"And the Pursuit of Happiness" - Louis Malle (1986)

Louise Malle was a commercially and artistically successful feature filmmaker with a career that spanned three decades and two cultures: France and the US. But I feel that it was in the area of documentary filmmaking where he did his best work, in both cultures. Rather than attempt to record “objective” reality, Malle largely embodied the more subtle documentary style of cinéma vérité originally championed by the French. In this mode of filmmaking, the observer is an acknowledged part of the story being told – it is the storyteller’s journey towards a more enlightened view of his or her interactive environment that the viewer experiences. Note, however, that a cinéma vérité film does not dwell on the observer – what is presented is the world “out there”, as seen from the observer’s perspective.  This picture of the external world, out there, may be subtly influenced by the observer’s presence, as authentically acknowledged by the cinéma vérité filmmaker.

Among Malle’s great documentaries are the magnificent Phantom India (1969) and Calcutta (1969), which revealed a cultured Frenchman’s appreciative attempts to understand the wonder of India.  After moving to the US in the late 1970s, Malle’s documentary fascination turned to a contemplation of just what it is that constitutes American culture, with God’s Country (1986) and then And the Pursuit of Happiness (1986), his last documentary effort.  In all these cases, Malle demonstrates a sympathetic attempt to arrive a critical understanding of his subject.  And this he shared with his audience.

And the Pursuit of Happiness was one of Malle’s most personal films, since he examines the various facets and multiple experiences of being an immigrant to the US, as he himself had once been.  Indeed, the film seems to be very much a personal effort on the part of Malle, since he is credited as being the photographer, narrator, producer, and director of the film.  Just as he had done years earlier in India, Malle evidently travelled around the US and recorded what he saw. And following the cinéma vérité tradition, he lets those he see tell their own stories. 

Although the film, of course, is edited, and only the choice footage survived that process, I felt when watching the film that the interactions with the various people Malle encountered were authentic and unrehearsed. The behaviour of the people before the camera might have been influenced by the knowledge that they were on film, but their actions and words were generally spontaneous.

The title of the film, “And the Pursuit of Happiness”, is drawn from a line in the US Declaration of Independence, which refers to what it considers the “inalienable rights” of man, which necessarily include, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”.  To be able to pursue happiness in one’s own fashion, that is with the largest compass to one’s activities that does not harm others – it is this that is held to be a basic human right.  And that is precisely what draws so many people from all around the world to America.

For the most part, the people that Malle encounters and films are ordinary, everyday people who are just looking for a new life.  But Malle does interview a few not so ordinary people, too.  These include

• Boris Leskin, a prominent Russian stage actor who came to the US in 1979 at the age of 56 knowing almost no English and having to start over from scratch.  By the time of this film, he is teaching acting classes and has restarted his acting career in America.
• Franklin Chang Diaz was born in Costa Rica of a Chinese father and a Costa Rican mother. Like President Barak Obama, he is an example success story of America’s ethnic melting pot. After coming to the US during his high school years, he was graduated from MIT with a PhD in physics and then went to become the first immigrant to be a NASA astronaut in the US space program.
• Derek Walcott, from the Carribean island of Saint Lucia, became a famous poet and playwright in the US.  A few years after his appearance in this film, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature (1992).
• General José R. Somoza was the son of the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and had lived a life of privilege in Nicaragua during the long, corrupt rule of the Somoza family.  He evidently brought a considerable amount of his wealth with him to the US when the Somozas were forced from power, because he is shown in this film living in luxury.

But Malle’s film covers people of many stripes and lots of themes, and there are roughly four general topic areas that come under focus along the way:

1. Freedom to start a new life
2. Educational opportunities
3. Acceptance of immigrants
4. The Problem of illegal immigration

1.  Freedom to start a new life
In this section Malle shows refugees from Cambodia arriving at US customs and happy to escape the genocidal conditions in their native country that led to the deaths of about one-quarter of the population (~ 2 million people).  These people are pursuing the dream that many people contemplate: to start a new life. Also shown is a Kurdish taxi driver, who has managed to join a worker’s cooperative that owns and operates its own taxi service. Here Boris Leskin is shown celebrating his own new life in the new world. 

Many new arrivals find their way to communities of their own people.  Malle shows people in “Little Saigon”, an area of Orange County, California, where 100,000 Vietnamese people have settled.  Cuban immigrants have almost come to dominate the city of Miami, where 65% of the population was said to be Hispanic.  Almost none of these people want to go back to their home countries, ever.

2.  Educational Opportunities
In this section Malle shows how the American system of universal education benefits many immigrant schoolchildren.  Some of the children shown in this segment include Chinese students, an Indian Sikh prodigy, and the aforementioned Franklin Chang Diaz

3.  Acceptance
Malle travels to Nebraska, in the American heartland, and shows a small town with an immigrant Vietnamese doctor – apparently the only non-native resident in the town.  As is generally true with the unassuming American Midwestern people, the doctor is readily accepted and included in the local society.  However, this acceptance doesn’t prevail throughout the US.  Malle also shows American blacks in Houston, Texas, who are at odds with the local Vietnamese immigrants. The blacks feel that the Vietnamese are being used as tools by corrupt landlords to force them out of their own, traditional neighbourhoods. In addition the film also shows a number of Arab immigrants, who although they have achieved comfortable middle-class status, feel the effects of social discrimination (for being Muslims) and discomfort with the “corrupt” American lifestyle.

The famous writer Derek Walcott is shown in this segment expressing what seems to me to be an eccentric view, perhaps what you might expect from an intellectual.  He argues that America’s “aggressive democracy” enforces too much conformity.  He thinks immigrants feel the pressure to conform to social mainstream standards and are reluctant to express their true feelings.  Malle lets Walcott speak his piece and says nothing.  But the rest of the film portrays the falsity of Walcott’s claims and just how happy the immigrant newcomers are to be in a country where they can express themselves – especially the various young girls and women who are interviewed in the film.

