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PHANTOM INDIA Reflections on a Journey
Only 2% of Indians speak English, the official language after colonization.
This 2% talks a lot, in the name of all the rest.
Politicians, businessmen, intellectuals, bureaucrats -
all explained their ideas to me at length,
and I immediately sensed that the real questions weren't being addressed.
In learning English,
they also learned to think as our civilization does.
Their words about their country were ordered by Western symbols and logic.
I'd heard them all before. I recognized them as my own.
Tattered ideas, worn-out phrases,
like Nietzsche's birds, so exhausted from flying
that one can catch them in one's hand.
Thursday, January 18. Delhi, the first day of shooting.
We leave the city.
Behind a small factory in the suburbs, a barren vacant lot,
scattered clumps of grass, crouching women.
On our arrival, one of the women curses us and flees.
Her curses are translated. : She doesn't want to be filmed.
It's evil, a spell we cast upon her.
Being filmed will steal from her everything she is.
The camera's fundamental brazenness is something I've constantly experienced,
even in Paris, even with actors, even on film sets.
Here it's worse. These women have absolutely nothing.
They spend the morning on their knees to glean a handful of fodder,
and I steal a bit more from them.
To them, we're Martians.
We enter their universe without permission.
Our camera is a weapon, and they're afraid of us.
Thursday, January 25. Shepherds on the road to Halvar at night.
Camera in hand, we emerge from the shadows
like bandits.
The shepherds watch us filming them, half worried, half mocking.
Our loot. : A few images, a few words, some laughter.
We know nothing about them. They know nothing about us.
That's what this film will be. :
images gathered without a script or preconceived concept,
a film of our chance encounters.
Like these stonecutters on the outskirts of a village.
They seem from another age,
pyramid builders, slaves from vanished civilizations.
I feel like I'm dreaming with my eyes open,
but for them, it's terribly real.
They earn half a rupee per stone and haul eight stones a day.
Tuesday, April 9. Mysore, 2.:00 p.m.
The man's face is blackened with smoke.
A skeleton is painted on the child's bare skin.
These are Muslims celebrating Muhurram.
This traditional dance is called the Tiger Dance.
It's also a job. The man and child earn their living dancing.
Words are useless between us. The image is our only connection.
They dance and I film them. That's all.
Everywhere we go, the first thing I see are their eyes, their stares.
In a moment we're surrounded by Indians.
We came to see them, but they're the ones looking at us.
So we preferred to film them that way,
their sea of enormous eyes turned on us,
on the camera's single eye.
We decided to film all these looks,
to make them the leitmotiv of our journey.
Monday, February 19.
A group gathers around an orchestra and dancers at a wedding.
At our approach, everything stops.
The participants stop what they're doing to look at us.
The roles are reversed. :
We've become the show, and they're the audience.
The young groom, his face covered with yellow powder,
wearing a flowered hat, waits for something to happen,
for us to do something.
Bit by bit, they seem to forget about us.
The ceremony continues
with its precise ritual, unchanged for centuries.
This eternity erases us, like an unimportant spot in the crowd.
The husband goes from door to door. He's given rice and offerings.
For 150 bricks, these men earn one rupee,
equivalent to 64 centimes,
but equivalents are meaningless here where everything is different.
We film them as they are, the hypnotic repetition of their movements.
There's some sort of truth to be found there at least.
To tell how they work 10-1 2 hours a day,
live in huts, come from neighboring villages,
have no land-
would all that add anything to what the images already reveal?
Saturday, March 2.
The proletarianized peasants call these "the backward classes, "
an expression used to designate those without caste, the Untouchables.
They are exploited, their lives stolen.
In this scene, rich ground for political analysis,
I notice the camera's chosen only one aspect.
It keeps returning to this young woman,
because we're drawn to her beauty, her graceful modesty, her laugh.
Because she dazzles us. Because that's what it was like that morning.
Gradually we discovered the simple joy of not planning ahead,
of deciding neither what to shoot nor its meaning.
We follow the camera. It guides us.
We're not filming to defend an idea, or demonstrate one.
For three months we followed the trees.
The roads are terrible, but the trees are magnificent.
They've been revered for centuries, with altars devoted to them,
with a statue of Ganesh, son of Shiva,
elephant-headed god of prosperity.
