The scene is the East Fork of the White River in Martin County, Indiana.
That particular stretch is at Hindostan Falls, site of a pioneer ferry across the White River on the stagecoach route between New Albany on the Ohio River and Vincennes on the Wabash River. A town had been founded there in 1819 by The Proprietors of Hindostan, a syndicate of land speculators, as the proposed seat of Martin County. The area was reportedly named by one of the proprietors who had previously served in the private army of the British East India Company. I don’t recall his name (let me refer to him as Proprietor X for the moment) but I remember wondering, while I was editing the film with John Bishop, if the subtropical climate along the White River reminded him of the Krishna River or the Hooghly River on the Bay of Bengal. It can get extremely hot and humid in southern Indiana during the summer. Or perhaps he was influenced by the fact that the name Indiana is derived from the West Indies, in contrast to the East Indies.
Even in its earliest years the town of Hindostan Falls had a mill for grinding whetstones from the sandstone cliffs along the river, and a factory for drilling mother-of-pearl buttons made from the nacre, or inner lining, of the local freshwater mussels. The money was in the buttons, not the rare pearls, which were even more rarely spherical. Unfortunately the town was completely depopulated and abandoned by an outbreak of cholera, a.k.a. yellow fever, during 1820-1822, so its dreams of glory were never realized. The town of Shoals, also located on the river, eventually became the county seat later in the nineteenth century.
Hindoostan or Hindustan was the Persian name for India during the Mughal Empire, meaning not that the Mughals were Hindus (they were Muslims from Central Asia) but that the Mughals ruled the indigenous Hindus and Buddhists. This usage was adopted by the British when they took over the region in 1803 and they extended the meaning to all of India including Ceylon, which had never been conquered by Mughals. In any case, whatever his inspiration, Proprietor X had become familiar with the term Hindostan while defending English traders in India, and he prevailed upon the other proprietors to name the crossing Hindostan Falls.
There were seven global pandemics of cholera between 1817 and 1961, all emanating from the Bay of Bengal. The first, 1817-1824, began near Calcutta; it spread throughout South Asia including present-day Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and the coast of East Africa. Although the outbreak infected Turkey and the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, it did not reach Europe beyond the Caspian Sea, or the Americas. The second pandemic of cholera, 1829-1837, did reach Europe including Russia and it did spread to North America. It ravaged the eastern seaboard from Quebec to Louisiana before extending to Cuba and Mexico. It reached the west coast but affected the interior of the United States only along major rivers like the Mississippi and Missouri, and along the Great Lakes, carried by steamboat passengers. Only the third pandemic, 1846-1860, carried by overland emigrants, greatly afflicted interior regions.
Needless to say, I also wondered while editing the film if Proprietor X, who had been in India in 1817 at the very beginning of the first global plague of cholera, had carried the bacteria directly to the United States and was the vector who infected the settlement of Hindostan Falls, a very early and isolated outbreak of the disease in Indiana. If I had stayed with filmmaking, i.e. if I had ever written a curricular guide to “The Pearl Fisher,” I would have done more research on this question.
I decided to use Georges Bizet’s Les Pecheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) for five reasons: first, because the opera is set in Ceylon, which the British considered to be in the Hindustani part of their empire. Secondly, because Bizet was a French Christian of the Roman Catholic persuasion, and that region of Indiana had been initially settled by French Catholics, part of a fur-trading network that stretched from Louisville to St. Louis and up into Quebec. Thirdly, obviously, because the film is concerned with dredging the river for clamshells and the occasional pearl. I was severely criticized by my folklore colleagues at the time for juxtaposing Barney Bass, the pearl fisher documented in the film, with a French opera from the Romantic period. They didn’t see the ironic humor in the choice, and I felt badly about exposing Jens Lund to their disdain. I had trouble explaining that I was responding to Laura Nader’s influential essay published in 1972, “Up the Anthropologist,” which advocated “studying up” and including middle-class and upper-class subjects in ethnographic films, rather than focusing exclusively on working-class people as had previously been the norm.
It’s true that Barney Bass was unfamiliar with the opera. He stated during a recorded interview that he had no particular musical interests or preferences, but he listened to a country-western station in his truck because it was the only option available on the radio to get the news. He couldn’t name any particular popular singers or hit songs. In the terms used by contemporary programmers on the internet, a la Spotify or Pandora, he would be considered an “indifferent” rather than a “savant.” But my background preparation showed that Les Pecheurs de Perls had been sponsored repeatedly in Vincennes, in French, since the early nineteenth century. The more prosperous and educated “savants” in Vincennes depicted in the film, including the pearl dealer and the jewelers, were all familiar with the opera, owned recordings of it, and had attended live performances at the local college. In this sense, using the criteria advocated by Laura Nader, it was appropriate as soundtrack. This was my fourth reason for using the opera.
The fifth reason was the symbolism of pearls, used in popular culture to represent purity, innocence, and perfection. Barney Bass was certainly familiar with this symbolism, which is why he gave the most outstanding pearls to his wife rather than selling them. He was also aware, in the religious sense, that pearls are associated with the Virgin Mary and Biblical doctrine of heavenly salvation, as in the proverb, “Cast ye not pearls before swine.” The greatest threat to his occupation was the increasing pollution of the river, which was staining the nacre and rendering the shells unsuitable for cultured pearls. Jens Lund and I tried to show the degradation as well as the beauty of the rivers. Bizet’s tenor aria heard in the background of the trailer, “A cette voix…je crois entendre encore,” usually translated into English as “I hear as in a dream,” features images of industrial factories and power plants on the river bank as well as statues of the Madonna, Catholic shrines and cemeteries. These images, filmed in Terre Haute and Vincennes, are intercut with scenes of Barney Bass in his boat on the Wabash as well as on the White at Hindustan Falls.
Personally, it was important to make the film because the first cash money I earned, from the age of 10 in 1961 onwards, was helping to dredge for mollusks at my grandparents’ fishing shack near the town of Buddha (!) on the White River. I was paid fifty cents per pickup-truck load, and the shells were taken to a button factory in nearby Bedford, the county seat of Lawrence County. Although my fellow folklorists did not “get” The Pearl Fisher when it was released by DER in 1982, and gave the film rather negative reviews, it did receive the Award of Excellence that year from the Society for Visual Anthropology, praising the subtle sense of humor, which caused me to think maybe I was laboring in the wrong academic discipline. Looking back on it now, it’s interesting to me that just as colonial imperialism was international, and infectious diseases are international, and place-names are international, so too is basic symbolism. In this case, for example, pearls are widely recognized in many cultures as repositories of wealth but also as tokens of love and devotion. It’s gratifying to me that you find The Pearl Fisher of interest for Folkstreams.
