The Curse of Gandhism: A Review of Prakash Jha's "Aarakshan"

I've just returned from seeing Prakash Jha's already-controversial film Aarakshan (Reservation) at the Regal Cinema in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Built by the British in the early 1930s, it is a magnificent, cavernous space complete with a wide balcony, round arches on the side walls, and pictures of old film stars in the lobby. Surprisingly, it's also fairly clean and well kept. All in all, it reminds me once again of how fake, gaudy and soulless the multiplex "experience" can be, especially in India, and how little of the old culture of film-going remains with us.

But I digress. As far as the content of the film goes, this was also a surprise. The pre-release controversy had made it seem like Aarakshan was a bold, reactionary attempt to criticise reservations - hence why it was banned in UP by Mayawati's government. In fact, as the Times of India review notes, very little of the film even references or discusses the issue of reservations in any sustained or serious way. It's more of an incidental device to move the plot forward to the real confrontation: between Amitabh Bachchan's heroic, inspirational ex-principal of a private college who offers free classes to the community and villain Manoj Bajpai's commercial education scheme. True, Bachchan's character does resign from his post at the college over his support for reservations, and there is a fierce conflict in the first half involving Saif Ali Khan's Dalit professor and a high-caste student played by Prateek Babbar. But they come together in the end to help Bachchan defeat the for-profit coaching classes, backed by corrupt politicians and the police. The film's climactic scene is a showdown, as bulldozers approach the gate of Bachchan's compound, between the good guys (students and volunteers of all castes) and lathi-wielding policemen.

By pure coincidence, I caught a bit of Richard Attenborough's Gandhi on TV last night, a film I have not seen in years and certainly not since I began doing a PhD. in Indian history. The moving scene depicting the Dharasana Satyagraha, in which row after row of peaceful marchers are mercilessly clubbed by police, shows just how ideologically and cinematically powerful the imagery of Gandhism continues to be. In effect, Prakash Jha has resolved his plot by using the classic set-up of Gandhian struggle: non-cooperating, non-violent do-gooders versus the mighty apparatus of the state. It comes as no surprise, though it still manages to be an emotional moment drawing cheers from the audience, when the bulldozers' drivers are convinced by Bachchan's appeal and cross over to join the students in solidarity. What does this say about Jha's view of politics, and its appeal?

This has been a hot topic for discussion since last summer's hit Raajneeti, which depicted the political process and very nearly all its participants as fundamentally violent and corrupt. A perceptive essay in the current issue of The Caravan about Jha's career basically makes the point that his characters have become "bereft of a moral core". They do not ask themselves questions about the "ethical consequences" of their actions. In some cases, as in Gangajaal (2003), the film "dangerously leaves the task of public accountability to the individual conscience of one man". It should become apparent from my description that, with Aarakshan, Jha can be absolved of the charge of not creating idealistic or ethically concerned characters anymore. Bachchan's principal is a model of uprightness, honesty and fairness; when the fight over reservations erupts on the grounds of his college, he steps in to reprimand both sides and dutifully carries on the fight to improve children's lives and test scores through tireless work and self-sacrifice. Here, however, Jha's tendency to offer solutions in the form of the virtuous actions of one individual reveals itself. Though an entire community comes together to help with the free classes, and a mass protest including both upper and lower castes ends up facing the villains at the end, in the end the success of the enterprise rests on one man's shoulders. The method of grassroots voluntarism being idealised here is also extra-institutional, and leaves no room for contemplating the reform of existing institutions like the private college. Only after Bachchan is on the outside can he score his great moral victory and then be appointed back to his old post. The crooked politicians are not voted out or held judicially accountable but publicly shamed.

