“Neither Painful Nor Pleasant, Neither Easy Nor Difficult”: On the Audiovisual Ghosts of Colonial Malaise in Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975)

By Matthew Chan, Edited by Edith Zhang

Marguerite Duras’ India Song (1975) follows Anne-Marie Stretter (Delphine Seyrig), the wife of the French ambassador to British Colonial India in the 1930s stationed in Calcutta. She spends her days in various states of indolence, despondency and decay, lounging around their lavish estate and indulging in various affairs with the men that roam through the house. As Duras herself remarked “India Song, the film, will be constructed first through sound, then through light”-this is the version of Duras’ film that can be taken from a distance, though it would be a gross oversimplification of a work composed of two distinct, overlapping worlds(Duras 169). When taken individually one can witness two different films, one that features an ensemble of French actors, model-like, dialogue-free and drained of outward emotion, posed in various tableaus in the rooms of the Château Rothschild in Boulogne, France and another of colonial malaise, as you hear four disembodied voices narrate and speculate about the complex shared histories of the figures depicted on screen and the collective ignorance they hold to the suffering of their colonial subjects. Accordingly, throughout the film there is a complete disconnect between sound and image, with any human presence, whether physical or auditory, being stripped of recognizable, common signifiers of humanity. The people on screen are not allowed to speak or emote, the voices off screen can never be shown. This sense of repression, which comes with an accompanying boredom, is what seizes Duras’ film, rendering it as an oppressive and intolerable portrait of the banality of the Western colonial project from the perspective of those stationed abroad. It is thus, from this historical vantage point, that we can interpret the film as less so a film about actual, existing people as much as it is a film about the ghosts of Western colonialism. As Michael Chion states in regards to the difference between the visual and auditory “One world is more ghostly than the other, and it's the world of sound,” and it is the voices, curious and omniscient, that act as a supernatural guide to excavate the spiritual rot at the center of the characters, while in a similar way the actors also function as specters, wandering through the detritus of a regretful past, finding no satisfaction in the corporeal world. (Chion 125) 

The voices in India Song are what Chion describes as “paradoxical acousmetres those deprived of some powers that are usually accorded to the acousmetre” as there appears to be a limit to their omniscience. (Chion, 130) As opposed to a typical narrator in a film the voices seem to function interchangeably as the inner voices of the onscreen characters and as wholly detached third parties, slipping between perspectives, between subjectivity and objectivity. In the beginning of the film opening, over consecutive images of the estate emptied out of any human presence, one voice remarks “Where are we?”, while another answers “The French embassy in India”. (7:29-7:38) From the start the voices appear to collectively hold limited information, as if to suggest they are discovering the locale at the same time as the audience. The initial function of the voices may hence, appear to be expository, filling in the contextual gaps the image fails to communicate. However, there also appear to be challenges to the purported objectivity of the film’s sound. Early on over an image of the horizon a piano song starts playing. For the audience there is the partial expectation that the sound will be “de-acousmatized, when the film reveals the face that is the source of the voice.”(Chion 130) Or in this case a diegetic source of the music, and as we cut to the next image, that of a piano, it almost appears that this instinct has been validated, though it quickly dawns on the viewer that no one is actually playing the piano on screen, so the source remains mysterious. (4:43-4:53) Perhaps the clearest indication of the non-representational, non-diegetic quality of the film’s sound comes in the first appearance of an on screen actor. As the camera pans and settles on the image of three actors in the frame, the voices remark “I love you to the point of not seeing, not hearing, dying.” (11:39-11:52) If we were to continue to interpret the voices as an objective guiding force then it would appear that we are given a glimpse into the internal monologue of one of the characters. But there is no indication at all as to whose thoughts these are. The voices hence, do not operate in the realm of objective reality and direct representation and instead function based on a sort of poetic logic, as if dipping into a collective memory. We thus, do not understand the feelings of the individual but an abstract whole, as if to ascribe the same sense of longing to the entire image presented.