4.  Illegal Immigration
The last segment covers the somewhat intractable problem of illegal immigration in America. Malle shows scenes of the American border crossing near Tijuana, where vast numbers of people seek to cross into the US every night illegally.  Many Americans see the source of this problem to be the practice of American landowners and factory owners hiring cheap fruit pickers and running “sweatshops” filled with exploited illegal immigrants paid a wages well below the government-specified minimum wage. They believe that if the US would rigorously outlaw such practice, then the illegal immigration flow would subside.  An extreme proponent of this perspective is FAIR – the Federation for American Immigration Reform, who seek to (1) drastically reduce legal immigration, (2) eliminate political asylum and illegal-immigrant legalization, and (3) repeal the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution, which grants citizenship to people born in the US. I don’t think the issue of illegal immigration can be solved this way, and furthermore, the FAIR organization is itself suspect – the widely respected Southern Poverty Law Center (famous for legally opposing racism in the US South), has claimed that FAIR is a hate group. Managing the immigration flow into the US will remain a complex problem for some time, and no simple solutions are at hand. As Malle shows, there are many people who are desperate to come to the US, whether there are low-paying jobs waiting for them or not.  Besides the people from relatively distant Cambodia, there are eager people closer to home, such as those from El Salvador, who are shown fleeing that country’s violence and famine. 

In ironic contrast to these desperate people at the bottom are wealthy immigrants like General Somoza, who after having plundered their native country, brought much of their wealth with them.  But even here, Malle doesn’t express any personal condemnation; he always lets these people speak for themselves.  Perhaps the ultimate expression here is that of General Somoza’s son, who appears to be a thirty-ish householder living in more modest circumstances in the US than he did in Nicaragua.  When he is asked by Malle which place he likes better, he says it is the US.  His life here is more natural, better.  He is free.

★★★

"God’s Country" - Louis Malle (1986)

In 1975 successful French filmmaker Louis Malle moved to the United States and began the second phase of his career, which soon resulted in the production of the feature, Pretty Baby (1978). But although Malle was mostly known to the public for his feature films, he was also an outstanding documentary filmmaker, with some magnificent credits during his French period that included Phantom India (1969) and Calcutta (1969). So when he arrived in the US, he brought his personal, cinéma-vérité-style documentary approach to the American scene. His first documentary film in the US was commissioned by PBS in 1979, and he was given freedom to choose any subject in America that captured his fancy. He eventually settled his focus on the life in a small town in Minnesota, which became the subject of his God’s Country (1986).

Glencoe, Minnesota, the subject of God’s Country, is a farming community about 100 kilometres west of Minneapolis, and its population today of around 5,000 is still about what it was when Malle paid his visits. The film comprises three main sections and becomes increasingly personal (that is, reflecting Malle’s personal fascinations with what he has found) as it progresses to each successive stage:

1. Overview of the Town (about 30 minutes)
2. Specific Subjects of Interest (about 40 minutes)
3. Revisiting the Town Six Years Later (about 20 minutes)

1. Overview of the Town
In the opening scenes I wondered if this film was going to be another European cosmopolite’s dismissal of provincial American hicks. Was this going to just another freak show depicting how humorously weird American Midwesterners are? The film opens with Malle entering Glencoe by road and encountering an elderly lady wearing an odd-looking cap and weeding an overgrown garden near the street. Although she looked a little odd, she turned out to be amiable and wiling to engage. And so it turns out with most of the Glencoe people we encounter in the rest of the film. This first part of the film is general survey of life in the town as seen by the interested French newcomer. After the old lady, we observe some typical small-town Americana:

• The American Legion and its concern for honouring Vietnam war veterans
• Bingo games
• The local Church and its pastor
• The American fixation with mowing and maintaining a well-groomed lawn
• A girl’s softball team
• A cordial local policeman who attends to a town with virtually no crime

Malle also shows an interest in something that might not occur to the locals: the Caucasian ethnic uniformity of the town. Are there many native Indians and Black people around? He speaks with one old man who discusses what he knows about the disappearance of the Indians from the area after the outbreak in 1862 known as the “Sioux Uprising”. Malle also surveys the local farming industry and chats with the owner of the largest farm and another man who is both a farmer and the local banker. The farming business in this area appears to be a balance between dairy and agricultural farming. The overall picture is that of a relatively prosperous and contented town that is shielded from the world’s problems.

2. Specific Subjects
In the next section Malle zeros in on a few people who open up their homes and give him a more intimate view of life in the town.

• We spend about ten minutes visiting the home and farm of a 28-year-old farmer and his wife.
• Then Malle visits a lawyer, Arnold, and his wife, Millie, an aspiring local playwright. Though they, like the great majority of the local populace, have been long-time supporters of the conservative and pro-military Republican Party, their son was a Vietnam war protestor during that war. Although Arnold and Millie approach the subject of that protest cautiously, they gradually open up to Malle and reveal how they came to support their son’s conscience-driven opposition to the war, which led to his arrest (he had been arrested in connection with an attempt to burn local military draft records).
• We meet Steve, who, besides being a performer in the town’s local theatre group (which performs Millie’s satirical plays), works in the local farming industry as the man who inseminates cows. This rather gruesome procedure he performs several times an hour on cows, who put up with this intrusive action without too much protest. Steve is in his thirties and a committed free-loving bachelor. He approvingly remarks on the attitude of the local citizenry of this laid-back farming community to avoid condemning alternative points of view (such as that exemplified by his own lifestyle).
• Glencoe’s young women provide the next topic of interest, and Malle is briefly fascinated with one young woman pumping gas at a local petrol station (perhaps not so common then in France?). He moves on to focus on a remarkable young woman, Jean, whose conversations with Malle were the highlight of the film for me. Jean has an ordinary job as a social security employee at the local court and also has a second job as a bartender on weekends. But Jean is not so ordinary – she is thoughtful, sensitive, well-read, and a free spirit. She has renounced her Roman Catholic faith (over the subject of abortion), and she openly shares her thoughts about life and the world around her in a series of candid film clips.
• The care of the elderly is then considered for about five minutes. Even though Glencoe is not a large town, it seems to have a well-equipped nursing home for its elderly. Although the health of these people is looked after, Malle has some grim shots of extremely frail and probably senile people in this facility living without hope or interest in life.
• The final part of this section is devoted to a wedding of a young local couple. There is a traditional ceremony featuring a soulful singing of “We’ve Only Just Begun”, followed by a dance/reception. But then for the rest of the afternoon the entire wedding party engages in a lengthy bar-hopping trek. Traditional habits apparently persist in this town, even on what would seem to be the most important day of one’s life.

This entire section serves to accentuate the first section, but in greater depth and intimacy.