The appeal of this worldview is not only nostalgic but deeply connected to the ongoing debate about corruption. The self-anointed Gandhian activist Anna Hazare has been mobilising the middle classes by fasting in support of the passage of the sweeping anti-corruption Lokpal Bill. Critics of Hazare's approach have pointed to the absolutist nature of the demands, which move beyond and even seek to de-legitimise the political process. A remarkable and profound interview in Tehelka with civil society activist Aruna Roy makes the point that any attempt to change the mechanism or culture of governance in a democracy must go through the painful but necessary process of soliciting opinions from stakeholders, debating drafts of bills, compromising, and, at the end, living with the end result even if it may not be ideal: "Democracy is a dialectic and you can’t afford to lose it. And no matter how imperfect it is and how much we struggle to refine it, unless we want to opt for a dictatorship, even a benign one, it is the only viable political system we have." She tells this story to illustrate the dangers of Hazare's bottom-line approach: "Let me give you a very small example from a meeting in Tilonia in Rajasthan. Every 15 August and 26 January the gram panchayat there has meetings and invites me to speak. Once there was this big talk in the air that “Constitution koh badalna hain”. I asked the 3,000-strong crowd, how many of you have seen the Constitution? About six hands went up. Then I asked, how many of you have touched it, about four went up. Then I asked, how many of you have read it and two went up. So then I said, if a political party is telling you the Constitution of India is anti the people of India and we must amend it, and all of you are saying, yes, yes, it’s bad, change it, are you acting out of reason or ignorance?"

The "curse of Gandhism" I am referring to is not so much the substantive nature of Gandhian political thought, but the enduring appeal of the form. In Hazare's case, as it has become very clear by now, the high-profile fasting and the other theatrical aspects of his movement conceal a contestable political programme (pushing for oversight by building a new bureaucracy) while claiming to be outside and indeed even hostile to politics. Prakash Jha's recent films, along with Rang de Basanti (2006), invoke the social-patriotic conscience of mainstream Hindi cinema (largely absent since the 1950s, the decade of Guru Dutt, Raj Kapoor and Bimal Roy). These are films about big issues, daring to ask about how to save the country (Aarakshan's tagline: "India v. India"). The answers they provide, however, are troubling in different ways. Rang de Basanti was an extreme case; its protagonists, apathetic students inspired to love their country by making a documentary about Bhagat Singh, take action by assassinating a corrupt politician. In Aarakshan, the solution is mild and basically unobjectionable by comparison. But by not saying anything about the political process, or offering any hope about building institutions other than the Bachchan character's selfless volunteerism, the film offers a bleak assessment of the prospects of Indian democracy. We never get to hear a full argument about the politics of reservations, or understand what place they have in India's democratic system. All we know by the end is that we must "be the change we wish to see in the world", so to speak. In 2011, that's no longer enough.

Provincializing America? My Name Is Khan and Modernity

Seeing My Name Is Khan with a group of sophisticated movie-goers guaranteed the usual bouts of exasperated sighing that accompany the credits of a Karan Johar film. In fact, this one is so over-the-top that the top is no longer even in view; it makes Kuch Kuch Hota Hai look like Scenes from a Marriage by comparison. As with all masala epics, suspension of disbelief is a given...nobody in any audience would think it realistic. But in some ways MNIK reaches much farther than the usual Hindi film. For one thing, in this as in other recent dramas (I'm thinking of Paa, which I just saw), set musical pieces are gone entirely, replaced by a more "Western" soundtrack-montage overlay. For another, and much more importantly, the film turns a sociological lens -both broadly and minutely- upon another country, the United States, in ways that suggest a new form of "globalisation" for the Hindi film. Instead of, as many scholars have pointed out, merely transporting the action to foreign shores or focusing on the culturally cosmopolitan wealthy middle classes in India, the post-1990s Hindi film is also making its first attempts at representational authority.

