When Deepa Mehta's Fire premiered in 1996, Hindu fundamentalists attacked cinema halls. They smashed screens. They burned effigies of the director. Their complaint was that the film depicted a lesbian relationship. What the film actually depicted was far more radical: two women in an arranged-marriage household who discover, in each other, the tenderness that their husbands have denied them.
Fire is the first film in Mehta's Elements trilogy, followed by Earth (1998, about Partition) and Water (2005, about widows in colonial India). Together, they form a triptych about women caught in the machinery of history, religion, and patriarchy — and the quiet, stubborn ways they resist.
The Body as Territory
Shekhar Kapur's Bandit Queen (1994) is a harder film. It tells the true story of Phoolan Devi, a low-caste woman from Uttar Pradesh who was gang-raped by upper-caste men, became a bandit, and eventually a Member of Parliament. The film is unflinching in its depiction of sexual violence — not for shock, but because Phoolan's story is incomprehensible without it. Her body was the territory on which caste warfare was conducted.
The film was controversial for its violence and nudity, but also for its politics. Phoolan Devi herself objected to how she was portrayed. Arundhati Roy wrote an essay about it. The debates around Bandit Queen revealed something important: that when a film centres a woman's experience of violence, it becomes a lightning rod for every unresolved argument about caste, gender, and representation.
The Mirror and the Cage
Lipstick Under My Burkha (2016) is a film about four women in Bhopal — a college student, a beautician, a housewife, and a widow — each navigating desire in a society that punishes female pleasure. The film was denied certification by India's Central Board of Film Certification for being "lady-oriented" (an actual term used by the censor board). The director, Alankrita Shrivastava, fought the decision and won.
The film's title is its thesis: under the burkha, under the sari, under the daily performances of respectability, women have interior lives richer and more complicated than the world permits them to show. The burkha is both a literal garment and a metaphor for the layers of surveillance and control that shape women's existence.
An Inheritance
Water (2005) had to be shot in Sri Lanka because Mehta's sets in Varanasi were destroyed by protesters. The film is set in 1938, among a community of widows — some as young as eight — consigned to an ashram for the rest of their lives because Hindu tradition considers them inauspicious. The film follows Chuyia, a child widow, whose arrival at the ashram exposes the cruelty of a system that uses religion to dispose of women.
The film ends with Chuyia being carried to a train station by a follower of Gandhi — a small act of rescue that gestures toward a future in which the widows' ashrams are museum pieces rather than living institutions. That future has not fully arrived. The ashrams still exist.
What runs through these four films is a recognition that the liberation of women cannot be separated from the liberation of anyone else. Caste, class, religion, the state — these are the structures that constrain women most directly, because women's bodies are the site where these structures intersect. To watch these films is to understand that feminism, in this part of the world, has never been a lifestyle choice. It has been a survival strategy.