WSJ Photo Journal: Sufi Anniversary

Photo © Deepak Sharma/AP-All Rights Reserved
The WSJ's Photo Journal has featured the above photograph by Deepak Sharma (AP) of Pakistani pilgrims carrying an offering of embroidered cloth (which I believe is called kiswa) to cover the tomb of Sufi saint Khawaja Moinuddin Chisti on the anniversary of his birth in Ajmer, India.

I should have been there!!! My kind of event!

Shaikh Khawaja Syed Muhammad Moinuddin Chisti was the most famous Sufi saint of the Chishti Order of the Indian Subcontinent. He introduced and established the order in South Asia, and was succeeded by various notable saints such as Nizzam Uddin Auliya.

I've never checked on this, but Khawaja in Egyptian Arabic means "foreigner", and was used as a title for all Greek and Italian residents (as an example) in Egypt, so I'm not sure if there's a connection or not. Wikipedia defines Khawaja as a title used by South Asians, which is possibly related to Khoja as well.

Fons Rademakers: Haridwar Kumbh Mela

Photo © Fons Rademakers-All Rights Reserved
I've featured so much work from various photographers, and seen so many photographs of the Nagas and pilgrims here and elsewhere, it's as if I've been there myself. I'm pretty sure these photographers who were at the Kumbh will either recognize each others work, or recognize the subjects.

However, here's the work of Fons Rademakers who's a physicist working at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in Geneva, where the largest particle accelerator is operated and where the World Wide Web began as a project. Fons leads a software project that provides programs for data processing and analysis, but started his connection with photography when 12 years old, and regards it as his passion next to physics and computing.

I would recommend to Fons that he ought to consider moving his many other photo galleries from SmugMug to his own website. They're certainly worth showing in a more professional medium.

Mark Thomas: Haridwar Kumbh Mela

Here's another feature from the recent Kumbh Mela which was held earlier this year in Haridwar, North India.

This body of work by photographer Mark Thomas is titled Kumbh Mela 2010, and is mainly of portraits he made during that religious event.

Mark Thomas is a photojournalist and a multimedia expert, whose work appeared in various publications, including The Boston Globe and National Geographic News. He professes a deep passion for documenting and photographing India.

His Kumbh Mela 2010 gallery consists of portraits of naga babas, the ash-covered sadhus who belong to the Shaivite sect, as well as pilgrims.

Mark's website has other Indian-centric galleries such as Faces of Kashi, Visions of Kashi and Child Labor.

A worthwhile website to bookmark for Indiaphiles.

Tony Smith: Kumbh Mela

Photo © Tony Smith-All Rights Reserved
Tony Smith is an adventurous Welsh photographer who, at the age of 15 joined a cargo ship to South America...and this is how his world travel started. He worked on ocean liners, and subsequently on dry land in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Johannesburg in South Africa and London before settling down in Winchester.

He's been deeply involved in travel photography to the point it's developed into a second career. He tells us in his biography that nothing pleases him more than attending and photographing cultural and religious festivals: the more difficult and remote the better.

Tony is an Associate member of the prestigious Royal Photographic Society. His travels have taken him to Nepal, Bhutan, India, France, China, Spain, Morocco the USA and Canada as well as the West Coast of Ireland. He attended Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist and Gypsy events.

He has just returned from Haridwar in North India where he attended the Kumbh Mela, and produced a photo slideshow and a blog travelogue.

Tony also produced a number of slideshows of festuivals such as Holi, Gypsy Pilgrimage, Maha Shivratri (particularly recommended) and Feria de Bernabe, as well as others which are on his website.

Underage Marriage in India

Photo © Prakash Hatvalne/AP Photo-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Prakash Hatvalne/AP Photo-All Rights Reserved
Two photoblogs, MSNBC's Photoblog and The Denver Post's Plog, featured images from a mass marriage ceremony held recently in the town of Rajgarh, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Both are credited to Prakash Hatvalne/AP Photo.

The top photograph is of Mamta (7 years old) standing with her husband Santosh, who is 11 years old. While the lower photograph is of an under-age newly married couple who refused to be identified.

While Indian law sets 18 as the minimum age for a woman to marry and 21 for a man, underage weddings occur in rural areas, where the law is seldom observed.

