Life on the Ganges

Life on the Ganges is a vibrant film about the ethnoscape in and around the Ganges River. In her brief and impressive characterization, Somani's succeeds in giving viewers darshan of one of the most sacred sites in all of India. Her portrayal of the life of Ganges boatman reveals both their economic hardships as well as their steady devotion.

Indira Somani's short film Life of the Ganges gives the world a glimpse of the holy city of Varanasi. Instead of focusing on deep traditions of the city, the work focuses on a recent spread the beautiful ritual of Dev Diwali. We learn that more than 50,000 clay lamps light up the banks of the Ganges on this day and the spectacle brings many people from near and far as spectators. This visual treat is offset by the voice of an aging boatman who tells us of the river as a mother and goddess.

Beautiful imagery captures Hindu devotion along the banks of the sacred Ganges River, considered a goddess by those who travel from afar to worship her and to be cremated on her banks, and also by those who live in Varanasi and make a living plying boats for pilgrims. The film thus simply depicts how the river goddess sustains both religious and economic life, inspiring hope even amidst poverty in one of India's oldest and holiest cities.

Vivid and direct, Life on the Ganges manages in a short span to convey the sincere devotion of the Hindus who live and work along the sacred river, while evoking the precariousness of that life for those who must make a living plying boats for tourists. Somani poignantly juxtaposes scenes of a boatman's humble home life with his young boss's cavalier assessment of the job's long hours and lack of a retirement system.

Like her physical presence, the Ganga's meaning for a civilization of hundreds of millions of people is an immensity that can be appreciated only in the gesture and the moment that is small, humble and consecrated by attention to her living symbolism. Indira Somani's Life on the Ganges immerses the viewer in one such story that partakes of the life-giving reality of this river to its children. In the life and words of Gauri Shankar, a boatman who awaits the festival days and the arrival of devotees who will give him business, we become witness to the inextricable harmony of the material and the spiritual, the aesthetic and philosophical, the everyday and the cosmic, that is Hindu life. In a time when the Gangetic civilization has become an object of exploitation by sensationalistic media giants hungry to exoticize and demonize the other with crude and false slogans like "City of Death," Somani's effort reminds us that no gesture or action is too small or unimportant in a culture steeped in reverence and gratitude. Students will find much to learn and appreciate in this short film. In showing us Ganga as Mother to its people, it also conveys to us a sense of Ganga as Guru to us all.

Indira Somani's work helped me see the Ganges anew -- the lives around it, the lives dependent on it. Her journalist's eye is evident in every shot and the story of one particular boatman is rendered with intimacy.