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PHANTOM INDIA Reflections on a Journey

March 1 1, 6.:00 a.m.

A festival at the Kapaleeshwar temple on the outskirts of Madras.

Once a year, this immense chariot is taken from the temple

and solemnly paraded around the temple walls and reflecting pool.

It takes five hours to cover the half-mile circuit.

These chariots, found in all the temples in the south,

are made of carved wood.

They're extremely heavy and have neither steering nor brakes.

They're also ageless, unchanged for centuries.

Pieces are replaced as they wear out.

Priests ride inside the chariot.

At each stop, they bless offerings hoisted up in baskets,

offerings of coconut and fruit.

There's a large peace-keeping force.

Police, soldiers, and some of the faithful too, dressed up like Boy Scouts.

From the upper floors of residences, the parade is doused with water.

It's both a ritual and a welcome refreshment.

Hundreds of the faithful pull the chariot, an exhausting and dangerous task.

It takes a lever and several men to get it rolling.

To stop it, they throw wedges under the wheels.

The chariot slides for 20 yards before stopping,

threatening to topple over at any moment.

At first, we're afraid. : afraid of the screaming crowd,

afraid of this colossus that threatens to demolish a house

or crush a crowd of believers.

The hellish, suffocating, humid heat

reinforces the sense of collective trance,

where everything can be released, where rich and poor mingle,

where castes no longer exist,

all abandoning their individuality to blend into one mass,

a single body without name or face.

We got caught up in the madness.

We became part of the crowd, shooting reel after reel,

jostled like them, drenched like them, joyous like them.

For a moment I forgot who I was.

I was part of something else. I belonged.

I gave myself up to it, heart and soul.

Obviously, sitting here in Paris, these images seem different.

They can be seen as illustrating medieval India, obscurantism,

the exploitation of the gullible,

fetishism and the opium of the people.

But that morning we followed our instincts, our senses, our feelings,

not our ideas.

We left the crowd at noon, exhausted, completely drained.

For five hours we'd experienced life differently, at a different rhythm.

In the tireless repetition of gestures, in the sea of faces,

time had disappeared, completely ceased to exist.

Sunday, March 3.

We saw a comedy in Tamil, the language of Madras.

It was a scathing attack on the New Delhi government,

politicians,

and the bureaucracy, criticized for its corruption and inefficiency.

Bureaucracy is truly the scourge of this country.

A legacy of the English, a state within a state,

it terrified us at every encounter.

Entire days lost in the shuffle from office to office,

countless underpaid employees,

polite smiles, vacant looks, refusal to take the slightest responsibility,

waiting lines filling hallways, piles of paper everywhere, misplaced documents. :

It constantly reminds us of Kafka,

and we wonder why the Indians don't have their own Cultural Revolution

and send the bureaucrats out into the fields.

The playwright is named Cho.

It's his 13th play, written in two days.

He plays the lead, the Mongolian emperor Mohammed Bin Tughlaq,

renowned for his despotism, who ruled India three centuries ago.

Cho's play tells of Tughlaq returning to India today,

demanding his throne and being named prime minister.

At the end of the play, we realize he's an impostor

out to show Indians the absurdity of their politics.

A few years ago a new political party was formed here, the DMK.

It campaigned for independence for Madras from the rest of India.

In the '67 elections, the DMKcame into power in Madras.

For the moment, they've laid aside their separatist claims,

but the facts are telling. :

India, as large as Europe, is a mosaic of populations

with only religion and the caste system in common.

The Indians in the south, especially the Tamils,

are aware of their regional identities.

They're convinced they're the "real" Indians,

those who best resisted foreign influences

and preserved the customs, religion,

and culture of the past.

Descendants of the first inhabitants of India, they have little Aryan blood.

They're very dark-skinned, which draws the contempt of the northerners.

They accuse the northern Indians of colonialism and exploitation.

One of their major problems is language.

The government plans to replace English as the official administrative language

with Hindi, the main language of the north.

The southern Indians absolutely refuse,

provoking bloody riots and street fighting in Madras and elsewhere.

The students lead the struggle.

One of their leaders, T. R. Janarthanam,

an activist who led a school strike of several months,

explains his viewpoint.

"Just 30% of the population speak Hindi.

70% do not.

I can't accept the idea of a minority language

replacing an international language like English.

We've spoken English for over 200 years.

It's become the Indian national language.

It's unfair to impose one of the 40 native languages

as the official language.

We, the Tamils, are against Hindi and will not accept it in any form.

