she landed a job helping on documentaries, learning the basics - second camera, editing, sound. When the outfit she was working for dissolved, she dabbled in journalism and met Paul Saltzman, who was in India making a documentary. They married and she moved to Canada without quite realising what she was doing.
"I think that's the naïvete of youth," she says. "You think sure, I'll go back and forth, which I managed to do. But, of course, I left India.
''
Personally and professionally, she was in for a rough time. Mehta and Saltzman turned out to be more different than they'd thought, and the divorce was unpleasant. "Are there divorces that aren't?
'" asks Devyani Saltzman, whose choice to live with her father caused years of pain for mother and daughter.
Mehta's career was a mess. She shot an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles in India and was hired in Canada to direct Camilla with Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.
When Camilla bombed, she seemed to be bottoming out. Although she wanted to go home to India, "that's when I couldn't," she says. "I would have lost Devyani.
"
So she stayed in Canada, saw her daughter when the custody agreement said she could, and laid everything on the line with Fire. "I wrote my own script," she says. "I said: 'I don't know, maybe I'm a lousy filmmaker.
But I'll never know until I do something that's my own.'"
She quickly developed the idea of a trilogy, and Mehta unconsciously articulates a thematic link while describing the fate of the widows in Water: "That's what happens when religion and moral codes of instruction sort of mesh. And then to take them out from people's psyches is a long and tedious process.
''
Mehta would have completed the trilogy in fairly rapid succession but for the Water shutdown.
After the film crew left India, Mehta soothed her nerves by making Bollywood/Hollywood, a subversive lark with campy Bollywood-style singing and dancing. Synthetic and suburban (it's set in modern Toronto), it doesn't feel like Mehta playing to the earthy dramatic strengths she displays in the trilogy.
"It was great," she says of the upbeat shoot. "It was life-affirming." A necessary purge, perhaps, before her next film.
• Water is in selected cinemas from 1 June.
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