This month, Deepa Mehta’s Water has been seen by audiences in Canada, England, Thailand and even in Pakistan. A privileged few have seen the film in India, at special screenings; it isn’t certain when Water will be released in Indian theatres.

Six years ago, Mehta’s crew was forced to stop filming in Varanasi. Mehta’s daughter Devyani Saltzmann was working with her mother as an assistant camera person; in a sensitive and candid memoir of that time, Shooting Water, she recounts what happened. Deepa Mehta was a prime target; her film Fire had been picketed. Screenings were disrupted by mobs, apparently protesting the depiction of a lesbian relationship between two “good” Indian women.

Water is set in a widows’ ashram in the Varanasi of the 1930s, and brings together three women ? an older, bitter widow, played by Seema Biswas, a young woman struggling to adapt to the harsh rules of widowhood, played by Lisa Ray, and a child widow, played by a young Sri Lankan girl, Sarala. Mehta was accused of plagiarising the story from Sunil Gangopadhyay’s Those Days. Bapsi Sidhwa defended her: “Of the scores of characters that fill (Gangopadhyay’s) book, there is one widow who commits suicide in the Ganga. The film script has a widow who also commits suicide; but surely Gangopadhyay does not have a patent on characters who commit suicide in the Ganga.”

It wasn’t plagiarism accusations that forced Mehta to delay the making of the film, change actors (Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das were originally in the lead roles) and shift shooting to Sri Lanka. It was the force of the protests from Hindutva groups.

The protests were clearly stage-managed. The women who initially picketed the hotel where Mehta and the crew were staying were from the woman’s wing of the organisation, the impassioned “devotee” who threatened to kill himself because Water was desecrating the holiness of Varanasi turned out to be a professional “suicider”, available on hire.

All the attention at the time was focused sharply on Mehta and her motives. A few people pointed out that the subject matter of the film ?the deliberate discarding and oppression of widows in the name of religion ?was accurate. But what was called into question was not the way we saw widows; there were few debates over whether the attitude to widowhood, to women thrust outside the “protection” of marriage had changed. The argument was all about Deepa Mehta; why was she making this film, was it true that she was casting aspersions on the chastity of the pure Hindu widow?

I hope Water will be screened, again and again, in India. Not because I’m a fan of Deepa Mehta’s work, but because the story she chose to tell, about women who are systematically exploited in the name of religion, who are forced into silence, is a story that continues in the present, and that we would prefer to believe belongs to the past. The debate over Deepa Mehta has, one hopes, finally died down; perhaps it’s time to look at the debate she wanted Water to provoke.