Saturday, May 13, 2017
133 - Calcutta, 1969, France. Dir. Louis Malle.
Louis Malle turns his gaze to India.
Calcutta.
People in the river.
Herds of cows passing busses and trains.
Elephants in the streets.
Men rubbing the backs of other men. Rubbing their faces.
People sitting on the sidewalks. Lying on the side of the road.
People boarding busses. Riding trains. Walking. Sitting on mats. Lying down.
Calcutta is the city of Mother Theresa. The Mothers of Charity. Caring for the sick. Providing for the poor.
The Dying Room. Where people go to die. Some survive and return to the streets.
Soldiers. Marchers. Protesters.
The United Front. Composed of Center-Left to Communist. Governed West Bengal after the elections of 1967.
Overthrown.
Martial law declared.
Assemblies of more than five people forbidden.
Every afternoon in front of the governor's palace, partisans of the United Front defy the law.
The police arrest them and take them away in vans without violence on either side.
Today it is the women's organizations who are demonstrating. The orange flag and trident are symbols of a religious sect.
Slogans.
"They call that Ghandism. We call it fascism!"
"Long live the revolution!"
"Bengal, another Vietnam!"
These women will spend three days in prison, some with their children.
Kumartoli. In the northern part of the city. Artisans prepare clay statues of naked women. For the festival of Saraswati. Goddess of Wisdom. Wife of Brahma. Protectress of Students.
They dress them. They paint them.
The statues are expensive.
The people are poor.
Thousands of statues are sold.
A man drums with thin sticks. Others join him.
The day before the festival, drummers drum on the sidewalks. They are paid for their services.
Students dance. Students from the University of Calcutta.
The statues are displayed for a week. Before the houses and in the streets.
Then the statues are brought in solemn procession to the river. And plunged in.
The horse track. Horses race from right to left. Clockwise. Standing attendees dressed in white. Those seated dressed in suits and contemporary dress.
The memorial to Queen Victoria.
Louis Malle tells us that Calcutta did not exist until the British built a fort on the site of a fishing village. A trading post.
In the 18th century the British East India Company drew from the resources of Bengal.
The Royal Calcutta Golf Club. Surrounded by high walls. Filled with portraits of Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Originally in Bengal, there were jute fields to the east and jute factories to the west. After the partition of 1947, the jute fields ended up in East Pakistan and the jute factories in India. India had to create new jute fields where there once were rice fields.
Bengal, once a rice exporter, now struggles to feed its people.
Workers in the jute factory in India are refugees from Pakistan.
Workers ride on top of trains. And hang on the side. They enter from the outskirts into the city. To work or to sell their wares in the market.
Many manage to ride without a ticket. The train is in debt. The train might close.
Men carry large baskets on their heads.
Greater Calcutta has more than 8,000,000 residents. (Today it is around 14,000,000.)
The population has tripled since independence.
2,000,000 refugees have come from Pakistan.
Immigrants enter from the countryside.
Food is rationed.
Residents use ration cards for rice, sugar, and oil.
Today is the festival of the Chinese New Year.
50,000 Chinese live in Calcutta.
The dancing dragon. Fireworks!
Sadhus. Renunciants. People who have renounced society. They live in the streets. They live off charity.
Flowers.
Every morning at the temple people buy flowers to lay as offerings before images of gods
Kali. Wife of Shiva. Goddess of Death and Destruction.
Every morning at the temple of Kali goats are beheaded in ritual sacrifice.
Burning Ghats. Where cremation takes place. The husband and the priest together.
Because the Hindus believe in reincarnation, death is not viewed as a beginning or an end but as a part of a cycle.
Verses are recited in Sanskrit.
The priest evokes the four elements: water, fire, earth, air.
The body is covered in wooden sticks.
Something is sprinkled over the body.
They light the fire.
They burn the body in the open street.
Shantytowns.
More than 500,000 have no home.
Immigrants continue to pour in.
A man sits on the street polishing somebody's shoes. Men sit on the streets shaving other men.
Women carry stacks of bricks on their heads. Big bricks. One brick left-to-right across her head. Three pairs of bricks front-to-back above it.
Construction workers.
A 25-story building.
Labor is cheap and abundant.
Twelve men are used to pull on a pulley.
