Global warning | 30 June 2007

At my time of life, and in my circumstances, I ought to be calm and unruffled. I should be like a saddhu in a Himalayan cave, whose pulse rate no merely external event in the world of appearance can raise. Instead, whenever I read the Guardian (which is often), a wave of irritation comes over me like a Jacksonian fit, the epileptic seizure that starts with a twitch in the toe and ends in a generalised convulsion.

The other day, for example, I was reading an article about an Indian film just released called Water. It is about the doleful fate of poor widows in India, and apparently the film achieved the highest of all artistic goals, the breaking of a taboo. The writer of the article interviewed the director, Deepa Mehta, and described the difficulty she had in making the film: ‘In 2000, just a few days after filming began in Varanasi …a howling mob of 15,000 turned up. Indignation quickly turned to violent protest. Death threats were issued; there was an attempted suicide. The main set was burned down and the print seized and destroyed. In the can were just five minutes of film.’

The author then lets the director take up the story: ‘It was a dark time for India,’ [she said]. ‘Paintings were being banned and history books were being rewritten. I tried to talk to the protesters and reason with them, but it was pretty obvious that they had their own agenda about projecting themselves as the protector of the faith, in a way that is no different from Christian fundamentalists in the West.’

Is ‘Christian’ quite the word she is looking for here? I am myself no great admirer of certain forms of Christianity, but it is some time since rampaging mobs of fundamentalist Christians have sought to curtail artistic licence by means of violence.