My arrival in India was like a homecoming. I had lived there between 1952 and 1954 even though I did not then visit all the famous sites or meet the gurus, the maharajas, the fakirs and the tigers I dreamt of as a youngster. It was an important time in my life-so much so, that when I hear the expression "Mother India", it still touches a chord.


On the morning of my return, as the taxi ferried me from the airport to the centre of New Delhi in the cool December haze, I looked out at the bleached plain on which I could distinguish the white silhouettes of the cows and the strange shapes of the labourers huddled in their dhotis, with only their black skeletal extremities showing like birds' legs. I almost stopped the car to kneel by a field and touch the earth with the palms of my hands. (I did nothing of the kind: the passenger alighting from a Boeing has to content himself with imagining such gestures.)


This preamble is meant to put into perspective the critical judgements which I may express about this country and its inhabitants. When I criticise India, it's like a man who finds fault with the one he loves and who, in some way, wants to avert the negative reactions of those who don't share his feelings.


After brief stays in Delhi and Chandigarh, I flew to Calcutta, my principal destination. As I got off the plane-very early in the morning once again-I didn't come up against the stifling heat which I remembered: December nights can be fresh even at this latitude. From the airport to the centre of the city, the taxi drives through six miles of shanty town-or rather, mud town: corrugated iron would be a luxury here. In the mist, I make out some motionless human forms ranged around a brazier or a paraffin lamp. Something about their attitudes or about this light imparts a feeling of tragedy.


I knew in advance that the subject of my reportage would be poverty. But the way we use this term does not correspond with the reality of Calcutta's five million inhabitants (or maybe four, or six, or eight million: no-one has ever counted). To us, "poverty" suggests a situation for which we should seek a remedy through economic development, for instance, or improved administration or humanitarian aid.


But, for most of the inhabitants of this city, poverty is the only kind of existence they know, and one is left to wonder if they can imagine any other. The projects advanced by their newspapers and politicians -industrialisation, urban planning, birth control-seem to have no bearing on reality. It's a little like the explanation given by the public relations officer who refused the cigarette I offered him, supposedly because he was abstaining from the pleasure of smoking until such time as the Chinese invaders had been pushed back outside the frontiers of his motherland.


Poverty was different in Cairo. The young mother with the rotten leg and the baby abandoned on the pavement showed something like a refusal to accept her fate, a spirit of revolt with which one could sympathise.


Here, people walk along in silence, squeezed together on the overly cramped pavements. When you see certain looks staring out from gaunt faces, you tell yourself it must be the mark of hunger. You see the same look on the rickshaw-coolies, most of whom seem to move as if in a trance. For eight annas (8 US cents), the coolie hauls his charge on a two-mile journey at a run.


His passengers are often fat wives of banja merchants (here, those who can afford to put on weight do so) accompanied by a sister or mother of the same dimensions and supporting two or three children and various packages on their knees: all of which easily adds up to 500 pounds or more. I've never seen a coolie drop his fixed stare. It's as if there was no room in his universe for the idea of a role reversal.


Rickshaw coolies are in fact relatively privileged. Most of them are peasants who had to leave their family and village because of a debt or a bad harvest. By one expedient or another, mostly by borrowing rupees from a banja money-lender, they find what's necessary to pay the deposit on the vehicle hire. They don't spend more than eight annas on their daily food and they sleep on the roadsides, curled up under their buggies. So long as their savings aren't stolen and they don't succumb to TB or the temptations of alcohol, they will manage to repay the debt and return to their villages. But they are not the only ones to sleep on pavements: the homeless-mostly men-are estimated to number several million. Just that most of them haven't scraped together the money to hire a ricksaw.


Their resignation appears so total that you finish up by regarding it as natural and you get to the stage where you can take a ride without a bad conscience: after all, you tell yourself, the eight annas of the fare will let them survive until tomorrow.


I had more trouble getting used to the sight of the women stretched out in full sun outside Howrah Station, surrounded by nearly naked and visibly under-nourished children. They're refugees, I'm told. (But where are they from? And from what did they flee?) I've given up dreaming of social or humanitarian solutions and even my sense of indignation feels dulled. I sense a knot in my stomach rising to my throat. I would like to lean on the parapet of the bridge, look at nothing other than the green water of the Hooghly and vomit.


The Hooghly is a branch of the Ganges-Brahmaputra. Its waters carry all the city's waste as well as numerous corpses, but this doesn't stop the brahmins from considering them sacred and purifying. They practise their ablutions from sunrise, preferably on the steps surrounding the pillars of Howrah Bridge. This structure connects the centre of the city with the main station and the Howrah district; it is a marvel of steel engineering, more than half a mile long, overrun by an uninterrupted flow of double-decker trams, lorries, wagons, rickshaws, flocks of goats or herds of cows, taxis, pedestrians, street vendors, lepers, sadhus and villagers. The bridge is in fact the city's main artery.


