French Authors on Hinduism: Cinema as a Mirror of Mircea Eliade’s Reflections
The film Verso Benares (2019), offers a fascinating exploration of India and its spiritual roots, particularly Hinduism. The film belongs to a cinematic tradition that, since the 1950s, has sought to represent India not merely as an exotic location, but as a crossroads of profound religious and philosophical traditions. This essay aims to analyze how Verso Benares dialogues with the French cinematic tradition on Hinduism, particularly with works inspired by the reflections of Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian scholar who profoundly influenced the Western understanding of India.
Hinduism in French Cinema: Between Exoticism and the Sacred
French cinema has played a central role in the representation of India, especially from the 1950s and 60s, when directors like Robert Bresson (A Man Escaped, 1956) and Jean Renoir (The Rules of the Game, 1939) explored themes related to spirituality. However, it is with The Silent World (1956) by Jacques-Yves Cousteau that India begins to appear as a place of profound spirituality, anticipating a broader interest in Eastern traditions.
In the 1960s, with the French New Wave, India became a recurring theme. Directors like Jean-Luc Godard (Weekend, 1967) and Agnès Varda (The Gleaners and I, 2000) began to explore India as a place of contradictions, where spirituality and modernity coexist. However, it is with the documentaries of Alain Danjou and India Song (1975) by Marguerite Duras that Hinduism is represented with greater philosophical depth.
Mircea Eliade and India: An Intergenerational Dialogue
Mircea Eliade, philosopher and historian of religions, had a significant influence on how India and Hinduism were perceived in the West. In his essay Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, Eliade analyzes Hinduism as a tradition that seeks unity between body and spirit, a theme that recurs in many cinematic representations.
In the film Verso Benares, the protagonist’s spiritual quest is an echo of Eliade’s reflections. The journey towards Benares, the sacred city, symbolizes an internal path, a return to origins, a theme dear to Eliade. The city becomes a place of purification, where the protagonist seeks to reconcile with their own existence, a concept that echoes the Eliadean idea of hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred in the everyday.
Verso Benares and Contemporary Cinema on India: The Manifestation of the Sacred (Hierophany) in Benares
The true resonance between Eliade and the cinematic vision of Varanasi lies precisely in the manifestation of the sacred, the hierophany. For Eliade, the sacred erupts and becomes visible in the profane world, transforming a common object or place. In Benares, every element—a stair, a boat, the act of drinking or washing in the waters of the Ganges—is invested with transcendent meaning.
Verso Benares captures this dynamic through the use of long, non-judgmental shots. The filming of the ghats does not focus on the exotic surface chaos (the profane time), but on the eternal repetition of the rituals (the sacred time), as if every dawn were the mythic re-creation of the world. Death, central to Benares, ceases to be a profane event and becomes the culmination of the hierophany: the body returning to the Ganges, the axis mundi (axis of the world), completes the cosmic cycle described by Eliade.
In this sense, the documentary moves away from mere travelogue and approaches the phenomenology of religions, a field of study that Eliade shaped. Cinema, particularly that influenced by the French aesthetic sensibility, offers the necessary lens to transpose such abstract philosophical concepts into contemplative and powerful images, making Varanasi not just a city, but a mystical experience accessible through film. Its absence of a voice-over narrative compels the viewer to experience the place, to find the sacred in the everyday, exactly as Eliade’s philosophy suggests that religion reveals itself.