The twelve men cost less than the pulley.
Sign: Scrap Automation.
Children pulled in rickshaws.
People pushing carts.
2,000,000 Bihari live here.
They are the sub-proletariat.
They work and save for 20 years in order to return to their families.
They complain that there are two men for every one woman in Calcutta.
A religious ceremony across from the train station. Porters sing. Ring bells. Clap. Light candles. Dip sticks in flower bundles. Place flowers on pictures.
Men pumping water at a water pump.
A leatherworker.
A cigarette salesman.
A book vendor.
The Marwari control parts of Calcutta.
They come from the state of Rajasthan.
A wedding!
An accordion plays all night for the guests.
They carry in the bride. She is sitting with her legs crossed on a plank.
The father is rich. A printer. A member of the Rotary. And the Congress party.
The ceremony lasts 40 minutes.
She has a large dowry. Of cash. And the jewelry she is wearing.
They part her hair with a red ribbon. She will keep it until she dies or is widowed.
A thousand guests sit to eat in shifts.
No alcohol.
The cost--15,000 rupees.
Sitars.
Students study for 12 years. With no professional ambition. But the joy of playing.
Their teacher is Aashish Khan. Son of Ali Akbar. Nephew of Ravi Shankar.
Students protest in the street.
The governor has closed the university.
One student denounces the demonstration as opportunists from the United Front.
Another student says they are in solidarity with the peasants. That they are following the example of the Chinese and Vietnamese.
They are not united.
They come from different groups. They have different points-of-view and different goals. It is not even clear most of them know what they want.
Or why they are there.
They march down the street with the energy and confusion of youth.
10,000 policemen and soldiers are waiting for them.
They protesters disperse.
A religious procession interrupts the demonstration.
The anniversary of the death of Rabidas, founder of a syncretic sect, composed of low-caste Hindus, untouchables, Sikhs, and Muslims.
Just as ragtag as the protesters.
And the soldiers shooting smoke bombs just as ragtag as the religious parade and the protesters.
No leaders among any of the groups.
Everything in chaos.
A sign in a window: "All reactionaries are paper tigers."
A Leper. Reciting a poem in Urdu. The disease cost him his job and family.
There are between 70,000 and 80,000 lepers in Calcutta. Most beggars.
He explains that he cannot board a bus or tram. That if he orders tea, he is asked to provide his own teapot.
"Our own people look at us with hate-filled eyes."
The nuns teach him to pray.
Our Father . . .
The nuns distribute soybean oil furnished by UNICEF.
The cans marked in 17 languages.
Donated by the people of the United States.
A Sadhu made a vow 7 years ago never to sit or lie down. He stands night and day under a tree in a public garden. Surrounded by his followers. A few yards from the Grand Hotel.
The Maiden. A huge public park in the center of the city. Every Sunday it is filled with people.
Wrestlers. Vendors. Singers. Story-tellers. Musicians. Priests.
All vying at the same time for the crowd's attention.
A man hangs upside down from a tall pole. He spins around on his belly on top of the pole.
A man does a stunt with his toddler. He ties her to a rope. He pulls her up into the air, hanging upside-down from her ankles. He swings her wildly, her head a few feet from the ground. She seems to be a veteran street performer. She acts like a pro.
People tell stories. The themes are taken from the epics of India. The Ramayana. The Mahabharata.
Men who do not know each other pray and sing together all afternoon and evening.
Living conditions have eliminated religious taboos. Muslims and Hindus share the same houses and wells. Which would be unthinkable in a village.
Ten people live in two rooms.
Several thousand cows are housed in the slums with the people. The excrement and refuse from the cows block the sewage canals and stand in the open street.
In the heart of the slums potters make clay cups. Which they sell to tea shops.
Warthogs live among the people in the slums. And eat from the open sewage.
In Howrah garbage has not been collected for several months. The municipality is low on funds.
Balls made of coal dust and cow patties are used for fuel.
The beggars earn a better living than the workers.
Leprosy is not hereditary, but the children catch it from their parents through contagion.
Ragpickers. Their children do not go to school. They speak Tamil. Their skin is darker.
"They are astonished to be filmed, to be pitied, to be a source of indignation."
A girl pumps a water pump.
She smiles.
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