Visual Culture and The Subject Formation in Deepa Mehta’s Water

Abstract

Visual culture investigates how the culture is expressed in visual images and analyses the influence it creates among the spectators who watch them. As it has no fixed boundary it generally overlaps with the other academic areas such as film studies, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, media studies etc. It is about the formation of the images which often build up complex relationships in the psychological arena of the spectator. The film Water is directed by the Indo-Canadian filmmaker, Deepa Mehta who unfolds the ethnicity of the East in a diasporic perspective and plunges into the cultural significations of the homeland culture. Being a South Asian Diaspora, Mehta examines the validity of the regressive ideologies of the Hindu laws in the psychoanalytical context of the subject Kalyani who explores the crucial Symbolic order for accomplishing identity. The last film of Mehta’s elements trilogy (Fire and Earth are the other two films), Water analyses the articulation of cultural significations in visual culture through the representations of the voiceless widows who inhabit the ashram at Varanasi.