Synopsis
Spirituality is the shining thread that runs through every motif of the rich and complex tapestry that is India. It is not only worship in temple, mosque or church, in gurudwara or agiary, that defines the faith of Indians - it is their ordinary, everyday kind of spirituality that serves as an axis, balancing the temporal with the eternal. "The Sacred India Book" seizes and distils this ephemeral quality often described as 'the Spirit of India'. Amit Pasricha seeks out meditative moments and momentous ones, exalted moments and exultant ones - the eternal quality of a weathered cross overlooking a windswept beach, the ecstatically outstretched hands of Holi celebrants at Vrindavan, the quiet faith of a women as she ties a piece of coloured thread on the latticed screen of a shrine. His photographs lay before the viewer the colourful, intricate mosaic of Indian religion, spirituality, ritual and tradition: images of religious art such as the living, writhing energy of unfinished idols in a potter's shed in Kolkata; the making of religious music a Buddhists chant from atop icy mountains; and, the richness of religious traditions in the pristine precision of a Parsi ritual. Amit Pasricha's masterful use of the panoramic format - in unintentional but fitting consonance with the wide, encompassing nature of the sacred in India - and Bharati Motwani's insightful text make "The Sacred India Book" a limited edition to be preserved and treasured.
From the Author
I grew up in a house on a road named after a Hindu god. At one end of the street stood a Sikh gurudwara with a golden dome and on the other, a Hindu temple dedicated to Hanuman.
Visits to both were routine and regular. At home, my grandfather Bauji, a religious man, would perform puja every day. We lived in a joint family and on special festive occasions, over a dozen family members would huddle into the small puja room to pray. When Bauji died, we took his ashes to Allahabad to immerse them in the confluence of the holy rivers. I went to a school run by Catholic missionaries and attended an Anglican Christian College. If I was influenced by any of these experiences, I was not aware of it. But what I do know is that my photography caused me to see and sense more deeply than I otherwise would have. I learned that while some of the best photographs are often lucky accidents, most of them happen because the photographer has recognized and captured the quintessence of a person, a dress, a landscape, a monument.
And so, perhaps somewhere amidst the several religious influences of my growing years, I
grasped a certain quintessence that is the germ of this book. That all religious activities are like parts of a grand symphonic ensemble, incomplete and unresolved unless heard all together.
When I put aside my camera, close my eyes, and lay my ear to the soul (for want of a better word) of modern India, I hear what at first appears to be a cacophony of random, conflicting noises. But if I continue to listen, the sound organizes itself to become in fact a harmony - the coming together of disparate tones and tympanic beats in a composition of rare beauty and spirit. In cities and urban hubs crowded with traffic jams, the debris of continual construction, and the scramble for ever-opening opportunities, I stumble at every turn upon a religious rite, a ritual, a call to prayer. Far away, in forests, ruins and forgotten villages, a reprise of an
ancient sacred cadence plays on. Down holy rivers are riffs of a liquid hymn; up on frigid
mountains the deep timbre of a chant freezes on the icy air. Everywhere is worship - a
constant music. As I listen, I am lifted clear off my feet, camera and all.
When I travelled across India to photograph the sacred, I saw also how, over distances,
religions shifted shape, reorganized themselves, took on new forms, or rediscovered old
roots. While historians, anthropologists and archaeologists seek to understand religions by
tracing migrations, dissecting dogma, stating what was spread by the sword and what arrived through trade routes, postulating, rationalizing, theorizing, classifying; what I experienced on the ground was considerably different. Religion was dynamic and organic, intensely subjective, responding swiftly to space and time, metamorphosing unpredictably on contact, and usually too personal to allow any meaningful delineation, deconstruction and definition. There really was no Big Picture.
When I swept my lens across the panorama of India, I saw that there was no place where worship was not, or where it had not left its palm print. It was in places it had no business being - in communism, in entertainment, in commerce, and in science. The sacred was
everywhere and every story about India had a subtext of belief and religion. History,
geography, politics, industry and the pursuit of wealth, culture, science - all of these were run through with the same sacred thread. What was more astonishing than the diversity of the sacred Indian experience, was the uniformity of its pervasiveness.
This book was photographed in the panoramic medium, where segments of a view are digitally stitched together to create a very wide image. In my earlier panoramic book, The Monumental India Book, I photographed India's medieval monuments - unmoving subjects, still, within and without. This time my subjects were alive, sometimes teeming, often bearing me along physically in their surging celebrations of faith. In this sea of movement I would have to find my long panoramic shot, part of which was often behind me. There was besides, the problem of people moving from one frame into the other, creating a blur. I learned how to plan my picture seams in areas of minimal movement and to shoot a sequence at lightning speed. You could say I learned to dance, turning with and around the swirl of energy. In some of the images, inspired perhaps by the Indian art form of narrative miniature painting, where a story unfolds within a single picture, I have experimented with panoramas where the subject appears more than once, using still photography to create a semblance of a moving picture.
Revisiting places that I had seen just five to seven years before, I was amazed at how much had changed so quickly. There were shopping malls and international brands where earlier there had been a dhobi-ghat. Small-town girls wore skinny jeans where earlier they would not step out without their dupattas. Disposable diapers, TV talent hunts and Facebook had changed the face of the country. What was even more amazing to me was how quickly people had adapted to their dramatically altered physical and cultural environment, behaving as if all of this had always been there. Amidst all this change was the persistence of faith and religion, quite undiminished. Amidst the diamonds and champagne of elite India too, a spiritual sensibility was implicit. Tycoons and their bhumi pujas, Bollywood stars and their mahurat ceremonies, politicians and their iftar parties, temples famous for blessing a new car. This meeting and mixing of two worlds is visible in several of the images in this book. It was as though India has not really experienced a collision between materialism and the life of the spirit. It had developed a huge appetite for all things materialistic and modern, and the gods smiled their approval.
This has always been India's way - to take every hard object, every fierce invader, every
proven truth, every absolute idea, and spin it around until it no longer recognizes itself. This has been the country's strength and its weakness. It's a chancy kind of order, always on the verge of descending into chaos but never doing so. Like the Universe itself.
Likewise, a book on Sacred India is always in danger of collapsing into the cliché of 'exotic
India', but I like to think my images are held back from that by the very device of the
panoramic format. It does not allow the viewer to be an outsider. It pulls you right into the vortex of the picture - into the middle of a drunken crowd, inside the dark, sooty sanctum of a temple, or at the feet of a goddess. It makes your viewing subjective. When I shoot a panoramic picture, I shoot what is wrapped around me, and that is what the viewer sees unraveled. An inside view.
The philosopher Kierkegaard once said, "Truth is subjectivity". Subjectivity is the worm's-eye view of human experience. The Western mind is trained to think that objectivity is truth - the bird's-eye view of the stream of life. But reality is really where the two intersect. India's sacred gift to the world is its enduring capacity to experience subjectivity and to offer this mystic magic to the Western spiritual seeker. The West offers us its rational, logical analyses of phenomena and the human condition. Someday in the future, when two worlds overlap, we will indeed be wise.
While the images in this book do not constitute a comprehensive body of work on the sacred in India, they are then, random, transcendent notes from the constant music that I have started to hear.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