3. Revisiting the Town Six Year Later
Although Malle’s original visit to Glencoe was in 1979, there were some work interruptions and funding delays that delayed completion of the film for six years. Finally in 1985 Malle returned to Glencoe with his crew to see what had changed. This section then serves as something of sobering reflection on what time has wrought.

The old woman gardener on the road entering the town is still there and still, now at the age of 91, cheerful and industrious. The fixation of lawn-mowing is unchanged. Steve is still a bachelor and still inseminating cows round the clock. But there have been some changes, too. The banker/farmer has died of a heart attack, and the liberated Jean has moved to Florida. But perhaps more significantly for the population at large, the town is now suffering from a severe downturn in agricultural food prices. Farmers are struggling to make ends meet, and some of them are going under. The big farmer, shown in the first section of the film as prosperous and contended, now has heavy losses and is intensely frustrated – he ominously reveals his growing sympathies for the fascistic Posse Comitatus group that fantasizes in Jewish-led conspiracies behind every discontent, and he predicts impending violence in the area.

To close the film, though, Malle turns away from these frustrations and signs of gloom and visits again with Arnold and Millie (the parents of the student antiwar protester). Millie is still writing and producing plays at the local theater. Over dinner, Arnold reflects philosophically on the growing darkness that he sees coming over modern society – its increasing obsession with material greed and the decline of traditional values and fellowship.

In earlier documentary films like Phantom India and Calcutta, Malle displayed two contrasting, concerns: an interest in the spiritual dimension of the people and an identification with the French progressive, leftist focus on social justice, particularly for the working class. One concern was directed towards personal fulfilment, and the other towards the collective good. Accordingly, one can detect in those earlier films Malle’s sympathies shifting back and forth, as he observes local religious practices, on the one hand, evidently holding back the material progress of the Indian people and at the same time offering them something uplifting and wholly lacking in Western societies. This tension is never really resolved in those films, but that two-sidedness is part of what makes those films enduringly interesting – they evoke the depths of unresolved conflicts that remain in today’s world.

Since throughout God’s Country Malle has let the people of Glencoe speak for themselves, the film may appear at first glance to be entirely removed from those concerns present in Malle’s earlier documentaries, and many viewers may be tempted to see the film as merely a snapshot of a small town – a banal cataloguing of a remote and not very exciting village. But though the talk is largely about the mundane aspects of the townspeople’s daily lives, Malle finds Glencoe fascinating, and so do I (even though I am from a town very much like Glencoe, myself). In truth the film offers more than just local-color Americana, and it does carry implicit allusions to those earlier Malle concerns. What evidently fascinated Malle, and what comes through gradually as one watches the film, is the general innocence and cordiality of these people. The ethos behind this social behaviour was epitomized by lawyer Arnold’s remarks at the close of the film. His basic concern for the preservation of common piety and decency was the message that Malle wanted to convey. The people observed in this film are ordinary commonfolk, but on the world stage, they are extraordinary – they mostly seem to treat everyone they encounter as their equals, and they are honest, genuine, and modest (the effect of their interpersonal directness is accentuated by having them speak directly into the camera). This not only shows where Malle’s interests in personal fulfilment and social harmony converge; it also points to the kind of society that we want to have – and if we already have it, as in Glencoe, we want to preserve it. This is God’s country.
★★★½ 

"Calcutta" - Louis Malle (1969)

In 1968 French director Louise Malle took a two-month furlough from the stresses of his life and professional work to visit India. He was only 35, but his brilliant early career (he shared a Cannes Palme D’Or at the age of 23) seemed to be on a dangerous downhill slope, and he was coming off a marital breakup. What he saw in India was a profoundly different way of life and attitude towards reality, which undoubtedly commingled in his mind on his return to France with the student rebellion going on at the time in Paris. He immediately decided to return to India with a cameraman and sound recordist to make a documentary film, and he travelled widely about the country, shooting footage opportunistically and without a preset plan over the ensuing five months.

When Malle returned to India, he had to edit the thirty hours of footage he had accumulated into meaningful documentary material. Much of the footage went into creating the seven-part TV series, Phantom India (1969), which is a uniquely brilliant and reflective examination of the soul of India. But he felt that the material he had for Calcutta (Kolkata) was too much to fit into the Phantom India series, and he made a separate 99-minute documentary film, Calcutta (1969) from that material for theatre release.

One of the interesting things about Calcutta is just how different it is from Phantom India. As I remarked in connection with Phantom India:

“Phantom India was very much in the cinéma vérité tradition that first flourished in the 1960s when the appearance of lightweight film cameras made possible the capturing of “real life” activities in the practical affairs of society. But cinéma vérité in its early European manifestation was distinguished from its counterpart in North America, known as “direct cinema”, which tried to capture “objective” reality by attempting to make the cinematographers invisible. Cinéma vérité filmmakers, in contrast to that, tended to acknowledge explicitly the presence of the filmmaker and his or her involvement in the processes under study. This, in my, view is the more realistic approach and is likely to lead to a more accurately captured “reality” on film. Whatever is captured on film is inevitably altered by the presence of the watcher, and in addition the choice of camera angle and the flow of edited images inevitably reflect the ontological context of the watcher. It is best to recognize this state of affairs and work within that context. This is exactly what Malle did in Phantom India. Indeed, Malle’s film is an extended examination of the issue of cinematic objectivity. He is less concerned with the camera’s putative “invisibility” (there are many occasions when his subjects look straight into the camera) than with the inescapable fact that the director, as well as each viewer, brings to the film his or her own intellectual categories by means of which the perceived reality is to be constructed.”

Calcutta is much less personal than Phantom India and strives for a more objective depiction. The contrast is particularly evident in connection with the presentations of Indian religious practices in the two works. In Phantom India, Malle reveals a personal fascination and amazed appreciation at the depths of Indian religiosity. There is almost a sense of envy at the dedication of Indian religious practitioners and the degree to which their beliefs may bring a profound sense of contentment, even under impoverished material conditions. But in Calcutta the bizarre religious practices seemed to be viewed from a remote and uncomprehending distance. There is no attempt to get inside what may motivate these practices. This remoteness carries over to the rest of Calcutta. Everything in the city seems strange, cluttered, exotic, and sometimes grotesque. There is less empathy and sympathy and more critical condemnation of the dysfunctional “system” in place. Nevertheless, this critical remoteness does not mean that Calcutta restricts itself to a purely objective topographic overview of the city. The film is still basically a randomly impressionistic presentation, but with a more dispassionate eye.

