Peacock pilgrimage: an ode to India

Penny Fowler-Smith Master of Fine Arts by research 2008

College of Fine Arts School of Media Arts University of New South Wales I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the text. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the text. I also declare that the intellectual content of this paper is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.

……………………………………………… Penelope Fowler-Smith

………………………………….. Date

- 1 - ABSTRACT

The project entitled PEACOCK PILGRIMAGE comprises two components: the screenplay for a feature film, entitled Peacock Angel, and an exegesis, which explores the underlying influences on the screenplay.

Peacock Angel is the story of a young girl, Deva, who grew up in India with a fascination for peacocks, especially the fictional peacock angel. After a time of isolation as a teenager in the West, she returns to India to reconcile with a tragic past and reconnect with her true longings. India is the place that mends her wounded heart.

Within the symbolic realms of the screenplay Deva, as the central character, becomes the peacock ‘goddess’. Her journey allows us to explore layers within the themes of identity, memory and fantasy.

The project holds an East/West theme, of disillusionment with Western material values and appreciation of the depth of Indian culture, of “the land where the heart is king”.

Field research on the peacock, the key motif of the project, has led me on a journey through India that has been full of synchronicity and given me a particularly rich taste of her timeless culture. The exegesis elaborates on aspects of my journey, on the concepts of synchronicity and pilgrimage, and on the motif of peacock – highlighting its symbolic and mythical meanings. It also situates Peacock Angel within the field of world cinema, in the category of Western films made in India and the genre of magic realism.

- 2 - ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has taken several stops and turns, in particular an extended break for the pregnancy, birth and early life of my daughter, Pia. During that time we also moved to The Netherlands and, later, India. Many thanks to those at COFA who supported this process, especially to my constantly equanimous and cheerful supervisor, Phillip George.

Thanks also to those of my family and friends who read my work at various stages, above all to my sister Louise for arranging its printing and many other things back in Sydney. And to my partner, Rob, who remained calm as I tore my hair out in the juggling act of mothering and writing.

My deep gratitude goes to the land and heart of India, which has provided the ongoing inspiration and a constant welcome.

- 3 - CONTENTS

Introduction 5

Synopsis of Peacock Angel 10

Chapter 1 The Peacock Woman 12

Chapter 2 Peacock 28

Chapter 3 Synchronicity, pilgrimage, 36 and the heart

Chapter 4 Background to the field 46 Short case study

Chapter 5 The script 60

Conclusion 70

Appendix 1 Selected filmography 76

Appendix 2 Peacock & India anecdotes 79

Bibliography 86

- 4 - Introduction

- 5 - INTRODUCTION

The project entitled PEACOCK PILGRIMAGE comprises two components: the studio art consisting of the screenplay for a feature film, entitled Peacock Angel, and this exegesis, which explores the underlying influences on the screenplay and why I feel committed to make it.

The Peacock Angel screenplay has evolved through numerous storyline ideas, but its essence has remained the same since the beginning:

Peacock Angel: As an Australian girl growing up in India, Deva forged an uncanny relationship with the peacock, in particular with a fantasy peacock angel. Now nineteen, and after an absence of 7 years, she returns to India to reconcile with her father and a tragic past. Once there her memories and visions, guilt and grief, collide to redefine her identity and mend her wounded heart1.

The Peacock Angel project has had a long gestation. The screenplay is set mainly in India. It was the peacock, as symbol and motif, that initiated this project, and thus I devote much of the exegesis to it in one form or another.

Much of what has inspired this project has come from my travels and researches in India, what I now call my peacock pilgrimage, and my subjective interpretation of events. For that reason this paper is both self-reflexive and an exploration of the key motif and creative processes.

I am a film and video maker. My independent short films and documentaries have covered subjects that range from environmental issues, to domestic violence, to subjects of death and grief, to sexual taboos like female masturbation, bondage and

1 Terms such as ‘heart’ are used loosely in a large variety of texts, and also have multiple meanings. In the context of this exegesis I use the term as follows: heart - one's inmost being; the depths of the soul; the soul, the spirit. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edn, 1989) - 6 - discipline and amputee devotees.2 Peacock Angel marks my transition as a writer/director from documentaries and short films to feature films.

The scope of this paper is foremost to give insight into the underlying ideas and events that led to the creative project, and not to go into debate about what is current knowledge in the various fields it touches upon. I will not give the background to every concept I introduce, except in cases where I think there is much dispute. For this reason I present some background to the idea of synchronicity in Chapter 3, but, for instance, do not go into Westerners’ projections on India, orientalism, post- colonial theory and the like. There is simply not room here for that.

While the peacock is the primary focus of this project, the subject matter also includes representations of India and some of her unique devotional spirituality.

What has struck me particularly about this project and its creative process has been the number of cases of ‘synchronicity’, or meaningful coincidences, I have experienced in its research and development. I have also had these types of experiences in creating earlier work, especially At Sea. But never before in my work or life have I experienced quite this frequency of uncanny coincidences, to the point that early on in the research I started to consider that there must be some sort of divine3 intervention, or ‘grace’ at work.

For this reason I have devoted the first chapter to a description of the series of experiences and events that have to date fuelled my Peacock Pilgrimage research and development.

This first chapter is autobiographical in nature, and thus subjective and personal. I feel all that I have written here is essential as a way of understanding both my

2 See Appendix 1, my reduced filmography, for details on my films mentioned in this paper. As my independent film and video productions rely on obtaining funding from various sources they have been just a part of my work. I’ve also worked extensively as a freelancer in various roles on other film and video projects, and for television as a producer/director. 3 I use the term divine as follows: (D)divine - that which is believed to be the underlying creative and sustaining force in the universe. (Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edition, 1989)

- 7 - ongoing drive to realise this project, and how the more personal trajectories within it have in their own way shaped it. It is a chronicle of connections to the peacock that have occurred in my life with no apparent reason or conscious prompting. They have repeatedly fed my curiosity and kept this project alive. They have also prompted me to explore subjects such as pilgrimage, synchronicity, and a variety of religious and spiritual traditions.

The second chapter covers the peacock as symbol. It is the selective result of my research on the peacock as represented in the visual and performing arts, as well as in stories and common beliefs, mostly in India. In it I focus on what has most interested me in terms of writing the Peacock Angel screenplay.

The third chapter looks briefly at the concept of synchronicity with the aim of understanding why the sequence of events described in Chapter 1 might have occurred; whether there was something I did unconsciously, or consciously, to set it up, or whether there is simply no explanation to it, scientific or otherwise. Concepts like synchronicity point at the belief in oneness, that all is connected. The chapter leads into a short discussion on pilgrimage, and on India as the “land of the heart”.

Chapter 4 looks at where Peacock Angel fits within the field of world cinema. Western films made in India are the focus here, along with the genre of magic realism and a few other categories.

Chapter 5 explores issues regarding the screenplay of Peacock Angel.

Research on this project, especially on the peacock, has taken many forms. My field research in India resulted in a large variety of references and material, gathered orally. Library research was disappointing, as there is little of value published on the peacock relating to arts and culture. Internet searches also turned up no one who had explored the peacock to the extent that I had. I found no collections of folktales or other stories on the peacock, so I again collected these in my field research. I adapted one of them, the fable of “The Peacock and the Cloud”, in Peacock Angel.

- 8 - Early on I realised that I would have to rely on field research, including both formal and informal interviews, when collecting information and inspiration. By communicating my passion for the subject people came forward with their associations, anecdotes and recommendations for further research. Interestingly, this oral approach has been perfect for the project, as it has continually drawn me into the heart of India and its people rather than allowing me to stay outside and remain only academic.

Beyond that, pursuing this project has changed my life. When I started it I was living in Australia. I was single with no children. Now I’m living in India with my 20 month-old daughter and husband. My peacock pilgrimage has taken me from West to East, physically and at many other levels.

- 9 - Peacock Angel Synopsis

Deva, 12, lives in India with her father, Jim, stepmother, Joanna, and younger stepsister, Alice. She has a passion for peacocks that both her father and his assistant Krishna, Deva’s idol, nurture with stories and mock field trips - in particular the quest for the elusive peacock angel. Her father works as an animal ecologist. He’s often away from home.

Tragedy strikes one night when Deva sets out on her own expedition in search of the peacock angel. Alice follows her secretly, and, in trying to keep up, accidentally falls from the huge banyan tree in their garden. She dies instantly. Joanna falls apart. Deva is sent off to boarding school in Australia where she feels abandoned by her father, which intensifies her experiences of cultural & familial displacement.

In Australia she’s mocked for her obsessions with India and peacocks. In her efforts to conform she betrays her true passions and, furious with her father’s loyalty to her stepmother, Deva refuses to return to India at all.

Deva is now 19. She gets word that her father has had an accident and is in a critical condition. After 7 years absence, she returns to India and is shocked when her father, suffering from a head injury and concussion, doesn’t recognise her. She is also confused by the old longings stirred by Krishna, the fantasy man she has never been able to let go of. But he now has two children in an arranged marriage.

Around her is the India Deva inhabited in happier times. Wherever she goes people from her childhood welcome her with warmth and love. But they can’t help her with her inner demons, and being back in the family home triggers the ghost of her sister.

Stimulated by the rediscovery of the old peacock story her father devised for her, Deva attempts to help her father return to health, at the same time as coming to terms with the adolescent nature of her fantasy-love for the unobtainable Krishna.

Her father is healing, cells regenerating and memories building, to the point where he

- 10 - is now able identify with what Deva is grappling with. She is finally able to reconcile her guilt about Alice and put her ghost to rest.

She realises that she must contact the divinity within herself. Krishna’s wife comes to her aid and creates her as the dancing peacock woman, a virtual goddess. The power of this transformation is profound.

The peacock story comes full circle and the monsoon rain comes bucketing down.

- 11 - Chapter 1

Fig. 1 “about a woman who wants to Become Peacock”

- 12 - Chapter 1 The Peacock Woman - or how the peacock keeps pecking me…

In this chapter I take you on the personal journey that describes how this work unfolded, and the uncanny outside influences that reinforced my desire to write the screenplay Peacock Angel. The point I want to make is that many times I’ve tried to drop this project, but every time something relating to peacock ‘pecks’ at me again.

The germinal idea for the film The Peacock Angel4 came out of the blue in 1992, when I completed the shoot for a short carnivalesque film on Bondage and Discipline (None of the Above 5). In the action of handing a gift to the main performer she asked me, “so what is your next film going to be about?” I looked down at the card I’d chosen for her - a black and white film still of Annette Kellermann dressed in Egyptian harem garb & staring down at a crane (bird) in a stance of unusual power play - (fig. 1) and replied, “about a woman who wants to Become Peacock!”

I have no idea where this response came from. I heard it come out of my mouth, in my voice, but the sensation was that it bypassed my thinking mind. Apart from anything else, I had no prior interest in peacocks; hadn’t ever considered them. And it was clearly “become peacock” and not “become a peacock” that my voice had said. For me the distinction between these two phrases is crucial in that the latter implies a direction to literally transform from a person into a peacock, whereas the former implies taking on some of its attributes, for instance its nobility. At the time the word ‘Become’ held a lot of meaning for me, whereas the word peacock held none. I instantly linked ‘Become’ to all the attention I had put on philosophical readings and thoughts around ‘Becoming’ during the process of developing the ideas for my film None of the Above. To ‘Become Peacock’ was not something mentioned in any of the texts, but the concept of Becoming-Animal6 had strongly influenced my approach to the final section of None of the Above. For me, these philosophical writings pointed

4 Working title only. 5 Short film. 35mm, Dolby SR. 13 mins. See Appendix 1, my reduced filmography, for details on my independent films mentioned in this paper. 6 “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible…” is Chapter 10 in: G. Deleuze & F. Guattari, 1987, (trans. B. Massumi). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, pp 232-309. - 13 - not at all to imitation or reaching a final state, but to transcendence to deeper aspects and on ongoing process.

My partner at the time reacted strongly when I recounted my day’s events and my strange statement. It turned out he had been fascinated years earlier by an animist tribe called the Yezidis, who worship the Peacock Angel. The Yezidis, or what’s left of them, live amongst the Kurds in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. For them the Peacock Angel represents Iblis, or Satan, and as theirs is a non-dualistic religion, having no concept of good vs. evil, Iblis is regarded as God’s closest angel. As a result they have been persecuted as devil worshippers for centuries, and so have had to keep their faith underground and their precious icons of the peacock angel hidden. I started a file on the Yezidis for further research.

Over the next few months, while editing None of the Above, I did some research on peacock and discovered that it had been used symbolically for a range of meanings: transformation, wisdom, immortality, purity, spring of hope, good luck, magic; and on the flip side, pride and narcissism. Much later I found out that in the miniature paintings and local song of many parts of India the peacock was seen as a messenger of love and symbol of the absent lover or Beloved.

Initially my research led me to Iran and the Middle East. I was already interested in the Sufis, with their burning focus on meeting the Beloved7, and had been collecting the translated works of Hafiz and Rumi for some years. I wondered about the connection to the peacock. The peacock was not native to Persia, but, as in many parts of Europe, the silk merchants had introduced them to the royal and affluent gardens, and onto their dinner tables. Thus there were numerous visual representations in miniature paintings, enamel objects, furnishings and the like. And of course there was the legend of the famous peacock throne, robbed from Delhi and taken to Persia in 1739.

7 In the language of many traditions, God is referred to as the Beloved. This is especially true in the divine love poetry of the Sufis, but also in the language of Christian mystics and the Bhakti poetry of India. - 14 - Meanwhile I was busy with other projects and paid work. The peacock was on the backburner.

I may have left it at that, but there was a note from my partner. He’d noticed that my name had peafowler contained in it (i.e. Penny Fowler-Smith, p.fowler, peafowler). A peafowler is the term for a shepherd of peacocks. There it was, inscribed in my name. I started to wonder if this connection with peacock was pre-destined8 for me. And because it had first come up in connection with a film idea, it followed that the object of my destiny must surely be a film that was in some way about a woman who wanted to become peacock, whatever that might mean.

At about that time I was already invited to some film festivals in Europe and the USA, and so I decided to base myself in Paris for a year. I had a round-the-world ticket with USA, Europe and India as stops.

In Paris I was astonished to find a book on the Yezidis, who worship the peacock angel, at the Bibliotheque de l’Institut du Monde Arabe. It had been published just months earlier, and was the first comprehensive study of this tribe. The timing of its publication reinforced my feeling that my involvement with this project was somehow “meant to be”.

An Iranian colleague was planning a shoot for a TV documentary on Iranian Cinema, in Iran, later that year. He invited me to be the location sound recordist. My two months in Iran were fascinating, but I soon felt it wasn’t the home, literal or inspired, for the peacock project. Despite this, peacock connections continued to arise. On my wanderings in Esfahan I stumbled upon an object that later gave me a literal wack on the head - a stylised metal sculpture of a peacock with a human’s head (fig. 2). The shop owner had no information on it, and obviously didn’t consider it valuable. Taking it through Esfahan airport for an internal flight I was stopped at an x-ray machine and told I’d have to have it classified before I could later take it out of the country. That got me excited, but then the Department of Archaeology classed it

8 I’ve felt this with other films, especially At Sea and Damming, despite the fact that I was brought up in an Anglo-Saxon culture that frowns upon the idea of pre-destiny or fate. - 15 - permissible for export, and not of cultural importance. Despite my enquiries no one could tell me what it was. I still wonder if it might be a replica of a Yezidis’ peacock angel. The only other symbolic animal I’ve seen that resembles it, in that region, is the Alborak – the vehicle of Mohammed’s flight, which is found in Persian miniature paintings. The Alborak has a human head, horse-like body and peacock feather tail. But the horse like body of the Alborak is always seen with four horse’s hoofed legs, in distinction to the two bird’s feet of my metal sculpture.9

While in Paris and Turkey that year I had an eye infection, allergic conjunctivitis, which kept recurring until I reached Iran. Then in Iran I had a vivid dream, like a waking vision, of hundreds of disembodied eyes coming towards me from out of a desert landscape. These connections to eyes felt relevant to me in terms of this project, and still do, particularly as the feature of the peacock is its tail feathers with hundreds of ‘eyes’. In mythological traditions, Western and Eastern, these eyes are assigned the role of all-seeing awareness, particularly in relation to the Goddess.10 I couldn’t help wondering what the eyes were trying to tell me.

