Peace in Earth is hard to find

A young girl, Lenny, picks up a plate from a set table and deliberately drops it onto the floor. It shatters. She asks her mother, “India is going to be broken. Can you break a country? And what happens if they break it where our house is?”

In an anxious hurry, Lenny gathers all of the dolls in her room. Choosing a rag doll, she persuades her young friend to pull one leg of the doll while she pulls the other. The doll rips almost in two, and she falls to her bed crying with the doll in her arms.

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“Lenny's was an entirely unique perspective. It came from within an impartial community, but was also the point of view of a child, who learnt about love, war, destruction and betrayal within a span of a few months.” Deepa Mehta on the film education website, http://www.filmeducation.org/secondary/Earth/index.html/

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Film critic C. J. S. Wallia dismisses these two scenes in Earth as being “simplistic treatment of a complex history,” arguing that director Deepa “Mehta’s script fails to create dramatic situations that could bring out Lenny Baby’s anguished bewilderment of the tragic events of the partition” (http://www.indiastar.com/wallia22.html). Apparently witnessing a screaming man with his legs each tied to two jeeps as they are driven apart doesn’t quality as bewildering. Couple that macabre display with Lenny’s knowledge of the mutilation and violent death of the Ice Candy Man’s sisters and the riotous violence in the streets, and one can certainly empathize with her reactions. For anyone, let alone an 8-year-old girl, such events would cause distress and complete disillusionment with humanity.

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Lenny Sethi tells the story of Earth, which unfolds during the final days of Britain’s 250-year-old occupation of India and the resulting division of the country into Pakistan and India. Director and screenwriter Deepa Mehta has taken the highly praised novel by Bapsi Sidhwa, Cracking India (originally published as Ice-Candy-Man) (http://www.monsoonmag.com/reviews/i3rev_julie2.html), and made a film which reveals the inexplicable violence, carnage, and brutality that resulted between countrymen when the British arbitrarily “gave” northwestern India to the Muslims.

It focuses on the friendships of a group of men who are held together by Lenny’s nanny, Shanta. They are moths to her light, each enamored to varying degrees by her beauty and magnetism. Lenny is significantly aware of Shanta’s position in the group, as well as her own as a sort of mascot. Representing all religions of India – Hindu, Muslim, Sikh – and various vocations – ice candy, masseur, gardener, zookeeper – this group is initially cohesive, but the bonds begin to wear and tatter as the eminent division of India approaches. “This is not only about Hindus and Muslims,” the ice candy man, Dil Navaz, tells Shanta. “It’s what’s inside us…we are all bastards, all animals. Like the lion in the zoo that Lenny-baby is so scared of. He just lies there, waiting for the cage to open. And when it does, then God help us all.” Then, in Lenny’s presence, Dil asks Shanta to marry him so “the animal that’s within me will be controlled.” Shanta shakes her head, but Lenny replies, “I will marry you ice candy man.”

After the brutal murders of his sisters and Shanta’s refusal, the Ice Candy Man’s lion is released and not even the charm of Shanta nor the admiration and infatuation of Lenny can keep it contained.

Lenny’s youthful point of view and her innocent perspective force us to view the events through impartial eyes. Some of her voyeuristic moments, like when she watches Shanta and Hasan the Masseur making love, border on creepy and irritating, but it is also the ultimate turning point for Dil, a voyeur himself, and his resolve to allow the lion to strike. His final act of betrayal of both Shanta and Lenny is shocking and anticipated at the same time.

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I view Mehta as a film-making maverick, stepping outside the strict realm of Bollywood to create cinema that explores real world aspects of living in India, especially for females. While Earth is not explicitly a film about women in India, it does explore their treatment, even in areas where they appear to have more autonomy. Consider the mutilation and murder of women on the train from Gurdaspur City, their breasts removed and found collected in four sacks; or Shanta’s probable rape as she is carried away by angry men; or the mention of the desecration of women on all sides of the conflict. Finally, there is the subplot of Lenny’s young friend, Papoo, who is forced into an arranged marriage to a man old enough to be her grandfather. Mehta develops this storyline extensively in Water, the last in her film trilogy: Fire, Earth, Water. An 8-year-old girl becomes a widow when her elderly husband dies, and is taken to a home for widows where she must live the rest of her life. In another look at the injustices towards women, Mehta brings Hindu deity into modern India as two sisters-in-law find comfort in each other when their traditional marriages – ones in which their husbands never display any gesture of love - bring them frustration and sadness. Since these women ultimately develop a sexual relationship, real time, real life Hindus were really pissed off about this film. On more than one level, Fire consumed some of its players and many members of its audience.

For an interview with Deepa Mehta about Earth, click here: http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/aug1999/meh-a06.shtml