Another significant distinction between the two works is the overall narrative flow. In each of the seven hour-long segments of Phantom India, there is a sort of narrative theme that oversees the images. In those films Malle seems to be relating part of his personal journey and encounter with the soul of India. But in Calcutta we see a repeating sequence of critical segments without Phantom India's sense of personal narrative flow. In fact the segments in Calcutta seem to move almost cyclically through three thematic subjects:

• People/Religion. I put people and religion in the same thematic category here, because in this film, both the customs of the people and their religious practices are viewed from the outside as things that are interesting, but somehow odd and unfathomable. The religious practices in this film are just one more strange aspect about the Indian people and do not represent something fundamentally different from other customs (which contrasts with Phantom India, where religion and spirituality was fundamental to the whole work).
• Politics. There are some segments that take a critical look at politics in India – from the perspective of Malle’s European leftist/Marxist sympathies. These segments are the most “distant” and represent depictions from a critical, Western viewpoint.
• The Poor. Calcutta at this time was the epitome of impoverished human suffering, and its horrors were also brought to Western eyes at about the same time by Ved Mehta’s 1970 article in The New Yorker, “City of Dreadful Night” [1], which later appeared as a chapter in his Portrait of India (1970) [2]. Malle dwells here on the wretched conditions of the many people who have come to Calcutta, some of whom were fleeing perhaps worse conditions of starvation in the countryside.

The segments circling though these subjects that are described below do not show much progression, and it almost seems as though they could have been placed in a different order.

1. People/Religion 1. The first fifteen minutes of the film show the sights and sounds of Calcuttans without any voiceover commentary. The segment starts off with people, mostly men, bathing in ritualistic fashion in the river (presumably the Hooghly). Then there are images of various people observed moving about the city in dense crowds, with a particular attention to interesting faces.
2. The Poor 1. This segment presents brief coverage of the “Dying Rooms” of Mother Teresa, who was not well-known to the West at that time (she was highlighted in Ved Mehta’s article soon thereafter). Here the “poorest of the poor” are picked up off the street by Mother Teresa’s charitable volunteers and given some care to alleviate their suffering prior to (for most of them) their deaths.
3. Politics 1. Some local politics are discussed. The 1967 election led to a centre-left/communist government in West Bengal, but it was overthrown by a parliamentary manoeuver, and to restrain dissent the new government declared martial law and forbad people assembling in groups greater than five (an absurd decree for the crowded city of Calcutta). Malle explains that both the two communist factions in India, the left-wing communists (who followed the Soviet line) and the right-wing communists (who didn’t follow the Soviets) refused allegiance to Mao. Only the fledgling Naxalites started in Naxalbari in 1967 followed the Maoist line, which was where Malle’s sympathies lay.
4. People/Religion 2. There is a coverage of the joyous Festival of Saraswati, the Hindu consort of Brahman and the goddess of knowledge and the arts. Calcuttans spend considerable effort to build and decorate numerous life-size statues of Saraswati, only to throw them all into the river on the final day. One can’t help but reflect on what seems to be the obvious waste of material resources and labour that all this entails.
5. Politics 2. There is a brief depiction here of the Westernized rich, who are cut off from Indian traditions and ape Western practices and lifestyles. Malle repeats the widely-held view of many Indians concerning the British plunder of India:

   “The British East India Company systematically exploited and exhausted the riches of Bengal, taking considerable capital back to England. This influx of money allowed the Industrial Revolution and English capitalism to get underway.”

6. The Poor 2. Before independence, Calcutta was the processing centre for jute fields that were later partitioned off into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). To replace the jute fields, the Indian government used land in West Bengal normally used for food production, leading to severe food shortages in the region and semi-starvation.
7. People/Religion 3. Calcutta was home to some 50,000 Chinese immigrants, and this section shows some of them celebrating the Chinese New Year. Today, though, the ethnic Chinese population is probably only around 2,000. This is followed by discussion of the Sadhus (these were also discussed in Phantom India), who have renounced all material amenities to practice their lone, individual spiritual paths. Despite the poverty in India, the Sadhus are respected and offered alms by even the poor people. Finally, this section shows a Hindu burial.

   “For the Hindu, death is not a dramatic event. It is neither an end not a deliverance . . . . life is only a stage, a passage, a brief moment in a cosmic cycle.”

8. The Poor 3. There is further coverage of the massive, abject hutments of Calcutta where squatters live on privately-held land. This is followed by shots of unskilled labourers and emaciated pedicab drivers struggling to pedal about their heavy loads. As always, Malle is fascinated by the seemingly pointless, menial tasks of labourers who often appear to be doing nothing more than moving useless objects or paper around. (But after all, are not most of us doing the same? The only difference perhaps is that we are better paid for our seemingly nonsensical tasks.)
9. People/Religion 4. This section covers a middle-class wedding, whose ceremonies appear to be ornately weird and laborious. But the large feast provided the groom’s parents is welcomed by the guests. This section also depicts a musical conservatory for sarod-playing that is run by Aashish Khan (son of master Ali Akbar Khan). Many of the students have studied the sarod there for years without plans for professional play, just for their personal satisfaction.
10. Politics 3. Students rebel when the University is closed by the state governor. Many of the students evidently advocate the idea of an armed peasant revolt in the style of the Vietnamese and Maoists. The ensuing student riot, however, is forcefully broken up by police.
11. The Poor 4. Here there is a coverage of the awful conditions of the lepers in Calcutta, which at that time numbered around 75,000. Since that time, however, the treatment of leprosy has been one of India's relative success stories, and the number of lepers has been greatly reduced in the country: there are now less than 5% as many cases as there were then.
12. People/Religion 5. Another Sadhu is shown. This one took up a vow seven years earlier never again to sit or lie down. He is shown surrounded by his disciples who attempt to tend to and alleviate his physical pains. This is followed by a series of shots covering street mountebanks, musicians, and further opaque religious ceremonies.
13. The Poor 5. Here there is extensive coverage of the slums of Howrah, a southern industrial sector of the Calcutta conurbation. Forty percent of Calcuttans were said by Malle to be living in “subhuman conditions”, and this section depicts the squalor and filth of their habitations. There is also coverage of Tamil immigrants from southern India, who don’t speak the local Bengali and are forced to live in squatter settlements outside the city in equally “inhuman” conditions.