I made this journey for personal reasons.
It was an escape, a break, a sudden detour,
but the escape quickly became a quest,
a need to discover, or rediscover.
Each step we take is part of the film.
Westerners with a camera - Westerners twice over.
Sunday, February 18.
We saw the flags and heard the music,
but when we got there, the festival was over.
We saw priests giving food to beggars.
Or at least that's what we thought we saw.
But these aren't beggars, but Brahman peasants come from local villages
for a ceremony honoring Shiva that will last several days.
As Brahmans they belong to the highest level of the caste system.
This doesn't make them the richest, but the most respected.
Other peasants keep a respectful distance.
They'd never dare share the Brahmans'meal.
Knowing someone's a Brahman isn't enough to place them in Indian society.
There are more than 1,800 subdivisions within the Brahman caste.
The groups cannot intermarry, nor even share a meal.
Western logic fails here.
It takes an intuitive understanding.
We'd have to experience it from the inside, be a part of it.
These are Catholic Indians, traveling performers putting on their show.
A circling rider who never dismounts, a transvestite in too much makeup,
music that isn't Indian at all,
an image of Jesus on the altar among Hindu gods -
it's like something out of a Fellini film,
ambiguous, indecent, completely unexpected in India,
which continually startles us with its Puritanism.
I'm taken by the sudden feeling of being home again,
finding Europe on the shores of Kerala.
Friday, April 5.
A Communist demonstration.
I'm told they're postal workers protesting a postage increase.
It seems odd, but at the same time, quite nice of them.
They keep chanting the same slogans.
We keep hearing a word that means "Long live..."
Long live the Communist party, the postal union, the Vietcong.
I don't believe the story about the postage increase.
I can see they don't trust us.
We've often been taken for US spies, CIA informants.
Indeed, I often feel like a cop,
as if my film were surveillance,
an investigation whose purpose still escapes me.
Friday, March 18.
In the south, not far from a village,
we come across a large group of vultures.
The corpse at the side of the road is a buffalo, mostly intact.
We've seen this often.
In many parts of India, for religious reasons,
it's forbidden to slay cattle.
They still die-of old age, sickness, cold, hunger,
what we call "natural causes. "
A dog helps itself to the corpse,
while vultures wait. They're in no hurry.
When I see this scene again today,
I realize we reacted in terms of our culture.
Around us, the landscape reminded us of Greece,
bathed in some austere grandeur
that lent an air of mysterious sacrifice.
To us it was a tragedy, a drama in several acts.
For our Indian companion, it was an everyday scene. :
a glimpse of life and death and their calm alternation.
It was nothing worth filming, nothing extraordinary.
As we headed further south,
we frequently found statues at the entrance to villages. :
gigantic animals, especially horses.
These are the villages' divine protectors, their personal gods.
In the south, religion is everywhere a part of daily life.
Here, a jeweler throws a party for his friends and family.
Folklore, as seen in the West,
is the continuation or rediscovery of ancient traditions.
Folklore needs tourists to exist, and in India, tourists are scarce.
The gestures, the attitudes, the ceremony,
everything happens in the present tense,
in the indicative mode, in reality.
Once the film has been finished, edited and projected,
it can be seen as folklore,
but it's you and I who make it so.
Drawings with ritual meanings can be found everywhere in India. :
on entrances to houses, on walls, in the streets, in homes.
The women who create them allow only tiny variations
on specific symbolic themes.
Where we take aesthetic pleasure
in the abstract floral drawings,
these women experience and recapture a link with the divine.
They draw to bring their god to them.
Indian women are very beautiful, especially in the southern villages.
These women belong to a group with tribal origins
that merged with the caste system.
They wear brightly colored clothing,
predominantly red and inlaid with tiny mirrors,
like fabrics from Gujarat.
Their noses, ears, necks, wrists and ankles
are all covered with solid silver jewelry.
They wear their fortune on them.
Alongside the dirty, crumpled rupees passed from hand to hand,
there's this wealth worn by all the women,
incomprehensible in such a poor country.
There is much dancing in India,
yet it's very rare to see a dance including both sexes.
Maybe this is a mystery of a country which remains essentially rural,
where an unchangeable system reigns.
Each person knows what to expect of his life from childhood.