What do I mean by this? It's not only that a non-Western film takes America as its subject. Plenty of such films exist. MNIK does so, however, without any pretence of subtlety or objectivity, yet from a universalist standpoint. It revels in its own partiality and stereotypes with confidence. Previously, Hollywood filmmakers would throw up a hasty sketch of a foreign country where the workings of that society, including timelines, would be hopelessly blurry. And of course it would all be defensible on the grounds of artistic licence! If a serious foreign film ever looked back, it would be from a verite or underground perspective. But here, we have a Hindi blockbuster taking the same kind of sloppy liberties, and the result is oddly exhilarating. Thus, most average Americans are shrill caricatures, racist and suspicious and decidedly unfriendly (contra the usual view of typical American openness and friendliness; see the scene where the cable car passengers crowding around Shah Rukh in the middle of the street are all abusing him, except for the good-hearted Indian Kajol). George Bush in 2008 is greeted by hundreds of happy supporters waving signs and flags at a speaking appearance. Politics don't exist (conversely, do Slumdog or City of Joy ever discuss the intricacies of party politics and opinion polls?). Along the same lines, teachers in San Francisco Bay Area (!) schools tell children that Muslims are evil. Scrappy college journalists can break a national story regarding torture by passing it on to the local television station...on this count Johar is far too naive and optimistic about America! And so on.

The most head-scratchingly bizarre choice of stereotype is the pre-Civil War Deep South village milieu Johar constructs (on a set in Bombay), with Big Mama Jenny and her little boy living in a shack and praying at the local church with all the other black folk. Prima facie this is all immensely racist, condescending, and ham-handed. There is a wish for some kind of alliance between the oppressed here (singing "We Shall Overcome" together, the convoy of good-hearted Muslims delivering supplies through the waist-deep water when no government aid arrives), but having no understanding of the experiences of minorities in post-industrial society (Katrina affected the poor urban population, not some idyllic hamlet where cows outnumber people 3 to 1) and pulling out the worst from the "yes'm massa" bag of tricks is no way to go about it. Then again, Karan Johar has always been a very conservative kind of filmmaker: witness the considerable abuse heaped upon the Anglo-Indian caricature in KKHH as disloyal and foppish (forget English! Sing Vande Mataram...and this in a film that supposedly celebrated the Anglicised youth).

Yet there is something very telling about this crude attempt to "provincialize America," as Dipesh C. would say. Johar does not merely see America from another (outsider) angle and thus renders it unexceptional, he in fact robs it of the modern and the universal. The loudest howls of protest from my friends were to the effect of, "Where is the government aid? How come Shah Rukh - and Kajol, and the film crews, and the helpful volunteers - can get to this village by taking the bus, while no state or federal authorities are to be found?" In taking the experience of Katrina to its logical extreme, Johar asks: what if America really was a Third-World country, as so many Americans who watched helplessly in 2005 feared it would resemble (yet, of course, not literally ever become)? This isn't an obscure or philosophical point. When a natural disaster happens in India, Pakistan, or even Romania (seasonal floods are always in the news), there is often no government aid for a while, if ever. Many of the places affected are isolated agricultural villages that really exist, unlike the absurd Wilhelmina, GA. The United States and fellow Western democracies are commonly understood as societies where the state has reached hegemony along with dominance (cf. Ranajit Guha), where its apparatus of ameliorative bureaucracy and impartial law extends, imperfectly but expectedly, across every inch of its geographical space. Furthermore, this theme runs throughout the film. The interrogator who tortures Shah Rukh is the mirror of the policewalas in Slumdog, the perfect Western metonym for Indian corruption and arbitrary use of power. Whereas a Western filmmaker would undoubtedly present similar critiques of government inaction or illegality from the realistic, gritty and ultimately liberal point of view that produces "social pressure" for reform, Johar is after the sentimental generalisation that is not so easily resolved. His vision of America is of the many tendencies believed by American reformist progressives to be flaws in an incompletely generalised system needing to be fixed as constitutive elements of a pre-modern, archaic society. This is why, and not because he's stupid or insensitive, he must rely on a vision of rural America from the 1850s.
So, while MNIK is ultimately a silly film, it delights in a cheeky right to represent that it would be a pity for Hindi film to lose. Backed by global capitalism and increasingly entering into international circuits of exchange, such exercises can inject some needed vitality in the rather staid debates about meanings and aspects of modernity.

Hindi Film and the World: An Alternative Globalisation

Once again, Amitav Ghosh has written an essay so thoughtful, rich and beautiful I feel compelled to react at length with my own comparatively disjointed yet (I hope) somewhat constructive thoughts. In "Confessions of a Xenophile," which appeared last year in Outlook, he puts forth something approaching a condensed vision of his entire personal and professional life, anchored in the formative experience of living in an Egyptian village in the 1980s. He begins with a revelation about Hindi films:

"My hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya – that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song – this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals. The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the fifties vintage – films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita..."

