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PHANTOM INDIA Reflections on a Journey

You peasants, met at dawn on a remote road in southern India,

your life flows imperceptibly

to a rhythm different from ours,

from the minutes and seconds we consider so valuable.

At this point in our journey we've almost found your rhythm.

It was very hot.

In the period before the monsoons,

activity is limited to early and late in the day.

We left the main roads and gave up all itinerary.

Our car became a vessel that had cast off its moorings.

We went where the winds of chance blew us, sleeping anywhere,

our only goal to lose ourselves in the infinity of Indian villages.

We became vegetarians, because no one eats meat here.

We lived almost as they did.

Europe was far away. We received no mail or newspapers.

We'd spend entire days without filming,

as if it was no longer what mattered.

Freed from my habitual anxiety and dissatisfaction,

I lived in the present moment.

We wanted to experience things, not understand them.

For instance, these priests officiating on the beach near a temple

use gestures we don't understand,

but that no longer matters.

We may not understand these people, but we're instinctively connected to them,

sharing their link with nature.

Letting ourselves go in their presence,

we feel as if we've rediscovered something we'd lost.

Nothing shocked me anymore,

for I'd accepted another perspective on the world.

It's not about explaining or dominating the world,

but being a part of it, fitting into it.

Watching them perform simple gestures as if they were rituals,

strange ideas came to mind.

If happiness is defined as a sense of balance and bliss,

being in harmony with one's surroundings, interior peace,

then these Indian peasants are happier than us,

who've destroyed nature

and do battle with time in the absurd pursuit of material well-being,

in the end sharing only our loneliness.

"Man must lose himself in the universe like an elephant in the forest,

a fish in the sea, a bird in the sky, " says one of their texts.

At the source of the Cauvery, the holy river of southern India,

a young priest performs the dawn rituals.

There's something magical in the precision of his gestures.

I came to accept everything in unblinking observation.

One afternoon, we came upon the unreal vision of this man

pushing a sewing machine down a deserted road.

In France, this would be quite surreal. Here, we watch without comment.

As if in a hallucinatory dream,

we journeyed beyond reason,

and I wondered if fate didn't have a hand in it all.

Monday, April 9.

We arrive in Trivandrum, capital of Kerala.

We came back to mail, newspapers and problems.

Our short spell in the world beyond time is over,

and yet, in the middle of the city, another fantastic vision.

These bats have a wingspan of three feet.

No one kills them or shoos them away.

They're left peacefully in their trees in the midst of this modern city.

Respect for life in all forms is a constant in India.

It explains why so many Indians are vegetarians,

and also why followers of certain sects refuse to farm the land.

The plow moving through the soil could kill worms and insects.

Tuesday, April 10. We're still not awake.

On a roadside in Kerala,

these piles of railroad cars,

a rusty scrap heap reaching to the sky,

seems as if it's always existed, a part of the landscape,

like ruins of some ancient civilization.

The truth is much plainer. :

It's a freight train that derailed on a bridge.

No one was killed, but it caused serious damage.

Actually, our first impression was correct.

Indian railroads are a vestige of the colonial past,

of Kipling and Victorian England.

To consolidate their economic and military control,

the English built a vast railroad network

that remains the primary means of transportation in India today.

Not much has changed since they left.

The trains are slow and sometimes antiquated,

managed by a huge bureaucracy, a state unto itself.

Today, India's rail network is twice as large as China's.

Wednesday, April 1 1.

Once again we stumble upon the ghost of colonial England.

These young women work in a tea plantation

at an altitude of 3,000 feet in the mountains of Kerala.

This 1 2,000-acre plantation belongs to an English company,

who operates it along purely capitalistic lines.

The plantation's employees live and eat here.

Their salaries are meager,

but they save every penny for their dowry.

After a few years,

they return to their villages to marry.

Each worker has a long rod that's laid on top of the bushes.

She picks any leaves higher than the rod.