Sociologists believe that child marriages originated 900 years ago with Muslim invasions of the subcontinent. Legend has it that invading armies -as was customary at the time- raped and carried unmarried Hindu women off as war booty, prompting communities to marry off their daughters almost from birth to protect them.

This tradition of child marriage, as many others considered by the Western world to be abhorrent, has also been created by necessity. In poverty stricken villages in the Indian subcontinent, Middle East and Africa, securing early marriages for daughters can mean the difference between subsistence and famine.

My Work: Orissa & Chhattisgarth

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Here are two images made while traveling in Chhattisgarh and the neighboring Orissa. There were made using my first digital camera, the Canon 10D...remember that one?

The first is of an Odissi dancer in Bhubaneswar. Odissi is one of the eight classical dance forms of India. It originates from the state of Orissa, in eastern India. On the basis of archaeological evidence, it's the oldest surviving dance form of India.

The second is of an adivasi in the Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, whom I found amongst the thousands of tribal people who congregated at one of the weekly haats. It's estimated there are 300 haats in Bastar, where villagers come to buy basic necessities, and to socialize.

It's at these haats that the adivasis imbibe copious quantities of toddy, the palm wine ubiquitous in these parts. The fellow was in a pseudo trance along with other members of his group. Despite my efforts, I never found out what the purpose of the trance was.

Here's my gallery The Adivasis of Chhattisragh.

Asim Rafiqui: The Idea of India

"The close relationships between the island’s Muslim and Hindu communities in fact reveal a blurring of religious and spiritual lines, reminding us of the artificiality of the labels of ‘Hindu’ and ‘Muslim’ and the ordinary human being’s ability to find accommodation and tolerance of the practices and values of his neighbors." - Gujarat’s Faded Testaments – The Parables Of Bet Dwarka

Asim Rafiqui is not only an excellent photojournalist, photographer, a thoughtful blogger, writer and commentator, but also a friend and an inspiration in many ways.

I've written a number of posts on his wonderful project The Idea of India, and its being supported by The Aftermath Project and Blue Earth Alliance in the past year, so it gives me great pleasure to announce that he was just awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to pursue this extraordinary project.

Asim will be based for a year in New Delhi starting this September, and the scholarship will allow him to continue, expand and delve deeper into this important project.

I encourage you to visit Asim's The Idea of India writings, as well as his accompanying blog The Spinning Head. I'm certain you'll bookmark both, and follow his explorations into India's past, present and perhaps future.

As a footnote, I am undeservedly privileged to be mentioned in Asim's The Idea of India, and hope to reciprocate the acknowledgment in a small way very soon.

My Work: Vedic Gurukul

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
During my Theyyams of Malabar Photo~Expedition™ in early 2009, I had arranged for a photo shoot at an ancient Vedic 'gurukul' (or training/boarding school very similar to the Buddhist monasteries for novitiates, or a Muslim madrasa) in Thrissur, where we were treated to a demonstration of this way of teaching the sacred Vedic scriptures.

The Vedas are the earliest literary record of the Indo-Aryan civilization, and the most sacred books of India. These are the original scriptures of Hindu teachings. The oral tradition of the Vedas consists of several rhythmic recitations and ways of chanting the Vedic mantras. The traditions of Vedic chant are often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence.

While photographing and watching the hypnotic chanting by the young boys, I was reminded of the similar recitation styles used by the Buddhist novices and the Muslim children at madrasas, who sway their torsos in time with the cadence of their chant. Moreover, many Jews also sway their bodies during prayer; a practice called shokeling in Yiddish.

SacBee's The Frame: Mr & Mrs Sadhu

Photo Courtesy The Sacramento Bee
Here's an amusing photograph featured by The Frame, the photo blog of the Sacramento Bee. It's of a sadhu and a woman "returning after bathing at the Sangam, the confluence of rivers Ganges, Yamuna and the mythical Saraswati, in Allahabad."

It's uncredited on the SacBee blog, except to say it's from AP.

Although I have seen female sadhus (known as sadhvis) in Varanasi, I have rarely seen a sadhu in the company of a woman, and wonder what are these two returning to. To me, this looks like a man and his wife returning home from work. He's dressed in saffron cloths, and is carrying the Shiva trident, an accoutrement of his trade, while she's carrying some stakes.