Here we have a classic case of cross-cultural exchange of the kind extensively facilitated by such products as Hindi films in many parts of the world during the 1950s and 60s- not just in Africa and the Middle East, but also in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Indeed, so popular were Raj Kapoor films in my native country, Romania, that the name is still readily recognised and frequently used; for instance, reviews of Slumdog Millionaire in the newspapers referenced its hero as an archetypal "vagabond" successor of Kapoor. Of course, much was lost in translation since virtually no Hindi was spoken or understood in the many parts of the world these films reached. Thus, the 1950s Romanian crooner Luigi Ionescu recorded a version of the song "Awaara hoon" (I am a tramp) that came out through misunderstanding as "Avaramu" (it can still be widely found on the internet today under this title, and it's a safe bet almost all Eastern Europeans wouldn't know it as anything else). It's quite an amazing thing that Romanians, Russians and Egyptians were singing in Hindi words they did not know, much in the same way so many of the world's teenagers today ape American pop songs without speaking English. The phenomenal worldwide success of Hindi films at this time was a different kind of globalisation, deeply tied to a specific set of political changes in the postwar era. Ghosh explains,

"Broadly speaking, those circumstances could be described as the spirit of decolonization that held sway over much of the world in the decades after the Second World War; this was the political ethos that found its institutional representation in the Non-Aligned Movement. We are at a very different moment in history now, when the words Non-Aligned seem somehow empty and discredited; today the movement is often dismissed not just as a political failure, but as a minor footnote to the great power rivalries of the Cold War. It is true, of course, that the movement had many shortcomings and met with many failures. Yet it is also worth remembering that the Non-Aligned Movement as such was merely the institutional aspect of something that was much broader, wider and more powerful: this, as I said before, was the post-war ethos of decolonization, which was a political impulse that had deep historical roots and powerful cultural resonances. In the field of culture, among other things, it represented an attempt to restore and recommence the exchanges and conversations that had been interrupted by the long centuries of European imperial dominance. It was, in this sense, the necessary and vital counterpart of the nationalist idiom of anti-colonial resistance. In the West, Third World nationalism is often presented as an ideology of xenophobia and parochialism. But the truth is that many of these movements of resistance tried very hard, within their limited means, to create an universalism of their own. Those of us who grew up in that period will recall how powerfully we were animated by an emotion that is rarely named: this is xenophilia, the love of the other, the affinity for strangers - a feeling that lives very deep in the human heart, but whose very existence is rarely acknowledged. People of my generation will recall the pride we once took in the trans-national friendships of such figures as Nehru, Nasser, Sukarno, Chou En Lai and others. Nor were friendships of this kind anything new. I have referred above to the cross-cultural conversations that were interrupted by imperialism. These interruptions were precisely that – temporary breakages – the conversations never really ceased."

There is much to discuss here. First, as a point of historiography we can see the organising principles behind Ghosh's tendency in both his fiction and non-fiction to explore the connections between people and places in a pan-Asian or Indian Ocean-centred arc. Thus, he has written movingly and with equal sensitivity about Egypt, the Gulf states, India, Burma, and Cambodia. Historians are nowadays setting their sights on these kinds of "comparative" and "regional" histories, but for clarity of purpose and beauty of prose none can match Ghosh. Secondly, he provides the key institutional context for understanding the spread of a cultural product. Hindi films with Raj Kapoor were not popular in Egypt or Romania because they were socialist (though the affinity of the Nehruvian ethic with the political aspirations of these other nation-states was certainly a factor). Their populism was, if not subversive of the state, certainly not dependent upon it. As Ravi Vasudevan notes, popular Hindi cinema appealed to a "mass public which lies beyond the borders of institutions legitimated by the state," and thus could "provide a distinctive route for the social imaginary." The manner of its translation abroad should not be read as a mere extension of relations between states but as a true globalisation: the spread of words, ideas, images and ways of seeing the world across vast numbers of people in many places at the same time.
Naturally, this included political ideas, and once again we are not speaking exclusively of state structures. The transnational popularity of leaders like Nehru and Nasser alluded to by Ghosh was widespread, and the sentiment is not entirely dead even today. Earlier this year, I was in an electronics store run by an older Egyptian fellow in Berkeley, just off of Telegraph Avenue. I was buying a converter to use with my laptop in England, where I was going to do research for my thesis at the British Library. The man asked me what I was studying, and I said imperialism. His eyes lit up and he exclaimed, "Do you know who the leader of Egypt was after the British left?" "Yes, Nasser." He continued with glee, "Do you remember what he did to the British? He stuck their nose in the mud!" That the Suez incident of 1956 should evoke such a passionate reaction in 2009 from someone who could barely have been a boy at the time is, if anything, a powerful reminder of the persistence with which the non-aligned moment lives on in people's minds.