The brahmins have built small temples all along the Hooghly, right up to the pillars of the bridge, each with its sacred steps (the ghats) leading down to the river. Flower-sellers hawk garlands of jasmine which the faithful will offer to Shiva and Durga Kali.


Naked sadhus smeared in ashes perform shoulder stands, heads down and feet to the sky, straight as posts. Others have their tongues or cheeks pierced by nails or their fingers segmented by rings of wire which are progressively tightened to the point where the digit atrophies completely. Beggars of a more ordinary variety surround them, each in a position which has been studied to show off his particular affliction: the stumps and bandages of the lepers, the monstrously swollen legs of those with elephantiasis, the crutches of the amputees and the paralytics. Stretched behind them are those who no longer need to beg. They don't smell good. Rags serve as shrouds and thick clouds of flies busy themselves around them. Some are still twitching.


When I photographed the man with no face, it wasn't so I could show the photo to anyone and even less to have it published in a magazine. I forced myself to focus and press the button precisely because my whole being resisted. Where there should have been eyes, nose and mouth, the man had four gaping holes. He was squatting on the pavement, holding a string instrument in his hands. From the lower hole, in which two loose teeth could still be made out, he was emitting a kind of song. Should I distribute the annas in my pocket?


My room in the Grand Hotel costs more than 50 rupees a day. It's the best hotel in the city and also undoubtedly the most uncomfortable of its category in the world. The air-conditioning has been installed in such a way that boards replace window panes and daylight is supplemented by neon tubes. There's a constant hiss of cold air which, as far as I can tell, has already passed through the kitchens; the noise is quite disagreeable at night. (On the other hand, there are four times as many staff as guests, dozens of boys with nothing to do dawdle in the corridors and line the walls of the dining-room.) I've worked it out: 1 rupee = 16 annas. So: 50 rupees = 800 annas. Knowing that a beggar's meal costs four annas, I realise that what I pay for one night in this hotel could feed 200 beggars.


I approach the beggars with my Leica and they stretch out their hands mechanically, without conviction. For them, I belong to an unknown species from whom charity isn't to be expected. It's from the hands of the brahmins who frequent these ghats for their ablutions that they hope for alms. But as soon as I get some coins out of my pocket, there's a stampede. They surround me, clutch at my hands and legs, shake their stumps under my nose. All I can do to get rid of them is push them away and run off, and only their infirmities force them to let go and prevent them from following me. I climb back up to the road and step onto the bridge but, when I reach the other end and turn around, I see I am still being pursued by three young urchins. One of them is a girl the size of one of our three year-olds, but whose expression makes her look older.


The effort of pursuing me at a run, all the while stretching her hand and repeating "bakshish babuji, bakshish babuji" doesn't stop her smiling like an angel.


But I am panicky. I have the impression that I shall never get rid of them, I can still feel the contact of all those dusty hands on my skin, I tell myself that if I stop to give the small girl a coin I will immediately be besieged by a new horde. And, at the same time, I feel ashamed of my cowardice and in a hurry to get into one of the taxis that I see parked in front of the station, so that I may be taken elsewhere to get on with my work. Before getting in, I could easily distribute my remaining change between them, which I'd intended for them in any case. But I do nothing about it: my panic is transformed into a kind of rage against these little hands and this insistent litany that I haven't been able to discourage. When the little girl hangs onto my knees as if to stop me getting into the car, my leg kicks out by reflex action. I strike her tibia: it must hurt because I see the corners of her mouth crease and her smile turn into a grimace. The driver takes a few seconds to start up. Before disappearing from my field of vision, she has time to recompose her expression, stretch out her hand one last time and repeat, "bakshish babuji".


I am forcing myself to tell this story-which does me no credit-to give an idea of the exasperation which can overcome someone from a different world when confronted with these beings who are so destitute and yet so gentle. This can be explained by a combined sense of guilt and impotence-but such an explanation is no excuse. Normally I would have wanted to pick that little girl up and take her into my arms. But at that moment, when faced with her outstretched hands and her begging smile, asking merely for a coin of almost no value to me, I behaved with unforgivable brutality.


Yet these children are not so different from my own, nor am I so different from an adult Indian: if I exposed myself to the sun for a few weeks and dressed as they do, my Mediterranean looks would get lost in the crowd. (Though I would have to change not just my gait -as I was already telling myself in Cairo-but also something much more rooted in my nature, namely my attachment to the material world and my sensitivity to its more painful inconveniences like heat, hunger or physical pain.)


