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PHANTOM INDIA Reflections on a Journey

Wednesday, March 13.

India can sometimes be dizzying.

This man moving through the crowd with faltering steps under a burning sun

in the midst of an exuberant religious ceremony

is alone.

He bears a complicated framework

of hundreds of metal rods, each pressing into his skin.

A long needle pierces his tongue.

He's obviously a yogi practicing some form of asceticism,

one of the countless cruel methods to mortify the flesh,

to control and dominate it.

There are thousands like him in India,

fanatics of the Absolute,

determined to escape the cycle of reincarnation,

to free themselves from the suffering of endless rebirth.

Saturday, March 9.

Near Mysore, a colossal statue of Nandi the bull,

the god Shiva's holy mount.

Highly revered, Nandi acts as intermediary between Shiva and men.

All day long, a steady stream of peasant families visits the statue.

They perform a puja. :

prayer, offering and ritual ceremony, all rolled into one.

The children's heads are shaved according to ritual.

They're taught their religious duty from infancy.

The sanctuary priests distribute holy water

and receive offerings.

Even the poorest give money.

I'm always struck by the fanaticism of the believers, especially the women.

Around Madras, there are huge temples like this one every few miles.

It's here in the deep south

that one must seek the living traces of Indian religion.

The heat is scorching.

The faithful nap in the shade of the columns.

I envy them.

Even when awake, southern Indians seem to me drowsy,

lifeless, absent.

Perhaps it's the climate.

According to essayist Nirad Chaudhuri,

India's climate, too cold or too hot,

too wet or too dry, but always excessive,

gave birth to Indians'pessimism, their rejection of the material world.

If so, the living conditions in India created the Indian mindset,

and not the opposite.

Wednesday, March 20.

This man, whom we met on the stairs of the Trichy temple,

offered to be our guide.

He's used to tourists.

He recites his speech by heart, with expressive faces.

He's a temple employee.

I ask what his job is.

"My job is to draw water from the Cauvery River below the temple.

The water's used in the ritual bathing of the gods,

done daily by 18 priests. "

He says he's had other professions.

He traveled across the country, all the way to Burma.

He worked as interpreter, accountant and typist.

"This is the cycle of life. : one day here, another day there.

Today I work carrying holy water. That's the way it is. "

Is he a Brahman?

Is he a priest, or what we'd consider a priest?

He wears the sacred thread over his left shoulder, the sign of the twice-born,

the Hindus of the upper castes.

This thread is magic circle,

protective barrier and divine link, all rolled into one.

There are dozens like him in every temple.

The temples are self-managed, with a board of administrators.

They're generally very rich. The faithful are generous.

"I'm not asking for a lot.

Give five more rupees. It's not for me.

I'm still young and can climb the temple stairs five times a day.

It's for my daughter's schooling. She's 15 and learning to type. "

We're fleeced like this at every temple.

The priests'greed knows no bounds.

Tuesday, March 1 2.

We're at the Tirukalikundram temple,

perched on top of a big rock.

Each morning at precisely 1 1.:30 a.m.,

the faithful make the long and tiring climb

to attend the ceremony of the white eagles.

Two eagles come to receive rice from the hands of a priest.

The origin of the ceremony is unknown.

It's taken place every day for hundreds of years, always at the same time.

The remaining rice is distributed among the faithful,

who vie for a few grains.

The priests are given money in exchange.

Thieving priests, gullible and generous believers,

hands extended to give and receive - the same images everywhere.

It's the dark side of Indian religion.

Who profits from this?

The easy answer is the Brahmans.

They're at the summit of the caste hierarchy,

and their traditional function is the priesthood.

In reality, contrary to what I first believed,

priesthood holds no prestige for Brahmans.

It's even seen as degrading.

Brahmans often occupy important positions in society.

Those who become priests are the outcasts,

those who didn't succeed elsewhere, incapable of anything else,

the poorest and often the least educated.

Many priests can't read.

They recite prayers in Sanskrit

without understanding the language of the holy texts.

