In the sacred, the sublime

Turning the pages of this book of panoramic images of ritual and religion from around India, says Kishore Singh, is a ceremonious act in itself.

You’d expect G R K Reddy, chairman and managing director of the privately owned Karaikal Port, to be in a business suit, not in a veshti, only he’s on his way to perform puja “for the peaceful conduct of business at the port”. Elsewhere, Sonali Kochhar, “wife of a wealthy lawyer, performs puja to Lord Ganesh in the marbled portico of their Italianate mansion” in a New Delhi farmhouse which “resonates each morning with channeled sacred chants to cleanse the space of any negative energies. A priest comes in every day to perform a formal puja at the family shrine on an upper floor. Twice a month, a havan (fire sacrifice) is performed for peace and thanksgiving,” observes writer Bharati Motwani.

 

Puja over, Sonali probably steps out for lunch with friends, or shopping, or to pick up her children from school, just as Reddy probably heads for an office meeting, or to sign more business deals, none of which is unusual, for in their propitiation of the gods Reddy and Kochhar are among the millions of Indians who will not undertake anything new, or start the day, without genuflecting before shrines, bribing gods with the promise of compensation in return for a favour, keeping fasts, chanting or celebrating divinity. Photographer Amit Pasricha’s sweeping overview of the sacred — and not the religious, he is at pains to explain — comes packed in a book that weighs five kilos and is 2.5 metres wide with its gatefolds open, a tour-de-force of what Aman Nath, who has written the foreword, describes as the “deep spiritualism of India — be it inward and silent or outward and celebratory — which is enacted every day, in every house, street, village and city”, and which Pasricha has photographed in its many avatars. So there are his panoramic images of Koran lessons and Navjote ceremonies, of Holi at Braj and Shiva worship at Khajuraho, of pigeons being fed and family havans, of ceremonial processions and consecrated foods, small everyday acts of piety or extravagant ceremonies of commemoration.

Pasricha has built up an enviable reputation as a panoramist. In his previous The Monumental India Book, you could be pardoned for thinking something was amiss in the extraordinary images, a condition of the publisher being that they be taken sans people. The missing chaos of India rendered them somewhat sterile, something the photographer more than makes up in The Sacred India Book which teems with people felicitating their village deities in Tamil Nadu and prostrating to wayside gods in Orissa (somewhat oblivious of the kitschy erotica amidst the divine beings). Here are climactic sacred orgies, such as the Urs at Ajmer or the arti at Haridwar; timeless images of Kashmiri women thronging a wooden bridge over the Dal Lake, returning after observing Moharram, while mist wreaths another bridge in Rishikesh; a woman is caught in a moment of rapture amidst satsangis in Delhi, while others dance in ecstasy at the Osho Ashram in Pune; devotees sweep the marble walkways of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, have their heads tonsured in Nagore, feed rats in Deshnoke, tie sacred threads around the roots of a banyan tree, place serpent plaques, consecrate their cars…and in an ancient temple in Bhubaneswar, sacred food, or bhog, is prepared to offer to mortals after it has been sanctified by the gods, each of whom has their own favourites, notes Motwani: “Ganesh is offered laddoos, Krishna butter, Shiva is served raw milk, Durga is propitiated with buffalo meat and Kali with mutton.”

Nor is Pasricha’s book devoid of its own sacred rituals — opening it is an act of ceremony, turning it into a family event rather than the act of isolation that accompanies most book reading or, in the case of picture books, book viewing. It’s not the kind of book you can idly flip while sitting alone in a chair by the window. Instead, like a splendid feast, it requires company, and if that company is the kind that enjoys a visual treat, then like the pictures themselves, it comes alive, turning each representation into a shared experience of what the photographer describes as “India’s sacred gift to the world [with] its enduring capacity to experience subjectivity.”

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THE SACRED INDIA BOOK
Photographs: Amit Pasricha
Text: Bharati Motwani
Publisher: The Shoestring Publisher
Pages: 224
Price: Rs 10,000