At the end of this cyclical coverage of Calcutta, one is left with a feeling of the crowded, cacophonous, almost lurid conditions of life in Calcutta. Since Calcutta was not an ancient Indian city, but was created as a service centre for British imperial interests, Malle is evidently castigating the West for creating these monstrous, inhuman conditions and not rectifying the faults that linger on. This is a fairly grim viewpoint, seen by an outsider, and it is one that might not be shared by Indians aware of the rich Bengali traditions and culture. Still, the film is a fascinating record, because Malle was one of the first people to get out on the streets and make movies about life as it existed there. He had amazing access to a wide spectrum of city life in Calcutta, and the images are not staged or faked. Malle’s interesting kaleidoscopic perspective is still available on film, as it was forty years ago, for anyone to see and make of it what he or she will. For Malle, and for Mehta and Kipling, too, Calcutta may have been “the city of dreadful night”. Whatever perspective one takes, though, we are still trying to understand and learn, as Malle was, from what seems to be an alluring phantom.
★★★

Notes:

1. Mehta, Ved, "Profiles: City of Dreadful Night." The New Yorker, 21 March 1970.
2. Mehta, Ved, Portrait of India, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970.

Phantom India, Episode 7: “Bombay” - Louis Malle

Louis Malle’s four-month filming sojourn in India that resulted in Phantom India (L'Inde Fantôme) came to an end in Bombay (Mumbai), and this serves as the backdrop for his final installment, Episode 7. Much of the footage in the episode appears to be random street scenes that were shot opportunistically and without much planning. However, on top of all this seemingly random but atmospheric footage, Malle supplies a unifying commentary, which goes beyond the locale of Bombay and provides a summary of how he sees India’s current state and future directions. His commentary is even more interesting to contemplate now, more than forty years after they were originally expressed. The commentary, itself, is less structured here than in previous episodes, and it basically amounts to his judgments on six scattered topics (which are interleaved throughout this episode and are not aggregated and presented in the order listed here).

1. The Hutments
One of the lasting impressions on Westerners who have visited Bombay is the squalid hutments that the poor have assembled out of scraps and discarded building materials (some of these shanty settlements are visible from road on the way in to the city from the airport). As far as I can tell what was true in this respect in 1968 is still pretty much true today. Somehow these people manage to make do under dire conditions in these shanty towns, which lack sanitation facilities and other infrastructure. Even worse, there are many other people who appear to live on the streets, without any shelter whatsoever to call their own. Malle comments that he didn’t see such squalor when he toured the countryside, but the fact that many of the people in these hutments have come there in order to escape worse poverty of the rural areas is an indication of just how widespread and severe rural poverty must actually be.

2. Muslims
Muslims are a significant element of Indian society, but Malle did not discuss them until this final episode. He says that much of the Muslim population derive from low-caste Hindu converts during the reign of the Mogul rulers (16th-19th centuries). Although Malle reports that India has (in 1968) 50 million Muslims, today there more than 160 million Indian Muslims, and they represent more than 13% of the population. The cultural influence of Islam is even more significant, especially in the northern parts of India: the Mogul rulers imported Persian and Middle Eastern cultural values that were incorporated into many aspect of Indian life.

Malle has picturesque shots here of the Haj Ali Mosque, which was erected in the 15th century on a small islet just off the Bombay shore and which is reached via causeway. The causeway is only accessible during low tide, so devotees often find themselves wading through the ankle-deep water in order to go back and forth.

In general, Malle observes that Muslims and Hindus live together relatively peacefully (although more recently the spread of Islamic terrorism has elevated communal tensions somewhat). This is a further tribute to the general harmony of Indian society.

3. Parsis
The Parsis are another minority community, and most of their roughly 100,000 population live in Mumbai. Malle photographs a Parsi wedding ceremony, and takes the opportunity to offer his own commentary. The Parsis, who are of Persian origin and follow the Zoroastrian faith, fled Iran during the 10th century, and they represent another example, like Tibetan Buddhists today, of people who found a refuge in India from religious oppression in their homeland. As with the much tinier Cochin Jews (Episode 6), Malle seems scornful of the exclusiveness of the Parsi community, and his portrayal of them is unflattering. Despite the small size of the community, though, it is interesting how many Parsis have achieved considerable eminence in a number of diverse fields, including literature (Rohinton Mistry), journalism (Dina Vakil), industry (the Tata family), entertainment (Freddie Mercury), and music (Zubin Mehta).

4 Mores
Given the generally conservative character of Indian social practices, Malle found the Bombay red-light district surprising and fascinating. The prostitutes, many of them beautiful, are visibly available in “caged” apartments. Many of them tried to dodge Malle’s camera when he photographed the district, but others were openly inviting. Bombay’s openness towards prostitution contrasted with another conventionally sinful practice, alcohol consumption, which was so low that Malle characterise Bombay as a “dry” city. Although consumption of alcohol in India has significantly increased since the time of the filming, overall alcohol consumption in India today is still relatively low by world standards.

5 Politics
At various points in the episode, Malle discusses politics and political figures whom he encountered in Bombay.

• Congress Party. They were powerful, but said to be corrupt. Their alleged corrupt practices later, in 1971, led to the infamous “Emergency” period (1975-1977) and to their ensuing fall from power.
   
• Communists. Malle was surprised (he had discussed this in earlier episodes) that the Communist Party was not much of a force in India. Malle’s apparent leftist sympathies led him to complain that the Indian Marxists were too unimaginative, and they needed a Mao Zedong to organize the peasant population. (The Naxalites, who are indeed self-consciously Maoist, were just getting started at that time).
   
• Shiv Sena. Malle covers the new Shiv Sena party and interviews their leader, Balasaheb Thackeray. This is an extreme right-wing and xenophobic party that tries to advance the interests of the local Maharashtri community ahead of all others. 


• Other figures. Malle interviews a conservative politician (Pashabhai Patel), a leftist intellectual (Vinayak Purohit), and a comely Oxford-educated economist (Rajani Desai), all of whom he seems to believe are too Westernized and out of touch with the real India. Actually I found that the thoughts expressed by Ms. Desai to be thoughtful and objective, and her optimism about India’s political future has essentially been rewarded by subsequent events.