What's more, many priests aren't even Brahmans,

especially in the cult of Shiva.

India is complicated indeed.

Seated before the divine altars like shopkeepers,

priests distribute powder for rituals

and rake in the rupees.

They present the offerings to the gods. : coconuts, rice,

butter, incense, flowers, camphor.

Southern Brahmans, whether priests or laymen,

always struck me with their arrogance.

Haughty with their privileges, stern, deeply religious,

they're strict vegetarians

and follow, even today, countless taboos on impurity.

There are special restaurants reserved for them in the cities,

and poor Brahmans, if not priests, are often cooks.

In a remote corner of the Tanjore temple,

far from the crowd,

a believer makes his puja

at a small statue of Ganesh, son of Shiva.

Far from the priests and crowds of fanatics,

this solitary believer, lost in devotion, reconciles us with Hinduism.

I sense his profound connection with his surroundings,

a peacefulness undisturbed by our indiscreet approach.

I later learn he's a minor civil servant

who comes every day at the same time to pray.

These children, of the Brahman caste but from poor peasant families,

are destined to be priests.

They learn thousands of verses by heart from the Vedas,

the most ancient Indian writings.

Tradition says the Vedas were not written by humans.

They existed before the gods. They are divinity itself.

The Semitic tradition says, "In the beginning was the Word, "

and the Hindu responds that the Absolute is sound.

The Vedas are made to be recited and listened to.

For a long time, it was even a sacrilege to write them down.

Monday, March 18.

A ceremony honoring Shiva at the Tiruvannamalai ashram.

The phallic stone is purified by dousing it with water, then milk.

It's covered with flowers, offerings and precious objects,

and just like every morning, the officiating priest recites

the thousand names of this many-faceted god.

It's the first time we've filmed a ceremony like this.

They're performed in the temple's holy of holies,

usually very dark, and closed to foreigners.

Shiva is the main figure in the Indian pantheon, along with Vishnu.

His worship is particularly dominant in the south of India.

He's a complex god,

with a thousand names and a thousand faces too,

which I won't attempt to describe.

Essentially, he regulates cosmic order,

simultaneously creator and destroyer.

Through him all beings and things die.

Because he's also the god of sexuality,

all beings are also reborn through him.

The phallic symbol of Shiva is called a lingam.

An erect monolith,

its base is surrounded by a yoni, the symbol of female genitalia.

Shiva isn't an Aryan god. He's not in the Vedas.

He's a resurgence of the phallic god of the first civilization in India.

The officiating priest presents the purifying fire to the faithful.

They draw the ritual symbol on their foreheads

with a greasy powder made from sandalwood.

The Tiruvannamalai ashram is one of the countless retreats in India

where disciples gather around a spiritual teacher, a guru.

This one is named after Sri Ramana Maharshi.

He died a few years ago.

This old man was his first disciple.

He explained a few of the guru's concepts to us in Tamil.

What little I understood of the English translation

seemed both simple and vague.

"Each of us must understand the Self, the truth inside us.

We must separate the self from the flesh in order to reach the Self.

The great teaching of the guru,

and the principal aim of all the disciples,

is the ultimate knowledge of the Self. "

Thursday, March 2 1.

We arrive at the temple of Madurai, the most venerated in southern India.

It's immense. Built in the 1 7th century,

it's dedicated to Meenakshi, one of Shiva's wives.

There are 1 1 gopuram, or towers, in the walls girding the temple,

which are also entrances to the temple.

They're covered with statues representing mythological stories. :

a prodigious accumulation of gods, goddesses and animals.

The statues are regularly repainted in vivid colors,

to the great indignation of Western tourists,

who forget that Greek temples and medieval cathedrals

were brightly painted in their heyday too.

Objections are raised to our entering with our equipment.

While we wait between two red-striped walls,

the question is debated inside the temple.

The administrators would like to let us film,

but only in the afternoon, when the monument is closed to the faithful.