Back in Paris I was on the verge of forfeiting the ticket to stay on in France when the peacock pecked again. During a few days it seemed that everywhere I looked I saw representations of peacocks. They were nothing that other people noticed, but they jumped out at me in fabrics and items in shop windows.

Then I had a chance conversation with a friend who insisted that if I was interested in peacocks then Rajasthan, a short hop from Delhi, was the place to go. I rang the airline, but the waiting lists were impossibly long on the last dates for which my ticket was still valid. But I’d decided to go and kept ringing. To my surprise one of the women I’d spoken to from the airline rang me back with the news that she’d blocked me a place for the next day. I grabbed the opportunity, wondering at events turning out in such a way that a stranger from an airline would decide to move me up

9 There is also the Kamdhenu, or Wish-Fulfilling Cow, an auspicious mythological creature in Hinduism, with the body of a cow, head of a woman and tail of a peacock. But again, this creature clearly has 4 legs, and is unlikely to be found in the bazaars of Esfahan. 10 These goddesses include the Roman Queen of Heaven, Juno (Greek, Hera) and the Vedic Goddess of Wisdom, Saraswati. - 16 - in the waiting list. She indicated that she’d been touched by our conversation and my interest in the peacock, and had acted against protocol.

In the middle of the night I touched down in Delhi and came to an unknown hotel with a night manager demanding my passport. But on looking at it, I did not recognise myself! I stood motionless and flabbergasted, staring at an unknown face and the name that went with it. Then, snapping out of my trance-like state, I looked again and now saw myself. Still, it had clearly not been “me” looking through my eyes for those moments. I’ve never had an experience like this before. I felt then that something larger than life was happening, and that India had something in store for me.

The next six weeks in India unfolded magically. I focussed on my peacock research and one chance meeting led to the next with art historians, dancers, folklorists and others. People who could guide me were available when they said they normally wouldn’t be, and in this way my itinerary unfolded organically. I saw peacock representations everywhere, to the amazement of many Indians who didn’t notice them at all. Often I would enter a place, for instance a museum, and ask where I could find peacocks in the collection. Inevitably I’d be told there were none, but I would then find scores of them – in sculptures, antiques, paintings, etc. I collected stories, anecdotes, and numerous items from markets and shops – old woodblocks and jewellery punches, embroideries, miniatures, enamel objects, and many other bits and pieces – all related to peacocks. So much so that by the end of this first trip I felt I had been on a peacock quest. For the first time I understood, at a deep experiential level, what Joseph Campbell had meant by his expression “follow your bliss”. People I encountered dubbed me the Peacock Woman and everything fell effortlessly into place. My passion for the peacock research was honoured. Every day I came across something to do with the peacock, in art forms or life. The peacock opened doors to all sorts of interesting experiences and people. Past lives were projected onto me - the reincarnation of a peacock, a sacred temple dancer, a saint. But mainly Peacock Woman.

- 17 - Over the next couple of trips I travelled the width and breadth of Rajasthan and Gujarat11, from tourist haunts and palaces to periods of stay in villages where foreigners had either rarely or never visited, and satellite TV had not yet reached. They were all places where something specifically peacock drew me.

By the time I returned to Australia my research notes, images and experiences had expanded considerably. I tried to contain some of it in a treatment for a docudrama in which the central character travelled India as a storyteller, recounting peacock stories wherever she went. However, to adapt and contain my personal peacock pilgrimage in this way felt frustratingly reductive, and contrived.

Again the project went on the back burner while I worked as a freelancer on other people’s films and produced two more of my own independent films, At Sea12 and My One Legged Dream Lover13. There was no time for the peacock project.

My One Legged Dream Lover was selected in competition at IDFA (International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam) in late 1998. I was invited, and included a stopover in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, in my return flight ticket.

A few years earlier, while in Bhuj, a remote desert area of Gujarat, India, I’d entertained a 3-year-old European girl with peacock stories in a restaurant. Her mother listened in. After a while the mother commented on my obvious focus on the peacock. I explained. “Oh”, she continued, “then you must go to Arunachala. The peacocks at the samadhi (tomb) of Ramana Maharshi are enlightened.” Enlightened peacocks?! I dutifully noted down the details in my diary. But I didn’t bother to enquire about Ramana Maharshi, assuming he was just another Indian saint, and that Arunachala was just another holy site. In India, saints and holy sites are far from a rarity.

11 See Appendix 2 (excerpts from my research diaries) for a selection of peacock and India related anecdotes, some of which I’ve modified in writing Peacock Angel. 12 Short film. 35mm, Dolby SR. 10 mins. See Appendix 1 for more details. 13 Documentary. Digital Betacam. 52 mins. See Appendix 1 for more details. - 18 - I arrived in Chennai in December 1998 and made plans for my first peacock pilgrimage in the south of India. Over the period of a month I planned to visit the major temples of Lord Murugan, the 2nd son of Shiva, whose vehicle is the peacock (fig. 3). That would take me all over Tamil Nadu. On the way I would look out for peacock representations in temples and on the streets, as I had previously done in Rajasthan and Gujarat with what seemed like a peacock sensor inside me. I wanted to finish the trip in Trivandrum, at the southern tip of India, to visit a dancer who had promised to demonstrate a variety of ways in which the peacock is portrayed within the many forms of Indian dance she practises.

On mapping out my trip I noticed that a possible first stop, only four hours from Chennai, would be Tiruvannamalai, the town at the base of the holy mountain of Arunachala. Ramana Maharshi’s ashram, the home of the reportedly enlightened peacocks, was only a few kilometres from the town.

When I arrived in Tiruvannamalai a couple of days later I found the town’s hotels noisy and uninviting, and so took a rickshaw with my bags to Ramana Maharshi’s ashram. Inside the ashram it was incredibly clean and peaceful, with peacocks wandering around on the roof of the main building. I went to the office to see if I could stay a couple of nights. My simple request was met with a look of disdain from the imposing man in charge of accommodation. People book months in advance to stay at that ashram, and only once they’ve proven themselves as serious devotees of Ramana Maharshi. That I was drawn there by a story of enlightened peacocks didn’t hold any weight, in fact just the opposite.

A woman who’d overheard my conversation about the peacocks approached me. She was intrigued. She asked me what I knew about Ramana14 and Arunachala 15. “Nothing,” I replied. She laughed hysterically, and then asked me if I had ever meditated. When I affirmed that I’d done a reasonable amount of Buddhist

14 Ramana Maharshi (1879 - 1950) was a renowned spiritual guide and mentor. Considered a saint and sage by all who experienced his wisdom, he was a teacher of Advaita Vedanta (Hindu non-dualist philosophy) and advocated self-enquiry (atma-vichara) based on meditation. 15 Arunachala has been considered a holy mountain, the embodiment of Shiva, since recorded time. It attracts millions of pilgrims each year. - 19 - meditation, including just recently a 10 day Zen retreat, she urged me to go and sit in the room where Ramana had sat with devotees for many years, and focus on the question “Who am I?”

In the room there were a number of people quietly sitting, facing towards an enormous photo of Ramana Maharshi propped up on a long couch. I sat, got comfortable, and posed the question “Who am I” in the way one would do with a Zen koan. Within what seemed like minutes I dropped into the deepest level of consciousness, or simple ‘beingness’, that I’d ever experienced. No thoughts, no disturbance, a pure emptiness.

After some time a bell went. I ‘came to’ and noticed people leaving the room. I’d been in there for over 2 hours but had no sense of that amount of time passing. I don’t remember having any thoughts at all. As I returned to the streets my Western trained mind started up with disbelief, but I still felt an incredible level of peace.

In the next couple of days the woman who’d first directed me to Ramana’s room took me under her wing. She was an old hand at recognising people in the state I was experiencing. She didn’t need to encourage me to change my travel plans and stay. I had no thoughts of leaving, and no more drive for my peacock pilgrimage through southern India. Instead, every day for the next month I went to Ramana’s room for a few hours and sat, then spent the rest of the day wandering around, reading about Ramana and the mountain. On some of these days I experienced periods of pure bliss, something like a post-orgasm state, but lasting for hours. I felt simply in union with everything within and around me.

Countless other people have reported these types of peak experiences, but unlike most of the people I met at the mountain I had not come to Arunachala and Ramana’s ashram as part of a spiritual quest for God or the Divine.16 It was my peacock quest that had led me there.

16 Within this paper, instead of using expressions which include the term God I generally refer to the universal spiritual ‘force’ as the Divine, or to oneness/connectedness, or to the Beloved. - 20 - To add to the synchronicity and mystery, I found out later that Ramana is considered by many Hindus to be an incarnation of Skanda, or Murugan. Skandashram, partway up the mountain, where Ramana lived for some years, is named for this. And, of course, as Skanda’s vehicle is the peacock, there is a small peacock statue facing the altar in the tiny inner chamber.

I also read that Ramana’s last words, after responding to his devotees’ grief by gently asking, “Who is dying?” were in reference to the peahen, which was on the rooftop above him, crying out. He apparently looked up and said, “She’s hungry… feed her.”

I started to read more about Ramana, Arunachala, and anything I could find about Indian spirituality, especially of that kind. Back in Australia I headed north to a friend’s farm to recover from the aftermath of a particularly virulent virus. My doctor told me I had post-viral fatigue syndrome. It was in Dunoon, about 40 minutes drive from Byron Bay, during a period when there was a spurt of spiritual masters visiting the area. And, again coincidentally, most of them traced their lineage to Ramana Maharshi through his disciple Papaji, who had a huge following during the 90’s: Gangagi, Vartman and Isaac Shapiro to name a few. All were Westerners who had supposedly attained enlightenment through the practice, or non-practice, recommended by Ramana. I had various chances to question them all, and they consistently explained away my enduring state of heavy fatigue with similar stories of people who underwent strong spiritual “hits”, and who were then sick for years – that new consciousness had jumped in, and the body and mind had to slowly adjust. Ramana had been recorded as saying that it was like an elephant squeezing itself into a small tent – the tent then had to expand, and in the process would be altered.

Just when I’d reached the stage at which I’d concluded that I’d never go back to filmmaking, and that my old drive had completely vanished, an Indian filmmaker friend rang out of the blue to ask what had happened to the Peacock Woman project. Shelved, but more likely gone, I replied. She was disappointed. Then a few days later I was driving close to dusk in the hinterland of the Byron shire. I came over a rise in a hill to a peacock standing in the middle of the road! When I stopped the car and got out the peacock walked straight towards me, then when about three metres away he

- 21 - veered off into the roadside paddock. I stood in the middle of the road stunned. There were no peacocks in the area as far as I knew. And if there were, they didn’t do this type of thing. Something reignited.

One evening I sat at the end of my bed puzzling about what to do next with my life. I don’t recall that I was moving about at the time, from memory I was sitting still, yet suddenly the metal peacock “angel” that I’d bought years before in Iran fell down off the bookcase and punctured the crown of my head with one of its metal toes. Blood spurted out instantly. I went into a strange calm, and pressed my hand hard on the puncture to stop the blood flow.

Uncannily, the position of the puncture was right on the top, or fontanel position, of my head. In the East this is seen as the position of the crown chakra, the opening to the Divine17. Sitting in the doctor’s waiting room I decided that it was time to devote myself to my peacock project again. It seemed the peacock was pecking, and I didn’t want to risk a worse accident occurring to draw my attention.

I picked up the project again and went back to India in late 2003, this time for a 3- month research trip. Where my earlier trips had felt almost exclusively like peacock pilgrimages, this trip followed more my intention to study character and scene ideas for the specific script I was writing, along with location rekkes, and general background to ensure authenticity for the project.

Again, some incredible synchronicity occurred along the way, particularly to do with the peacock and wider project. I might have brushed some of these off, but this time I was travelling with my sister who was incredulous at the apparent coincidences.

For instance, three times in the space of a month I ran into Prakash, on whom I’d based my screenplay character Krishna,18 at locations at opposite ends of Rajasthan.

17 It’s said that when your crown chakra is open you have direct contact with the Divine. 18 Only after this, I changed his character name in the script from Prakash to Krishna, as, strangely, when he recognised me and approached in Amber Fort, for the first time we’d seen each other after many years, I looked at him and said, “Krishna?” rather than his actual name Prakash. It’s this type of ‘slip’ that I find uncanny. And the name Krishna perfectly suits his character in the script. - 22 - We’d lost touch years before. The most meaningful of these three occasions was at the famous Peacock Gate in Jaipur (fig. 4). I’d arrived minutes before for a rushed visit, taking photographs, when he walked in with a group.

Later in Mumbai I ran into another old friend, in very unlikely circumstances, who took me to a meeting with Ramesh Balsekar.19 During this meeting I asked Ramesh if he had a perspective on my connection with the peacock. Ramesh gave an elusive reply, something to do with my connection to the Divine. But after the meeting a man came up to me and asked me if I had seen what he’d seen, that Ramesh had taken on the form of a peacock as he answered my question. I hadn’t seen that, but was dumbstruck that he had.

Finally we came to Pondicherry and a visit to nearby Auroville.

I laugh now as I think how my well-laid plans hardly ever eventuate in India. I waved goodbye to my sister on the morning of December 5. My plan was to be alone and write for the next 3 weeks. That afternoon I took my first break from writing to visit a local Internet café that I’d earlier discovered to have wonderful Italian expresso. It was completely empty as I walked in, but right behind me came a European man. Since not even the staff was in sight we started to talk. He was a Dutch journalist, living in Auroville. We quickly discovered shared interests, and somewhere along the way I spoke of Arunachala, and how I planned to visit there once the crowds of people attracted by the upcoming festival of Deepam20 had passed, as during that time accommodation was impossible to find. His face lit up. “I want to test-drive my reconditioned Enfield, why not come on the back of my bike? If we can’t find accommodation we can always drive to another town.” He said he’d heard about Arunachala and Ramana, but had never found the time before to go. For some reason I agreed to go with him on the day before Deepam, two days later.

19 Ramesh attracts a similar group of spiritual seekers as Ramana, Papaji, Gangagi and the like. Their teachings all point back to seeing beyond separation, experiencing the witness who is unchanging. 20 Deepam is a 10 day festival in late Nov/Dec, the precise dates depending on the date of full-moon in that period. On the 10th evening a huge flame is lit on the summit of Arunachala, symbolising a famous story of Shiva. On this day about 2 million people turn up. It is seen as the most auspicious night of the year to do giri-pradakshana (usually walking) around the sacred mountain. - 23 - My personal life and the peacock synchronicities get highly entwined from here on, so I’ll be brief. My relationship with Rob started soon after our trip to Arunachala for Deepam. I ended up staying in Auroville for six months out of the following two years. It turned out that Sri Aurobindo had written about the peacock as the symbol of spiritual victory.21

In July 2005 my relationship with Rob was at a crossroads. He had returned to the Netherlands to work, and we questioned what to do and where to live together. Again I was working on the peacock woman script and applying for funding. I did an Internet search on the town where Rob lives. He’d always told me he lived in Harderwijk, which I’d looked up and dismissed as just another European town with a medieval town centre – quaint but not enough to move countries for. But that day I noticed his unofficial address in Ermelo, a neighbouring town to Harderwijk. I googled it, then opened the first document on Ermelo. Up came a coat of arms with a white peacock in its centre! What were the chances of that in the Netherlands? It turned out there’s a castle in the Ermelo area, Kasteel Staverden, with a legend of the white peacocks attached. One of the beliefs in the middle ages was that white peacocks must be kept there or the castle would disappear in a puff of smoke. The feathers are still collected each year and given to the local representative of the queen, and in years gone by were worn by the local knights on their helmets.

The Ermelo peacock connection decided me. I spent two months there, and on my return to Sydney realised I was pregnant. It seemed impossible, a miraculous conception at my age of 43.