Another example of this disconnect comes in the scene of a party. The audio in the background consists of the overlapping chatter of party guests yet on screen, within a still shot that restricts the view of the audience, we only see the two inhabitants of the home and a servant who occasionally wanders in and out of frame. (34:19-35:00) Therefore, “audio and visual perceptions were divided one by the other instead of mutually compounded, and in this quotient another form of reality, of combination, emerged,.” as a new image is created in the minds of the viewer through the disconnect. (Chion 126) We are not viewing a party as much as we are observing the non-specific representation of a party, one that has invariably occurred multiple times in the characters’ past and will likely continue to occur in the future. Many such instances of poetic representation accumulate in Duras’ film to effectively sketch a portrait of the repetitive and banal nature of the life of the colonizer, separated from their native home, and forced to exist within a liminal and limited range of experiences. As remarked by one of the voices: “This general despondency. It’s neither painful nor pleasant to live in India. Neither easy nor difficult. It’s nothing. You see? Nothing” (55:43) 

The characters of India Song appear to exist not within any actual location by being seemingly suspended in space and time through the audiovisual disconnect, despite the constant complaints of the oppressive heat of Calcutta, but in Gilles Deleuze concept of “any spaces whatever”. (Deleuze 8) To Deleuze, post-World War II there saw a prevalence of these such spaces, which were “deserted but inhabited, disused warehouses, waste ground, cities in the course of demolition or reconstruction.”, in order to echo the destruction the war had brought. (Deleuze 8) It became less so about where the characters were physically but of the historical memories the places they occupied may have held and even more so the memories they themselves clung onto. Likewise Duras perceives the film's location as “both one of amnesia and of this defective memory, a place filled with contingencies of light, shadowy hollows, fractures and other zones of startling clarity.”. (Duras 162) Though they may appear to be in Calcutta where the characters, both on and off screen reside, is in memory, as they constantly recall and long for places elsewhere. 

Perhaps the clearest example of a character who exists in “any spaces whatever” is the beggar woman from Savannakhet, Laos who appears twice in the film. The film opens on the

title of “India Song” over a sunset yet we are immediately introduced to a contradiction, as the song that plays is in the Lao language and we hear the woman sing, speak and laugh. (0:00-4:26) The primary voices are introduced commenting on her incongruity and the mystery of her appearance in the Ganges, remarking that she had “Twelve children dead while she marked towards Bengal”. (0:00-4:26) The film is hence, in actuality composed of three prominent layers: the visual, the auditory world of the primary voices and a separate world only occupied by the beggar woman who appears ignorant to anything else surrounding her despite her geographical dislocation. She later crops up once more and is remarked to have actually entered the estate as the voices remark “I keep thinking it can’t be possible. We’re thousands of miles away from Indochina”. (1:02:15) As a figure the beggar woman only exists in song, which is repeated with every appearance, isolating her to a single vocal snippet. Unlike the primary voices she appears to lack agency, roaming in and out of the film like a benevolent spirit. Her persistent presence does the dual job of introducing a sense of intersectionality between the colonization of Laos by the French and India by the British, whilst representing the residual guilt the Stretter’s hold from their time in Savannakhet, which is referenced later in the film and is suggested by the devastation the beggar woman encountered which led to the death of her children. Moreover, zooming out even further one can interpret the fixation on Indochina to be reflective of Duras’ own personal history, having grown up in French colonial Vietnam. As she stated in relation to the parallels between her novel The Lover and India Song: “I have staged my obsession” (Duras, 172). A key line comes when the voices remark “Perhaps she follows you. Follows the whites”, which comes to suggest Calcutta as an “any spaces whatever”, as a locale that exists not actually as Calcutta but a microcosmic representation of colonial occupation. (1:03:10) Though it may appear reductive perhaps to Duras, Calcutta is Savannakhet is Vietnam, as an impossible, constructed space to work through her guilt and complicity to France’s colonial empire, a guilt further refracted onto her lifeless characters, perpetually haunted by the song of the beggar woman. 

