At the outset of the first episode of Phantom India, Malle’s issue concerning what is true about India is explicitly addressed. He reminds us, visually, that much of our understanding of India comes from the 2% of the population that is English-speaking. But these interpreters are employing Western-learned categories and constructions and consequently seeing India through a reductive Western cultural lens. Their testimony, Indian though it is, is suspect. Malle states that it is his intention to explore India, as much as possible, without preconceived prejudices. He has no planned itinerary and will go and photograph wherever the opportunities lead him.
Episode 2 of Phantom India focuses on what Malle encountered in the south Indian city of Madras (Chennai). There are five main sections, three of which attempt to come to grips with the local Tamil culture, while the last section is an extended contemplation of Indian dance culture.
In Episode 3 of Phantom India, Louis Malle attempts to come to grips with a core feature of Indian civilization: its deeply-felt and unabiding spirituality. In fact with due consideration and respect for all the dedicated religious practitioners in various parts of the globe, it seems that Indians are the most religious people on earth. But how can one convey that spirituality in a one-hour film? Since it is always difficult to convey spiritual notions via the concrete imagery of film, the task of taking on of the vastness of India’s never-ending spiritual journey would seem to be hopelessly daunting. Despite these long odds, though, Malle’s documentary investigation here does offer some interesting insights.
By now, Malle has moved across the south of India, from the Coromandel of the southwest coast to the Malabar coast on the southeastern side. The narrative of this episode drifts through four sections, each one starting off with dreamy appearances about a particular activity, followed by the narrator’s calling our attention to the less pleasant “reality” of that subject.
This episode focuses on life in the traditional villages, where Malle has been told that you can find the essence of what India is about. To be sure, he tells us, despite a number of big urban areas, 80% of the Indian population resides in rural villages, and so he and his crew have gone to a village in Haryana province, just to the north of Delhi, to film the local inhabitants. At the outset Malle interviews an American Peace Corps volunteer, who has come to an Indian village to introduce modern farming techniques to the local population. He is trying to bridge the gap between the modern West and the traditional East and hoping that Western technology can make a positive contribution life in the villages. But, of course, this is an enormous challenge to effect significant changes: there were only 700 such Peace Corps volunteers and over 560,000 Indian villages.
In Episode 6 the attention is turned to some encounters with people and groups that were ostensibly outside his principal focus, which was to come to grips with the mystery of essential Indian culture. The activities described here offer something of a potpourri, and their only common trait would seem to be that they are outliers. Nevertheless, there is an additional unifying thread in this episode that relates to Malle’s overarching theme, and that is the degree to which Indian society has always largely tolerated and provided a peaceful home for diverse customs and lifestyles. The episode successively takes up the activities of five interesting social groups, each of which has its own fascinating ways of operating.
Louis Malle’s four-month filming sojourn in India that resulted in Phantom India came to an end in Bombay, and this serves as the backdrop for his final installment, Episode 7. Much of the footage in the episode appears to be random street scenes that were shot opportunistically and without much planning. However, on top of all this seemingly random but atmospheric footage, Malle supplies a unifying commentary, which goes beyond the locale of Bombay and provides a summary of how he sees India’s current state and future directions. His commentary is even more interesting to contemplate now, more than forty years after they were originally expressed. The commentary, itself, is less structured here than in previous episodes, and it basically amounts to his judgments on six scattered topics.
