by Maria Staiano-Daniels
Daily Lobo
New Mexicans understand more than most the importance of water, but it is nothing compared to the reverence Indians show the Ganges.
"Ganges: River to Heaven," which runs Feb. 10 through Feb. 16 at the Guild explores one aspect of the powerful connection between the people of India and their sacred river.
The documentary deals briefly with the mythology of the Ganges and the environmental issues that surround it. It focuses on one city along the river, Kashi, where people come to die. According to Hindu belief, if a person dies in Kashi, they achieve moksha, or freedom from the cycle of death and rebirth.
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The town of Kashi is filled with hospices where the dying and their families stay. The center of the movie is one such hospice, the Kashi Labh Mukti Bhawan Hospice, which is free to those who need it. "Ganges" follows several families who have brought dying relatives there. The rooms of the hospice are stark, with bare plaster walls and a small mat on the floor, but the familial love within them is palpable.
The intense devotion shown in the movie is a rather unusual sight for many Americans. We send our aging parents away to nursing homes because we work too much to take care of them. To see a young man talk about how he and his sisters took turns carrying their mother 15 miles to a bus stop on their backs, or see a woman feed her grandmother one painstaking spoonful of milk at a time is powerfully moving.
The stories of the Pandey, Chobey, Singh and Sharma families form the central thread of the documentary. Though the movie branches out to explore the faith of others who live in Kashi, it always comes back to the families, providing what could have been a disorganized film with structure and continuity.
"Ganges" looks at age and death unflinchingly - another odd sight for Americans. We see images of violent death every day on movies and TV, but we almost never see someone simply dying of old age. In "Ganges," the camera lingered on the ancient guests of the hospice. Their faces were haunting, eyes looking somewhere far away.
The documentary also deals with the issue of faith. Ganges is a goddess in the Hindu cosmology, and most people interviewed on camera refer to the river as mother. Many in Kashi ritually bathe in the Ganges daily - it is believed to be a kind of spiritual cleansing.
The Ganges, however, is extremely polluted. Open sewers flow into it and bodies are regularly placed in the river - it is part of traditional Hindu last rites. The movie dramatically documents this practice, showing bodies, shrouded or bare, floating down the river as people bathe on the banks.
Why, if the Ganges is polluted, do people still bathe there? An engineering professor interviewed for the documentary explained that this is due to faith - his head knows about contamination, he said, but his heart believes in the spiritual power of the river.
The documentary shows the Ganges is the spiritual lifeblood of India. As one man interviewed for the documentary said, the unique spirit of the country depends on the Ganges. However, due to rapid urbanization and increasing contamination, the Ganges may become unusable. As "Ganges: River to Heaven" shows, that would be a terrible loss to the spirituality of an entire nation.
