Deepa Mehta, the director and scriptwriter of the opening-night gala presentation at the Toronto International Film Festival, is back in hot water because of lawsuits over her latest and famously troubled film, Water.

According to media outlets, the High Court in New Delhi has issued a summons for the Canadian-Indian director to appear there on Nov. 8 for cross-examination in a plagiarism case that has dogged her picture since 2000.

Mehta is battling the accusation that she lifted her script from the novel Shei Shomoy. The award-winning book by acclaimed Bengali writer Sunil Gangopadhyaya - which goes under the title Those Days in English - like Water, also deals with the "child widow" phenomenon that has plagued India for centuries.

The charges were first made by Hindu extremists angered by the touchy subject matter and who attacked and burned the Water set in the holy city of Varanasi, causing over $600,000 worth of damage. Production was shut down until last year, when Mehta secretly finished the movie in nearby Sri Lanka.

Mehta answered the accusations with a lawsuit against Gangopadhyaya, publisher Badal Basu, English translator Aruna Chakravarty and editor Anuradha Dutta, who went along with the plagiarism accusations. Mehta is not commenting on the matter.

The four recently countersued, asking the Indian court to block Water from making its debut at this month's TIFF. The request was rejected on Aug. 23.

David Davidar, publisher of Penguin Books Canada, and formerly of Penguin India, has read Shei Shomoy and knows Gangopadhyaya. He hasn't seen Water yet, but believes that the charge of plagiarism is nearly impossible to prove.

"Unless you do a line-by-line comparison, who can tell?" he says. "Everyone is exposed to so much material now, it's very difficult to tell what has inspired a writer."

Like Mehta, Gangopadhyaya is opposed to the exploitation of India's child widows, the result of prearranged marriages in which the husband dies. Her film and his book both offer the radical solution of widow remarriage, still opposed in many circles, and are set in reformist times - 1938 and the 19th century, respectively. Those Days and Water also both feature women who are rich men's mistresses and who hope to change their lives.

Still, as Davidar states, "there are a clutch of novels on this subject in India."