I've started watching films in Hindi to get a better sense of the spoken language, and this morning I came across a film called "Water." The film told the story of a nine-year-old widow, who was forced to live with a group of widows in a sort of convent. The group was essentially untouchable to the rest of society, begging on the streets, without hope of leaving (until they discover halfway through the film that a law has just been passed encouraging remarriage) and prohibited from coming in contact with certain others. Juxtaposed with this group is a wealthy young lawyer who falls in love with one of the widows. She has been forced into prostitution (which he doesn't know), and when others come in contact with her, they wash themselves, feeling contaminated by her presence. The two fall in love and grow attached to the nine-year-old, and while things take a dramatic turn for the worse by the end of the film, a great deal is said about relationships between members of different classes and genders.
The plot is notably dramatic, almost a caricature of a Hindi film, but the relationships seemed nuanced in ways that English subtitles could not accurately capture. For instance, when the nine-year-old widow, Chariya, first meets Naryan, the lawyer, he uses the informal address (tum) when he speaks to her. Chariya's age and class would suggest that she should use the formal means of address (aap), but she uses tum when she responds. This shows both her naivete, and potentially foreshadows the intimate friendship that develops between the two. Further, When Naryan meets Kilyani, the widow he falls in love with, the two use aap to address each other, even though young Chariya is using tum with both. That Naryan should even be speaking to the two widows goes completely against social mores of the time, but as the director was Canadian, and set the film during the rise of Gandhi's movement, the theme seems to be that things are slowly changing, and that Naryan is realizing the absurdity of the class system.
Even though Naryan holds progressive views during the film, his higher status is evident. Men and members of the upper-class are the only ones who use English phrases (Naryan even quotes Shakespeare)--and Kilyani cannot even read, speaking only Hindi with the other widows. Thus, English was infiltrating upper-class parlance at the time of the film's setting, showing that it was an elite privilege, but suggesting that it may also spread to other groups.
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