Everything is laid out in advance, even marriages,
governed by the exacting boundaries of castes, subcastes and families.
A lengthy protocol,
a rather dreary party despite the expense,
and above all, the bride's solemn expression.
There was something poignant about all these marriages,
but maybe that's just one more Western conception.
We spent five months in India without ever seeing love.
We never saw a man turn to watch a woman,
never saw a woman whistled at, nor a single provocative or tender gesture,
as if there were only one sex.
Once, however, during our last days in Bombay,
we came upon this boy and girl flirting.
We filmed these two lovers with rapt attention.
It's our most precious footage, absolutely unique.
In India we always saw the women on one side of the street,
the men on the other.
What also surprised me was the lack in Indian newspapers
of reports of sexual offenses,
sadistic acts, rape, exhibitionism, etc.
Each Sunday, Indian newspapers devote pages to marriage offers.
These aren't lonely-hearts ads.
They state their terms.
I'll read an example. : "Seeking accomplished young woman,
light-skinned, non-kusika,
for single man, masanad prakaranam,
34 years old, government employee.
Send horoscope. "
Marriage isn't a personal matter here.
First and foremost it's about caste,
because the young woman must not be kusika
in order to marry the young man of the subcaste masanad prakaranam.
As for the horoscope, requested without fail,
it crushes any chance of love at first sight.
"Light-skinned"is a frequent demand, but completely relative, of course,
in a land where everyone is more or less copper-skinned,
but it's assigned great importance, especially in the higher castes.
In Northern India especially,
a dark-skinned child's birth into a high-ranking family
is seen as a catastrophe.
Saturday, February 1 7.
Konarak. A gigantic chariot of the sun,
with 1 2 stone wheels, each 10 feet high.
Begun in the 13th century, it was never completely finished.
This temple is famous for its countless bas-reliefs of all sizes
illustrating the Kama Sutra,
the Indian encyclopedia of erotic techniques.
Indian tourists listen calmly to the guide. Apparently, they aren't shocked.
Is it just a pose?
Victorian England brought its Puritanism here
and left a profound mark on India.
In Indian films, couples never kiss. It's forbidden by the censors.
In the crowd of Indians, we meet two young Frenchmen.
They belong to the international brotherhood of penniless travelers
that journalists call "beatniks" or "hippies. "
Lots of Europeans who come here
are touched by grace.
After only two weeks in India, they claim they're Buddhist
or Hindu.
Some just make the trip on a lark and smoke hashish all day.
That's all they do-smoke and sit around. They don't go anywhere.
All they're interested in here is being able to smoke freely.
That's all they care about.
For a lot of people,
drugs are an end in themselves
instead of a means.
Hashish can be a way of opening yourself more fully
to music or poetry or love.
It can be a means of accessing those things,
but for a lot of people it's an end in itself.
They say, "We can smoke hashish. We're free and happy."
India is too beautiful, too full of things.
It makes you want to stay.
We thought we'd stay three months, but now we don't want to leave.
We've gotten used to the Indian rhythm of life
and have adopted it.
When we left France we still had...
the defects of Western society.
We were basically selfish individualists.
Here you realize that money doesn't matter.
The Americans send their Peace Corps here
to teach the people to fish intensively.
The people aren't interested.
They have enough to live on and don't need more.
They don't feel the need for more.
That's an Indian character trait.
They won't work more than they need to.
The poorest man with a rickshaw -
ask him to take you somewhere, and he'll say no if he doesn't want to,
even if you give him money.
He earns his three rupees daily and that's enough. He doesn't need four.
The fisherman fishes until he catches his two pounds each day.
He's not interested in catching more.
Why? To have more money? He's not interested.
- You're not interested in money? - Absolutely not.
Unfortunately, in the society we live in, we need money.
When you live in modern society, you need money to live.
You can't live without money.
You'd like to get rid of it?
At our level, yes.
We live in a parallel society, completely different from modern society.
Capitalism and all that.
If we have enough to live on, that's enough.
We don't want to produce things to export.
We produce what we need for ourselves.
We don't need the extra money.
By farming the land, making our own tables and furniture,
binding our own books.
Knowledge won't be limited to a bunch of dusty intellectuals.
The days of books and grandiose thought are over.
We have to know how to farm the land.