Those who speak of Indian spirituality are perhaps referring to this kind of insensitivity, and maybe also to a still more general disinterest towards all things material. This may be a result of the heat or humidity of the climate, whereby objects tend to disintegrate into dust and rottenness-and consequently it is better to do without them.


Indian villagers, for example, do not possess clothes in our sense of the word. The men's dhotis and turbans (just like the women's saris) are nothing but lengths of cloth which are wrapped around the body with no stitching or buttons. The poorest have just one dhoti which they wash as they perform their ablutions. This means they don't need furniture in which to keep their clothes, nor sewing kits to repair them, nor suitcases for travelling. Mostly they walk barefoot or, if they are better off, they wear sandals (though this represents a compromise with their concept of purity, because leather is a piece of corpse).


Aside from the dhoti, the ordinary Indian has just two possessions: a small copper recipient for his ablutions and an iron disc which he spreads with flour paste; this is then cooked on a fire of dried cow dung. When the chapatti is ready, he places it on a banana leaf and brings it to his mouth with his right hand (the left is impure as it serves to clean the other opening of the alimentary canal). For drinking, he uses a little clay pot which costs hardly anything and which he throws away after use. So he has no need of plates nor of glasses, which has the added advantage of keeping him from the contamination he fears most, namely that of human saliva.


At night he covers himself with his dhoti (or sari for the women). When he can afford not to sleep on the ground, his resting place is a string mesh stretched on a wooden frame supported by four uprights. It can be carried with just one hand (for example, to be placed on a rooftop or on a terrace when the nights are too hot to sleep indoors); it allows air to circulate around the body and is a convenient substitute for our mattresses, sheets and pillows.


All the effort otherwise expended on acquiring and looking after objects is invested in care of the body. Indians brush their teeth for hours, and those who can afford the luxury spend yet more hours having their ears cleaned, getting the dandruff removed from their scalp, being smeared in oil and massaged-not to speak of the different ablutions and purifications, physical and mental, internal and external, recommended by the various schools of yoga. In every square of Calcutta, at any of the milder hours of the morning or evening, you can see hundreds of men doing their physical exercise, individually or in groups.


These exercises are not remotely sensual or narcissistic. Indians have no particular love for their bodies: rather, they think of them as an unavoidable burden which they must try to preserve from rotting and contamination (most especially any contamination by their fellow humans-it's well-known that lovers in Indian films never kiss on the mouth…)


The British conquerors superimposed their own way of life onto that of their subjects. The most spectacular result of this superimposition was Calcutta, for long the capital of the Indian Empire and port of entry to the subcontinent. The Maidan was modelled on Hyde Park, the Fort on the Tower, Chowringhee (the main street) on the Mall. The great residences were decorated with colonnaded facades in the style of Belgravia, and effigies of Wellington and Queen Victoria were set in the squares. The bridge on the Hooghly is a masterpiece of British steel engineering and public transport is provided by red double-decker buses made in the same factories as those of London.


At the beginning, this London-on-Hooghly was reserved for Crown servants, merchants linked to the City and a minority of anglicised natives. The Indians accepted this apartheid for a long time: in their eyes, the English were just another ruling caste that had taken the place of more ancient ones, just as other conquerors had done before.


With independence and the wave of refugees from East Bengal (which had become part of Pakistan), the Indian masses engulfed the city: brick, marble and plaster were impregnated with their sweat, their urine and with the red spit from betel chewing which is easily mistaken for blood. The homeless found refuge on the main staircases of the buildings and covered them with ordure.


Certain streets had to be closed to traffic and were transformed into rubbish dumps as high as hills, on the slopes of which children in rags now scavenge for left-overs. It's as if humanity was a disease of the city.


I left Calcutta without any longer daring to think in terms of "this or that should be done" (such as management, plans, reforms, organization, education, efficiency…). Western-style development, I told myself, has no meaning for people who are not interested in producing and possessing material goods. Wise Indians like Gandhi and Vinoba Bhave had been aware of this and therefore advocated reforms based on the traditional life-style and forms of occupation in the villages: every Indian should himself spin the few yards of cotton fabric he needed, the flow of money should be replaced as much as possible by barter and the muscles of men and oxen would then recover the functions usurped by machines.


It goes without saying that this dream could only come true if India isolated herself from the world. Those who are currently in charge are no doubt realists; they favour heavy industry, a planned economy and a standing army of five million men. I am not qualified to question their judgement, but I cannot imagine their future India except as an aggregate of its 700,000 villages, nightmarishly mutated into one Super-Calcutta.