I have seen and met countless of these so-called sadhus during my travels in India, and most of them are charlatans and con-artists. After all, it's rather an easy life they lead. They are given free food and alms, they ride public transport for free, they smoke marijuana whenever they can, and people generally give them a wide berth.

Naturally, there are also a few sadhus who are genuine ascetics, but these are rarely seen by Western tourists except at important Hindu religious festivals, such as the Kumbh Melas. However even there, the real ones are a minority.

Stuart Freedman: The Idol Makers

Photo © Stuart Freedman-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Stuart Freedman-All Rights Reserved

"In Western art, few sculptors -other than perhaps Donatello or Rodin- have achieved the pure essence of sensuality so spectacularly evoked by the Chola sculptors, or achieved such a sense of celebration of the divine beauty of the human body."- William Dalrymple, Nine Lives

Stuart Freedman is an award-winning British writer and photographer whose work was published in, amongst others, Life, Geo, Time, Der Spiegel, Newsweek and Paris Match covering stories from Albania to Afghanistan and from former Yugoslavia to Haiti. His work has been exhibited in Visa Pour L’Image at Perpignan, The Scoop Festival in Anjou, The Leica Gallery in Germany, The Association and the Spitz Galleries in London.

One of his many galleries is The Idol Makers, which documents the work of Radhakrishna Stpathy, an idol maker, a caster of statues, a master craftsman in Tamil Nadu, India. Stpathy mastered the ancient art of bronze casting which traces its origins from the Indus Valley civilization and achieved its apogee during the Chola period.

Chola period bronzes were created using the lost wax technique, which is also know by its French name, cire perdue, and is the process by which a bronze or brass is cast from an artist's sculpture.

Be sure to read Stuart's accompanying article on Stpathy, and the historical background to idol making in Tamil Nadu.

I've previously featured Stuart Freedman's work on Kathakali here.

Steven Greaves: Kashi, City of the Dead

Photo © Steven Greaves-All Rights Reserved
American writer Mark Twain wrote:

"Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together."

Varanasi (Benares) or Kashi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world and probably the oldest of India, and is one of the most sacred pilgrimage places for Hindus of all denominations. More than 1,000,000 pilgrims visit the city annually. For centuries, Hindus have come to Varanasi, the holy city on the Ganges, to attain instant moksha, or "release", at the moment of death.

Steven Greaves's galleries include Kashi, City of the Dead, and Kashi, City of the Living; both which I highly recommend.

Steven is a freelance photographer, who was born in the UK, but considers New York City as his home. With a formal education as a lawyer, Steven interned with VII Photo Agency, and his work was published by a number of international publications and displayed in New York City, Miami, London and New Orleans. His work is currently represented by Lonely Planet Images.

NPR: The Grand Trunk Road

The Grand Trunk Road played an important role in India's history at every step of its way. Some 3500 years ago, with the Aryan invasion of the subcontinent, it served as a corridor starting at the Khyber Pass winding eastward between the Himalayas and the Thar Desert onto the Gangetic plain. Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Buddhism spread through it, and Muslim proselytizers traveled on it. Since 1947, Pakistan controls the 300-mile segment between Peshawar and Lahore, while the remaining 1,250 miles link six Indian states, making it lifeline of northern India.

Nowadays, the road used by Alexander the Great, Ibn Battutah, Mughals invaders and other conquerors and the just curious, is ruled by truck drivers roaring through countless tiny villages.

NPR features a hybrid multimedia project in which its journalists travel the route and tell the stories of young people living there, who make up the majority of the populations in India and Pakistan.

Giulio di Sturco: Dreaming Fashion

I've been meaning to feature Giulio di Sturco's photography for a while now, and recently revisited his website, to which he added a number of galleries.

One of those consists of his work during Indian Fashion Week in New Delhi, and is titled Dreaming Fashion.

You may wonder what I chose to feature this gallery on what is essentially a travel photography blog.

My rationale is multi-faceted: this gallery of edgy fashion and striking models underscores the enormous strides made by India in becoming an Asian economic powerhouse with a new growing middle class and modernizing cities, but also emphasizes the growing wealth disparity between its haves and have-nots.

Another reason is Giulio's photographic style. His blurry photographs impart both a dreamy look and one that suggests motion and energy.