All this time the name of the Peacock Woman in my screenplay had been Pia, but now all our searching for names for our daughter came back to Pia. We tried to settle on another name, but it was the only one that stuck. I had to change the name in the script.

21 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 1972, p. 980. - 24 - Soon after Pia was born I was bicycling back from a dentist appointment when something caught my eye. There on the bike-path was a peacock made of folded paper, attached to a wooden stick (fig. 5); the sort of thing you might use as a party decoration stuck into a cake or other foodstuff. Perhaps I read meaning into it where none was due, but, again, what were the chances?

As I write this we are living back in Auroville. For the first three months we lived in a guesthouse. The couple who established this guesthouse introduced peacocks into the area, and thus into Auroville, over 20 years ago. So every afternoon there was up to thirty peacocks scattered through the garden for us to enjoy. Now we have moved to a house where I am encouraging a few local peacocks with scattered seed each afternoon.

My peacock project has been essentially on hold since Pia was born, but not abandoned.

- 25 - Fig. 2 Peacock sculpture found in Esfahan

Fig. 3 Murugan, with peacock as vehicle

- 26 - Fig. 4 Peacock gate, Jaipur

Fig. 4

Fig. 5 Peacock found on my path

- 27 - Chapter 2

Fig. 6 Woman with peacocks – longings of love

- 28 - Chapter 2 Peacock

My focus on peacock, as indicated in the previous section, was clearly my departure point on this project, and continues to be the primary motif within it. However, the way I include it in the Peacock Angel screenplay has changed over time. I started with a story that was more of a docudrama based on my own peacock pilgrimages. In the end that felt contrived, and so I changed course and developed it over time into the fiction that it has become.

My spontaneous statement that my next film will be “about a woman who wants to become peacock” has kept me wondering ever since. Still, my research trips in India and the encouraging synchronicity I’ve experienced keep fuelling my quest. Deep down, I still suppose that if I dig around long enough I’ll finally find some answer to that seemingly purely random statement about a woman who wants to become peacock, or to how one ‘becomes peacock’. Or perhaps I won’t; perhaps it will remain a quest, and a ‘becoming’.

The quantity of information I’ve collected on peacock could be a book in itself, so in this general section on peacock I detail that which has most influenced my creative work.

My peacock research was initially worldwide, but it soon shifted to India. I’ve researched the peacock in the visual and performing arts, as well as in stories and common beliefs. I’ve collected much of the following information in the field, in India.22 There I’ve been as interested in what people believe about the peacock as in biological or other facts. A variety of beliefs are useful both as sources for my screenplay and as insights into my subconscious - and mysterious - relationship to the peacock.

My interest in the peacock also extends to certain European and Persian associations, for instance the Greek story of Juno's peacock, in whose tail feathers she placed the

22 What follows in this chapter is largely from my field research in India, and is noted when from published sources. - 29 - eyes of Argus in order for the bird to be all-seeing, and the peacock angel of the Yezidis, mentioned previously. The peacock was used as the symbol of the Resurrection in early Christian iconography. It’s probably because of the multitude of eyes in its tail feathers that the peacock was accepted as the symbol of wisdom. It has often been confused with the fabled phoenix the due its general appearance.23

Peacocks have been held sacred in India since ancient times, and their meat is taboo for Hindus. They figure prominently in Indian legends, mythology, religion, folklore, dance, visual arts and Ayurvedic medicine. In 1963 the peacock was declared India’s national bird.

As far back as the Upanishads the peacock is linked to the Gods. Rudra is described as the Creator of the World “the God of might and wrath, the neck and throat blue, peacock’s feather as a crest.”24 In the epic Ramayana, Indra, the god of thunder, rain and war, becomes a peacock in order to escape the demon Ravana. The peacock is the vahana (vehicle) of Murugan25, Lord Shiva's son, as well as of Lord Rama, one of the avatars of Vishnu, and sometimes of Saraswati26, the goddess of learning. Lord Krishna, another avatar of Vishnu, is represented wearing a peacock plume on his head. In paintings with Radha, Krishna’s beloved, peacocks are nearly always featured dancing close-by.

The peacock has been associated with human bliss and happiness as well as with grief and sorrow. It is said to have acted as a messenger of love, and also kept company with the lover and the beloved.27 It’s not just with Radha that the peacock is the symbol of the lover. A guide at Jodhpur Fort told me “lonely ladies admiring the clouds and lightning bolts are love-sick heroines, remembering their absent lovers.” I gathered he meant this in terms of representations of “lonely ladies” in paintings in

23 Hall, M. P. The Secret Teaching of All Ages, 1988, p. LXXXIX. 24 Sri Aurobindo, The Upanishads, 1981, p. 395. In Sri Aurobindo’s commentary on the Nirarudra Upanishad he states that the deep azure blue of Rudra’s neck and throat denotes bhakti (devotion) (ibid, p. 395). This azure blue is also one of the colours of the peacock. 25 Murugan, as he is mainly known in the south, is also known by numerous other names, including Karttikeya (particularly in northern India), Subrahmanya and Skanda. The name used depends on the context and the location. The peacock called Paravani is his vehicle. 26 Saraswati is at other times represented with the swan as her vehicle. 27 A.K. Mukherjee, Peacock: Our National Bird, 1979, p.26. - 30 - the collections there from Bundi, Mewar and Marwar. But he was extremely fervent about it. In these paintings of women alone there is nearly always at least one peacock not far from their side (fig. 6).

From Indian mythic traditions, the peacock is a symbol of transformation, wisdom, immortality and pride. Amongst these the qualities of transformation and wisdom have been of most interest to me in writing Peacock Angel.

Alchemists referred to the peacock as the ultimate symbol of transformation, as its colours appeared after the four stages of nigredo, albido, rubedo and citrono if the process was coming to a successful conclusion. They called this stage of full colour the cauda pavonis, the peacock’s tail.28

Transformation is also implied by the peacocks’ renewal of its tail feathers each year, usually a couple of months after the summer.29 They drop up to 300 feathers over a period of about three weeks. The tail feathers grow back over the following months.

Perhaps because of this association with transformation, the peacock’s tail feathers are used as ‘morchals’ (small brooms made with peacock feathers). These are often used in temples by Brahman priests for the ritual cleaning of statues of gods. They are also used by some gurus for shaktipat30 initiation due to the commonly held belief that peacock feathers act as an excellent conductor for the transmission of cosmic energy vibrations, which aid in healing and also 'wake' people up. During my research I’ve been told about many gurus or spiritual teachers, including Muktananda31, who have used peacock feathers in this way.

28 R.A. Johnson, R.A. Owning Your Own Shadow: Understanding the Dark Side of the Psyche, 1991 pp. 117-8. See also F. Birren, The Symbolism of Colour, 1988, p.68. 29 Texts I’ve consulted say the tail feathers drop after the monsoon. This appears to be true in Northern India, with its July/August monsoon. But Tamil Nadu has its main monsoon in October/November and yet peacocks I’ve seen there have dropped their feathers by mid October. So from my observation it seems more accurate to say that they drop their tail feathers following the summer. 30 Shaktipat is a Sanskrit work that refers to the act of a spiritual teacher conferring a form of spiritual ‘power' or awakening on a disciple/student. 31 Muktananda (1908-1982) was the founder of Siddha Yoga, based on Kashmir Shaivism. It is interesting to note that the walls of Muktananda’s samadhi (tomb) were covered in actual peacock feathers. - 31 - According to Indra Kumar Sharma, a biologist in Jodhpur, peacock feathers are considered to have supernatural power, which is why they are used to ward off evil spirits and worship gods. The modern European superstition that it’s bad luck to keep peacock feathers indoors has no resonance in India. It’s more likely a reaction against pagan and early Christian beliefs, including goddess worship, which produced this European superstition.

You also see peacock feathers used traditionally as decorative fans, to fan saints and royalty. I’ve seen this in paintings throughout India, and in numerous films of both Indian and Western origin, including Kundun (1997, Dir: Martin Scorcese, USA).

The Indian peacock is also known as Sitapanga, meaning that which has white outer corners of the eyes, signifying purity of mind and soul. The Burmese peacock doesn't have this eye decoration.32

Indian saints and gurus have referred to peacocks in their spiritual discourses. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Sri Aurobindo referred to the peacock as the symbol of spiritual victory.33 In interpreting a devotee’s vision the Mother once said,34 “the victory of spiritual forces (Peacock) leads to total transformation.” 35 A woman I met in Auroville, who went to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram school as a child in the 1950’s, told me that as a schoolchild she remembers being told that if you put a peacock feather in your notebook you would gain knowledge and enlightenment.

The animal represented with Amitabha, the Red Buddha, is the peacock, supposedly due to its powers of transformation. It is said that the peacock gained its place by Amitabha’s side because of its ability to transform poison into beauty36, paralleling

32 Mukherjee, p. 6. 33 Sri Aurobindo, Letters on Yoga, 1972, p. 980. Sri Aurobindo wrote also of Kartikeya as the leader of the Divine forces, with his mount, the peacock, as the bird of Victory (ibid, p 393). 34 The Mother was the spiritual partner of Sri Aurobindo. 35 Roshan & Apurva (comp. et ed.), Visions of Champaklal, 1990, p.179. 36 Not only the poison of the snake, as commonly known, but also a Tibetan myth that the peacock ingests poisonous plants and transmutes them into the beauty of its iridescent feathers (Sopa, p11). - 32 - the transforming power of Amitabha’s love and compassion.37 In some Buddhist texts the peacock is compared to the Bodhisattva38, probably because it is said that the Bodhisattva took the form of a Golden Peacock in one of his former births.39 And I’ve been told that peacocks are used like watchdogs at some Greek Monasteries.

An American man I met on one of my research trips told me that Osho, the late guru, loved peacocks and used to talk about them a lot in his discourses. He said that in Osho’s commune40 in Pune they were seen to target certain people. For instance, they might peck a particular person each time they saw him or her and then be very friendly with another. In other words, he said, peacocks within Osho’s commune took on the job of giving people what they needed for their spiritual transformation. I once asked him if many people there believed this. “Absolutely”, he replied.

Another myth about peacocks, elevating them beyond the laws of common life forms, is that they reproduce without intercourse. Many Indians still believe that the dance of the peacock puts the peahen on heat, and then the nectar that the peacock puts in the peahen’s mouth after dancing fertilises her eggs. This is of course not true. Peacocks mate via intercourse, but it’s rare to see it, as they do it in shrubs and other areas under cover. And the peacock's dance doesn’t put the females on heat - peacocks dance all year round and the peahens are on heat for a short time only. According to biologists there's no real relationship between the dance and reproduction. Also, the dance doesn’t only happen to warn of the monsoon, as some fables relate.41 We are simply more likely to see it when there are dark clouds because peacocks don't usually dance in bright sunlight; they mostly seek out the shade.

There is a belief that the flesh of the peacock will not putrefy, even when kept for a substantial time. It’s said that the peacock became the emblem of immortality, and

37 Vessantara, Meeting the Buddhas: A Guide to Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and Tantric Deities, 1993, p. 97. Amitabha’s emblem is the lotus, for openness. His name means infinite light. 38 Sopa, G.L., Peacock in the poison grove: two Buddhist texts on training the mind, 2001, p.viii, p.11. 39 Nair, P.T., Peacock: The National Bird of India. Calcutta: Firma K.L.M. Private Ltd., 1977, p 262. 40 This centre is known as the Osho Commune International. 41 For instance the fable of “The Peacock and the Cloud”, which I retell in my script Peacock Angel. A version of this story was recounted to me orally. - 33 - the symbol of the soul, due to this particular belief, “because the spiritual nature of man - like the flesh of this bird - is incorruptible”.42 On top of this, Indians in general believe that peacocks don’t die, perhaps because it’s apparently rare to see a peacock carcass, just as it’s rare to see them mating.

Peacocks were also venerated because they destroyed snakes, as snakes were traditionally regarded as messengers from the underworld, along with being dangerous to humans when venomous. Peacocks and snakes are often represented together in Indian paintings, frequently with the peacock holding a snake in its mouth.

Peacocks are immune to both poison and snake venom. They are said to be able to swallow whole snakes without coming to harm. In the royal courts peacocks were used to test food, and if they “screeched” it was assumed the food contained poison.

In terms of pride, the common story in India is that the peacock, head high, is proud of its beauty, but the moment it sees its ugly feet it starts weeping.

Many Indian dances are based on stories involving the habits of peacocks. The classical dances include mudras and other abstract movements. The folk dances tend to be more literal and use costumes of peacock feathers and colours. In addition, peacock feathers are used in the costumes of a wide variety of tribal and folk dances not directly related to peacock stories, again because the feathers were believed to ward off evil.

The first chore of the day for women, and some men, in villages all over India is to feed birds, in particular peacocks. They spread seed out for them, on rooftops and in courtyards. Peacocks particularly like sorghum, a large grain, and corn. I’ve been in village houses where peacocks land on the flat rooftops for their feed, and others where they walk casually into the house itself. In Osian, in Rajasthan, I came across a stationmaster who fed the local peacocks daily by hand. They crossed the railway tracks from the desert scrub nearby. But they are very wary of strangers, and in all the

42 Hall, 1988, p. LXXXIX. - 34 - above instances the peacocks refused food from me, even when I stayed for many days. The stationmaster said it was because they could see, or sense, that I was not from there. My attempts to dress in the way of the locals and thus blend in didn’t fool them.43

It’s these types of local habits, observed during periods of field research, which have been particularly useful in providing details for the Peacock Angel screenplay. And characters like the peacock goddess, an invention on my part, must surely come from the distillation of this research.

43 Now that I live in Auroville, the local peacocks that wander around near my house are not shy of me, but they still keep some distance. - 35 - Chapter 3

- 36 - Chapter 3 Synchronicity, pilgrimage, and the heart

Something opens our wings. Something makes boredom and hurt disappear. Someone fills the cup in front of us. We taste only sacredness.44

In Chapter 1 I described how the peacock has seemingly insinuated itself into my life. This created a drive to research peacock as a symbol generally, and as represented in visual and performing arts, and led to my exploration of India, and simultaneously to the inspiration for the fiction film.

But why the peacock, when I had no previous interest in the bird whatsoever, or its symbolic meanings? This leads me to ask why we choose a certain subject as an artist. And do we choose it, or are we led to it? Is it somehow predestined?

And then, in some cases, once we choose a subject it seems that mysterious forces come into play to keep it alive and developing. Over the years I’ve felt this with certain projects, but especially with this one. I’ve certainly heard it reported as a phenomenon by others, in particular artists, psychologists and scientists.45 Some of this presents as opportunities that arise, aiding the continuing development of the project. Other times it manifests as what might be called synchronicity, or lucky coincidences. One might also include concepts such as ‘grace’ or divine intervention to explain some of these incidences. A term often used by artists when absorbed in their creative process is happy accident. i. Synchronicity Considering the meaning I’ve derived from my connection with the peacock, I feel it’s necessary to consider the concept of synchronicity.

44 Moyne, J. & Barks, C. (translations), 1986. Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi, p. 56. 45 Einstein, Wim Wenders and Naomi Wolf, to name a few. - 37 - Jung, who first coined the word, published his first major paper on it in German in 1952. He explained synchronicity as “an acausal connecting principle”46, i.e. a pattern of connection that is not explained by causality, that manifests itself through meaningful coincidences. His elaboration of the principle, or phenomenon, is bound up with depth psychology concepts of individuation and the workings of the collective unconscious. Within the Western culture of scientific materialism they are particularly troubling phenomena, as there are no rational explanations for these situations in which a person has a thought, dream or inner psychological state that coincides with an event.47

Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidences were not merely due to chance, but instead reflected the creation of an event or circumstance by the coinciding or alignment of universal forces with the life experiences of an individual.48 He stressed that for it to be a case of synchronicity the event must be meaningful to the individual. He also clarified that not all coincidences are meaningful.49

The process of becoming intuitively aware and acting in harmony with these forces is what Jung labelled ‘individuation.’50 Jung argued that an individuated person would actually shape events around them through the interaction of their consciousness with the collective unconscious.51

According to these definitions many of the experiences I’ve had connected to the peacock are examples of synchronicity. For instance, the peacock walking onto the road just as I drove over the crest of a hill, causing me to stop my car, or the presence of peacock motifs on furnishings in Paris shops catching my attention just when I was about to forfeit my trip to India, or the foot of the statue puncturing the top of my

46 C. G. Jung, ‘Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle’, in Jung/Pauli The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche, 1955. 47 J. S. Bolen, 1982. The Tao of Psychology: Synchronicity and the Self, p. 6. 48 Jung, ‘Synchronicity’, 1955, pp. 102-7. 49 Jung, ‘Synchronicity’, 1955, pp. 141-3 50 Jung, “On Psychic Energy”, Collected Works, vol. 8, 1978. 51 Jung defined the collective unconscious as akin to instincts. - 38 - head when I was wondering about my future direction, and so on.