They're surprised to learn we're more interested

in the faithful than in the monument.

In the end it works out, as it always does.

It's simply a matter of time and money.

The temple is most active in the early morning.

The citizens of Madurai come early, before the heat becomes stifling.

They mix with pilgrims from across India, beggars, and hermits,

all those who live outside of time, without fixed abode,

stopping for several days or several months at a temple.

This woman sitting between the double walls was there when we arrived.

Practically immobile, she softly murmurs some unknown litany.

When we leave in the evening,

she's in the exact same spot, in the same position,

as if she hadn't moved all day.

The faithful perform their ritual ablutions in the temple pool.

Indians are obsessed with water.

When we see how relentlessly they scrub, douse and dunk themselves,

we're tempted to label them the cleanest people in the world.

But it's not a question of hygiene.

This water is putrid, swarming with larvae and fish.

They drink it because it's the sacred water of the temple.

Purification by water is an essential element of worship

in a religion and culture principally founded

on criteria of pure and impure.

Rivers are sacred, and daily ablutions punctuate believers'lives,

from dawn till dusk, birth till death.

Indians scoff at hygiene.

Perhaps they think the Western notion of hygiene leads to sterility.

Our practice of hygiene consists of killing life, cutting ourselves off from nature,

isolated in a nice, clean world all by ourselves.

That's not the way it is here.

An Indian calmly explained that the water of the Ganges was sacred

and thus posed absolutely no danger to the faithful.

Yet during our visit,

a tributary near a pilgrimage site became polluted,

resulting in an epidemic.

This seemed to prove Mark Twain was wrong

when he declared that the water of the Ganges was so dirty

that even germs couldn't survive.

Each Indian temple has a holy of holies, the garbagriha,

a dark, narrow chamber where the image of the temple's appointed deity is kept.

Non-Hindus are forbidden to enter,

as were Hindus of the lower castes until fairly recently.

The rest of the temple is composed of hallways, stairs,

walls, colonnades, pools -

an architectural composite in the image of this multiform religion,

built by architects versed in geomancy.

Crowds of believers and throngs of priests,

countless rituals, and intense spiritual life -

it reminds us of medieval Christianity when it was a living religion,

when the house of God was the house of men,

a refuge, a place of rest, a free zone.

Atheism doesn't really exist in India.

No one ever asks if you believe in God.

They ask what religion you are.

When some truckers once gave us a ride after our car broke down,

they made a quick stop.

It wasn't for a drink, as I'd thought,

but to do a quick puja at a roadside temple.

The adherence of an entire population was even more striking

when I realized Hinduism isn't unified, with no central leadership,

no supreme leader, like the pope for the Catholics.

The gods, rituals and worship are infinitely varied,

as are the basic beliefs.

In a village in Rajasthan,

there's a temple where believers worship rats.

They give the rats pounds of grain each day,

grain they desperately need themselves.

Everywhere in the temple, at the altars of countless gods,

the faithful tirelessly repeat these strange gestures.

Everyone performs their own puja,

a personal ceremony to a specific god of their choice.

We stayed there for hours, leaning against the columns,

watching and filming without understanding.

These gestures can seem funny,

and we could have easily exaggerated their comic aspect

and made a sarcastic portrayal of fetishism and excessive piety.

But we didn't want to.

We show them to you as we filmed them.

You decide whether they're ludicrous or admirable.

What I personally found especially striking here

was each believer's solitude, which seems so lacking

from social life in India.

Perhaps religion offers them an outlet,

a chance to finally be alone through worship.

Perhaps prayer is their only moment of freedom.

In any case, these southern Indians, normally so drowsy and dull,

are unrecognizable.

In the presence of their gods, they become attentive, lively, dynamic.

Perhaps the key is found in the doctrine of transmigration,

the fundamental belief of India.

After death, each soul returns to earth

and reincarnates in other bodies indefinitely.

The ultimate aim of the religion is to end this eternal cycle,

but failing to end it,

the faithful try, through devotion and good deeds,

to improve their lot in their next existence,

for each new incarnation is a verdict on the previous one.