The third reason is the pretty models...always a magnet.

Giulio's work also includes more sobering work. His galleries of photographs of the Ganges' pollution, the misery of Bihar residents after a flood and violence in Kashmir provide a reality check, and a reminder that not all is rosy in India.

Giulio di Sturco is an award-winning Italian photographer working between Milan and New Delhi. He studied photography at the European Institute of Design and Visual Arts in Rome, and was published in D (La Repubblica delle Donne), Internazionale, Vanity Fair, Marie Claire, Anna, Amica, Geo, L'Espresso and others.

Michael Rubenstein:India

Photograph © Michael Rubenstein-All Rights Reserved
Michael Rubenstein is a photographer based in Mumbai to cover South Asia for Redux Pictures, having lived in New York City and Portland, Oregon. He has a degree in Environmental Policy and has studied at Ohio University's School of Visual Communications.

His clients include: Time Magazine, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times Magazine, The Oregonian, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, Complex Magazine, The Paris Match, Bloomberg News Service and W+K.

Some of his work on Andheri, a Mumbai suburb being transformed into a hip neighborhood appeared in the NY Times. And it's interesting to see the stylistic difference between this photo sideshow and his India gallery on his website.

WP: India In Motion

The Travel section of the Washington Post has featured a collection of short videos titled India In Motion. The videos are somewhat eclectic, and start with fast paced clips of Mumbai, then Udaipur, Jaislamer, Agra, Haridwar and Rishikesh.

The videos are by Whitney Shefte, while the design is by Kat Downs. It's unfortunate that some of the music choices chosen to accompany the videos are incongruous. For instance, I'm still scratching my head over the logic of having music which sounds it's played by a Central European zither group with a video clip featuring camels in Jaisalmer!

I realize that the Washington Post is not the National Geographic, but India In Motion is superficially researched, and seems to meander with no clear objective and purpose. It puzzles me when a project such as India In Motion, with the considerable backing and funding of one of the premier newspapers in the world, ends up being an incoherent mess like it is.

Terri Gold: Still Points in a Turning World

Photo © Terri Gold-All Rights Reserved
Terri Gold's artistic creativity and energy were patently obvious during my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ , as she moved from one photo shoot in a village to the next photographing with her two cameras; one "normal" like those used by the rest of us, and the second professionally modified to shoot infrared.

She is an award-winning photographer and artist based in New York City, and built an impressive reputation for her rituals, rites of passage, festivals, celebrations and portraits from all over the world.

Her infrared photographs of Rajasthan and Gujarat as an audio slideshow have now been added to her ongoing personal project “Still Points in a Turning World” which focuses on Asia’s vanishing tribal heritage.

With her acknowledged expertise in infrared photography and its intricate post-processing, Terri provides personalized hands-on tutorship to photographers who are interested in the craft. So visit her website, and email her to learn this exciting photographic technique that is growing in popularity.

A previous post on Terri's photography is here.

Luciano Rodriguez Pena: Holi & Kumbh

India Khumbamela from SENSES on Vimeo.

Here's a movie by Spanish photographer Luciano Rodriguez Pena, made during a recent trip to India. It features two main events during the first three months of this year: Haridwar Kumbh Mela and Holi. I liked the colors (as befits a country such as India) and the tremendous energy which the movie imparts. I wish there was a different soundtrack to it, but the stills and the movie make up for that.

Luciano is a Nature & Travel photographer, and teaches digital photography in various photography schools in Madrid.

Holi is a festival of color and was recently celebrated all over India. It's an exuberant festival which aims at infusing fresh hope to people as it marks the end of the winter days and the start of summer. The Kumbh Mela in Haridwar is a three month-long bathing festival along the Ganges river which occurs every 12 years, and about 50 million Hindu devotees performing their prayers and washing away their sins in river's waters are expected in this holy city.

The Hijras (Eunuchs) of Becharaji

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Eunuchs, transsexuals, or transgender men are known as hijras in South Asia. They adopt feminine gender identity, women's clothing and other feminine gender roles. Etymologically, the word hijra is an Urdu word, seemingly derived from the Arabic root hijr or emigration in the sense of "leaving one's family, tribe or country," and it has been borrowed into Hindi.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
Many hijra live in all-male communities, and have sustained themselves over generations by "adopting" young boys who are rejected by, or flee their family. Many work as male sex workers for survival. According to estimates by health organizations, only 10% of hijras are actually castrated.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
During my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ , we stayed at the immaculate and well-run Rann Riders resort in Dasada, and its knowledgeable owner Muzahid Malik, suggested we visited Becharaji where hijras frequented its temple.