The writings around synchronicity post-Jung are extensive, particularly in the fields of psychology and quantum physics. Since Jung first published his paper about it in 1952, many have grappled with what they see as Jung’s inadequate description of just what is and what’s not synchronicity. And since the theory of synchronicity cannot be tested according to Western classical scientific method, it’s widely regarded within mainstream science as pseudo-scientific, or an example of magical thinking.

That it cannot be tested, or reproduced, by classical scientific method has not stopped many scientists from supporting it, especially those working in the area of quantum physics. It is more the scientists than the psychologists that have brought some respectability to the concept in the West, in particular the scientists who have subsequently developed knowledge of psychology.52

But within mainstream science it has not been considered a serious area for research, despite the fact that it points to such a strong universal law of the connectedness of all things: the inner life to outer life, the law of oneness, etc. Within Eastern thought, this theory is unquestioned as a universal law, as found for instance in the Tao and Vedanta. It is a mainstream Western position that continues to support duality as opposed to oneness. As Von Franz elaborates,

In his paper on synchronicity Jung stresses the point that since the physical and psychic realms coincide within the synchronistic event, there must be somewhere or somehow a unitarian reality – one reality of the physical and psychic realms to which he gave the Latin expression unis mundi, the one world, a concept which already existed in the minds of some mediaeval philosophers. This world, Jung says, we cannot visualize, and it completely transcends our conscious grasp. We can only conclude, or assume, that there is somewhere such a reality, a psycho-physical reality we could call it, which sporadically manifests in the synchronistic event.53

52 For example, Victor Mansfield, David F. Peat, Fritjof Capra, Niels Bohr, David Bohm, Werner Heisenberg. 53 Von Franz, M., 1980. On Divination and Synchronicity, p.98. - 39 - In the East similar concepts have been accepted since recorded time. So when I’ve told parts of my experience in researching peacock to Indian scholars they have simply nodded in understanding – they don’t have my Western indoctrination fighting against it in their minds. The Eastern mind tends to accept that some things cannot be understood by the mind. The Western mind is indoctrinated to understand how and why, and more insistently, how to control it or make it work in its favour.

My fascination is at the level of the interconnectedness of all things - the structuring principles of the psyche and the structuring principles of the outer world – putting into question our Western assumption of duality. To truly accept synchronicity one must surely accept the law of oneness, or the interconnectedness of all things.

Through synchronicity the Western mind may come to know what the Tao is. As a concept, synchronicity bridges East and West, philosophy and psychology, right brain and left. Synchronicity is the Tao of psychology, relating the individual to the totality.54

Victor Mansfield, a professor of physics and astronomy, but who is also published widely in interdisciplinary fields between science, philosophy and psychology, links synchronicity with soul-making in action.55 As he says, rather than shying away from them as phenomena which raise too many problems for the scientific community, synchronistic events deserve reverence.56 He encourages us to revise our beliefs about the world and ourselves in order to appreciate the meaningful world-view implied by synchronicity. He says, “if we have the inner eyes to see, the self is providing us with both the necessary experience and meaning required for our transformation, our individuation.”57

The peacock is a symbol of transformation; synchronicity may lead to our transformation. It seems that existence is knocking loudly at my door with this project. That the project goes beyond itself as a product, and has had a profound

54 Bolen, 1982. The Tao of Psychology, p. 7. 55 Mansfield, V., 1995. Synchronicity, Science and Soul-Making, p.6, p.199. 56 Mansfield, p.3. 57 Mansfield, p.199. - 40 - effect on my personal life and journey, I hopefully made clear in Chapter 1. And so in the end, for me as an artist and in my life, what’s most important about the synchronistic experience is not so much defining or proving why it’s happening as where it is leading and the journey itself. ii. Pilgrimage Where the synchronicity with the peacock has led me, as I hope I made clear in Chapter 1, is on a pilgrimage that introduced India to me in a very particular, rich, and focussed way. I didn’t plan these initial trips as pilgrimages, but rather as research trips, yet with hindsight they played out more as pilgrimages than research trips – more to do with the heart than the head, more mythos than logos. The bonus that has come from doing my peacock research in this way is that I now feel a deep heart connection to India and its traditions. This surely goes with the territory, as there is a long tradition of pilgrimage in India. Major pilgrimage sites criss-cross the nation, and smaller shrines are found every few kilometres. Pilgrimage is supposed to be undertaken with an attitude of devotion, and for Hindus and Buddhists with the intention of gaining liberation. From my experience it even seems that the pilgrimage itself creates synchronicity, and ‘grace’. It seemed, especially on initial trips, that the act of focussing internally on ‘peacock’ drew in external manifestations and uncanny coincidences.

I have chosen to label this my peacock pilgrimage, as it seems to have so much in common with historical ideas of pilgrimage.58 In India pilgrimage has a solid tradition dating back to the beginning of recorded history. In the West the tradition was arguably strongest in the 13th century. This was the time of writing and telling of epics having to do with the quest for the Holy Grail, and the quest for a new and higher vision of humanity, though in the case of the Crusades it was of course also the time of invasion, murder, theft and persecution in the name of Christianity. It was

58 The popular usage of the term pilgrimage is as trips to sites of veneration, with the purpose of asking there for aid, or for fulfilling some religious or spiritual obligation. What I call my peacock pilgrimage has been a research journey led more by the heart than the head. See etymology of ‘pilgrimage’ - e.g. Middle English, pilgrime, Old French, pelegrin, derived from Latin peregrinum, supposed origin, per and ager–with idea of wandering over a distance. [http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12085a.html (accessed 24.11.07)] - 41 - also the time of Rumi, and in general a golden era of the Sufis.59 It conjures up ideas and histories to do with the search for the Beloved and concepts of following “a path with heart”. Various religious and spiritual traditions use this term, in particular Buddhism and Sufism.60 And most mystical branches of the world’s religions describe something similar.

This idea of moving inwards to the heart is echoed in Joseph Campbell’s conclusion:

The whole idea of pilgrimage is translating into a literal, physical act the pilgrimage of moving into the centre of your own heart. It’s good to make a pilgrimage if, while doing so, you meditate on what you are doing and know that it’s into your inward life that you are moving.61

I’m not sure that I was aware at the time that it was into my inward life that I was moving, but I have noticed, looking back, that my research, or pilgrimage, in India led me more and more into spiritual areas as it progressed.

Movement is the essence of pilgrimage. It is the single most significant condition for a ritual to be identified as pilgrimage (yatra). Movement separates pilgrims from home; carries them through unfamiliar and often difficult landscapes, across physical and metaphysical thresholds into liminal space; engages them in circumambulation (pradakshina) around a sacred centre; and, then, returns them to the ordinary world often as changed individuals.62

Many anthropologists who write about pilgrimage, as above, make reference to the liminal as “the space between” in which pilgrimage takes place. In his book The Anthropology of Performance, Victor Turner comments on the term liminality, which he defines as “...a betwixt-and-between condition, a space between two positions or

59 Houston, J., 1987, The Search for the Beloved: Journeys in Sacred Psychology, p.200. 60 The term has probably been given greatest currency in recent decades through the writing of Jack Kornfield, American Buddhist. 61 Campbell, J. 1990, Transformations of Myth Through Time, p.98. 62 D.P. Dubey, 2002. ‘Cultural Significance of Pilgrimage Process in India’. Keynote address, NCSAS Workshop, Melbourne University, 4-6th July. - 42 - spaces--eras, phases of life, conditions of existence, and so on.”63 Implicit in any definition of liminality is that it is a transitional phase. I am drawn to what I understand of this concept, as it seems to be the place I’ve been in so often in India, and also the place that my character in Peacock Angel occupies.

Major transformations occur at liminal places, at least partly because liminality, being so unstable, can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Turner coined the word liminoid to refer to experiences similar to liminal ones, but without the implied transformation taking place. The liminal is part of society, an aspect of social or religious ritual, while the liminoid is a break from society, part of play.64 In this way entertainment, for instance film viewing, would be viewed as liminoid. But within the stories told in films the liminal is often there – rites of passage and the like. iii. The land where the heart is king This journey I have made has parallels with many other foreigners’ experiences that went before me, many of whom have written of how touched they were by India, and how it changed them – some of the more famous names include Octovia Paz, Joseph Campbell, George Bataille, Catherine Clément65, to name a few.

Of course others hold conflicting points of view about India, focussing on the social problems. They would target me as a romantic in my approach, and no doubt also an orientalist, projecting exotic ideas onto India while being removed from its reality. But India holds many realities. I’ve met people who only report a view of an India full of cheats trying to rip them off and who think I’m naïve with my view. But my

63 V. Turner, 1987. The Anthropology of Performance, p. 101. The term liminal was first used by anthropologists to describe the second of the three phases in a rite of passage, the three being: separation, transition, and incorporation. During transition or “limen” (meaning “threshold” in Latin), the ritual subjects pass through a period and area of ambiguity, a sort of social limbo, unlike the profane and relatively stable states on either side. 64 V.Turner, 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: the Human Seriousness of Play, pp. 38-41. 65 E.g. Clément’s Syncope, Campbell’s Baksheesh and Brahmin, Paz’s In Light of India. Also Huyler’s Meeting God: Elements of Hindu Devotion. Arthur Clarke says, “India is not a country, it is a universe.” [Introduction by Arthur C. Clarke in the book, A Frog in My Soup, by Miller Harry (Delhi: Penguin Original, 1997]. Octavio Paz describes India as an “unusual museum”, a living one in which “modernity coexists with the archaic that has survived a millennia.” [Octavio Paz, In Light of India. London and New York: Harcourt Brace, 1997), p. 75.] - 43 - experience has been different – not to say that I haven’t been cheated, but I don’t identify that as particular to India. I seem to belong to that group whose overall experience of India is positive, soul enriching, and perhaps soul-making, as described above.

The many realities of India are surely why India holds such a strong attraction, especially for many Westerners. Hinduism posits that union with God is possible – perhaps this is why India feels different, because, unlike the dominant beliefs of the West, it promotes non-separation from God. Representations of people’s infinitely varied types of worship confront you everywhere in India, in a way that touches a chord rather than tries to force any alliance. The forms are so varied that there is something for everyone. Much of this presents as aspects of Hinduism, but there are also many other tribal, folk and other religious traditions existing side by side, usually with no conflict. Hinduism is a dominant influence on belief systems in India. It is more a philosophy than a religion, and as such there is traditionally no proselytising. At the base of Hinduism is the idea that all is one; God is within everything; there is no separate God. This belief seems to have had an influence on the forms in which other religions present themselves there. India is also acknowledged as the home of the major world religions. This has left its mark. India remains full of infinite colour, customs, festivals and rituals. This is not to dismiss the history that also includes Partition and countless other massacres in the name of separate religions, but they are relatively few considering the nature of the apparent melting pot of India. The recent appearance of Hindu fundamentalists, who want to change India from a declared secular state to a Hindu state, is also an exception. For the main part India remains a democratic inclusive society.

This project has forced me to examine more closely than ever my own Western indoctrination, and to compare it with many opposing beliefs originating in Eastern worldviews, e.g. dualism vs. oneness; one life vs. reincarnation; profane vs. divine or sacred. In the end what has resonated most for me is the idea of the land of the heart, and of the sacred.

- 44 - One recent Australian fiction writer, Gregory David Roberts, sums it up well for me through the voices of his characters:

The simple and astonishing truth about India and Indian people is that when you go there, and deal with them, your heart always guides you more wisely than your head. There’s nowhere else in the world where that’s quite so true.66

This is not England, or New Zealand, or Australia... This is India, man. This is India. This is the land of the heart. This is where the heart is king, man. …That’s how we keep this crazy place together – with the heart. Two hundred … languages, and a billion people. India is the heart. It’s the heart that keeps us together.67

66 Roberts, G. D., 2002, Shantaram, p. 35. 67 Roberts, G. D., 2002, Shantaram, p. 455. See also p.85, p.459. - 45 - Chapter 4

- 46 - Chapter 4.1 Background to the field

Peacock Angel belongs to the field of world cinema feature films, and more specifically to the following categories:

i. Feature films made in India, or at least partly in India, by Westerners, with Westerners in major roles. ii. Feature films made in India by Indians, which include Westerners in major roles.68 iii. Magic realist feature films. iv. Feature films that include themes of the sacred or Divine.

Peacock Angel could also belong to a group of films made with the symbolic underpinning of the peacock. To my knowledge no such group exists. There is one film, Tabutta Rovasata (Somersault in a Coffin) (1996, Dir: Dervis Zaim, Turkey), which is the story of a car thief who steals a peacock from a castle believing it’s a symbol of prosperity and protection from evil. In this film the peacock is only a minor character.

Peacock Angel could also be classified as a film about an Australian girl who, like so many young Australians, seeks outside of Australia for meaning, but then its field would be very limited. And this ‘searcher’ theme fits well into the category of fiction films set in India, created by Westerners, because in so many cases India is a location sought by foreigners searching for meaning that they are not finding in the West.

There is of course a vast field in literature of most of the above, and literature that has directly influenced cinema, including screenplays adapted from books, but I must restrict myself to the actual field of cinema here.

68 Peacock Angel doesn’t belong to this group, but it’s useful for comparison. There’s also the category of feature films of Indian stories set in India and made by NRIs (non resident Indians) as international co-productions. Best known of these are Deepa Mehta’s films which include Water, Earth, Fire, and Mira Nair’s films, including Monsoon Wedding, Kama Sutra, Salaam Bombay. Mira Nair is currently slated to direct Shantaram, which includes Western characters, including its main character. An additional category comprises feature films made by NRIs, set in the West but with Indian cultural themes, e.g. Bend it like Beckham. - 47 - i. Films made in India, or at least partly in India, by Westerners There are many subgroups to this category. While within this larger group there are films that depict India in a negative light, films that caricature Indians, etc. I will not discuss any of them here.

The category that Peacock Angel fits into includes films drawing on Indian myths or stories; films depicting India in a positive light; and films made by filmmakers who have been deeply affected by their contact with India.69 What distinguishes this category is that they were all made to appeal to Western audiences, or within India at best to an elite ‘art-house’ audience. The vast majority of the Indian population, apart from in cities such as Kolkata that have a tradition of film societies, has to date shown little or no interest in Western films.70

Titles that bear some similarities to Peacock Angel, and which also convey a love of India, include Nocturne Indien (1989, Dir: Alain Corneau, France), Heat and Dust (1983, Dir: James Ivory, UK), The River (1953, Dir: Jean Renoir, France) and period films like Gandhi (1982, Dir: Richard Attenborough, UK/India), Passage to India (1984, Dir: David Lean, USA). Heat and Dust deals directly with Western women’s fascination with India during two different eras – that of a woman in the 1980’s and her grandmother two generations earlier.