6 Industrialization and Society
The eternal questions concerning capitalism and socialism were fundamentally associated with the degree to which India was expected to open up its economy to more private ownership. The leftists wanted democratic socialism, and the right-wing wanted more freedom for the business sector. At that time in 1968, the economy was pretty restricted. For example, anyone who wanted to own a car for personal use had to get on a waiting list for 7-10 years. But new factories and auto-assembly plants were being built, and Indian industrialization was starting to emerge.

Malle still found the admixture of Western globalized practices and traditional Indian practices to be bizarre. Indians adopted some Western practices readily, while they resisted others. For example, many Indians enthusiastically adopted the British “stiff upper-lip” mannerisms to the point that they claimed that they were the last holdovers of true British culture. On the other hand, the fervent traders on the Indian stock market floor still felt compelled to consult their astrological charts in order to determine whether an upcoming trade offer was propitious.

In the final analysis Malle seems to be of a mixed mind. He remarks that India resists Western globalization, because “its social structures are stronger and more vital than anywhere else.” That is an expression of confidence that Indian culture will endure this invasion, as it has all the others. Yet at the end of the film, Malle wonders gloomily whether India’s special way of life will increasingly be overwhelmed by the modern world, which is more and more a case of man exploiting his fellow man. This to me is a bit too pessimistic. The stratification of Indian society has always represented an entrenchment of rules that ensured social and economic exploitation. There is nothing new about that. No, there is something else, something far deeper, lying at the heart of the Indian soul that persists and which will continue to endure and spread out to other parts. It is my hope that globalization's interaction with India will work in the reverse direction, too: the rest of the world will somehow be touched by and learn from the Indian way.
★★★½ 

Phantom India, Episode 6: “On the Fringes of Indian Society” - Louis Malle

In Episode 6 of Louis Malle’s seven-part documentary series on India, Phantom India (L'Inde Fantôme), the attention is turned to some encounters with people and groups that were ostensibly outside his principal focus, which was to come to grips with the mystery of essential Indian culture. The activities described here offer something of a potpourri, and their only common trait would seem to be that they are outliers. Nevertheless, there is an additional unifying thread in this episode that relates to Malle’s overarching theme, and that is the degree to which Indian society has always largely tolerated and provided a peaceful home for diverse customs and lifestyles. The episode successively takes up the activities of five interesting social groups, each of which has its own fascinating ways of operating.

1. The Bondo People
He first describes his strenuous hike to meet up with the Bondo people, who live in the forests of Orissa, in eastern India. The Bondo, who number about 5,000, are a fiercely independent aboriginal people who live completely outside ordinary Indian society. Their language, for example, has nothing in common with other Indian languages. The men, who are only semi-clothed, hunt with bows and arrows. The women wear only a couple of items of clothing: (a) an extremely low-hung loin cloth, which leaves their buttocks almost completely exposed, and (b) a collection of thick brass necklaces – nothing else. Unsurprisingly, their quasi-nudity attracts the attentions of Malle’s camera. Despite their primitive conditions and isolation, though, the people seem not to have minded the intrusion of Malle and his small crew.

Further attesting to the fact that the Bondo people do not seem to stand on ceremony was the fact that the boys and girls of the tribe mix together with total sexual freedom and often live in unisex dormitories, where they can better acquaint themselves with future spouses. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Bondo, at least to Malle, was their women, who (unusually for India) outnumber the men and traditionally marry men who are about a half-dozen years younger themselves. The principle labour of these women involves the construction of straw brooms, which they sell at a local Indian market for the extremely low price of ten brooms for a single rupee. This occasional visit to the market is the only contact and economic commerce that the Bondo have with the outside world. Amazingly, the pitifully small amount of money collected from these sales apparently all goes into buying more brass necklaces for the women.

Despite the simplicity and seeming innocence of these primitive Bondo people, however, their frequently sad countenances suggested to Malle that their lives were very hard and are far from the paradisal existence that he had hoped to find.

2 Christians in Kerala
Kerala has a significant number of Christians, and the Christian Church in India traces its history all the way back to the visit of St. Thomas, the Apostle, in 52 A.D. Nevertheless, Malle observes that Christian evangelism hasn’t made much progress in India, despite efforts by both the Portuguese and the English. The small minority who are Christian, according to Malle, are “fanatic”. The conversions that the Christian manage to make apparently come from either the highest or the lowest castes, and indeed the caste system persists just as firmly within the Christian community as it does in the Hindu community. Thus the Christianity in India seems to be something of a hybrid with aspects of Hindu practices. This should not be surprising in light of the fact that Muslims, too, both in Indian and Pakistan, also live according to the caste system.

3 Jews in Cochin
Malle also visits the Jewish community of Cochin, which was even older than the Christian community, claiming a continuous history of 2,600 years in India. Remarkable, and a further testament to Indian cultural tolerance, is the fact that India is the only country in the world that has not ever subjected its local Jewish community to persecution. But the Cochin community that Malle visited was very small, only about one hundred members at that time. In connection with such a small group, Malle disparagingly criticised their exclusive endogamous social practices, by which inbreeding, he dismissively claimed, had weakened the community and made them sickly and physically degenerate. The people that Malle interviewed, though, asserted they were very happy with life in India, where they lived in relative prosperity and free from persecution. The community population had been diminishing by emigration to Israel ever since 1948, and in fact today, it has apparently dwindled to zero. (There is still a Jewish community today in Mumbai, numbering about 5,000 people, but, sadly, they were targeted by Muslim terrorists in the Mumbai bombings of November, 2008.)

4 Aurobindo and Pondicherry
Malle and his crew next cover the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry (Puducherry), which is situated in an enclave in Tamil Nadu in southeast India. The founder, Sri Aurobindo (Aurobindo Ghose, 1872-1950), was a remarkable figure who managed to be a prominent Indian nationalist activist, politician, philosopher, poet, and yogi. After his political activities were essentially stifled by the government, he retired from politics and founded the ashram in 1920. He was soon joined by a French woman, Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973), who became his spiritual colleague and was eventually simply referred to as “The Mother”. She took over management of the ashram in 1926, when Aurobindo retired into meditative seclusion. By the time Malle arrived in 1968, The Mother was very frail and not making public appearances, but she was still making recordings to deliver to her followers. The ashram is attractive to educated, prosperous Europeans and Indians, and many of them have come from all over the world to settle down there, bringing their wealth with them. There is a progressive school, athletic activities, and small businesses – all run by the devotees. All of those interviewed by Malle asserted that they had found an inner peace and understanding that had led them to true happiness. Malle is nonjudgmental, but seems sympathetic. At the time of Malle’s visit, the ashram was in the process of planning and constructing their utopian city, Auroville, near Pondicherry, and it continues to operate today, with a population of about 2,000.