This belief justifies the caste system.

Everyone has a place in the hierarchy based on the quality of their previous life,

and therefore, they must accept it.

Saturday, March 30.

We reach Rameswaram, at the extreme tip of India,

where boats set sail for Ceylon.

This colossal temple, with its mile-long colonnades,

is dedicated to Rama, legendary hero of the Ramayana.

"I left my family and everything behind.

I've been here for three months

to cure myself of mental problems.

I've visited many temples since beginning my journey.

I plan to stay here another six months, until October.

I pray to the Lord. When he has healed me, I'll return home. "

This man, whom we met in the corridors of the temple,

speaks six languages.

He was a navy officer and a civil servant on the railroads.

Now he's chosen to be a hermit and beg for his food.

There are millions like him throughout India

who, for various reasons, have left everything behind.

Many of these renunciants are old men

who married, fathered children and practiced a profession.

At the end of their lives, having fulfilled their social contract,

they take to the road, wanderers until their death.

It's a holy custom.

Even more puzzling are the sadhu,

who, from earliest childhood, live on the fringes of society.

They're grouped into different sects, each with precise rituals and customs,

often extremely weird, a mix of occultism and magic.

This sadhu, whom we met at Tanjore, recited the temples he'd visited

all across India.

They're bizarre, sometimes even frightening.

Among them are many social misfits, unstable and abnormal people,

as if society got rid of them by sending them out on the road.

And yet the existence of these millions of renunciants

is an essential aspect of Hinduism. :

the antithesis of the caste system,

a sort of safety valve for such a restrictive world.

A Hindu living by society's rules is oppressed.

His life is spent in a suffocating hierarchy,

a straitjacket of rights and duties.

If he seeks escape, a freedom no one can deny him,

he becomes a hermit.

He leaves behind society and its rules

and chooses to undertake his own salvation.

At the same time, he risks everything.

By devoting himself to religion,

he attempts to escape the cycle of reincarnation once and for all,

to never return to this world of suffering and illusion,

to finally know the ineffable joy of being one with the universe.

This man was one among the thousands we encountered.

I don't know where he came from nor where he's going.

We circled around him with the camera.

He continued on, never even glancing our way.

He follows his path, staring fixedly ahead. He is elsewhere.

At Rameswaram, at the temple entrance,

beggars wait for the faithful to exit.

Among them are many sadhu and renunciants.

Begging is a sacred act, and the faithful are obliged to give alms,

like this fussy believer,

who counts the beggars before distributing his meager alms.

I've reached a point where this doesn't shock me.

Maybe it's from seeing similar scenes so often.

Besides, that day, I was in no mood to judge.

These beggars, many who beg voluntarily,

symbolize the renunciation of the material world and physical reality,

a permanent feature of India.

They're part of a whole one must either accept or reject in its entirety.

Though we often saw beggars,

we were rarely able to film them.

Someone always intervened,

always someone who spoke English, an Indian from the city.

The beggars saw no reason we shouldn't film their everyday life.

But the Anglicized Indians, who'd learned to think like us,

were ashamed.

Not ashamed that it existed- because it didn't shock them -

but ashamed we were filming it.

Nearby, this woman climbs the stairway

of a small shrine set apart from the main temple.

According to the Ramayana, the great Indian epic,

this is where the hero Rama returned to India

with his army of monkeys

after killing the giant Ravana, king of Ceylon.

A footprint of Rama is preserved in this shrine.

This woman is 87 years old.

She travels throughout India from one holy place to the next,

accompanied by her family and disciples,

who claim she has divine vision,

an intimate connection with the hereafter.

I no longer know what to think.

At first, I judged this religion rationally

and saw only fetishism and exploitation.

Then, gradually, I started going deeper.

This old woman speaks to the gods - or believes she does. It doesn't matter.

I look on and listen, fascinated.

Translation by LYNN MASSEY for SUBTEXT SUBTITLING

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