69 There’s a tradition of India as inspiration for filmmakers prior to me. Many have come to seek in India what the West has lost. For instance, in a documentary produced by the BBC about Jean Renoir (1995, Dir: David Thompson, UK), Adrienne Corri, who acted in The River, said that Renoir’s spirits revived in making the film in India, after being previously very unhappy with his Hollywood experience. Making The River was a spiritual adventure for Renoir. And re Louis Malle: “after his death, when I was going over his letters, as a part of remembering him, I realized something that I had not grasped before: how India had changed Malle. …Here was a first-hand experience of how one non-Indian filmmaker, a very creative and sensitive one, perceived India—and why.” (http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/mulay/mulaytext.html; accessed 2.4.06) 70 It would be naïve to think that any of the Western films mentioned in this section would appeal to mainstream Indian audiences, as they don’t contain enough melodrama or action. I’ll never forget seeing the third in the Lord of the Rings series in a Pondicherry cinema. Whenever there were dialogue or quiet scenes the audience booed. They only stayed silent during the action scenes. - 48 - A film like The Mahabharata (1989, Dir: Peter Brooks, France), set in an imaginary India, also fits this group, in that it’s a re-telling of an ancient Indian story, but interpreted by a Western director, and so with a distinctly Western feel. Also, like the above examples, this film is pitched to a Western audience and market.

Many of the above films are set within the time of the British Raj (i.e. colonial India). Peacock Angel, by contrast, is not set at a particularly politically significant time in Indian history. It is set in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, before the advent of satellite television and mobile phones.71

Beyond this, what is common to Peacock Angel and many other films of this type is that the India they present holds unique magical or sacred qualities. Sometimes this magic is portrayed on-screen within an otherwise realist genre, for instance A Little Princess (1995, USA, Dir: Alfonso Cuaró).72 This is where I hope Peacock Angel fits – conveying something of the magic of India, in addition to showing some of its grit and grime, and the endless contradictions that exist there. When a film tips totally to the magic side it would be more likely labelled fantasy than magic realism, e.g. The Jungle Book (1994, Dir: Stephan Sommers, USA).73

If the magic is represented on-screen, it tends to demand a magic realist approach, such as in Peacock Angel, and also in children’s fantasies like A Little Princess (1995, USA, Dir: Alfonso Cuaró).

Since beginning this research I have been looking for authors who have examined the ways in which India has been represented by Western filmmakers. There is an almost total gap in this field. Till now the only source I’ve found is the research of Vijaya

71 Peacock Angel is set in this period as I don’t want mobile phones, Internet cafes and other technologies that date easily in the film. On the other hand I don’t want an imposed “period” feel. I will be selecting a setting in India that is more of a backwater, and not part of the fast- paced and ever changing urban centres. In terms of fashion, Indian traditional clothing – saris, salwar kameez, lungis, dhotis, etc, - haven’t changed. And Deva, when in western clothes, will be in timeless tight t-shirts and jeans. 72 I devote more space in Chapter 4.2 to a short case study of this film. 73 There are also two earlier versions of The Jungle Book – Walt Disney’s animated version (1967), and Zoltan Korda’s 1942 version. - 49 - Mulay74, who at the time of writing is still completing a book entitled How the West Views Us.75 Within it she will examine her topic across the history of cinema. In a journal article she describes the scope of her research and what brought her to it.76 And she sums up the trends she has observed:

In terms of film history, visions of India have undergone many changes: from a mystic and exotic land, to imperial imaging, a land of contradictions, a spiritual land, an imaginary homeland of non-Indians of Indian origin, and also as a part of a global humanity.77

But what persists in Western cinema is this image of a ‘wonderland’ India – of course not in all films, but in some. Vijaya Mulay looks further back into history:

In medieval Europe and in travellers’ accounts, folk tales, stories, and literature, India was portrayed as a land of fabulous wealth where magic and charms worked and wishes were fulfilled. It was represented as a paradise of sensual pleasures even as its mystics and philosophers were considered wise and spiritual. With the passage of centuries, though the gorgeous mental Technicolor of such exotic portrayals has faded, the vestiges of this golden myth have persisted. One sees them in films made as late as in the forties, fifties and even the nineties. In the French film Les Enfants du Paradis78 by Marcel Carne (1945) and the Polish film

74 I organised a meeting with Vijaya Mulay at IFFI (the International Film Festival of India) in late 2004. At that time she spoke to me of the changes in approach and of themes that she could identify over the past century of cinema in the way foreigners imaged India. She also spoke of the positive ways in which India affected filmmakers like Louis Malle and Renoir, and the effects on their work after they made films in India. Unfortunately I’m only able to draw upon an Internet article at this stage, as her research is not yet published. (Despite some email correspondence between us, she is unable to release any of the research before publishing). 75 This was the title Vijaya gave me. But checking on-line, the publication is promised for July 2008 with the title From Rajahs and Yogis to Gandhi and Beyond: India in International Cinema (publisher: Seagull Books). 76 She pursued this research after noting an almost complete gap in this field. 77 V. Mulay, ‘Pather Panchali’, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, vol. 45, Fall 2002. [found on: http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc45.2002/mulay/mulaytext.html; accessed 2.4.06] 78 In Carne’s film, the heroine, played by Arletty, drapes a stole over her shoulder like a sari and tells her beau, played by Jean Baptiste, that they should pretend that they were in India. - 50 - The Night Train79 by Jerzy Kawalerowich (1956), characters express either a longing to be in India or to convey India’s wisdom.80

The tendency to represent India in this way continues into this century. The most recent example of this is The Darjeeling Limited (2007, Dir: Wes Craven, USA), which uses the aspect of the beauty and mystery of India as a backdrop to its Western family drama. Like Peacock Angel it also works with the theme of estranged family members. In this case, three semi-estranged brothers travel across India in search of their mother, collecting rare objects and experiences along the way, in a high-toned tourist adventure. If it is anything like the book on which it is based, the upcoming production of Shantaram will also portray a love of India.81 As quoted at the end of Chapter 3, Shantaram posits India as the “land where the heart is King”.

I imagine this trend will continue for as long as India retains its special character, enfolding its visitors, or some of them, in a sort of charm. This longing for India, once touched by her, has been expressed by foreign philosophers and writers for eons,82 and has so far not been arrested by ongoing modernisation. India has certainly affected me in this way, and thus also my writing of Peacock Angel. Despite the multitude of often contradictory experiences I’ve had there over the years, I still feel most compelled to represent something of the unique and sacred aspects of India that have so touched me. ii. Films made in India by Indians, but including Western characters Peacock Angel could end up belonging in this group if an Indian director directs the script. This is not my intention, as I have written it as a writer/director, but even so it is worth mentioning this category for comparison.

79 In the Polish film, the hero who is travelling in a carriage with only two berths that he had reserved for himself has to surrender one berth to accommodate a woman passenger, as the train was crowded. She is ill at ease with him. So he tells her the story of the wise Brahmin who travelled with a crab as a companion. 80 Vijaya Mulay, ibid. 81 After many years of development, Shantaram is now slated to go into production at the end of 2008 with Mira Nair as director. (Source: various websites) Also in development is The Aquarian Gospel, a Hollywood film following the supposed trail of Jesus in India from the time after his resurrection up until his death. 82 As mentioned in Chapter 3, by Octavia Paz, Joseph Campbell, Catherine Clément, George Bataille, etc, but also by characters in multitudes of fictional works. - 51 - What becomes obvious if you watch a number of ‘masala’83, Bollywood style, films is that Western characters tend to be caricatured as one dimensionally evil and exploitative, even in a film hit like Lagaan (2001, Dir: Ashutosh Gowarikar, India).

On the other hand, in films considered art-house84, and which tend to be chosen for screenings at International Film Festivals, like the films of Satyjit Ray, the Western characters are portrayed with more or less equal depth to the Indian characters, e.g. Shatranj Ke Khilari (The Chess Players) (1977, Dir: Satyjit Ray, India).

Of course this is not a phenomenon unique to Indian cinema; rather it is mirrored in Hollywood style films set in India, as mentioned above, in which the Indian characters are represented thinly as bumbling and overly passive, e.g. City of Joy, (1992, Dir: Rolland Joffe, USA), and others which caricature India and Indians in various ways and use exotic locations simply as backdrops to their adventure or other genre, e.g. the James Bond film Octapussy (1983, Dir: John Glen, UK). So, once again, there is more likely to be depth of character, even in the representation of the ‘other’, in Western art-house85 cinema than in popular commercial cinema. iii. Magic realism The way in which I use the term magic realism86 in cinema is to describe a mixture of the realistic and the fantastic, both in terms of content and technique. It implies a

83 Masala simply connotes mixture. Masala films are those including song & dance routines, and are invariably melodramatic. There is quite a strict formula to how and when the songs are placed within the film. Their duration is, traditionally, at least 3 hours long. I’ve been told that it must be at least this long for mainstream audiences to feel they’re getting their money’s worth. 84 Indian film critics have tended to use terms like ‘parallel cinema’ (or less often, ‘art cinema’ or ‘new wave cinema’) to describe a cinema known for serious content (usually critiquing the social-political climate of the times), realism and naturalism. ‘Crossover cinema’ is a newer term, to describe films that can be distributed successfully in the world market. Most recently the term ‘multiplex cinema’ has also come into use to describe films, often of the ‘crossover cinema’ type, which can be depended on to fill small cinemas in India, as opposed to the traditional single auditorium for blockbuster ‘masala’ films. 85 ‘Art-house’ is a term that has tended to be used as a description for serious, non- commercial, independently made films aimed at a niche audience rather than a mainstream one. Since they have small budgets, they only need to appeal to a niche audience to become commercially viable. 86 The term itself has become the subject of much debate, especially within post-colonial studies, as the ‘fantastic’ it describes is often euro-centric, i.e. what to Western eyes is seen as - 52 - presence of the mystical, or folklorish, or supernatural. In this context it could also be described as low fantasy, in which the fantastic breaks into the real world, as opposed to high fantasy, in which a totally alternative world has been imagined, e.g. The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003, Dir: Peter Jackson, NZ).

In cinema history it finds its origins in the works of the cinema pioneer George Méliès, who came to cinema from the circus world, and was more interested in using the film medium to reshape time and space and portray wonder and magic than to simply record or represent the real. Even Méliès includes visual references to magical India in one of his early short films, The Brahmin and the Butterfly (1901, France).

Within this group Peacock Angel fits more specifically into magic realism of the type that gives space to magic and enchantment in life, than into that employed in sci-fi or horror, or other fantasy genres.

Titles within this subgroup that bear some similarities to Peacock Angel include: Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s films, in particular Charachar (The Shelter of the Wings) (1993, India) and Uttara (The Wrestlers) (2000, India); Orlando (1992, Dir: Sally Potter, UK/Russia/France/Italy/Netherlands); The Mirror (1975, Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky, Russia), and to a lesser extent many other Tarkovsky films; Orphee (1950, Dir: Jean Cocteau, France) and La Belle et La Bete (1945, Dir: Jean Cocteau, France); and Amelie (2001, Dir: Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France).

Some of these films deal with themes of God, enlightenment, etc, but not all. Amelie, Orphee, La Belle et La Bete are all French films that give space to magic and enchantment in life, not in a sci-fi genre (Star Wars, etc), but in a way much closer to fables of simple life. I find films of this type are rarely from Anglo-Saxon cultures.87

‘magic’ in a foreign culture is often to native eyes considered ‘real’. But to enter into this topic would be too lengthy. 87 Science fiction and children’s films are the main cinematic genre within which Anglo- Saxons seem to feel free to play with magic. There’s a dearth of examples of films from USA/Britain/Australia, apart from children’s films and sci-fi, which work with magic realism – or enchantment - in daily life.

- 53 - iv. Films which include themes of the sacred or Divine Within this group Peacock Angel fits more specifically into the category of those films that aim to uplift, inspire, touch the heart, transform, provide fresh insights. Films in this category that bear some resemblance to Peacock Angel include: Samsara (2001, Nalin Pan, Italy/France/India/Germany), The Mahabharata (1989, Dir: Peter Brooks, France), and Kundun (1997, Dir: Martin Scorcese, USA).

A film in this category which Peacock Angel resembles less, but with which it attempts to share an overall mood or tone, is Spring summer autumn winter… and spring (2004, Dir: Kim Ki-Duk, Korea), with its clearly Buddhist subject. In this film, and in certain other Asian films, it seems that the assumption is made that ‘oneness’, or the interconnectedness of all things, is the common ground upon which style and subject matter are formed. This is doubtless because they come from cultures in which oneness is a common belief. In my experience this foundation makes for a soul-enriching viewing experience. I would like Peacock Angel to convey a similar quality during its closing act and resolution.

- 54 - Chapter 4.2 Short Case study

There are a couple of children’s films that have strong threads in common with Peacock Angel.

A Little Princess (1995, USA, Dir: Alfonso Cuaró) is set in WWI. The protagonist is a privileged young girl, Sarah, who grew up in India. Her mother is dead. WWII starts and her beloved father sends her away to boarding school in New York City, while he goes off to war.

By day the conditions at the school are often cruel, but at night Sarah tells exotic stories of India to the other girls. Her self-confident manner stirs up trouble with the austere headmistress, especially as she insists, “every girl is a princess”. When her father is reported dead she is left destitute, and put to work as one of the girl servants in the school to pay off her debts. All ends up happily, however, when her father ends up in the home of an Indian man across the way, with amnesia resulting from a bomb blast.88 In the end she and her father return, together with the other rescued sweeper girl, to India and ‘paradise’.

The Secret Garden (1993, Dir: Agnieszka Holland, USA/UK) is again about a young, privileged British girl born and reared in India, but in this case she loses both her parents in an earthquake. She is sent to England to live at her uncle's castle. As her uncle avoids home due to his own tragedy, she finds herself left to her own devices and discovers a secret garden, which turns out to be the way to her uncle’s heart.

Both of the above are classic childhood fantasies that also appeal to adults, and both are tear-jerkers. Unlike Peacock Angel, both of these are set in the time of the British Raj.

88 I had not yet seen A Little Princess when I wrote the amnesia aspect of the father character in Peacock Angel, so I was surprised to see it there. - 55 - These films have much in common with Peacock Angel. Both feature young girls who grow up in India and then are sent to the West. In both, experiencing childhood in India, especially in that epoch, has given these children a special sense of magic that’s then found lacking and/or repressed in the children they meet in the West, in this case Britain. Their young female protagonists easily touch the hearts of the children they meet.

What interests me especially about A Little Princess is that, in addition to the above, it deals with many other similar themes and aspects to Peacock Angel. And despite being made relatively recently it shows almost exclusively mythological aspects of India, despite being made in an era when there was already a critique about orientalising or exoticising the East. But I feel it is able to get away with this - to an extent - by setting its story in 1914.

A Little Princess also fits into the genre of magic realism, as although it brings magic into its representation of India, the New York it represents is grim realism.

One of its strongest messages, also common to Peacock Angel, and to many other films made in India by Westerners, is delivered near the beginning. As they are about to leave India, her father, looking out on the landscape from Sarah’s bedroom, says, “I shall miss it here; India’s the only place on earth that stirs the imagination”.89

It has numerous other similarities: the young girl protagonist gets reunited with her father, and in both at the time of reunion the father has amnesia; there is an Indian man who plays an important part in bringing the father and daughter back together; there’s something free and unconventional about the young girl that both irritates the power authority in the school but also gives her the self confidence to survive; it’s the myths she tells about magical India that attract friends and which also restore her faith. She is an independent thinker, not a follower, and this, along with her vibrant imagination, gives her the character to survive hardship when it comes. Even when

89 This is, again, one of those sentiments that appear not just in films but also in many types of writing, across the ages, relating to India. - 56 - reduced to being a servant she still has her stories and kindness to share. And at the end she returns to India, although unlike Peacock Angel she returns as a child.

A Little Princess is clearly a children’s film, and pitched so, being very simple in its plot and characterisation. The India it portrays is a purely paradisiacal one. It deliberately depicts an image of magical, mythical, romantic India at the time of the British Raj. The caption on the opening scene tells us we’re in Simla, 1914. Sarah, dressed in Western style, and her young Indian friend, dressed in Indian clothes with his red turban and dhoti and bare chest, sit, wet, on the top of an enormous stone Buddha rising like a fallen ruin out of the centre of the lake. There’s a small elephant bathing in the lake; a peacock enters in and out of one of the shots; and a woman in sari sits at the edge of the lake – presumably the mother of the young boy, Maya. Sarah is animatedly recounting part of the story of the Ramayana at the point where Rama leaves Sita in a circle of protection while he goes off.