The harvest continues year-round as the leaves grow back.

The work is well-planned, the yield excellent.

In the plantation's small factory, the leaves are dried, sorted and cut.

The tea is then sent to a nearby port, where it's shipped to England.

Thus the beauty of the landscape and gestures

hides a particularly harsh form of neocolonialism.

As often in India, the scene can be seen in two ways.

It all depends on how you look.

Friday, April 1 2.

An artificial lake studded with submerged trees, seemingly petrified.

We're in the forest and wildlife sanctuary of Periyar.

There are millions of animals. : deer, boar, buffalo, elephants.

We spent several days in this paradise.

It's a wonderful place for a vacation.

Except that it was all fake, and we felt it.

It wasn't real nature, but nature preserved.

Outside of sanctuaries like this one,

it's almost impossible to see wild elephants in India today.

On our way to the coast, we filmed other elephants,

but they're slaves.

They work in a lumberyard next to a sawmill.

Many work sites like this exist in southern India

where elephants are used for labor.

Intelligent, obedient and very powerful,

they cost less than a bulldozer or tractor.

Elephants have almost disappeared.

In India, like everywhere, man's destroying the environment,

natural habitats and wildlife.

The modern world, demographic pressure

and new means of transport

all reduce, day by day, the area of virgin forest.

It's slashed and burned for farming and industry.

Men, grown too numerous and powerful,

push the animals back further and further, into extinction.

The India of The Jungle Book,

a wildlife paradise for so long,

can't escape this trend.

Throughout our journey,

like nai: ve Europeans seeking the stories of their childhood,

we'd hoped to see a tiger.

Reality's cruel joke. : This is the only tiger we came across.

A well-behaved tiger at the Mysore Zoo

who purrs as his keeper treats him like a big kitty.

The truth is there are almost no tigers left in India.

The last ones are killed on a sort of safari

called a shikar here.

If you're very rich and have some free time,

they'll organize beaters across a large area

to statistically guarantee you a tiger to kill.

They'll see to every detail,

including all amenities, down to your cold drinks.

Two hundred people will join in and flush the tiger out for you.

They'll even drug him to make him easier prey.

Monday, April 16.

Near the city of Cochin, on the sea,

we discover a gorgeous landscape of lagoons and canals.

Water, coconut palms and an infinite number of islands

compose a fluid landscape where water and earth blend.

A picture postcard of the tropics,

a movie set for a Conrad story,

a place tourists dream of, as yet intact,

but which certainly won't remain unexploited for long.

We heard them from far off.

They've set up under the trees by a small temple on the edge of the lagoon.

His face is covered with bright green makeup.

Dancer, singer and mime, he tells a story from Indian mythology.

Time to come back to earth.

Kerala, which seems a wonderful place to live,

is in reality severely overpopulated.

Population density is roughly 1,200 habitants per square mile,

a frightening statistic considering that a great deal of Kerala

is practically uninhabited, nonarable mountains.

Industry is practically nonexistent.

The port of Cochin, sheltered by an island,

is a natural anchorage that has hosted great navigators throughout history,

from the Sumerians to the Portuguese.

Today it stagnates in the melancholy atmosphere of a colonial trading post.

The anchorage of Cochin is surrounded by huge nets,

like spiderwebs suspended over the water.

They call them "Chinese nets"here.

Installed on permanent platforms, they're plunged into the sea,

then pulled up using big suspended rocks as counterweights.

Men raise and lower the nets tirelessly throughout high tide.

It makes a beautiful postcard.

It will certainly draw tourists, if any appear,

but the catch is meager,

and the few fish in the net are fought over

by birds and fishermen.

Less archaic methods of fishing are used in Kerala too.

The government makes a great effort to promote open-sea trawl fishing.

It's more innovative than it seems,

because coastal fishermen seem very reluctant to leave the shore.

Perhaps they aren't cut out to be sailors.

Kerala's farms don't produce enough to meet the needs of the population.