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved
As I walked in to the temple ahead of my group, I chanced upon hijras who, upon seeing me, started to clap their hands and laughing. Not really catching on that this was their trademark way of announcing their presence and sexual persuasion, I imitated them and clapped in exactly the same way...one hand on the top of the other, rather than sideways. This drove them to raucous laughter, and eventually to self-consciously pose for our cameras.

There are many stories told about the hijras, and how they extort money by embarrassing shopkeepers and guests at wedding parties, but those we met at the Becharaji temple were friendly and obviously delighted that we took such nonjudgmental interest in them. Naturally, there was some posturing for the cameras, and much competition for the most suggestive poses.

Muzahid invited me to spend a couple of weeks in Dasada. Perhaps I will...After all, there's a hijra festival at Becharaji in late summer. Another potential destination for a photo~expedition?

For a book on hijras, read Zia Jaffrey's The Invisibles.

The Sabarimala Pilgrimage: Asim Rafiqui

Photo © Asim Rafiqui-All Rights Reserved
It's always a pleasure to start off the month with a super interesting post.

Here's a religious event/festival that not only fires up my adrenaline and imagination, but whose descriptive details I savor with relish, particularly as these are written by one of my favorite writers, William Dalrymple, and photographed by one of my favorite photojournalists, Asim Rafiqui.

And naturally, this event (as one of the largest pilgrimage festival in southern India) will be added to my list of possible destinations for a photo~expedition in 2011 or beyond. Not as overhyped as the Kumbh melas, it's the sort of authentic event I would love to photograph and attend...and then produce photo-essays and audio slideshows. It is this kind of destination that I seek for my photo~expeditions, which are destination/event-driven rather than just hopscotching from one tourist spot to the other. The trek up to the temple takes a minimum of five hours on a crowded path and unfortunately, women aged 10-60 are excluded from the pilgrimage.

The festival is the Sabarimala pilgrimage, and it brings Hindus and Muslims together in a fashion that is seldom witnessed. It would be redundant for me to re-post what Dalrymple describes, so here is his article as published in The Guardian.

Here's Asim's post in his opus; The Idea of India, and in which he writes:

"Here, in this small town in Western Kerala, members of two communities have managed, through legend, lore and ritual, to create a shared spiritual and social space and bridged what many claim is an insurmountable divide. The Sabarimala pilgrimage, in the course of about forty days, will bring nearly 50 million pilgrims through this town, and to the Vavar mosque. The seventy kilometer trek from Erumeli to the mountain top shrine of the god Ayyappa at Sabarimala cannot be completed without first paying respects to his friend the Muslim pirate/saint Vavar and asking his permission to proceed."

Asim meets a guruswami who invites him to join his group to Sabarimala and, being of a different persuasion, assumes wrongly that the invitation was only rhetorical. As the guru leads his group towards the mountain shrine of Ayyappa, he waves and tells Asim that perhaps Ayyappan did not call him yet, but that when he was ready he'd ask him to come.

I hope Ayyapan includes me as well.

Paulette Waltz: Tibetans In Exile

Photo © Paulette Waltz-All Rights Reserved
Here's an audio slideshow of black & white photographs of the Tibetan community in Manali by Paulette Waltz.

There are 3 Tibetan monasteries in Manali; two of which are located in the main downtown area of Manali, while the third monastery is on the opposite bank of the Beas river. In common with other Tibetan communities, there are a number of handicraft stores and restaurants. The two I frequented -while teaching at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop- was Chopsticks (not much imagination in the name, but decent and cheap food) and the delightful Peace Cafe which served a wonderful granola and yogurt breakfast, as well as noodle soup and other staples.

Paulette Waltz lives and works in Tokyo, but was born and raised near Washington, DC. She pursued Psychology at Emory University, studying in Europe and Africa. Post-graduation, she traveled Asia and lived in northeast China as well as Japan. She developed her interest in photography in Namibia, where coming across photogenic Himba women.