There follows a succession of shots of Sarah and the young boy running through jungle-like settings, playing. We then move through a series of landscape transitions showing the beauty of India to arrive in Sarah’s exotic bedroom looking out onto a Rajasthan-style desert in the distance.

For the rest, we don’t see much of India. Most of the remaining screen time of the film is set in and around the New York boarding school, except when Sarah is recounting stories to the other girls. Then the fantasy world of the Ramayana is intercut with Sarah’s boarding school bedroom.90 And also when Sarah has become a servant and is fantasising with Bekky about escaping the school, the lake location from the opening sequence is repeated. Sarah has earlier been shocked by the way Bekky is treated as a black servant girl. It seems she was never exposed to racism or ill treatment of servants in India.91

90 Her father’s wealth is such that she has a large bedroom to herself, rather than sharing with any of the other girls. 91 We never see the way her household in India was run, but as it was visually palatial there must have been servants. - 57 - We see only three Indian characters in the film, the young boy child described above, his mother Maya, and later an Indian man. The two adult Indian characters are both portrayed as extremely wise, unlike most of the adult Westerners. In the first scene Maya92 tells Sarah “all women are princesses, it’s our right”! When Sarah later repeats this to her father he replies that Maya is a very wise woman. The second adult Indian, a man dressed in silk kurta93 and turban, is seen first on the same boat as Sarah and her father on the way to the USA with his pet monkey. This dignified Indian is next seen living opposite Sarah’s school with a rich, elderly NY invalid. It’s not clear whether he’s his helper or guru, he’s certainly not dressed, or treated, as a servant.

The scenes that for me set the film in the magic realist genre, and which again have something in common with Peacock Angel, appear in relation to this Indian man. In several of the scenes it’s subtly implied that he has special, magical powers. One snowy morning Sarah’s attic doors fly open, and when she gets up to look, there he is greeting the day, arms in the air, facing towards her. Then a connection is implied between him and the appearance in Sarah’s attic room of food and exotic Indian furnishings – this on the day when she and Bekky were to be punished by being deprived of food all day. The two girls lift their orange juice in a toast just before we cut to the Indian man handing a glass of orange juice to Sarah’s injured father, his bandaged face and amnesia concealing his identity. And then as Sarah is being dragged away by police, unrecognised by her father, the Indian man comes to her father’s side and visibly concentrates energy towards him94, with the result that he regains his memory suddenly, in time to race out and rescue Sarah.

While India is portrayed as flawlessly positive and supportive – a magical ally, and beyond grit and grime - in contrast the Western world is portrayed with greater dimension – full of both evil and kind people and situations. It’s first the Western war, WWI, that causes such a disturbance in Sarah’s life. It puts her in boarding school while her father goes off to fight, and then leaves her as a penniless orphan

92 Maya means illusion in Sanskrit. 93 A long loose collarless shirt worn by men in many regions of India. 94 At this moment the soundtrack bursts out an Om-like bass drone, with glass tinkle sounds mixed in with it. Those glass tinkle sounds are a sound motif often used in films to connote magic spells being performed. - 58 - when the British government seizes all her father’s assets after her father is presumed dead. Sarah’s only allies in the grit and grime of NYC and its miseries are the poor themselves – first Becky, and then the poor in the markets.

And last but not least in A Little Princess, there is the odd, fleeting, portrayal of peacocks – wandering through the first scenes in India, in bunches of peacock feathers amongst the Indian furnishings of her room at the school, and in the Ramayana sequences.

- 59 - Chapter 5

- 60 - Chapter 5 The Script

How does a project mature? It is obviously a most mysterious, imperceptible process. It carries on independently of ourselves, in the subconscious, crystallizing on the walls of the soul.95

This project marks a transition for me from documentary and short films to feature films.

Up until this project entered my life, I didn’t seriously consider feature filmmaking as an area for me, especially not using traditional three-act structures. I considered it an area too commercially driven in terms of both financing and shooting. And so, I felt, also lacking heart. Although over the years I have worked on several feature films as a crew member, for my own work I remained committed to the forms of documentary and short films.

But from the beginning of work on Peacock Angel I felt it needed to be feature length, and at least partly fiction. For a while I worked with the idea of a docudrama form and wrote a long treatment that mimicked my own peacock pilgrimage. It was about a woman who travels through India collecting peacock stories, and who in the end becomes the storyteller herself, a sort of Pied Piper character. Within this I wrote a number of key dramatic scenes to be shot in drama form. I realised that for the documentary elements this approach would rely to a large degree on an attitude of guiding events in India. But my experience from my research trips was that whenever I tried to steer events in India it never worked there. So in the end this storyline and approach felt both overly contrived and unrealistic to achieve.

As a result, I embarked on writing the screenplay for a purely fictional feature film. i Additional training My early training was in all aspects of film and video production, and I had always written my earlier scripts for short films and treatments for documentaries. But to aid

95 A. Tarkovsky, Time within Time, 2004, p. 103. - 61 - my transition to this longer drama format I completed a course on feature film writing, “Focus on Scriptwriting,” in 2003. This gave me additional tools to approach and structure a long drama.

Although I’d worked in crew roles on feature films in Australia, I felt I also needed some experience in how to make a feature film in India. To this end I was lucky enough to secure a Directing Fellowship through the AFC (Australian Film Commission) to assist Buddhadeb Dasgupta in India on the production of his film Kaalpurush (end 2004/early 2005).

The way this opportunity came about also seems part of the magic of the Peacock Pecking I described in Chapter 1. I met Buddhadeb at the 2003 Sydney Film Festival. He was there with Mondo Meyer Upakhyan (The Tale of a Naughty Girl) (2002, India), his 12th feature film, and something he said to the audience in his Q & A session struck a chord. I felt I had to meet him, and so I approached him outside the cinema after the mob surrounding him had dispersed. I told him briefly of my connection to India and the Peacock. I’d overheard him already politely declining all sorts of invitations, so was quite surprised when he agreed to a meeting the next day. During that discussion he asked to see some of my films, which I arranged, and he liked them very much. He then invited me to assist him on one of his films, both in order to watch him at work and meet the people he worked with. As I wanted to produce Peacock Angel on location in India I felt this would be a wonderful opportunity, especially as the one film I’d seen of his appealed to the filmmaker in me so much.

Apart from giving me an inside view on Buddhadeb’s approach, working on Kaalpurush satisfied my perceived need to work with an Indian crew, in India; to reassure myself it would be possible for me to make a feature film in India, despite my cultural and social differences. Most of the experience was inspiring and positive.

During this trip I also attended the 2004 IFFI (International Film Festival of India), and watched the entire program of Indian Panorama in the fiction section, and much of the non-fiction section. Cramming in 9 days worth of viewing improved my

- 62 - knowledge about current Indian cinema, and inspired me to search out old classics in both the ‘independent’ and Bollywood (masala) traditions. Although I’m not trying to write a film for an Indian audience, it’s still useful to see how Indian filmmakers work with their material. ii. The process I concur with Tarkovsky, above,96 that the maturing of a project is a mysterious process. And in the case of Peacock Angel it seems to be very much led by the subconscious. I reiterate that at its beginning I heard myself say that my next film would be about a woman who wants to become peacock, but the statement bypassed my mind and simply came out of my mouth. Once I started researching the peacock and making my pilgrimages to India it became clear that things worked best when I wasn’t trying to consciously control them.

But of course the execution of the project is another thing. I find it flows well when the unconscious provokes conscious intentions, and in the process of following through with consciously driven actions the unconscious starts mulching away anew. But at times the conscious drive to progress and produce can squash the more subtle, and fragile, movements of the unconscious. They work on a different time scale and require a different attitude – ‘doing’ versus ‘being’ and all those types of well-worn arguments.

This has been a delicate balance with Peacock Angel. In writing the screenplay itself I’ve tried to carry over the attitude of immersion that I’ve experienced during research trips in India. And whenever I reflect on my experience of the peacock pecking, as described in Chapter 1, it brings me also to a state of wonder. As mentioned in Chapter 3, Victor Mansfield links synchronicity with soul making. Popular authors like Thomas Moore would say that all work with soul is process – alchemy, pilgrimage, adventure – in which we can’t expect instant success or any kind of finality.97

96 See quote at the beginning of this chapter. 97 T. Moore, Care of the Soul, 1992, p. 259. - 63 - iii. Approach Let the Lover be crazy, disgraceful, absentminded somebody sober will take care of events going badly let the Lover be.98 and In your light I learn how to love. In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest, where no one sees you,

But sometimes I do, and that sight becomes this art.99

To me these Rumi verses imply immersing myself in the project and not being concerned with material outcomes; of approaching as the Lover, leading with the heart. This is the spirit in which I have tried to approach Peacock Angel, not in a literal way but in essence. Definitely this attitude, of approaching as the Lover, has worked well on my research trips, or pilgrimages, in India, especially the earlier ones. But back home in Sydney I’ve often found it a challenge to make the transition from enriching research and pilgrimage in India to writing the screenplay.

Looking back at my history in filmmaking I recognise that I have often taken circuitous routes in developing projects, and often also in their realisation. Of course, it’s different if I’m employed on someone else’s project and brief – then I simply fulfil the brief. This seems fairly common to artists, in contrast to the approach of, say, most journalists or scientists. I can see that working on my independent films like Damming and None of the Above, my stylistic approach was the opposite of journalistic. It was poetic, rather than prosaic. But the initial research was still relatively ‘ordered’. However, for Peacock Angel my research has been much more rhizomatic or meandering than on any previous project.

The relationship of my research to the final script has planted the seeds for the key motifs, and also given me the details for locations and physical aspects of the scenes,

98 J. Moyne & C. Barks (translations), Unseen Rain: Quatrains of Rumi, 1986, p. 7 99 C. Barks with J. Moyne (translations), The Essential Rumi, 1995, p.122 - 64 - plus insight into local customs, in order to write those scenes representing Durga Puja, village and urban life, and so on.

But while the bulk of my research finds no place in the fiction of Peacock Angel, and has nothing literally to do with the script, it has had a lot to do with developing the place I’m coming from for creating the project as a whole. In the end this project is much more than the script; it’s been a large part of my life for many years now. So when I hear that Sri Aurobindo saw the peacock as “victory of the divine” I feel that there’s still a journey ahead, with a strong force on my side if I can just tune in to it.

My background experiences of synchronicity in India have also led me to include a number of synchronistic moments in the screenplay. For instance, the peacock feather that Deva finds on the ground next to her in the park, just at the moment when she’s deciding whether to return to India. iv. The Divine Indians are on the whole much more likely to accept the possibilities of miracles and synchronicity than the average Australian. As discussed in Chapter 3, there is a tradition of Westerners being drawn to India to experience the sacred. That sense of ‘something missing’ which so many Westerners express finds relief in India. Perhaps it’s because of the rituals and other signs of devotion occurring in what seems like every nook and cranny there. Perhaps there’s simply more sacred energy contained in the environment there.100 As Dr Dubey states, “in fact, some earthly places reveal the Divine more readily than others.”101 Whatever the explanation, getting in touch with one’s own divinity simply seems easier within the Indian context and it’s often suggested that is why so many of the enduring world religions originated there.

100 It was suggested to me by a journalist in Auroville, who’d heard it elsewhere, that there are layers around the earth containing different energies, and that in India the ‘sacred’ layer is closer to the earth level than anywhere else in the world. 101 D.P. Dubey, ‘Cultural Significance of Pilgrimage Process in India’. Keynote address, NCSAS Workshop, Melbourne University, 4-6th July 2002, p. 6. See also pages 6-7 regarding sacred place and power of place. As he says there, “sacred place is never chosen by man, it is merely discovered by him.” - 65 - My central character grows up taking this for granted. For her it is the peacock that connects her to her divinity within, and in India she has the freedom to attach her experience of the divine to whatever has meaning for her. It is only when she is cut astray in Australia that she feels disconnected and separate. In Australia those with ‘other’ beliefs are likely to be teased and excluded. The overriding culture, especially in the teenage years, is sport and consumerism, with not much room for divinity, beauty and Truth. Compared to India, urban Australia is a spiritual wasteland. In order to survive as a teenager there Deva shuts down her connection to India and her spirituality. She changes her name back to Eva, her birth name, taking the “d”, the divinity, out of her life. v. Key motifs The peacock, and to a lesser degree the sacred tree, are the key motifs. Other motifs are fire, water, hair, falling, the scream (of peacock and women) and the visual element of the study of hands absorbed in processes like flower threading, kolam making and hair combing.

In most cases the motifs I chose came instinctively at first, but then when I researched them I found material that reinforced what I had written on other, often deeper, levels. For instance, the story that Deva creates with her father, in the scrapbook, features golden peacock feathers, but I only later found the reference to the Bodhisattva as golden peacock, mentioned in Chapter 2.

The central motif of the peacock lore and ritual, and Deva’s peacock angel game, allow the film to open out into the areas of magic-realism that I feel so well fits this story, apart from appealing to me as a filmmaker.

I have already devoted a lot of space to the peacock. Much of what I’ve covered in the early chapters finds meaning in the story, however subtle. I draw on my field research in numerous ways, including things like referencing the story of the Peacock and the Cloud as the story Jim told Deva as a child.

- 66 - The peacock goddess is, as far as I know, my invention. As mentioned in Chapter 2, as far back as the Upanishads references link the peacock to the Gods. For this reason I feel able to take the liberty to create a peacock goddess in the screenplay. There is also a tradition in India of creating new gods when a perceived need arises.102

Characters like the peacock goddess, apart from coming from the distillation of my peacock research, must also be unconsciously influenced by other ancient and universal beliefs. The bird is generally seen as a symbol of the soul, and messenger of tree spirits and nature gods.103 The “woman who wanted to become peacock” morphed, in one of its aspects, into the nocturnal peacock angel as my imagination had its way. The peacock is not a nocturnal bird, but in my script the peacock angel is. In his chapter on the bird as symbol for the soul, Hall writes,

Nocturnal birds were appropriate symbols of both sorcery and the secret divine sciences: sorcery because black magic cannot function in the light of truth (day) and is powerful only when surrounded by ignorance (night); and the divine sciences because those possessing the arcana are able to see through the darkness of ignorance and materiality.104

I feel that the way in which I represent the peacock angel has clear allegiance to the former, the divine forces, and not much in common with the latter.

The peacock angel lives in the sacred banyan tree. In India trees were the original ‘temples’, before temples were built. These were often banyans, which hold major religious significance. In Peacock Angel I use the banyan tree in this way as the site for Deva’s dance to the peacock angel, and for pujas to the ghosts who haunt her. But it is also the place from which Alice, Deva’s sister, falls to her death. Here it seems

102 A recent example is that of the broom god. Briefly, in Delhi some years ago, there was a community in which the local sweepers were treated very badly. In order to give them some status a Delhi-based social group, who publish Manushi, invented the “broom god”. They created a puja to which the press was invited, at which they introduced the broom god into the pantheon of gods being worshipped at that site. The result was as they hoped. The local sweepers were no longer persecuted, and left to do their work with respect. When I heard this story, in a much longer form, I felt inspired, but also sure that my invention of peacock goddess would not offend the average Hindu. 103 M. P. Hall, 1988, The Secret Teaching of All Ages, p.LXXXIX. 104 M. P. Hall, 1988, The Secret Teaching of All Ages, p.LXXXIX. - 67 - again I’ve tapped into a universal meaning which adds another dimension to the tree, that of the Cosmic Tree, or Tree of Life, which connects not only to the celestial world through its branches, but also descends into the abyss via its roots.105

Water has been a constant motif in my films, and is usually said to represent the unconscious. Here the still pond of water is the place of Alice’s death, and this image haunts Deva. Fire is used in Indian rituals for purification, especially for performing pujas. It carries the associations also of heat and passion. Deva has a nervous tick of fiddling with her own hair, which later finds parallel in Alice’s lock of hair. There is also the affectionate action of combing Deva’s hair, giving opportunity for sequences of hands and hair, moments of intimacy and bonding, with Jim, Jasmin, and Saroja.

