Dreaming India

RECENTLY AN intensive study in The New York Times concluded that two bottlenecks hindered economic progress in Asia. The first was the increasing population resulting from better medical care. The second was the failure to distribute equitably the benefits of investment in industry and agriculture. For centuries the West attempted to exploit Eastern civilization. Now it tries to explain it away with facile economic analysis.

Looking at an Asian religious festival, or at the eyes of a peasant planting rice in a lagoon shows the futility of explaining Asian society with Western ideas. What does "medical care" mean to people who believe in reincarnation and bodily deprivation? What does "industry" mean to people who still spin thread by hand? Western observers nevertheless continue to foist their models on Asian society. More tragically, they attempt to make the society conform to their models.

Louis Malle traveled to India with different expectations. After realizing the limitations of his bourgeois concerns with upper-middle-class love affairs, he divorced his wife and left France torn by the political riots of May 1968. Financed by the British Broadcasting Corporation and given a free reign by the Indian government to film whatever he wanted, he made Phantom India, a seven-segment television documentary. As the filming progressed he felt his own perspective becoming more and more insignificant when confronted with the vast panorama of life and death, food and hunger of the India countryside.

Consequently he decided to film India with as little personal intrusion as possible, letting the landscapes and people speak for themselves. At the same time in his laconic French accent Malle narrates his reaction to what he sees and his problems filming. The result is a successful amalgam that is both about the subcontinent and the difficulties of a Westerner trying to understand it.

MALLE'S MAIN concern is the interrelation between politics and the primitive in India. He starts his journey outside Madras looking at two women on their knees shearing bits of grass with little spades. "As so often in India, you can look at a scene in two ways," he says: He sees the beautiful harmony of these women with the earth; then he senses that they are forced to scratch a crop from practically barren ground for their livelihood. He discovers similar naturalistic and political significance in most Indian scenes.

Everyday occurrences here seem like atavistic ritual, mythical folklore and abject cruelty. He watches a group of Indian fishermen pull their small nets along the shore, hearing the hypnotic harmony of their voices all shouting in an unknown language. Sitting outside a Hindu Temple he finds a senile old man who says with wonderful pride that he works there as a "holy water carrier." He sees two Muslim men, their bodies blackened with soot, dancing at midday on a deserted street of a small village. Driving along a highway he stops to film vultures stripping a dead water buffalo of its flesh, burrowing into its eyes and mouth. His images of vitality alternately excite and disgust us.

He emphasizes the political implications in similar scenes. He shows us beautiful young women, Untouchables, who carry bowls of cement to a construction site. He sees uneducated and illiterate Brahmins collecting the fruits of their offices as priests. Wisely he refrains from a theoretical explanation of economic and social unequality. Looking across a field of bricks hand-made by laborers paid a few rupees a day he asks, "Need anymore be said about this... Doesn't this explain it all?"

THE SHOTS I LIKE best are those when Malle catches the essence of something non-western, showing a way of life so different it could come from another planet. In a religious demonstration in Madras hundreds of worshippers pull an enormous chariot through the streets and thousands follow. Frantically everyone waves his arms like a traffic policeman trying to direct the procession, but without any Western overriding compulsion for order. In fact the chariot seems to move itself. In another scene a group of villagers stand in front of their huts staring at the camera. It is impossible to know what they feel or hope. Their dark eyes seem expectant, urgent, yet resigned.

The most telling of these incidents is Malle's view of a group of mechanics trying to fix a flat tire. Ten of them jump on and off the tire trying to fit it to a rim that is too large. They don't understand that technology will not allow certain possibilities. Similarly, at the site of a derailed train Malle highlights another strange mixture of men and machines; dozens of workmen pile rocks under the wheels, forming a ramp for the train to move onto the track.

When Malle does put order into these diverse events it is more a reflection than a theory. He lets Indian politicians discuss splits within the Communist party, and films Indian gurus praying in isolation. He takes these themes to their furthest extremes by showing political problems in the slums of Bombay and the primitive beauty in natural village communes isolated from the Indian mainstream. These polarities bring some conclusions to the sequence of scenes.

But it is just as well that these attempts are only half-hearted. Any resolution of the material into an overriding significance would violate Malle's own admission of ignorance, and his refusal to patronize Indian civilization. Surely this vast culture has its own order which no Westerner can penetrate in two months. And surely there is no need to simplify or compromise it. Perhaps on his journey Malle learned the Indian virtue of humility. With all the wisdom of a grey-haired, bright-eyed maharaja he says we can only look at this foreign culture and beyond that "we are prisoners of our civilization, dreaming India."