Rice and grain must be imported from other regions of India,

which causes considerable political problems.

The trawlers bring in a catch of high-quality shrimp

to be processed in this factory.

Sorted, packed in ice and packaged,

they're then shipped to Europe by air.

The workforce is exclusively feminine.

With the area's rampant unemployment and overpopulation,

nothing is automated.

These young women working shoulder to shoulder are Catholics.

Almost the entire Christian population of India is concentrated in Kerala,

almost a quarter of the state's population.

It's a very old community, dating from when St. Thomas the Apostle

came to convert the Indians, according to tradition.

Tuesday, April 1 7. We return to the lagoons.

In these villages, where little farming is done,

the peasants live off coconut palms.

Even the bark is used.

It's soaked for six months,

then beaten and separated into fibers,

which the women untangle and spin on primitive wheels.

It's not a first-rate raw material,

but it serves for string and rough mats.

To take advantage of this archaic industry, one of their main resources,

certain villages have joined together in cooperatives,

a collective society in embryonic form.

But here, like just about everywhere,

production is controlled by the landowners and merchants,

who own the coconut palms and to whom the peasants are indebted.

This tropical paradise is also a hell on earth.

Nonetheless, these poor and exploited peasants

are the most advanced in India, and the best educated.

Kerala's literacy rate is the highest in the country.

So it's hardly surprising that they're also the most politically aware.

It's here, and in Bengal,

that the largest Communist parties in India are found.

The prime minister of Kerala is a Communist.

I had a lot of doubts about the Indian Communists.

Throughout our journey, I interviewed party leaders

on their true strength in the country, their tactics,

their separation into two large rival parties,

which, oddly, are called "Left Communists"and "Right Communists. "

On this split, which occurred in 1966,

I questioned Namboodiripad, prime minister of Kerala,

and a Left Communist.

"The split was caused by the issue of our internal policies.

Some wanted to collaborate with the Congress Party,

the party currently in power in New Delhi.

We split with them. "

However, I'd heard that Indian Communists

were divided into two camps. : pro-Russian and pro-Chinese.

Jyoti Basu, general secretary of the Right Communist Party in Bengal,

rejects this explanation.

"I don't think ideological differences

in the international Communist movement

caused our split.

That explanation serves as anti-Communist propaganda. "

Mrs. Gouri Thomas, food minister in Kerala,

is a picturesque example of the split.

She's a Left Communist,

while her husband, T. V. Thomas, a minister in the same government,

is a Right Communist.

Apparently it doesn't stop them from forming a solid couple.

The Communists aren't the only ones in power in Kerala.

Namboodiripad heads a coalition of ministers

that includes Marxists and non-Marxists.

So he often has to compromise.

"The various parties of the coalition have agreed on a basic program

to try to solve the most urgent problems of Kerala.

For the moment we've abandoned the revolutionary objectives of our party. "

Mohammad Koya illustrates the paradox of this coalition.

He belongs to the Muslim League,

which represents the Muslim minority in the north of Kerala.

The League was previously allied with the Congress Party.

Today, Koya is minister of education in the Namboodiripad government,

but ideologically he shares no common ground with the Communists.

After the 1967 elections,

nine of the 1 7 major states in India were led by coalitions like this one.

The only thing uniting them is their common enemy, the Congress Party,

which has dominated Indian politics since independence,

the party of Gandhi and Nehru,

today weakened and divided, but still very powerful.

These anti-Congress coalitions are too eclectic

and have met with varying success.

They can contain both extreme right-wing parties and Communists.

This is justified by tactical considerations.

"We must take part in Parliament and participate in elections,

but at the same time we must enlarge our extra-parliamentary activities. "

Sunday, April 15.

A large Communist demonstration in Trivandrum, Kerala's capital.

100,000 peasants, trucked into the capital, gather in the rain

and parade with impressive orderliness.