The study of Indian hands in the process of flower threading has been a form of contemplation for me. I had already focussed on the hand of my mother peeling an orange in At Sea to convey something of the pain of losing a child. Watching the hands of Indians threading flowers has a dreamlike quality, and conveys something of beauty and timelessness. This aspect of Indian daily life, along with the tradition of drawing kolams on the front doorstep to welcome in the new day, as the character Jasmin does in Scene 66, are both practices that remain commonplace in India. Sequences like this are key to creating the poetic feel that I aim for in Peacock Angel. vi. Themes and story Looking back, I’ve noticed a pattern in my independent film and video work since I first started making experimental films in the mid 1980’s, and that is that they all seemed to be working with taboo issues – on one hand the themes of death, loss and grieving, which Western culture does not deal with well, and on the other hand themes of sexual taboos, for which there is often judgment, embarrassment and misunderstanding.

Peacock Angel also deals with death, loss and grieving – the loss of Deva’s paradisiacal childhood, of her sister and mother through death, and of her innocence. But it also aspires to be a story of love conquering all.

105 R. Cook, 1988, The Tree of Life: Image for the Cosmos, pp. 8-9. - 68 - In addition, transformation is a key theme to Peacock Angel. In fact most films are about transformation at some level, and thus the much-used term ‘character arc’ for the journey a character takes from beginning to end, transforming in some way. But in the case of Peacock Angel my aim is for the connection to peacock as a symbol of transformation to add a potent quality to this.

I set the film at two crossover periods of Deva’s life, adolescence and womanhood – the coming of age times that Westerners, especially men, shy away from. They are also, in some ways, taboo. By contrast, in India when a young girl reaches puberty and has her first menstruation there is over a week of ritual – of the girl being bathed and rubbed with oil, adorned with flowers, bought saris, and being the centre of other celebratory rituals. In the West, things tend to be left hidden around these rites of passage. This period is a liminal space, a space ‘in between’, a transition between one state and another (as I referred to in Chapter 3). Deva is not only in this transitional space; she’s also a character who lives between two cultures, not Indian and not really Australian. After casting herself off alone in Australia, like an orphan, her decision to work in a fantasy house is a reflection of her need to create alternative identities for herself. Once back in the heart of India she is able to construct her identity and find her roots again within herself. Feeling loved, and connecting with love, is vital for this.

The subject matter also includes representations of India and spirituality, and presents a picture of a lack of heart in the West, amongst other things. It is a magic-realist interweave of exotic location, at least to a Western audience, and fluid psychological space alongside an ongoing ‘everyday normality’.

In Peacock Angel there’s the absent mother (or absent for Deva), in the sense that her mother has died. Her stepmother is clearly not present for her, and obsessively attached to her own daughter, Alice. As the child of a first marriage, with a new mother, the bond she developed with her father in their storytelling space gave a lot of fuel to her peacock obsession, especially for its magic. The peacock transmits magical energy.

- 69 - Conclusion

- 70 - Conclusion

Only beauty can save the world Dostoyevsky

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. Art is the transforming experience. Joseph Campbell

Films can take us on rapturous and transcendent journeys, for instance into ritual that, in general, our daily life no longer holds. Within the realm of fiction, particularly in the genre of magic realism, rather than realism and naturalism, the scope is enormous. Through visual elements and evocative soundtracks, they can conjure qualities of the timeless and sacred that reside between the material and spiritual worlds. That is my aim with Peacock Angel. By using simple cinematic devices, for instance highlighting the beauty of their iridescent colours in movement, symbols like the peacock can easily link us with feelings of transcendence. In addition, sequences that focus in a poetic way on the rhythms of simple elements of day to day life, for instance the elegance of threading flowers and drawing kolams, and interactions between women in rituals of bathing, hair washing and combing, give space in a film for the use of slow-motion and close-ups in order to create the sort of pacing that puts us even further in touch with a sense of delight. A focus on beauty will be the basis of the visual style of Peacock Angel, along with a soundtrack designed to touch the soul, drawing the audience more and more into feelings of the sacred in everyday things as the film progresses.

I perceive one of the greatest needs we have in the West is for re-enchantment in our lives and the way we view reality. This is something I have personally got from my multi-layered engagement with India. So although I could be criticised for portraying an overly positive view of India, I do not think this view is false. I choose to focus on what India has to offer rather than what it’s missing – the distinctive energy of an ancient culture, a diversity of ways and customs, and a welcoming. Also the way that in India, even in the thick of a big Indian city, but particularly in smaller towns and villages, little things occur that light up your day.

- 71 - Peacock Angel could have been set in a time period in which I could also have made some strong social or political comments, for instance the time of Partition or during a time of natural disaster, but I’ve grown weary of this device. The majority of films I refer to in Chapter 4, those films made by Westerners in India, have used either WWI and the British Raj, or Partition, or some other time of natural or human disaster. This has then become another clichéd way of Westerners representing India. With Peacock Angel I want to comment on some of the quieter aspects of daily life in India, rather than on the high drama at times created by some of its social and political structures.

As I’ve described, there have been many synchronistic aspects to the journey my peacock research has taken me on. It has seemingly directed me and not vice versa. I feel that this is often how the creative process works, but I have never before experienced it as remarkably as with this project.

The peacock symbolises transformation. On another note of synchronicity, shortly after moving to Auroville in the south of India, my family was offered a house-sit for a year in a community called Transformation, which we took up in December 2007. As I write this, one of the handful of peacocks that frequent our garden is doing its dance – a beautiful sight that continues to fill me with wonder and joy. It’s remarkable to me that, at least for the time being, I’ve ended up living in a place where peacocks daily walk across our terrace and peck at our flowers.

I often wonder if this project entered my life to initiate my pilgrimages in India, and now my life there; whether it’s a case of art leading life. At other times I become obsessed with the synchronicity I’ve experienced, and why this ‘thing’ picked me to peck. But no matter how much the form of the project shifts and changes, its core for me remains the symbol of the peacock in relationship to the heart of India, and to a Path with Heart.

As a writer/director, my aim is to realise the Peacock Angel screenplay as a film. The screenplay is a big step towards that. In the screenplay I’m not specific about the region in which Peacock Angel is set. This is because during my research trips I have

- 72 - identified three possible villages106, each one in a different state of India – West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Rajasthan. When I determine which region is most practical for the film shoot I will then include additional local flavour into the village scenes, and translate the dialogue that is currently noted as ‘in local dialect’.

Peacock Angel is written as a low-to-medium budget film107 for the European art- house market. After consulting with two separate producers, one in West Bengal and one in Tamil Nadu, I believe I could make it in India for less than a million Australian dollars, which is a relatively low budget.

Apart from in cities like Kolkata, with its traditionally film-savvy population, the vast majority of the Indian population has to date shown little or no interest in Western films. Exceptions to this have been up till recently only some blockbuster films, like Lord of the Rings and films relying heavily on action sequences. Part of the success of securing funding to make Peacock Angel could be aided by changes already occurring in the rapidly expanding economy of India. The boom in multiplex cinemas in India is being driven by the growth of increasingly sophisticated and prosperous audiences.108 On a practical level, this should give producers more confidence to invest in films like Peacock Angel if they think they could, at the very least, find a niche audience109 in India as well as in the West. Confidence in this trend has been most recently shown by UniFrance, who in January 2008 are releasing a group of

106 The name I use for the village in Peacock Angel, Tirumali, is in fact an imaginary name – one which might fit anywhere in India. 107 I have deliberately written Peacock Angel to be low budget – down to the point that even the scenes that might read as including a special effect can still be realised with in-camera techniques. As a writer/director I don’t see any point in writing scenes that I won’t be able to realise. Thus my absolute need to have done field research in India in order to write the screenplay – including searches for locations, possible collaborators, etc. 108 Before it was difficult for independent films to get a release in India, because they needed to be able to attract large enough audiences to fill the large cinema auditoriums traditionally filled by blockbusters. Films by Indian directors that depart from the traditional ‘masala’ formula are now finding success in multiplexes in small to medium sized auditoriums, along with some Western films, particularly those of a more commercial nature. However if this trend continues it’s very likely that audiences will finally also welcome Western art-house films, just as over the past two decades art-house films have become more and more mainstream to Western audiences. 109 It doesn’t matter that this trend is unlikely to ever touch that market of lesser-educated Indians who are only looking for escapism and who expect intense melodrama in their films. A niche audience of less than 0.1% in India, with its huge population, could still translate to close to a million people. - 73 - French films across Indian multiplex cinemas, in response to the success of their recent test screenings.110

In addition, with the growth of ‘video on demand’, that makes cinema from anywhere in the world available via the Internet for streaming directly onto home cinema units, the market for art-house films will almost certainly increase substantially.

Peacock Angel aims to be a richly visual piece, drawing on a mix of the mythic and the real, in combination with innovative film techniques. Till now I have worked on this project alone. The next step for Peacock Angel is to find funding for a script editor, and ideally also for a producer, to carry the script forward to its next stage, ready to attract production funding.

In the further development of Peacock Angel, my commitment continues to be in films that uplift, inspire, touch the heart, and transform. Films which encourage you to ‘follow your bliss’ and which provide fresh insights. Films which manifest beauty, and which look for the soul and the deeper essence of things. The peacock woman in me keeps my drive alive for realising this project in all these ways, and more.

110 Deccan Chronicle, 25 January 2008, Chennai, p.10. UniFrance is an organisation committed to promoting French cinema across the world. - 74 - - 75 - Appendix 1

SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY

Only those titles mentioned in this exegesis are listed here, in chronological order.

My One Legged Dream Lover (1999) Role: Co-Producer/Director, 2nd camera Format: Digital Betacam, 52mins Financed by: SBS/Film Finance Corporation Documentary Accord Distributed by: Jennifer Cornish Media

Synopsis: Through the eyes of Kath Duncan, a one-armed, one-legged media star, we take a fascinating, sometimes painful and often humorous, look at the world of amputees and their “devotees”, those with a fetish for “stumps”.

Selected theatrical screenings – 1999-2002: International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, Sydney International Film Festival, San Francisco International FF, Berlin Int. FF, Festival L’Estrange (France), Bombay Documentary Festival, and numerous national & international conferences for people with disabilities. Broadcast screenings: SBS-TV, Women’s TV Network (Canada), Estonian TV

Awards: Silver Wolf for Best Documentary, Runner-up, IDFA (International Documentary Festival, Amsterdam) (1999) Dendy Award for Best Documentary, Runner-up, Sydney, (1999)

At Sea (1997) Role: Producer/Director/Writer/co-Camera/co-Editor/Sound recordist Format: 35mm, DolbySR, 10mins Financed by: Australian Film Commission (AFC) Distributed by: AFI

Synopsis: A baby boy dies and is buried at sea. Many years later his mother still grieves for him, painfully and bitterly. “At Sea” is a cinematic and poetic reflection on loss.

Selected theatrical screenings – 1997-2002: Sydney, Melbourne, London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Brisbane, Auckland, Wellington, Vancouver, Cork & Rotterdam International Film Festivals, Tampere International Short Film Festival (Finland), Bilbao Int. Documentary & Short FF (Spain), St. Kilda Int. Short Film Festival, Berlin Kinemathek, Vancouver FF (+ repeat screening in 2001 showcase of their favourite films from past 25 yrs), Women’s Film Festival in Seoul, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music – Aus. Film Retrospective) (+ many other smaller festivals). It toured Australia as part of the Travelling Film Festival (a division of the Sydney Film Festival) and with the National Women On Women Festival. - 76 - At Sea continues to be used as a teaching tool in Film Theory, Film Production, and Oral History courses throughout Australia. Broadcast screenings: SBS, ABC, Channel 4 (UK)

Awards: Grand Prix, City of Melbourne Award for Best Short Film – Melbourne International Film Festival (1997), Outstanding Australian Short Film promoting Human Values, MIFF (1997), AFI Award, Best Sound in a Non-Feature Film, Australian Film Institute (1997), Best Short Film, Women on Women (1997)

None of the Above (1993) Role: Director/Writer/Sound Design/Sound Editor/Mixer Format: 35mm Dolby 13mins Financed by: AFTRS Distributed by: AFTRS, AFI (Australasia) & Jane Balfour Films Ltd (International).

Synopsis: Is it a hard-nosed investigation of the world of bondage and discipline? A light-hearted musical tribute to dominance and submission? A dark journey through the steamy underbelly of adult perversion? Or is it… None of the Above?

Selected theatrical screenings – 1994-2001: Sydney International FF, Clermont Ferrand Short FF (France), Immaginaria (Bologna, Italy), Out on Screen (Vancouver, Canada), Frameline International FF (San Francisco), New Festival (New York), Fantasporto (Oporto, Portugal), Women on Women (Sydney) (+ many other smaller festivals). None of the Above toured during 1993-4 in a program of AFI short films, “Black Holes/Flaming Desires”, throughout Australia and New Zealand, and with the Travelling Film Festival.

Awards: Best Short, Queer Screen, Sydney (1994) Dolby Award for Audio Excellence, AFTRS, Sydney (1993)

Damming (1992) Role: Director/ Writer/Narrator/Sound Design Format: 35mm, Dolby, 13mins Financed by: AFTRS Distributed by: AFTRS & Jane Balfour Films Ltd (International).

Synopsis: The flooding of a valley resurrects memories of the drowning of a sister.

Broadcast screenings: SBS-TV Selected theatrical screenings – 1992-1994: Sydney, Chicago and Vancouver International FFs, St. Kilda FF, FIFREC Film Festival (Nimes, France), Film Festival of International Cinema Students (Tokyo) (+ many other smaller festivals)

- 77 - Damming toured throughout Australia with the Travelling Film Festival (1992-3) and Women on Women (1992), and nationally and internationally in the program of Experimenta #3 - Diversionary Tactics (1992-3)

Awards: Medaille de Nimes - Best Experimental Film, FIFREC, France (1993) Gold Plaque Experimental Film, Chicago International Film Festival, USA (1992) Sound Design Award, FFICS, Tokyo (1992) Kodak Award, St Kilda Film Festival, Australia (1992) Dolby Award for Audio Excellence, AFTRS, Australia (1992)

- 78 - Appendix 2

PEACOCK & INDIA ANECDOTES

Find below a selection of notes, all transcribed from my research diaries of 2003. This selection focusses on peacock anecdotes and ideas I had at the time for the script. Also included are some experiences I had in India that particularly struck me. I have adapted some of these for inclusion in the Peacock Angel screenplay.

Delhi I walked into what looked like a park, behind the Red Fort. Confronted with the procession of cremations at the ghat above the Yamuna River. So different to cremation in Australia.

An Indian man comes to talk to me. I tell him about death rituals in Australia - and how weird the process of funeral and cremation is there. So detached. But this is the opposite, watching the body, wrapped up in cotton, dipped in a pool of water (in front of where we're standing), then taken down to a platform built up with wood, placed on the top of the wood, and set alight. The family staying around the body as it goes up in flames, seeing the flames eventually drying out the shroud and licking/burning them away to reveal the body, the body drying up in the intense flames and burning back to the bones.... if the burning wood has been adequate, eventually burning the whole body back to its bones, the family and friends watching all the while... (? any proximity to a dead body requires a Hindu to bath as soon as possible to remove the pollution - do they bath in these ghats in Delhi? or go home and wash?)

Jaipur Remembered a friend told me about having tea with the prison superintendant of the main jail in Jaipur. There were peacocks roaming around freely. Gorgeous ones. He told her that they are reincarnated inmates - who couldn't leave! They fly in and out of the jail's courtyard to be fed in the morning and at dusk. I try to contact this man. But he’s been moved to a new posting.

Osian A young peacock, with no tail feathers yet, comes and sleeps on top of the Jain temple every night, from about 7pm till about 6:30am. It stays perched there on top of the highest dome. The head priest says this is a sign that the temple is good!

Later, the young nephew of the head priest is drawing a peacock in chalk/crushed rock on the concrete outside my room111. He's come to collect me. The head priest and his young nephew have taken me under their wing.