We'd be forced to learn a third language

in addition to English and Tamil,

putting us at a disadvantage to native speakers of Hindi.

The central government should realize this

and understand our problem.

Otherwise, it will lead to the disintegration of India. "

The Indian government makes a colossal effort at population control.

Everywhere one sees billboards showing a happy Indian family of four-

two parents, two children -

even in the most remote villages.

We visited the family planning exhibit at the Madras fair.

A mixed crowd files past pictures and statistics

while being brainwashed by loudspeakers.

What is this loudspeaker saying?

"Did you know that in our country, a child is born every 1.5 seconds?"

55,000 every day, 2 1 million each year.

India represents only 3% of the world's landmass

but contains 1 4% of the world's population.

In 30 or 40 years, there will be 1 billion Indians.

Until now, population control hasn't achieved the anticipated results.

According to the latest statistics,

the population continues to grow faster than production.

Yet the campaign doesn't lack imagination,

offering a free radio

to any man who agrees to be sterilized.

This is a demonstration booth.

A young man explains how to use an IUD,

using 3-D models of sexual organs and not sparing the slightest detail.

Now he's speaking to the men.

"If you want to have intercourse with your wife, don't forget to use this. "

After the demonstration,

he distributes Russian-made condoms by the handful.

The audience scrambles for them,

especially a 10-year-old boy who lays in a good supply.

Whose fault is it if India is overpopulated?

Indians answer. : England.

"They exploited our country, bilked our peasants,

raped our economy, and at the same time brought medicine. "

So they lowered the infant mortality rate and suppressed epidemics,

which means they disrupted the demographic balance

without ever developing the country's economy

to allow it support this excess population.

Movies are a real industry in Madras.

In this city alone, there are 15 major movie studios,

producing over 200 films every year. :

musicals of three or four hours,

historical epics, detective films set to music,

anything that draws an audience.

Comparing these billboards to the people in the streets,

we always wonder. :

In a country with such beautiful, delicate people,

why are most of the movie stars short, fat and thick-featured?

They wear heavy white and pink makeup, making them even uglier.

Once again, it's the racist prejudice about skin color. :

To be beautiful, you must be white.

A movie studio in Madras resembles one in Paris or Rome,

except for the garland of flowers on the camera.

No one's in a hurry. Here, a film can take a year to shoot.

This is a blockbuster, a story of thwarted love

between a handsome musician and a well-bred and chaperoned girl.

This is the scene of love at first sight.

The film stars Sivaji Ganesan, the Tamil Belmondo,

a superstar in southern India.

His career began on the stage at the age of five.

He shoots several films simultaneously and earns astronomical fees.

Indian intellectuals highly disapprove of the cinema of Madras and Bombay.

They condemn its poor taste, stupidity and excess,

calling it a synthesis of the worst of Indian and western vulgarity.

But terrible as these films may be,

they're the means of expression and sole entertainment for the people

in a country in which TV is practically nonexistent.

I admit I liked some of these films,

with their incoherence, dramatic plot twists, one-dimensional characters

and constant intervention of magical forces.

Thursday, March 16.

Like obedient tourists hungry for Indian culture,

we treat ourselves to a performance of Bharatanatyam,

the classical dance of southern India.

We're a bit surprised by the chubbiness of the dancer,

and also by the cabaret-like presentation.

Though treated like tourists,

we're still moved by the extreme grace of the gestures

and the beauty of the singing.

Monday, March 1 1.

We're a few miles outside of Madras at the Kalakshetra School,

conservatory for the traditional dances of the south.

The school day here begins with prayer.

Teachers and students sing to God.

The religion and rite don't matter.

God has many names,

but there's only one God.

This dance school was an offshoot of the famous Theosophical Society,

founded more than 50 years ago by Annie Besant,

a European who dreamt of bringing India and the West closer.

It's a well-protected world.

It was difficult to get authorization to film.

The directors of the school kept hesitating,

questioning us with slightly scornful suspicion.

Finally, they grudgingly agreed.

There are several courses.

We visited a class in Kathakali, a dance from Kerala,

which has a different cultural heritage.

Kathakali is more realistic, closer to mime, and restricted to men.

It's a kind of religious pantomime with many characters.

The young dancers illustrate for us how situations and feelings

are expressed in the symbolic language of Kathakali.

This is a bee gathering pollen from a lotus.

Climbing a mountain.

Fear.

Classes begin in the early morning, before the heat becomes overwhelming.

Bharatanatyam is a woman's dance,

more stylized and purer than Kathakali.

To be skilled at it,

one must train from the earliest age and possess great patience.

