Verso Benares: Travelers Without a Map and the Inner India
Verso Benares (2022) is an Italian poetic documentary that immerses the viewer in the sacred rhythms of India, exploring themes of spirituality, perception, and the metaphysical nature of travel. With its contemplative imagery and minimal narration, the film constructs a meditative space where time dissolves and inner transformation becomes the true destination. This essay draws a line between the film and a broader cultural context, linking it to the introspective tradition of Indian cinema and to the literary sensibility of Pierre Loti, the French writer who sought “India” not only as a place, but as a spiritual metaphor.
Pierre Loti and the Myth of Inner India
Pierre Loti (1850–1923), though never extensively immersed in Indian culture like other orientalist writers, remains a key figure in framing the West’s poetic imagination of the East. In L’Inde (sans les Anglais) (1903), he presents an India filtered through his melancholy gaze—mystical, ceremonial, unknowable. His travel writing resists linearity and embraces the fragmented impressions of a man seeking a truth behind appearances. While his best-known novels such as Pêcheur d’Islande do not concern India, his Indian writings cast him as a “traveler without a map”—one whose journey is driven more by spiritual restlessness than geographic precision.
This poetic sensibility resonates with the ethos of Verso Benares, where the external journey through temples, rivers, and rituals reflects an inward pilgrimage. The protagonist, unnamed and without narrative explanation, observes more than acts. The film thus recalls Loti’s principle of interiority: one does not discover India; one is changed by it.
Verso Benares: A Cinematic Meditation
Rather than following a conventional plot, Verso Benares unfolds as a cinematic raga—a slow, deliberate unfolding of visual motifs: the Ganges flowing at dawn, bodies in ritual, children playing near temples, the distant hum of prayer. The camera acts not as an interpreter, but as a humble witness.
There is no “Jacques” in the film, and no fictional journey toward the source of the river. These appear to be elements from an earlier fictionalized summary. The real strength of Verso Benares lies in its refusal to guide, define, or resolve. It is precisely this absence of narrative that allows the viewer to enter a contemplative state, much like that cultivated in Indian ascetic traditions.
Echoes in Indian Cinema: The Inner Landscape
The idea of “Inner India” has long been explored in Indian art cinema. Directors like Ritwik Ghatak, Satyajit Ray, and Mrinal Sen portrayed the psychological and spiritual depths of Indian identity, especially during times of political upheaval and postcolonial redefinition.
Ghatak’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960) confronts the trauma of displacement through haunting soundscapes and mythic structure. Ray’s Charulata (1964) explores loneliness and desire within the cloistered world of Bengali high society. Both films, while grounded in realism, reach for the symbolic. Their protagonists, like the observer in Verso Benares, experience India as an inward terrain.
These works are united not by setting, but by an attention to interiority. In all of them, the “map” is unstable. The true path lies in stillness, ritual, memory, and self-confrontation.
Conclusion: Film as Inner Pilgrimage
Verso Benares belongs to a quiet tradition of spiritual cinema. In rejecting voiceover, plot, and explanation, it invites the viewer to dwell in the silence between images, much like a pilgrim sits beside the Ganges and simply watches the river pass. This is the essence of the inner journey.
Pierre Loti, Indian auteurs of the 20th century, and contemporary filmmakers across cultures share this understanding: that sacred places are not defined by geography, but by states of perception. In Benares, the visible world is only a reflection. The real India—like the real self—emerges only when we stop trying to grasp it.