The Forgotten Orientalist: Louis Malle

Of all the famous explorations of India by Westerners, from Kim to Slumdog Millionaire, none has been so undeservedly ignored by post-colonial scholarship as Louis Malle's epic seven-part 1969 documentary L'Inde fantome, and its accompanying theatrical release Calcutta. Their recent release in a Criterion Collection DVD box set, with crystal-clear restored picture and English subtitles, promises to remove this extraordinary document from the arthouse circuit and bring it to the attention of more students of Indian history, especially in the classroom. A rigorous analysis of Malle's project has so far been the domain of film enthusiasts, but viewing it beyond the narrow lens of artistic technique reveals a complex and contradictory view of India at a particular point in its history as an independent nation-state.

Malle's extended and multifaceted look at India, from urban poverty to social unrest to the remote concerns of its tribal populations, and touching all the hot topics -religion, caste, class, gender- must be judged both as a measure of its historical work (how it reveals a time and a place) and as a literary device that problematises the relationship between a society and an outside observer. In this respect Malle is surely an Orientalist, a Westerner obsessed with exploring India who continually veers between confidence and despair, condescension and sympathy, sincere effort and authorial laziness. Unlike other Orientalists, however, he is unusually open about his frustrations; his ramshackle narration does not shy away from discussing his struggles at coming to terms with what he sees before him. This is perhaps what makes these documentaries endearing even when the viewer may vehemently disagree or question Malle's approach. Even so, one would have to admit that Malle is always better with the historical particularities than with the generalisations and attempts to extract meaning from the pictures.

The first episode of L'Inde fantome, shown as a miniseries on television, is by far the worst and sets up an unpromising frame. Malle's conceit was that he would let the camera guide him, and he would act more as an observer than as an interpreter. His lack of familiarity with India, especially his choice to travel without translators speaking local languages and apparently without doing much background reading, is a deliberate choice to get at the "real" India. He starts out by emphatically rejecting all the contributions from the middle and upper classes, whom he derisively calls "Anglicised Indians," casting them as inauthentic. Government officials, academics, and anyone who speaks in good English is automatically distrusted and dismissed. The problem with this approach is that first, these groups play a vital role in shaping the realities Malle sees around him, and secondly that he does not interview many of the other Indians anyway, and when he does they speak mostly in English! Malle's prejudices lessen as the series moves on, and we get to hear a lot from businessmen, party leaders, and a few artists. One of the strongest aspects of the film from a historical point of view are the uneasy interviews with famous figures like Jyoti Basu and Bal Thackeray. Malle's suspicious questions do not give them a free pass; indeed, especially in Thackeray's case (then a young, charismatic figure on the rise), letting them speak is enough to allow the viewer to form a decisive opinion about what's going on. Thackeray proudly displays his aggressive communalism, and Malle doesn't need a voice-over to paint him as a dangerous force in Indian politics.
But it is the subalterns who suffer the most in Malle's presentation. Peasants, urban crowds, beggars, tribals, sadhus, and especially women are viewed from a distance, as a spectacle or an object of particular interest. They look into the camera, and the camera looks back, recording silently. They rarely speak, and when they do it is in broken English or with the help of an unknown translator. We never find out where Malle gets his information about who the subject of a particular scene is and what he or she is doing. How do we know how much this bricklayer earns? How do we know which caste this woman is from? Malle of course doesn't need to detail every step of the filming process, but his narration (recorded after he had returned to France) appears as a detached account that is part fact, part imagination and conjecture. For example, when Malle admits that his peaceful utopian view of fishermen on the banks of the sea is disrupted by a banal argument over the price of fish, he doesn't go further by telling us why the people are arguing. He films on and on, the women yelling at each other in the vernacular without translation. The viewer gets the point: the endless interplay between the fantasy of India and the mundane, but Malle is still secretly afraid of the mundane and stops short of letting the viewer go too far into it. Some part of the scene must still remain mysterious and fundamentally incomprehensible.

Malle's Orientalism is dominated by his perceived inability to ultimately "know" India. This is most obvious in the extended Bharatanatyam segment in Part 2. After days of uninterrupted filming of dancers practicing, Malle is convinced that the essence of India is beyond him and all outside observers. Through their movements, the dancers express a quality of "Indianness" that is only known to them and cannot be accessed from the outside. His obvious proof consists of two white dancers, who (Malle thinks) are too clumsy and can learn only by rote, never achieving the natural grace of the Indian students. Here, on the one hand Malle is an atypical Orientalist because he respects Indian culture and does not presume to dissect it, categorise it or manipulate it. On the other hand, what could be more typically Orientalist than advocating such an essential separation of the human experience? Malle is categorically saying that learning the mythology, practicing the dance, speaking the language, and any other kind of epistemic activity is bound to fail. This perspective deeply influences how Malle approaches almost all his subjects, but becomes especially evident in the villages. When discussing caste hierarchy or religious practice, Malle gives a few limited explanations, but always retreats into the impossibility of ever knowing why people behave the way they do. They are Indians, we are Westerners. They think differently than us, and view the world differently. We can observe, record, comment but not understand.
In one way, this is the inevitable outcome of Malle's choice to film from a distance and not to try and know India in the first place. This may be a well-meaning attempt to prevent his own prejudices and investigative techniques from corrupting the desired "real," but it is more often due to a sense of fear and uncertainty that he is inherently incapable of knowing India. In this respect, Malle's documentaries are worth careful study to tease out the ambiguities of the outsider in India. This is rich literary ground.
Historically speaking, this ambiguity is more harmful than interesting. Malle demonstrates several times the ability to make subtle and unique observations about how post-colonial Indian society works, on topics that far too little scholarship has focused on. For example, in the first episode, he notes that mainstream Indian newspapers do not report on violence or rape. This quick point, derived undoubtedly from comparing the Indian press with the one in France, can lead us to ask a thousand questions: about patriarchal norms, a "tacit consent" to construct an information flow that puts some facts in the public sphere while concealing others, or about the distance between the urban literate newspaper reader and the rural site of certain events. Finally, we can ask how this has changed in the past 40 years since Malle's documentary (the observation would certainly not hold true today). In the fifth episode, this theme is briefly touched upon again when Malle notes that few crimes against Dalits are reported in the press, and that it only takes a policeman or minor official to break the "law of silence" (Malle's term) for these acts to see the light of day. Now we also have a glimpse of the middlemen on the information chain, and the complex position they find themselves in. These topics are severely underdeveloped in studies of post-colonial India, for justifiable reasons of sensitivity and obscurity. Malle's outsider view casually and almost unconsciously brings them to light.

But in the end, Malle cannot transcend the central contradiction of his project, between the desire to explain and the inability to know. He spends much of the seven episodes talking about economic exploitation, showing the power of rich landlords and urban capitalists, the proletarianisation of peasants, and the struggle to organise for better working conditions. He interviews prominent Marxists and assists at major demonstrations (including a striking student riot dispersed by tear gas and gunfire in Calcutta). Malle is sympathetic to the oppressed and speaks the language of class, as would be expected of a French intellectual in 1968. But despite his confident and fair economic analysis of India's problems, Malle slips back into the language of peasants as "fatalistic," and incapable of change. In the very last scene, Malle offers what is perhaps the most adventurous explanation he is capable of: that the India of tradition from time immemorial is changing into an India beset by the recognisable economic woes of the modern world. The tyranny of caste becomes the tyranny of class. It's a simplistic judgment that ignores the many ways in which caste and class have interacted and co-existed, and how their relationship evolves across time and space. In the end, when it came to giving his film a title, Malle chose to admit that finding the "real" India was impossible. For him it remained merely a phantom.