5 The Toda People
Malle’s last topic in this episode is his visit with the Toda people. Here, at last, he claims to have found the real, utopian society. The Toda people, numbering only about 800, live high up in the Nilgiri Mountains in Tamil Nadu and remote from the rest of the world. There they seem to live in a state of nature, all practicing free love throughout their lives. Malle asserts that no Toda girl is a virgin past the age of thirteen, and that sex is considered by these people to be a simple, natural need. In those days of Malle’s visit (1968), because Toda men outnumbered the women, women would often marry all the brothers of a given family (fraternal polyandry). In this connection and as a consequence of the prevailing free love practice in the society, paternity was impossible to establish, so the oldest brother was automatically designated to be the legal father of any offspring.

Besides free love, though, there are other attractive features about the Toda way of life. The people have never waged war, and they have no weapons. Fighting is not something they do. Although they never took to farming, they are nevertheless vegetarians, and live off milk, honey, and wild fruits. Their land is communally owned, and they have no laws, leaders, or hierarchy – complete egalitarianism. If ever there is a dispute among the Toda, a council of elders is gathered specially for the occasion in order to resolve the issue. The people, themselves, Malle observes, are generally carefree, and he captures on film their spontaneous ability to improvise songs and dances to suit the occasion. But Malle worries that encroaching “civilization” will eventually and inevitably absorb these people and divert them away from their idyllic ways. Although we are only talking about 800 people out of the vastly populated subcontinent, Malle laments the thought of such a passing –

“. . .these 800 Toda are the last remnants of a free society. They never knew war, hunger, prudishness, or injustice.”

If Malle were alive today, he might perhaps view the fate of the Toda people as a metaphor for the relentlessly homogenizing impacts of globalization on all of Indian society.
★★★★

Phantom India, Episode 5: “A Look at Castes” - Louis Malle

Throughout Phantom India, writer-director Louis Malle shows his awareness of the tension between two conflicting approaches towards encountering Indian culture. On the one hand one must situate what one sees within the critical categories of Western thought; and on the other hand, one must be open and receptive to things that go beyond our reflective categories. In this connection in Episode 4, Malle’s reflections took a swing towards the critical side, and the bias to this side is continued further in Episode 5, where the subject of the Indian caste system is brought to the fore.

This episode focusses on life in the traditional villages, where Malle has been told that you can find the essence of what India is about. To be sure, he tells us, despite a number of big urban areas, 80% of the Indian population resides in rural villages [1], and so he and his crew have gone to a village in Haryana province, just to the north of Delhi, to film the local inhabitants. At the outset Malle interviews an American Peace Corps volunteer who has come to an Indian village to introduce modern farming techniques to the local population. He is trying to bridge the gap between the modern West and the traditional East and hoping that Western technology can make a positive contribution to life in the villages. But, of course, this is an enormous challenge to effect significant changes: there were only 700 such Peace Corps volunteers and over 560,000 Indian villages [2].

Initially, Malle finds the people in the Haryana village living according to simple practices and routines that have probably been unchanged for centuries. He observes that the people there live collectively in town, not on the farms where they work. The women always cover their faces with veils when unfamiliar men are present. Almost everyone is vegetarian, and he films women spending hours each day making their daily staple: chapati bread. One thing that surprises him is the usefulness to village life of cow dung. In a country with little remaining forest for firewood, cow dung, instead of being used for fertilizer, is used as a slow-burning fuel.

But after settling down and watching the villagers engaged in their mundane routines, Malle starts to notice interesting patterns that were not initially evident to him. In this village of 2,000 inhabitants, there are over twenty water wells (where two or three would have sufficed), and the same village women whose traditional job it is to fetch water always gather water from the same specific wells. What he has discovered, without being told, is that the village has a separate well for each caste, and only members of a particular caste can draw water from any given well. The remainder of this episode is then an extended exploration of how this peculiar (to Westerners) institution, the Indian social caste system, operates in the local village arena.

Generally speaking, caste systems can be said to exist in many places in the world, but the Indian caste system is extreme, which makes it a particular subject of curiosity to outsiders. For various reasons, perhaps because outsiders approach the subject with disparaging prejudgments, Malle observes that Westernized Indians avoid discussing the topic altogether. But other Indians don’t discuss the subject much, either – the local villagers that Malle encounters don’t mention it, because the nature of the system is merely an accustomed and accepted part of the social fabric. To them it is just the way things are and have always been. Even the English speakers among the local villagers don’t know how to explain “pariah”, “caste”, and “untouchable”, since those words seem to have no meaning for them in their native tongue.

Of course we know that many Indians have long been critical of the caste system. The Buddhists, Jains, Ajivikas, Muslims, and Christians in India have traditionally condemned the caste system as an anathema. And Asoka, the Buddhist monarch who reigned over the vast Mauryan Empire in the 3rd Century BCE, was one of several rulers in Indian history who outlawed or discouraged the caste system. Gandhi was opposed to the caste system, and the Indian Constitution in 1950 explicitly outlawed caste-based discrimination. Yet still the system has stubbornly persisted over the millennia and continues to dominate rural India today. Why it endures so unrelentingly is still somewhat mysterious.

The nature and origins of the Indian caste system are obscure. Westerners are taught that there are four principal varnas: Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaisyas (merchants, herders, and cultivators), and Shudras (laborers). But of course it is much more complicated than just those four classifications, with multiple gradations and variations across India, plus thousands of sub-castes (jatis) [3]. The origins of this system and how it came about are also obscure. The ancient Aryans of Greece, Iran, and the Caucasus had, it is true, three principal classes corresponding to warriors, priests, and farmers. So an early assumption was that the caste system in India was introduced by the Aryan invaders [4], who simply classified the native Dravidian people as the lowest class, the Shudras, below the three Aryan classes. But more recent research suggests that the Dravidian people had a well-developed caste system before the Aryans invaded. From this account it would seem that the existing Dravidian caste system was simply adopted by the Aryan invaders, who then placed themselves at the top of it [5].