Though what Duras also achieves through the audio-visual disconnect is a pervasive sense of dehumanization from any person depicted both on and off screen, through the deprivation of either sound, particularly dialogue, or image. In relation to her characters Duras stated “I wanted identification between actors and the real characters to be impossible”, though

this was referring to the characters on screen, as the actors, and the voices off screen, as the real characters, the resistance towards identification is witnessed throughout the film. (Duras 173) Perhaps the only outward display of contempt towards the Indian natives from the film’s characters comes in an extended dialogue between two of the primary voices. One questions “On the slopes, those dark places?” while the other responds “People. The highest density in the world.” (1:35:34) These lines are delivered with the same monotone inflection as any other that comes from the voices, though in this case there is an added callousness from the casual degradation of the Indian people off hand in this exchange, reducing them to an unidentifiable mass defined by their complexion. Though the irony of this scene emerges from the image the audio is juxtaposed against as you see the inhabitants of the estate draped in shadows locked motionless in tableau for an extended period of time, being deprived of movement as smoke from a candle emerges, indicating the extended length of the take. (1:35:34) The voices may be referring to the natives but perhaps the actors better fit the description of “dark places”, being fully objectified by Duras’ camera and being reduced throughout the film into models to be posed, with any opportunity for passion or emotion being completely suppressed. 

There is, however, a single instance of diegetic sound in the film, or at least sound that is implied to be diegetic. One of the few narrative threads within the film concerns the romantic advances of The Vice Consul of Lahore (Michael Lonsdale) towards Madame Stretter, which finds its resolution when he is pushed out by the men of the house. In response he steps off screen and at an incredibly loud volume screams “Let me stay! I am going to stay here tonight! With her! Just once with her!” (1:17:53-1:26:21) These screams continue to remain audible for the next 9 minutes of the film as he is gradually kicked off their estate and his pleas fade into the background. There is a visceral quality to the scream as it is the only vocal delivery permitted any passion throughout the film, providing a great release to the pent up emotion that accumulates prior within every character. The diegetic nature of the scream moreover, pierces through the heavy artifice which Duras constructs as if to suggest the inhumanity of her experiment and gesture towards how abnormal the construction of the film actually is. Only when we are allowed to perceive emotion do we realize how impossibly cruel it is to suppress it.

However, the lack of feeling carries out in the remainder of the film, with the closest thing to an emotional climax being a kiss between Stretter and her husband, which is conducted with a complete lack of passion, ending with Stretter glancing expressionless into the distance. (1:51:30-1:52:37) This choice to restrict emotion within the actors comes loaded with possible intent, in some respects it seems like Duras is trying to bestow the same dehumanization onto colonial leaders that they themselves bestow on the natives, while in others it seems like an effort to communicate the all encompassing banality of their existence which they reluctantly adopt. What the film presents may in fact be somewhere in the middle, with years of guilt developed from cruelty and misdeed curdling within the characters, emerging as a form of cognitive dissonance as they fail to reconcile the unfulfilling nature of their lives with the devastation they have brought onto the spaces they occupy. Or in Duras’ own words: “Anne-Marie Stretter is my hysteria. And for that very reason, it is impossible to represent her” (Duras, 173) 

Within Duras’ India Song the disconnect between sound and image is wielded towards various hostile ends, transporting the audience into a purgatorial state where they are forced to contend with the ghosts of western colonialism. A heaviness lingers in the air of each image as the geographical and temporal non-specificity of the voices transform the estate into a place of eternal remembrance, as a poetic representation of the repetitive, and ultimately banal life of the white colonizer. Though perhaps what cuts through the repression is the power of sound. As a character remarks “I came to India because of India Song”, stating that “The tune make me want to love” and that “I have never loved. I had never loved anyone”. (44:43) Sound provides a means of expression, which when yielded can create an opportunity for love, though this is an opportunity Duras denies her characters, just as the colonial project restricts their subjects’ ability to love. 

Works Cited 

Chion, Michel. Audio-vision: Sound on Screen. Edited by Claudia Gorbman, translated by Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, 1994.

Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema II: The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. 

Duras, Marguerite, director. India Song. Sunchild Productions, 1975. 

Duras, Marguerite. My Cinema: Writing and Interviews. Another Gaze Editions, 2023.