At the railway station the station master feeds peacocks out of his hands. He told me to come back at 1600 to see some of the regulars. He also suggests going to Marwalohawat, four stations from Osian, on the way to Jaiselmer. More peacocks there, but smaller sand dunes than Osian. Across the railway tracks are rolling sand dunes broken up with tree/scrub areas. I gather that's where the peacocks hang out.

111 These chalk drawings are called kolams in South India, mandana in Rajasthan, alpana in parts of north India. - 79 - Walking in Osian this morning - before I get to the railway station - that feeling of looking for the peacock - the elusiveness of it for me. Even now, in Rajasthan, that people tell me where I can find them, but then it's not there, but patience and I find it somewhere else. Often I hear its cry, and see traces of it, footprints, small feathers, but am not able to see it. It remains hidden from me. The may-ur cry tugging at me.

The railway station is covered in bougainvillea. I return this early morning. The "mor" (peacocks) are on the rooftop of the main building. Seed has been left up there to attract them. To attract them, the station-master does a low-throated "owr owr owr mor mor mor" They come to him and feed from his hand, but when I try to do it they run. He comments that they're scared of me. They're very intelligent. They know I'm different (!). My clothes are too bright. But, I say, Indian women's clothes are very bright - ah, they say, but then you must dress as an Indian woman, with veil, then they will not be scared of you... (Ishwar Prakash had said he would wear the local clothes if he was looking for local animals, so he could get close to them. If he was looking at deer, for example, he leave his jeep at the village entrance and then go on bullock carts. For the deer, a jeep = death (people shoot from them), but a bullock cart = friend (the Bishnois, who are very protective of animals). He would not do anything "new" so as not to scare the animals.

How many times here do I wish I was a man, or more easily disguisable. I need some new clothes that are neat and one colour. I like it best, recently, when I'm included in a group - e.g. the Jains yesterday - when I feel like I'm being treated as a person rather than a freak! (Perhaps Pia (now called Deva) can dress up at some stage to track peafowl - in turban and men's clothes, or women's clothes...)

The image as I close my eyes is of being in a tunnel of endless columns and archways - all Raj/peacock fan design inspired - the colours off-white - with all the other colours and designs I've seen, blending into each other (dreamlike scene - based on Ajmer room of columns - mix with the pov footage - travelling through the recesses of her mind)

The manager at the Durga temple, Vimal Sharma, told me that on his land, where he grows crops, he has seen peacocks do dance, with their huge fan-tail, and the peahen then sits & the peacock mounts it for intercourse - said he'd seen it. So far I've been told it's very rare to see a peacock mating - that's where all the myths around peacocks fertilising the female with their teardrops come from. I asked Ishwar Prakash if the peacocks dance is what puts the females on heat - no! The peacock dance all year round; females are on heat for a short time only. There's no real relationship between the dance and reproduction, we just see it when there's dark clouds because peacocks don't appear to dance in bright sunlight, they seek out the shade...

Back in Jodhpur, I head off with Govin (aged 12) to try and find some children's books with peacock stories. No success. Went to about 8 shops. Why is it so hard to find any peacock stories in print? I suggest we go on an adventure, somewhere nice and cool for the late afternoon, preferably with peacocks feeding. We arrange to take the tonga to Mandore Gardens, via Balsaman Lake. Yippee, someone to come with

- 80 - me who's young and sweet, but doesn't have any sexual expectations or resentments. When we first enter the gates there's a peacock in dance...

Jodhpur Fort - the first time I came here I remember asking at the ticket office if there were any references to peacocks in the collection - no, I was told. Then of course I went in and found peacock representations everywhere - on royal carriages, cradles, in miniature paintings, etc. A guide in the fort, seeing me admiring a painting of a woman and a peacock said "the peacock is the symbol of the lover. Lonely ladies admiring the clouds and lightning are love-sick heroines, remembering their absent lovers." (esp. in paintings from Bundi, Mewar, and Marwar)

In Rajasthani songs, the peacock call can be seen as an omen that the loved one is coming. It can be a symbol of husband, omen, messenger, sister. In many of the songs the singer calls on the peacock to make its call. Songs featuring the peacock are often sung by people when they are missing another member of the family. Unfortunately songs are losing their currency as customs are changing (hear recording of songs I made with Govin's mother)

Soundtrack motif: The erection and quivering of the train feathers produce a soft musical rattling sound "jham-jham", like the patter of rain on dry leaves.

Bhadaria Temple (pronounced Bhadria) First morning. Many peafowl, about 40 feeding down in a sandy valley near to where I am sleeping. Woke this morning at 4:30am to very loud Hindi music The peafowl are incredibly quiet here. There's a sick peacock in the room next to mine. They feed it grain and water. It apparently electrocuted itself - flew onto electricity wires and ...bzzt. I wonder if it happens often! It's injured its leg. After my wanders I sat with Babaji, and then went underground with my old shiva man to see the library - almost finished - just needs the books in it now - Babaji's vision of a library and college to study world religions.... Apparently Babaji spent 9 years underground - having one glass of milk or curd a day - nothing else...He did this 16 years ago - I'd like to talk to him, but he seems to speak no English - has a mobile phone sitting at his feet! his only clothes a draped bit of orange material... I wondered why Babaji chose this place to go underground, which when he first came had no buildings, just the small Durga temple. Babaji also knows Ayurevedic medicine.

Get villagers (adults & children, individually and in groups) to imitate peacock for me (Prakash's imitation was really good)

Sitting in my peacock palace room in my jutting out alcove. I call it that as it has fading murals on the wall with peacocks dancing, all in original vegetable dye, and peacock fan-shaped arches in all the many window and door frames. It’s very early. Small squirrels darting across the rooftops of the Jain temples. The sounds of washing out the houses and streets below, and of course Indian music in the distance mixed with children's squealing and a clamour of voices. 9:20am. Still in my room, in my alcove above the happenings of the laneway below. A head darts out, a woman's, from a window next door, then disappears. The wonder of these windows, the small ones. To see out of but not into. - 81 - I watch a boy come along the narrow pathway below my latticed window on his bicycle. There are two cows, one black, one grey, blocking the laneway. The boy starts making clicking noises as he approaches but the cows do not stir. He is getting off his bike. He pushes his front tyre against the back of the grey cow, making clicking noises as he pushes. No movement. He pushes again, no movement, and again. He then tries the same routine on the black cow. A couple of young children come towards him and climb up on a stone block to the side of the black cow and squeeze along the laneway wall. I think, surely he'll lift his bicycle and do the same. But no. He moves his bicycle behind him and puts it on its stand. Then goes to the grey cow and lifts its tail perpendicularly, forcing it to rise. He then goes back to his bicycle and walks it through. Why do I get so much joy watching these types of events, I wonder?

I'm stuck dwelling on the question of whether and when to give money to beggars. The Indians I've spoken to seem to view the decision to be a beggar a bit like a career choice. They can often make more money that way, from tourists. But I want to know their unwritten laws. I see Indians giving money to some beggars. What difference do they see that I don't?

What about the guy who I recorded playing the one stringed instrument, got his wife to sing. I gave him some money when I heard him playing as I was walking into the fort a couple of days ago, and have been chatting to he and his wife (with very grubby eyed baby hanging off her) when I see them in my comings and goings into the fort. Then they asked me to come and see where they live. I went yesterday. Pretty dismal. Don't know how they'd survive in the monsoon - guess they go somewhere else. In amongst and encampment, all with a bit of ground, no real shelter, a measly worn blanket or two, kids galore... no hope for their children, they say, 'cause they can't afford to send them to school - they're leading up to asking me for money. What should I do? I feel uncomfortable. I can't find a position - except an instinct that it's not as simple as giving them money... and I don't feel right about it somehow - but I feel mean and paternal at the same time - because through their eyes I have so much money and control... It’s a bit like where I get to when I start thinking about the place of women in Rajasthan - with my eyes they look like they have no rights, yet when I speak to them, they wouldn't want to be like western women - again, it's so complex...

Peacocks line drawings (some quite abstract) drawn in chalk or paint on houses, especially by tribals, to protect from snakes. Peacock brooms used by shamans - touched on people for healing. Tye dye with peacock on it - worn only by married women whose husband is still living

7:15am. I'm sitting t the Jodhpur bus station, waiting for the tickets to be transferred so I can buy my ticket for Ranakpur on the 8am Super Deluxe. So funny. I came at 7am to reserve, but of course you can only pre-book if you go all the way to Udaipur. So I said I'd pay the whole way, only 25 Rupees more, and get off at Ranakpur. Well, this created major consternation! Finally got the man's handshake that I could get a place on the 8am bus. I insisted. First time I'm testing out an Indian handshake.

- 82 - Ranakpur - 30th September. They have a peacock as part of a lighting decoration hung over the Jain temple here. Inside today the statue of Adinath is covered in gold and silver. On his sides are peacocks and apsaras (celestial nymphs) and angels, atop an array of more earthly things. The apsara has her feet on the peacock in the statue outside, where I gather for an illicit smoko with the head priest here. He's already started calling me peacock woman. He tells me that at the bus-stop at Mundara there is a monument to a peacock. It's the place where Rajiv Gandhi was in a car driving. They hit a peacock, which was crossing the road got out of the car, prayed to the peacock and apologized. People gathered and they made a cremation of the peacock. A wealthy Jain paid for a marble monument of the peacock to go on top of the bus stand. It cost 25,000Rs! On the monument is inscribed in Hindi a statement referring to the peacock run over there. I decide to go and have a look. I arrive the next day via Saderi and shared jeeps rides. Get the feeling it would have been less complicated to take the buses - they now want to up the price. At Mundara is the memorial to the peacock. I'm quickly surrounded by men and boys wanting to know where I'm from, etc. I try asking about the peacock statue. No-one speaks much English! Apparently the peacock fell from electricity wires, and then was hit by Rajiv Gandhi's car. "Peacock mark. Memorial of Prakash...(man who paid for statue) Jura a Maji (father's name) Tarachand AMehta, June 1983. On other side - "Congress Party, Parliament remembers in 1983. Garlanded by Rajiv Gandhi". I gather all the villagers were involved in the ceremony. They buried the peacock underground. "Not cremated?" I ask. No, buried.112 The shrine is built on top. The body of the peacock unadorned, flowers put in grange with nothing more, buried 5 feet deep. There was a night ceremony. Singing national songs, Rajasthani songs, and chai. ... I have been ushered across the road into a small room for chai. Govrdhan Sain, the English teacher at Saderi (who lives in Mundara) has been fetched. The story changes again. He tells me that one day during a storm there was a short circuit in the electricity wires. A peacock flew into the wire in the storm and was electrocuted. The peacock happened to be a village favourite. The villagers were used to feeding it seed by hand. So when it died they formed a huge ceremony for it. Got the headmaster to declare the day a holiday. The children were sent home to join the procession. The peacock was put on a hand cart and garlanded with flowers and pushed around the village. The grave was dug (5 ft deep) and it was buried with religious ceremonies by a priest. Every year on this date, 12 June, they do a ceremony and sing a hymn to the peacock... Three days later a memorial was built, in memory of a man named Prakash. On the 28th Oct. 1983 the memorial was inaugurated by Rajiv Gandhi. He was a member of congress at this stage and was visiting Ranakpur, and by chance came through Mundara. The donations from people paid for the statue. The hymn they sing was specially written about this peacock, in a local dialect (Marwari), and sung by the religious people of the village. Most people in the village don't speak this dialect. I'm then taken off to a Durga temple a couple of kilometres away. The priest here is the most gorgeous looking man I've ever seen. Very tall and full and glowing. He blesses me with a broom of peacock feathers, bringing it down repeatedly over my

112 Diary note: within the context of Hinduism only saints are buried. - 83 - head, and lets me take photos. People are busily decorating the statues here with coloured paper, ready for Dussehra.

Evening - sleep time. Full moon candle ceremony in the Jain temple. The Dutch guy and I got invited to come (everyone else there Jain). Gold on the Buddha-like statue (Ardinath?) glittering even stronger when Jai Prakash waved his tray of candles in front of it. Shimmering. The eyes of the idol seemed so bright tonight. I could feel them in me.

I just got up and looked at myself in the mirror - aglow - eyes sparkling - hair shining - amazing. No wonder I've been attracting so much good-will. Peacocks in my eyes. I remember a period when I had a series of dreams, starting in Iran, with eyes flying around in the air, coming towards me from a distance.

Udaipur I tell someone about the peacock memorial at Mundara. They comment that in India the peacock demands more respect and protection than human beings!

Girner Hill, Gujarat. I started climbing at about 5 am. A couple of hours later came to the first Jain and Shiva temples at the first summit. Luckily the sun only started coming over the mountain after I made it to the first temple. And the climb was difficult enough in the shade. Another half hour to pass a series of temples and then up and down a couple of steep craggy rocks to the highest summit - a tiny offering spot with orange painted Shiva tridents and deities on the highest points. Sat for a while. The myth is that this mountain is the grandfather of the Himalyas. Certainly feels pretty blissful up her. And that incredibly fresh crisp air. Felt like I was drinking it in. Started wandering down. The heat is already becoming sweltering. Stopped at a Shiva temple and went in. Nice babas! Gave me a sweet. Saw a lot of gorgeous old tridents grouped together, with cinders and ash at their base. Ganga water in another part. A deity sleeping underwater. The Ganga water said to come up through the mountain (did I misunderstand?) Coming down. I pass, for maybe the 4th time, a man carrying a large weight of stores on his back (everything has to be carried up this path - no helicopters to airlift stuff in!). His movement is still as I saw it earlier. One foot, stop. One foot, stop. In the early morning I'd passed him resting. Then he'd passed me as I collapsed just a few turns above him. And then I passed him again, and fast left him behind. Boy, do I feel for him now. All that time he's been climbing. Time is fascinating on this mountain. People pass me, in the opposite direction going up, or racing down. So much noise. And then silence. SILENCE. So rare in India. Till the next passers-by. The old man reminded me of the man in "Orphee" - in the underworld, carrying the panes of glass. In a repetitive, eternal movement. No beginning, no end. One step after another... Stopped for a coke further down. I hear singing coming towards me. A group passes, heading up. I wonder how they can do the climb at midday and manage to look happy! I'd like to just set my camera up here - hidden - and record the people going by - a boy just went running past - heading up! And at the same time and old man and woman went slowly down, with walking sticks. And all the while the 2 boys

- 84 - in the shop (bit of a shack) stay silent, not disturbing me. A young man with a radio skips past. It's tuned to static! What a mix of people. And I haven't seen any Europeans all day. I was almost back at the base of the path when I wandered past a man who gently asked me to sit down. Soon after a sadhu - jolly looking with a ponytail of frizzy hair, a big fat belly poking out of his orange robes, and very good English, came and sat. We chatted. He asked me to join them for lunch - yum. Turned out this sadhu was just visiting - he stays mainly in U.P., at the base of the Himalayas. The chief sadhu of this temple area came out. Gorgeous. Tall, strong yoga body, long shining black hair, shining eyes, and pretty young looking. He had a very endearing way of letting out low chuckles. He asked me if I smoke the chillum. He seemed stoned, but not in a doped-out way. I felt uncomfortable for a while when they questioned me about my life. Guess to them renunciation is the only way. A life in the material world is one stuck in ego. The gorgeous sadhu asked, through the pudgy one, if I could stay and teach him English. He was preparing to go away to Belgium and the USA. Seemed this wasn't his first trip o/s. Didn't ask him where he got his money from. In exchange he would teach me Hindi. I said it was a good idea. But right now I was expected in Baroda - maybe I'd come back... They said I could stay there. Couldn't help wondering if there were any other expectations in the "exchange". Young very gorgeous looking chillum smoking sadhu, although with a totally yogic look in his bright eyes.

In small town out of Bhuj, with the Swami Naryan temple. I'm surrounded by children looking at me, mainly young girls. As I start to write they all come closer. When I hum a phrase or 2 of "Haam Aapke Hai Kaan" (a hit movie song) they smile and laugh - then go back to their fixed staring at me. And again, as I write, they creep forward, onto me. An older woman screams at them from across the road, and they retreat about a foot. They stay until I leave.

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