A Road in India (1938) - Jack Cardiff | BFI

The Indian Road is like no other in all the world. Its surface is of good hard metal, but the life upon it is a fairy tale. It traverses not only India, but the very sands of time. For many thousands of miles the modern highway winds through the fertile plains and over desolate mountains, across burning desert and through mysterious jungle. But in that long journey it does more than span a continent. It runs through every century of India's strange and colourful past. For on the Indian Road, the dawn of the world is just around the corner. Every twist and bend reveals another age in history, another aspect of the enigmatic and disturbing East. Here beside the road is a Muslim hermitage. All these white stone jars perched up on the tops of poles are gifts that have been left by women. Muslim women who have been to pray on the holy ground, beseeching Allah for the blessing of many children. The jars which they have left are held in India to be the symbol of fertility. Though the public highway is as modern as tomorrow, the travellers who use it are of yesterday and all the ages back into the remote times. The bullock carts still travel in convoy for fear of tigers and the heavy transport is still the work of elephants, as it was in India before history began in Europe. The working elephants made possible the glories of ancient India. Their great strength built the early cities and won great battles for the possession of the Hindu star. Their great strength also made mechanical invention unnecessary. It may well be due to the working elephant that in India the science of dynamics never got beyond the wooden wheel. Miles the Indian highway cuts across a bleak and bitter landscape, torn and ravaged by the monsoon floods and then for 10 months without intermission, burnt and hammered by the tropic sun. To that same sun the scotting yogis are indifferent. These strange and holy men of India believe that by imposing pain and hardship on themselves in this life, they will find peace and happiness in the next. In sharp vivid contrast, that contrast which forever typifies the Indian road is the mode of travel of a local raja seeking escape from the intolerable heat of the plains. He is on his way to his summer home in the cool heights of the mountains but he must travel in state with his ceremonial sword bearers, his drummers and his dancing girls. India is a country ruled perhaps more than any other by tradition and tradition binds the behaviour of the rich more than the poor. Tradition places dancing girls on each side of the raja's richly decorated litter. Tradition insists that they shall dance throughout the long and tedious trek. Tradition too governs the raja's wife, the Rani. Being of lesser rank, she rides without a canopy, enduring the full force of the sun. That same tradition even decorates the peasant's cow. Round her neck is the blue ribbon which at once marks her as a sacred animal and at the same time acts as a charm to ward off the evil eye. By the fierce Indian sun, a motor bus pulls up to cool its engine. Passing it, one more example of that weird contrast which is India is the palanquin, a type of vehicle which has not changed for more than 2,000 years. It is bearing a beshrouded Muslim woman on her lonely travels. Her religion sternly forbids her to allow the world the smallest inkling of her charms. Fact and fantasy are yoked together on the Indian road as camels to the Rajputana carts and travellers on this highway learn not to be surprised, not even at the spectacle of painted sheep. This too is a tradition and one closely associated with a Mohammedan religion. During the long hard fast of Ramadan, no true Mohammedan in this part of India may eat meat, but he makes up for it in a large way afterwards and in the meantime gaily decorates the primest sheep in his flock. In the roadside villages, the travellers by ox cart and camel cart pull up for a noonday rest. No native caravan will halt upon the open road if it can be avoided, not even in broad daylight. The tigers still run wild in the surrounding countryside and take an average of 500 travellers a year. And for those who halt here, as in the railway stations of our own hemisphere, there are diversions and amusements, but being India of a strange exotic kind. This Indian road is never done with its kaleidoscope of colour and of contradiction. The Hindu women carry water with averted faces. The village barber wields his clippers in the open air, scorning any less advertisement. And over all the gossip of the travellers, the carriers of news upon the Indian highway hangs upon the air as with the humming of a million insects. Beside the village pillar box, the postman takes his ease while his assistant smokes a hookah in the sun. And now the oxen must be driven again to the yoke. The time of the siesta is behind them. The kaleidoscope is shaken as a million wooden wheels begin to turn. The modern road winds on, a ribbon of the present, threading the fantastic centuries of ancient India.