The intimate relationship between Hindu believers and their Gangaji.
Buddha was born in Kapilavashtu, enlightened at Maghada, taught at Varanasi, entered nirvana at Kusinagara….
Thus begins the meal chant of Buddhists all over the world. But Buddha himself was a Hindu yogic practitioner-and the most devout Hindus still travel to the city of Varanasi, now called Kashi, to die, because there Mother Ganga, the river goddess of the Ganges, is most accessible, and there they have the greatest chance of being liberated from the relentless cycle of reincarnation back into the suffering of birth and death.
Gayle Ferraro's meticulous documentary observes four different families, each with an aged and dying mother, each of whom has travelled for some distance to be at a hospice which has been operating since 1958. It's not so much a medical facility as a place where families can take care of their dying, where professional holy men offer near-constant prayers and where the burning ghats are nearby, so the departed can be cremated and then have their ashes thrown into the river. In the hospice's small, dark rooms wait the Pandeys and the Choberys (whose dying matriarchs are 90 and 96 years old, respectively), while we go on side trips to the ghats to watch the amazing cascade of humanity flowing ceaselessly, it seems, into the holy Ganges.
With some 60,000 people living and bathing, and an average of 200 bodies per day being cremated, along a seven-kilometer stretch of riverbank, you'd expect some degree of pollution-and the Ganges is, by Western standards, lethally contaminated. We watch engineers test for fecal coliform, which should be below a certain measurement and is several thousand times that. As one scientist explains, "With my rationally trained mind, I know what is in the water…but as a committed believer," he trusts along with millions of others that the protection of Gangaji will keep the water pure. Yet the rampant pollution, including raw sewage released directly into the water, causes concern-since the Hindu codes originated when there were far fewer people to practice them.
Ferraro's camera doesn't hesitate to capture the gorgeous, the garish and the ghoulish indiscriminately, following funeral processions of bodies wrapped in red and gold cloths, strung with tinsel and garlands of marigolds-and a corpse bobbing facedown in the river, peacefully enough, a seagull perched on its rump pecking at the flesh. We watch untouchables carrying unthinkably huge loads of firewood on their heads, and listen to the sons of the dying women as they explain in hushed, worried voices that their matriarchs have stopped eating, their wives and sisters spooning milk into the ancient women's open, toothless mouths. Women are forbidden to attend funerals, and apparently can't be interviewed either, but they work incessantly in the background, plucking at their dupattas with fastidious, elegant hand motions, bangles clanking-and they mourn, as we can hear wails of grief afterward. Other than a few moments of poorly executed digital slo-mo, Ferraro's photography is simple and beautiful, with a blessed absence of narration;
Ganges
stands alongside
Born into Brothels
as an intimate record of the subcontinent's struggle to retain ancient custom amidst the need for modern solutions to all-too-modern problems.
