part0017

At least five or six performances in Calcutta, especially (outside the city) by a young theatre group which presents contemporary Bengali plays with a certain energy. We are removed from all vestiges of tradition: no make-up, no costumes. The audience sits all around the room which has nothing of the theatre about it. We understand none of the words but the vibrations are good. No costumes, no ‘lighting’. An impression, at moments, of improvisation. Good teamwork. And today’s themes.

Some beautiful women in the audience. They sometimes look boldly at us, eyeing us provocatively with an expression that in the West would be taken as an invitation. But that is not the case. Here one makes love only with the eyes. When we leave at the end, the young woman who, a few minutes earlier had been staring at us, turns and leaves with her friends, without once looking back. Something had transpired, but what?

We listen to the singers, the musicians. It is unending. Watch a narrator following a special ritual. He has to kneel on one knee. He has a single accessory, an object which resembles a sort of paddle. In his hands this object becomes all sorts of things: a club, a bow, a lance, a musical instrument, a woman, a tree, a horse.

Three musicians accompany him, seated behind him. He tells the whole story of the Mahabharata (playing the different roles, singing sometimes) in eighteen evenings—eighteen here is a sacred number (the Bhagavad Gita has eighteen chapters, for example).

We watch him do an episode from the battle, the death of Drona.

Calcutta, ‘City of Compassion’. That is how its inhabitants like to call it. They remember how during the Bangladesh war the city of Calcutta, already overpopulated, nevertheless took in millions of refugees and gave them shelter.

Smell of fresh blood in the early morning, in the Kali temple on the bank of the Ganges. That is where they slaughter the goats. A sombre atmosphere, almost sinister. We look in vain for what we call ‘sacred’. In the practice of religion are found poverty, harshness, darkness. And a rapacious greed for money.

After a futile attempt at a modest hotel (our budget put palaces out of our reach), we settled down in the Bengal Chambers, a sort of British-style Indian pension with a common dining table, vast rooms, fans, an Indian lady-proprietor with, naturally, a British manner. Very special. A hybrid place, not without a certain charm and for us, affordable. Peter adores it: an England in disguise, a British masquerade.

Here, among all the instruments of music, the human voice reigns supreme. And one understands why. Nothing left to say, after such singing. To hear it is enough. It is the entire body that listens.

What we understand more and more clearly is that the many different levels in the work—multiple, complex, moving from farce (Bhima disguised as a woman in order to choke the life out of Kichaka) to the highest spiritual summit of the Gita —are levels that can be found in Indian society, in the Indian mentality. This complexity is all around us. In a society of supposedly sharp distinctions, divided strictly even by caste, it is often the ambiguity which strikes us. Feelings are not always what we think they are. Seriousness, dignity, charm, humour—all present at the same time. With what appears, at least to us, an element of strangeness.

What binds all this together is indisputably a vitality. That is what strikes us most strongly. An incredible energy, everywhere. Unexpected, of course: it is the opposite of the usual image of India.

We meet a group of Bengali ethnologists who work in India itself. Some have come back from three or four years of study in a village in Rajasthan (different language, different culture). They have just published an inventory they have made (they show it to us) of the stories they collected in this one village. More than seventeen thousand.

Told of our desire to go to Orissa and Bihar to look for the survivors of the Mahabharata among the tribal people (in India there are at least fifty million), two anthropologists decide to join us. They are very interested. In India, they say, it is not necessary to go anywhere else. One can find here itself all the eras of history, all the epochs.

We leave (a Land Rover and an Ambassador).

I get into the Ambassador with one of the anthropologists and some of our stuff. Peter, Toshi, Marie-Hélène and Simon in the Land Rover (more chic).

Plenty of zigzags and wrong turnings on the way. Pass through Purulia. As night falls we arrive in the village of Chau. Our car is the first to arrive. No sign of Peter’s. While the anthropologist, who speaks a bit of the language, goes off to try and get some news, I sit in front of the house which belongs to the chief, a short, stocky man, very dark and wearing a lungi, strongly resembling an Australian aborigine. He offers me some water, which I refuse although I am dying of thirst (the bottles of soda water are in the other car), then something to eat: potatoes in a reddish sauce, atrociously spiced. I eat one or two out of politeness. Then I make signs to indicate I am tired, that I would like to lie down and rest while waiting for the others.

Fine. He has a bed brought out into the open, that is to say a wooden frame with interlaced ropes, and tells me to lie down while he carries on with his evening chores. It must be seven or eight o’clock. Before going he tells one of his daughters, dark like him, to keep an eye on me.

She must be twelve or thirteen. While I lie on the ropes, she sits silently, gracefully, near me. I close my eyes. A moment later I feel the little girl’s hand very lightly touching my shoulder. I open my eyes: she has brought me a cushion to place under my head. I do so, and close my eyes again. Another moment, another light touch. I reopen my eyes. Without any words, knowing they would be incomprehensible to me, she makes me understand with signs that I am lying partly under a tree on which there are insects, or caterpillars, which could fall on me and sting me.