The demonstration has two contradictory aims. :

on one hand, to support Namboodiripad and his government -

it's practically an official parade, supported by the government -

but on the other hand, slogans demand real agricultural reform.

But revolutionary action isn't currently on the government's agenda,

and only the Communists support it.

The contradictions go even further. :

Prime Minister Namboodiripad tries by every means

to attract new industry to Kerala.

To calm nervous capitalists, he must guarantee social stability.

But Communist Party leader Namboodiripad can't fight

the strikes and union actions.

"I don't think we can achieve our goals

in the framework of parliamentary democracy.

The day will come when village peasants must organize themselves

and collaborate with the urban proletariat.

This communal action is the only way things will change. "

Gopal speaks in the future tense.

But when I see thousands of peasants demonstrating in perfect ranks,

I tell myself the great day is drawing near.

A Maoist-style revolution seems inevitable,

but I know that Kerala is an exception.

In general, the Indian peasant class is barely politicized.

However, there are farmers'revolts on a local scale.

One of these, in 1967 in Naxalbari in northern Bengal,

caused quite a stir among Left Communists.

"It was really a big peasant movement, no doubt,

but we feel this movement was sidetracked by certain of our comrades,

who now call themselves Naxalites.

We threw them out of the party

because we consider them to be adventurers,

smooth talkers who don't truly represent the peasant population.

They would have led our movement into disaster. "

His words remind me of something.

Indian Communists have their leftists too, and they judge them severely.

"You see, the Naxalbari movement could succeed

as long as it limited itself to equal redistribution of land

and remained a movement against landowners.

Unfortunately, the leaders tried to stage an armed insurrection

to seize power.

But in only part of a district, on a purely local level,

it's impossible to take power, even with weapons. "

So even though Gopal is a peasant leader,

he doesn't believe a Maoist-style insurrection would ever work.

Mrs. Ranjekar, councilwoman in Bombay, is just as categorical.

'At this time, the Indian people don't feel armed insurrection is the solution.

They have faith in parliamentary democracy, and we must respect that.

The peasants aren't ready for an armed uprising.

It would lead to violent repression.

The party would be outlawed. It wouldn't solve anything.

There's a big difference between India and China.

At the time of the Chinese revolution, China was chiefly agricultural.

It had no industry or railroads,

and the police couldn't intervene in the countryside.

In India today, industry and railroads are highly developed.

Each country has different characteristics,

and it's impossible to predict the form India's revolution will take. "

Mrs. Ranjekar's statements surprise me.

To hear that India is highly industrialized,

when I know that four-fifths of the population live in villages,

leads me to believe that the orthodox Communists

don't really want a peasant revolution.

Since my departure, a third Communist party has been created in India.

This one is openly supported by the Chinese,

whose radio brands the Namboodiripad and Basu camps "imperialist lackeys. "

This third party, born from the split provoked by the Naxalbari uprising,

is in favor of an immediate armed uprising.

What happened in Vietnam can happen in India.

Of course we stopped and followed the elephant.

Dressed in ceremonial regalia,

it was the holy elephant of a nearby temple celebrating its annual festival.

He goes from house to house, where he's worshipped and then fed.

Here where almost everyone is hungry, each house prepared a bucket of grain.

I'm told this is a Communist village,

but the temple festival isn't celebrated any less fervently.

I remember an announcement I saw in a newspaper in Calcutta. :

"Due to the festival for the goddess Saraswati,

meetings of the Left Communist Party

are postponed until next week. "

It's easy to see why Indian Communists never attack religion here head-on.

I found the festival sad- a subjective impression, to be sure.

After encountering so many contradictions in India,

all else seemed trivial to me.

The elephant returns to the temple, where the entire village waits.

Young girls wait along the path to the temple,

their faces covered with rice powder.

They're waiting for a minister who promised to attend. A Communist.

He's late.

Village girls with your fixed stares, what are you really waiting for?

I still don't understand.

Translation by LYNN MASSEY for SUBTEXT SUBTITLING

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