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The world is awash in fake holy men, pious hypocrites, and snake-handling demagogues, and they�re all a litigious bunch, so I will confine my examples here to the dead, because the dead can�t be libeled and the dead can�t sue. For every person who finds him or herself confused and afraid and drowning in the isolation of the human condition, there�s an asshole out there willing to exploit them with a mantra and a blessing in exchange for a check or credit card. In America we have televangelists: ugly, bitter old white men who rant about the gays and the feminists and use your donations to build megachurches and megahouses for themselves; or charismatic black Baptists who call themselves �bishops� and who only interrupt their condemnations of homosexuality in order to engage in it. India, by contrast, is a land of gurus, wonderworkers who have gone into the Himalayas and received special wisdom from immortal demigods and who have returned to civilization to spread the word and buy Rolls-Royces. They dazzle rich and poor alike with their recollections of their past lives and their leger-de-main magic tricks, like the late Sai Baba, who could �materialize� coins and wrist-watches (but apparently not large quantities of food for poor people). Or there was Pete Townshend�s guru of choice, Meher Baba, whose blessedness couldn�t prevent him from repeatedly getting into several terrible car accidents.
This all brings me around to Bengali master filmmaker Satyajit Ray�s The Holy Man (Mahapurush) (1965), about a travelling huckster named Baba Birinchi who insinuates himself Tartuffe-like into a well-to-do family and begins exploiting their friends and neighbors. Now, Birinchi doesn�t attempt the �miracles� of Sai Baba, but he instead dazzles with anecdotes from his lengthy life history (he claims to be well over two thousand years old): we hear how he taught Einstein the theory of relativity; how he intimidated Plato with is wisdom; how he knew the Gautama Buddha when the latter was a child; how Manu presented his laws to him for review; and how he knew Lord Vishnu when He was incarnated as a Boar. His celebrity friends remind one of the late Korean cult leader Sun Myung Moon, who claimed to have been visited by Jesus, Moses, Buddha, and Confucius.Now, Baba Birinchi�s arrival on the scene ends up seriously impeding the romantic plans of a young man named Satya, who is attempting to court the young lady of the house into which Birinchi has inserted himself. It will be up to Satya�s older, less love-addled friends to unmask Birinchi for the hypocrite that he is and drive him from the scene.
As a side-note, this movie has some of the loveliest black-and-white cinematography that I�ve ever seen, and serves as a reminder that black-and-white was at its best just as color film was about to supplant it. I would also like to mention that I have seen lamentably few Indian movies, and about half of them were directed by Ray. If anyone has suggestions for Indian films that I should see, please mention them in the comments.