Going beyond these general and categorical speculations, we have Malle and his cameraman on the ground in the local village making specific observations concerning Indian castes. Malle can see no obvious physical differences across the classes [6], yet the class-specific differences in behaviour, learned from birth, are marked. He pointedly notes the occasion when a village child asked him if he were American. When Malle indicated he was not, the child responded by asking him, “then what caste are you?” To Malle it was clear from those two questions that caste was a mechanism for identifying one’s basic nature and thereby marked essential boundaries of separation

Upon reflection we might presume that there may have been some real social utility to the caste system in ancient times. Originally, it may have functioned like the professional guilds in medieval Europe. Even outside the scope of identifying an occupational grouping, the caste system could have been used as a social-networking tagging system to create artificial brotherhoods. Such brotherhoods can conceivably foster the adoption of social norms and cooperative standards of behaviour that can bring benefits to the group as a whole. Along these lines Malle wonders if in past times the caste system could have indeed once provided a useful system of balanced, interlocked functions and rewards in the village society. Then, maybe, but not today. Now, with the rigidity of the caste boundaries and the landowners owning everything, the caste system is simply a ruthless instrument of oppression. In fact now the caste system may actually be a significant impediment to a well functioning democracy, since castes are becoming ever more rigid, isolated, and locked in mutual opposition, rather than forming an interlinked fabric.

We know, of course, that however the caste system may have originally been influenced by utilitarian and economic considerations, it has long been more than simply a set of occupational groupings or a tagging system, and it has always been part of the Brahmanical religion (Hinduism). It functions primarily in that context as a hierarchical system of privilege, based on presumed purity. The less pure one is, the less fit he is even to come in contact with those of the higher castes. An example of such a lower-level caste is the dhobis. These are people who wash clothes, including underclothes, which is an operation unsuitable for the higher caste wives, who have a more elevated level of recognized purity. In all the villages, clothes cleaning (performed laboriously, without the use of soap or detergent) is undertaken by the dhobis, and even in the big cities the clothes cleaning businesses are manned by dhobi manual laborers.

The lowest classes are the Untouchables, those unsuitable to be touched by the upper castes. But even lower are the tribal people that Malle observes. They are not even allowed to enter the village, and their state is even worse than the Untouchables – they are outcastes, standing completely outside the system. These severely disadvantaged classes are not at all a small segment of Indian society – the scheduled castes (loosely, the Untouchables), scheduled tribes, and other backward classes may make up more than 30% of the population [7].

Yet all these lower castes do not protest such daily denials of basic human rights, because they do not see all people to be of fundamental equal worthiness. The ritually pure have essential superiority. This is supported by the Hindu system of metempsychosis (the transmigration of souls), which instructs the followers that there is an eternal cycle of rebirths. After death a person will be reborn to a new state in the world based on the merits of his or her past life. If one is born into a lower caste, then it is simply one’s own fault. The only way to rise to higher levels is to accept dutifully one’s position and not complain. Because one always has another chance to make things better in the next life, Indian funerals, Malle observes, are not such sad occasions as they are in Western societies.

Since the schoolteachers are customarily Brahman, the education system at the local village level is operated by people who have a stake in the existing system and are unlikely to call attention to its inequities. This is the way that class stratification persists the world over. At the end of this episode, Malle observes a further example of small-town corruption when he witnesses a panchayat, which is a local village council that has the appearance of a town-hall meeting and which adjudicates a village dispute. Although the law requires the presence of a woman and an Untouchable on the panchayat board, they are said to be “absent” from the day’s meeting that Malle witnesses. As Malle watches how the local landlords and proprietors stage-manage the proceedings, he concludes dismally that the panchayat is, just like the caste system, simply another instrument of oppression for the benefit of the local privileged classes.

At the beginning of this episode, Malle was worried that he was directing the villagers to play roles for his camera that would not be natural and authentic. So he finally stopped telling them not to look at the camera and just let them behave as they wished, without instruction. Later, though, he decided that the people were still stage-directing themselves, artificially, in order to play what they imagined would be a good role for the camera. For example the villagers put on a local music performance for the filmmakers, using musical instruments that they had not used for a long time. The whole proceeding was, for Malle, false and not really authentic. But by the time we reach the end of the episode, Malle has come to an even more dismal conclusion about authentic behaviour. He realizes that the social rules of the caste system are perpetually forcing the people to play artificial roles (for the Brahmanical gods watching) throughout their lives.
These roles are forced on them by a system of beliefs that perpetuates the oppression.

Finally, Malle reflects on that Peace Corps worker he interviewed at the beginning of the episode. What is needed for Indian rural society, he concludes, is not the introduction of modern technology and tools, but a fundamentally transformed mindset about nature and society. Given the ingrained and enduring nature of India’s cultural traditions over the centuries, this would be a vastly more difficult task.
★★★★

Notes:

1. The 2001 census indicated that the rural Indian population was 73%.
2. The 2001 Indian census indicated that there were about 640,000 villages in India.
3. See, for example, A. L. Basham, The Wonder That Was India, (1959), Grove Press, NY, pp. 147-151.
4. There are disagreements among scholars concerning whether this "invasion" involved a significant population migration or was actually more of a cultural invasion. See, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration.
5. G.S. Mudur, "Caste in the genes". The Telegraph, (1 January 2001) Calcutta. http://www.telegraphindia.com/1070101/asp/knowhow/story_7203802.asp.
6. Indeed, studies have shown that there are essentially no characteristic genetic differences across the castes, cf. Kivisild, T.; S. Rootsi, M. Metspalu, S. Mastana, K. Kaldma, J. Parik, E. Metspalu, M. Adojaan, H.-V. Tolk, V. Stepanov, M. Gölge, E. Usanga, S. S. Papiha, C. Cinnioglu, R. King, L. Cavalli-Sforza, P. A. Underhill, and R. Villems (February 2003). "The Genetic Heritage of the Earliest Settlers Persists Both in Indian Tribal and Caste Populations", American Journal of Human Genetics 72 (2): 313–332, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=379225&blobtype=pdf.
7. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Other_Backward_Classes.