These girls will train for 10, 15 or 20 years

before giving a public performance.

The movement of the wrist, the nuance of expression, the position of the foot -

each has a specific meaning.

Bharatanatyam is a code, an encrypted language

that must be known to the audience as well as the dancer.

Otherwise they can't follow the story.

Westerners watching the dance

are incapable of understanding, incapable of participating.

From outside, we judge its aesthetic qualities as a performance,

when in fact it's a ceremony.

Moving from class to class,

nonbelievers lost in a sacred world, burdened by our equipment,

we noticed something quite striking. :

No one paid us the slightest attention.

All were extraordinarily concentrated on their exercises.

To them, we didn't even exist.

It almost hurt our feelings.

Bharatanatyam is the mother dance that gave birth to all the others.

It's said to have originated at Tanjore, great temple of the Chola dynasty.

The dancers belonged to the temple and danced only for worship.

Even today, despite its secular appearance,

to dance is to relive a tradition, regain a heritage,

reestablish contact between the present moment and eternity.

The school gives performances throughout India and abroad.

The students perform major ballets with many characters,

but each dancer dreams of becoming a soloist.

Few will succeed.

Others will pass on the tradition, becoming teachers at the school.

There is currently a Bharatanatyam renaissance,

which almost died out 50 years ago.

Perhaps this means India is sliding towards folklore.

Perhaps this renaissance is a death knell for the dance,

like everywhere that ancient traditions are artificially recreated.

If India forgets Bharatanatyam,

there will always be foreigners to dance it.

These two were admitted to beginning classes at the school.

Their touching but pathetic efforts are a bit embarrassing.

The American and the Japanese girl have learned a little of the technique,

but it's obvious something is missing.

There is neither truth nor grace in their dancing.

It's a caricature.

Watch them carefully.

They demonstrate in striking fashion

how impossible it is for foreigners to fit into Indian culture.

The failure is particularly striking here in its physicality,

but it's the same in all domains.

The dancer must forget her body, which is immensely difficult,

because perfection is achieved only through absolute control of gesture

and memory.

But these dancers have gone beyond technique.

These images clearly show dance as language, or better yet, dialogue.

The gestures are a prayer, an invocation.

The dance is one of the yogas,

meaning a path to transcendence,

a bridge between here and the beyond.

We filmed tirelessly, several days in a row,

as if the dancers were elusive images that would fade away.

There was something uncertain and unreal in the air

that tore at one's heart.

This grace, this beauty, this perfect harmony of body and mind

is like the idealized vision of India,

one that I'd so rarely encountered that I questioned if it really existed.

Mystical India,

India that transcends appearances to achieve unity.

The southern Indians like to represent their great god Shiva

in his incarnation as Nataraj, the cosmic dancer,

he who orders the movements of the universe.

Dance is the supreme expression of Hinduism.

This is India. : a worldview we don't understand,

a social hierarchy that puzzles us,

an economic reality that shocks us,

but also the hesitant, fragile grace of two girls conversing with God.

We have to practice every day.

From 9.:00 to 1 1.:00 a.m., and often in the afternoon.

She's from Hassan, on the other side of India.

She's light-skinned, with slightly Asian features.

The other is from Madras, a purebred Tamil.

I liked their laughs, their expressions,

how natural they were, and how serious.

I told them that classical dancers in Europe also practice every day.

They answer sharply, "We have to concentrate more.

If we're not completely concentrated on what we're doing,

we can't express our faith, our love of God.

We must think and concentrate. "

"The heroine is the main character in solo Bharatanatyam performances.

She always venerates the hero,

and the hero is always one of the gods in our religion.

Each god is attached to a specific temple,

like Tanjore, for example.

The dance we rehearsed yesterday was dedicated to the god Krishna.

Today's is to the god Shiva.

Songs always address one god at a time.

We don't seek innovation.

We don't believe in it.

What we do comes from the distant past,

and we always choose traditional songs. "

These are the stars of the school, the best and the brightest,

or they will be when they finish, for they still have much training ahead.

Now we've begun to distract them a little.

We're keeping them from attaining the total concentration needed

to attain perfection.

We keep filming. We watch them endlessly.

Time has stopped. We don't want to leave.

We can't tear ourselves away.

Then we're suddenly thrown out,

like slightly suspect characters come to disturb their perfect order.

They sensed something fishy about our presence.

When I think back on it now, I think they were right.

We were indeed thieves,

intruders in a world to which we didn't belong.

Translation by LYNN MASSEY for SUBTEXT SUBTITLING

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