LOS ANGELES: “Nobody should be a stranger to love,” Mahatma Gandhi once said. For writer-director Deepa Mehta, the Indian independence leader’s mournful sentiment imbued a seven-year professional journey — the making of her latest film, “Water” — with solemn purpose.

In 1996, Mehta (“Fire,” “Bollywood/Hollywood”) was walking through the Hindu holy city of Varanasi in northern India when she came upon a frail 80-year-old woman blindly looking for her lost glasses along the banks of the Ganges. Upon escorting the woman, Gyanvati, back to her home, Mehta stumbled onto a hidden world she had heard about but never witnessed: ashrams where Hindu widows, dressed in plain white saris and with shaved heads, are sent to live the rest of their lives in economic, familial and romantic deprivation following their husbands’ deaths.

“My heart sank,” Mehta says.

A few years later, as Mehta again stood above the Ganges in Varanasi on the second day of filming “Water,” she found herself facing 12,000 angry Hindu fundamentalist protesters chanting “Death to ‘Water!’ Death to Deepa!!” In the midst of the riot, her sets were burned, destroyed and pushed into the river because of the alleged blasphemies of her screenplay, in which she dared to build a narrative around the despondent residents — ages eight to 80 — of one of these holy “widow houses.”

A best foreign language film Oscar nominee (Canada’s entry), “Water” follows a rebellious girl of eight who is widowed and sent to an ashram in Varanasi in 1938, just as Gandhi’s civil disobedience liberation movement is gaining power. There, the child encounters the longtime inhabitants of the widow house, including a pretty young woman named Kalyani who is prostituted to high-caste men across the river and who falls in love with a budding social revolutionary named Narayan (a sacrilege since widows who remarry cannot go to heaven).

Mehta’s tragic and moving film is full of images both beautiful and sad, and she ultimately weaves a thread of hope into the misery.

“For me, screenplays are all about details,” Mehta says. “So I write everything, and then I slash 90 per cent of the dialogue and see how I can use cinematic details to convey the words. So the story is paramount and the situation is paramount, but whenever I can avoid people talking to me, especially when you’re touching on subjects that are hairy and don’t sound real if people say them, it’s much better to show it.”

Before filming began, fundamentalists got their hands on ten pages of Mehta’s script and stirred up a mob by rewriting them and circulating thousands of copies. In a fascinating cultural twist, the detractors had not objected to Kalyani’s prostitution — as well-known as this practice was, it was not likely to anger anyone. Instead, they changed the script to make Kalyani the high-caste Brahmin and Narayan a low-caste. This forbidden love, Mehta says, was what made her script seem incendiary. (Once her sets were demolished, Mehta spent four years refinancing a smaller, secret production in Sri Lanka with new actors and a dummy title, “Full Moon.”)

“It’s about the choices that we make — the choices between our conscience and our faith,” Mehta says. “This is a question as a human being that really has always intrigued me, coming from the country that I do, where religion plays such a strong part — whether it’s Islam or Hinduism…. Fundamentalism — any kind of fundamentalism — has become such a force in our lives, that you have to stop and say, ‘Do we listen to this force? What does my conscience say?’ “

Mehta sees a kindred filmmaking in similarly controversial films such as Peter Mullan’s “The Magdalene Sisters,” about Irish women forced into cheap labour in Catholic laundries, and Phillip Noyce’s “Rabbit-Proof Fence,” about the “stolen generations” of mixed-race Australian children.

Mehta herself was exposed to the practice of isolating women in widow houses, and the Hindu laws in the Manusmriti holy texts that sanction it, only through the literature and philosophy she read at college during her upbringing in New Delhi. (She now divides her time between there and Toronto.) To research the cloistered world of “Water,” Mehta spent six months studying books such as “Perpetual Mourning: Widowhood in Rural India” by Martha Alter Chen, speaking to and observing widows, and traveling to ashrams around the country.

The widow houses are still very much alive, but Mehta remains hopeful now that activists are teaching the widows skills that will liberate them from economically dependent and degraded lives that reduce them to begging, prostitution and, in some cases, chanting hymns for eight hours in order to earn a mere handful of lentils and rice.—Dawn/The Los Angeles Times News Service