Anthony Pond | Entranced

Photo © Anthony Pond-All Rights Reserved

It is said that in Varanasi one has to watch out for four things: young and beautiful widows, cows (and their patties), holy men (ie sadhus) and irregular steps of the ghats.

However, I would add another important consideration to these four. While Varanasi is the quintessential Hindu city, it also has a sizable Muslim community of almost a third of its approximately one and a half million inhabitants. There has been Muslims in Varanasi for hundreds of years, and they have built their own societies where they live and work with respect for their own rituals and religion.

During my 2014 The Sacred Cities Photo-Expedition-Workshop to Varanasi and Vrindavan, I made it an obligatory stop to schedule a photo shoot at the shrine of the Sufi saint Bahadur Shahid in the outskirts of the city. Its atmosphere was electric with a large number of women in deep trances and imploring the dead saint for favors.

Anthony Pond participated in the photo expedition, and has just produced Entranced; a monochromatic multimedia piece that very accurately depicts what the atmosphere was like whilst we were there. The shrine welcomes Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims who mingle and seek blessings from this Muslim saint, and because of the prevailing religious intensity, some of them go into intense trances.

The trances you will witness in this multimedia piece are caused by the religious fervor of the women involved, who react in the ethereal "presence" of a saint...a syndrome colloquially called hajri. Being in a trance signified the entrance of the deceased saint in the body of the entranced person, to rid it from ailments, from jinns and other undesirable symptoms.

In my own secular (but non medical) view, these “hajri” manifestations such as auditory hallucinations, the paranoid or bizarre delusions,  may well be schizophrenia.

Anthony worked for more than two decades in the criminal courts in California as an attorney for the Public Defender’s Office. Now pursuing his passion for travel and photography, he travels repeatedly to South East Asia and India, amongst other places, to capture life, the people and the culture.

POV: The ‘Russian Nesting Dolls’ Syndrome

Photo © Tewfic El-Sawy-All Rights Reserved

Caused by a number of reasons, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted on my blog. Traveling to Hanoi to expand on my research for my forthcoming photo book “Hau Dong: The Spirit Mediums of Vietnam”, then to Cairo then to San Francisco for non-photography related reasons, has limited my available time and focus to do so.

Since I started my involvement in this personal project, I’ve experienced a resurgence of excitement, not only for photography, but also a spike in my intellectual interest in syncretic religious traditions, occult cultural customs and practices, Asian history and languages, to mention just a few.

My photographic expeditions-workshops were characterized with constantly having a definite documentary objective to them. Whether the objectives were Sufi festivals, obscure Hindu religious events such the gathering of the Vellichappadu and Theyyam, or the Cao Dai tradition in central Vietnam, I always had an intellectual, and not only a photographic, interest in such esoteric activities, and those who joined my trips seemed to have shared that. However, being practically unable to spend but just a few days at such events meant that significant ‘coverage’ was impossible, and this frustrated me. Spending weeks in a single location or on one single religious event was impractical with a half dozen or more other photographers in tow.

Literally stumbling on the Vietnamese religious tradition of Đạo Mẫu, and its ceremonial tangential manifestations such as Hầu Đồng and Hát Chầu Văn in late 2014 literally supercharged, and reinvigorated, my enthusiasm for documentary photography, audio recording, storytelling and multimedia production.

I’ve already amassed a substantial inventory of photographs and interviews relating to Hầu Đồng ceremonies and the mediums who are involved in the practice, but similar to matryoshka dolls (aka Russian nesting dolls), every ceremony or interview I attend or conduct reveals another interesting opportunity. Moreover, the more I read and research about Đạo Mẫu, the more I discover other influences that intrigue me, and that I want to explore and incorporate in my continuously evolving personal project. I now have the serious fear of not knowing when to call it quits.

The British idiomatic expression “how long is a piece of string?” in response to a question of how long will a project take is apt in my case. It’s in my hands when I deem it to be complete, but with the continuous emergence of connected traditions, I’ll have a difficult time to say enough is enough.

Sreeranj Sreedhar | Ashtami Rohini

Photo © Sreeranj Sreedhar- All Rights Reserved

I was under the totally ridiculous impression that I had photographed most of the important religious festivals in India until I recently saw photographs of Ashtami Rohini, an annual celebration of the birth of the Hindu deity Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu.

The festival is celebrated in August–September, and includes dramatic enactments of the life of Krishna, and is observed all over India, but especially observed in Mathura and Vrindavan; which Indiaphiles know as the epicenters for the famous Indian festival of Holi. 

On this day, women fast and keep vigil in Krishna's temple till night. When the pujas are over, they are allowed to share the edible offerings left by the devotees for Krishna. The temples are illuminated with countless of oil lamps, and worship goes on almost till the early hours of the morning.

Sreeranj Sreedhar photographed Ashtami Rohini in Kerala, and his photographs provide a wonderful insight into the festival, and the enactments of Krishna's life. The make-up sessions, the painting of the feet and palms, as well as the magnificent costumes are all documented in his gallery.

In his Photo Stories, Sreeranj also photographed the Holi festival in Nandgaon, and in Barsana. These photographs remind me of my own 2014 Holi photo expedition, especially those of the young Holi reverlers holding water pumps filled with color water to spray the passerby.

Sreeranj Sreedhar is a travel, documentary and culture photographer who's creently based in Dubai, but is from the Indian state of Kerala. He started his photography in 2011.