The only religion will be that of love and friendship
and life.
If it works, maybe someone will say, "Hey, that's a good idea.
I'll do the same thing here." And another will say the same.
Maybe a lot of people.
In Madras, three weeks later, we ran into Bernard and Didier again.
They'd changed a lot.
As we went further south, the climate got rough.
I got sick as soon as I got here.
Ever since I got to Madras, I haven't been able to eat.
I throw up. My head hurts.
You've decided to go home?
Yes, I wrote to my parents.
They're sending money and a plane ticket.
Didier has made up his mind to go home.
He doesn't want to try Indian doctors or medicine.
To go back suddenly like this,
straight from Madras to Paris, is going to be really strange.
I'm going to Goa.
- By yourself? - All by myself, like a big boy.
To Goa, then back to Delhi?
Then Pakistan.
Young people from Sweden, Germany, England, Australia -
all the industrialized nations -
have come here, like me, to find something else.
But none of us can escape our civilization.
I'm afraid they're dreaming India, like I am.
In Goa, on one of the immense beaches inhabited by hippies,
an Italian nudist spoke of his disillusionment.
What were you looking for?
A new way of living.
To learn to live a certain way.
I wanted spirituality in my life that was missing in Italy.
I felt something was missing, that there were other things to do.
That's what I came to find, but I didn't find it.
Maybe what I was looking for was just an idea I had.
An idea of my own.
Just an idea in my own head from reading books.
For example, I was really interested in the life of Gandhi.
It really intrigued me.
But the idea Gandhi represented can't be found here anymore.
Yes, India isn't easy for foreigners.
It started with the American rental car,
an exception in India, where late-model imported cars are rare.
The tires were completely bald.
The manager of the rental agency offers to change them,
but there's one problem. :
There are no tires this size in India. They're not produced here.
But they'll find some approximately the same size.
That "approximately" will mean a dozen flat tires over the next two months,
the same scene repeated over and over.
Ten mechanics take the tires off, remount them and take them off again,
trying to solve the impossible problem of the curve of the rim.
They possess infinite patience. Time doesn't seem to exist.
It can take an entire afternoon.
Once or twice, due to our poor Western upbringing,
we threw an angry fit,
an ugly-and quite useless-reflex.
Tuesday, February 27.
I awoke very early.
The light is still undecided, very soft and sad,
as it often is in the tropics.
I'm suddenly projected 15 years into the past,
to early mornings in the Seychelles,
on beaches like this.
I was 20, shooting my first film.
The tropics enchanted me, the entire world one big promise of happiness.
Suddenly, the fishermen in front of me are replaced by others.
Once again memory fills the foreground.
Once again, I'm incapable of living in the present,
of feeling it, of touching it.
Even in the Seychelles, reality escaped me,
that elusive harmony between men, light and landscape.
I had to reinvent it, modify it,
project onto it my dreams and memories.
I had to destroy it.
Westerner, filmmaker,
time's tamer, time's slave.
The sun is now high in the sky.
The catch is poor, as it often is on the Madras coast.
We film the faces, the order and beauty of things.
Suddenly, the scene changes.
A stranger joins the fisherman.
He stands out in his city clothes.
He's come to buy their fish,
to take it on his bicycle to sell in the neighboring city.
He's not a big buyer,
but for these fishermen, as in the rest of the world, he's the enemy,
a middleman who won't pay full price.
So begins an argument over pennies.
It's the same story over and over, the old story of exploitation.
These fishermen are in a caste of their own,
or more precisely, a non-caste - unclean, untouchable.
They live on the bare sand, sleeping in huts made of leaves or under the stars.
Sometimes they move further down this stretch of beach.
Then they return.
They aren't sailors. They can only fish from the shore.
That's how they've always done it.
Another argument breaks out. Once again it's about money.
The woman is the partner and ally of the fishmonger on the bicycle.
This is my film.
On one hand, an entirely subjective reflection on my interior world,
but on the other, just the opposite. :
the economic realities that won't let me escape into dreams.
An incessant back-and-forth between myself and the things before me.
Almost always, reality gains the upper hand.
Due to the state of the original material,
certain defects could not be removed in the restoration of this film.
Translation by LYNN MASSEY for SUBTEXT SUBTITLING
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