Today's globalisation is of a fundamentally different kind; Ghosh refers to the alliance of "capital + empire," with fundamentalism thrown in as the third pillar of the new world order. The changes can be easily tracked in Hindi cinema. Rochona Majumdar writes, "In the six decades since the country’s independence, inaugural prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s nationalist, populist government, rooted in socialist ideals, has given way to neoliberalism and globalisation. On the screen, this evolution meant the end of the category known as 'the people'" exemplified by Raj Kapoor films. Thus,

"To Bollywood songwriters in the 1950s and ’60s, city streets were playful and teeming with possibilities. Albeit idealized, their depictions animated a then-true national identity: in 'innumerable' songs, Majumdar says, 'you see the dream of socialist India come to life.' As the global economy arrived at India’s shores in the 1980s, however, the collective people disappeared from Bollywood screens. The iconic city street darkened, becoming a 'contested space,' she says, where people from different religions, castes, and professions—criminal or otherwise—strove for dominance. Bollywood itself splintered, producing different films for distinct audiences. India’s wealthy diaspora saw movies in which characters from large, affluent families fall in love and get married, their weddings setting the stage for grand musical sequences. Often these films, which emphasize individual—rather than universal—experiences, are set abroad in places like Switzerland, Egypt, or New Zealand. These are the films foreigners consider typical Bollywood fare, and their popularity has inspired Hollywood and other film industries to use Bollywood conventions, directors, and stars for movies like Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and Bride and Prejudice."

While Majumdar makes some great observations about the use of space (the changing meanings of the street and the choice of filming locations), what is most important here is the particular kind of globalisation processes Hindi films participate in. In the 1950s, a self-consciously nationalist Indian cultural form resonated with foreign audiences. Today, the mainstream Hindi film is a fragmented product that is slowly being woven into a truly global tapestry of interchangeable symbols. Dancing in the Alps or under the pyramids, surfing on the beach in Australia, partying in nightclubs and so on are the common aspirations of the moneyed "good life" driven by notions once viewed as typically American and Western European. It is not a question of recovering the "Indianness" of films in danger of being "Westernised," but of recognising that such categories are themselves rapidly becoming obsolete.

In parallel, the rise of the Hindu right in the 1990s and the prospect of communal violence has provoked the most sustained attempt by the Hindi film industry to address the relationship between religion and nationalism since the first few decades after the independence. Noted filmmaker Shyam Benegal speaks of a revival in recent years of "hugely successful films like Lagaan which equate an inclusive secular unity with nationalism." Other films that have appeared since then that explore urban life in contemporary India, including Rang de Basanti and Mumbai Meri Jaan, feature explicit plot lines revolving around the suspicion and hostility between Hindu and Muslim characters that is happily resolved in the end. Unlike the old days, however, when censor boards would not allow any impression of communal tension to make it to the screen, the new crop of films are didactic without being unrealistic, as they often begin by openly acknowledging mistrust and conflict. Many of these films perhaps owe more to their Nehruvian predecessors than to the homogenising tendencies of our globalisation. And Hindi films remain popular abroad, though offering a much different kind of entertainment than they once did.

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.