I get up. With her help I move the bed a little further away and lie down again. She again sits down in silence near me, fanning me with a small fan made of peacock feathers. Above us is the sky, the night. Closing my eyes I have the impression that my sleep is protected by a little girl come from far away, from prehistory, at once younger and much older than me.

I have hardly fallen asleep. The second car arrives and the evening—which lasts the whole night—gets going. First a reception in the courtyard of the chief’s house, a courtyard which must measure around thirty square metres. He has grasped that Peter is the head of our delegation. He makes Peter sit opposite him and asks first—through one and at times, two interpreters (the anthropologists): ‘Where are you from?’

This question is always primordial. It is translated into English as either ‘Where from?’, or ‘Native place?’ Peter replies, with great seriousness, ‘London.’

Peter, therefore, is from London. The chief, who hasn’t the slightest idea where London is to be found, nods satisfied, and asks the second question: ‘Do you have a house in London?’

The phrase is translated for Peter who, still very serious, replies, ‘Yes.’

The chief again nods his head. Good. Here is a man who has a house in London. Then comes the third question, as important as the first two: ‘How many cows in your house in London?’

Peter smiles, tries to answer. The explanations go on.

During this time a feast is being made ready, and a performance. Very beautiful images, very strong, the strongest since the Theyyam in Kerala.

Here also the actors, back from the fields, with the night all around us, allow themselves to be made up for the roles they are to play. They lie down on their backs and close their eyes; two, three or four hours pass by as the others work in silence around them. Little by little, as in Theyyam, in the hands of his friends, of his neighbours, the peasant becomes a god. Or at least a sacred character. The manners of the others towards him become respectful. As if he has been invested with a new power, which the make-up symbolises. Metamorphosis.

When all is ready around eleven at night, in the village square the feast begins. It lasts the whole night. Everyone is there, even the children who at some point fall asleep. Songs and dances with drums. Scenes we recognise: Arjuna in the mountains fighting in vain with the hunter who was no other than Shiva and who would give him the supreme weapon—which he would never use; then a moment from the Gita , the beginning; and Bhima’s fight with the terrible Rakshasa in the forest. Very beautiful, very strong, full of sound and fury.

Also the death of Abhimanyu, that marvellous adolescent, son of Arjuna who in his mother’s womb, learnt how to break Drona’s discus-like formation of war ( Chakravyahu ). Actually, he heard how to enter into the Chakravyahu but not how to get out of it because his mother fell asleep while Arjuna was telling the story.

The death of youth in the war (a war for which it had clamoured). ‘These heroes have killed a child’.

At times when a character moves while speaking, especially when he is enraged, a drummer follows closely behind him, like a second voice mute, yet articulate, a striking shadow.

We drink it all in avidly. The Bengali anthropologists take notes. Toshi records the rhythms.

It goes on almost until dawn.

In other Chau villages, dancers use masks, painted on a white background. We take one back for the actor who will play Ganesha, the scribe with the elephant head, patron of artists—and of thieves.

Another place the next morning, a well-known centre we have heard about. A performance organised for us, and paid for by us. But everything is different. A French ballet master passed through here towards the end of the eighteenth century. Something of him still remains in the style, in the rhythms. It is as if they are dancing a minuet, without any sense of conviction, vapidly. (Western dance, English rather than French, only became known at the beginning of the twentieth century.)

In the city now, where a famous guru runs a dance institute. But the guru is absent. Could we still visit the school? We ask the administrator sitting at a desk on a raised platform in the centre of the room. All around him an incredible pile of documents and files thick with dust.

He asks for a translation. Then he thinks about it. Is he authorised to allow us to enter? The effort of thinking shows on his face. He asks a question which is translated for us. We try to answer it. He thinks again. And again. And again. This goes on for more than an hour. The man remains silent for a long while, raises his eyes, asks some more questions. Let us enter the dance school? No. Finally he says no. And we leave.

A palatial building, whitish, pitted by rain, and mysteriously closed.

Return via Benaras, the inevitable stopover, and via Agra where, as the sun sets, we gaze at the dazzling unity of the Taj Mahal. End of exuberance, here is Islam. A perfect work would combine the Taj and the temple of Madurai. But that would be inconceivable.

The visit to Benaras: classic emotion, more or less guaranteed. But everything depends on the order of the voyage. Where one begins, where one stops.

To die in Benaras: the promise, or almost, of nirvana . In the streets, a marriage. The bride and groom are decked out like princes. Installed in a sort of horse carriage but pulled by men who carry on their heads, each one of them, a sort of lighted neon tubelight. These are actually linked by thick, twisted electric wires to a small generator which follows the procession.

Let each one carry his own light. That is the way it should be.

We have several times slept in the most improbable places. Arrivals in the middle of the night. Nobody, nothing to drink, throats on fire. We were grateful if at times, we found a warm Pepsi-Cola. On two or three occasions I shared a room with Toshi. Bugs, one time, which had to be killed. Noises. Almost all over India a faint, cloying smell of shit.