The magazine of the photo-essay
Nov / Dec 2020 back issue
Indian LightsTravels across a mystical country
“A free, really high quality photo-essay magazine. Fabulous!” Stephen Fry. British actor, writer and film maker
by Thierry Clech
It is unclear whether this country emanates from a dream or a nightmare, whether one watches over it or sleeps within it, to the point of being convinced that one has seen what is not there, or of imagining oneself to be the victim of a delusion in the face of the tangible apparition of Indian horrors and lunacies. This crazy and perpetual swarming of the subcontinent’s cities as soon as dawn breaks, amid this smell that cannot be defined, at least not without breaking it down into its elements—spices, sewage, sweat, urine, incense, cardamom, burning garbage, moldering stones after the monsoon, fried food, jasmine—this blaring bedlam on asphalt cloaked in the acrid, torrid smoke of the exhaust pipes—archaic buses, dying cars, rickshaws patched up a hundred times over—this concert of anarchic horns that, in warning everything no longer warns anything, in the evening it all collapses into silence to contemplate water and fire in Mumbai, Pondicherry, Chennai, Haridwar, facing the Ganges, the Arabian Sea, the Indian Ocean, or the Bay of Bengal. The grand spectacle that occurs when the sun sets, each day it is as if they are seeing it for the first or last
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time, dressed in their multicolored saris, their rags, and those white skirts that the men fold up and tie over their thighs, evoking a type of swaddling. And when, at dusk, the star of the sea and the river dwindles behind the horizon and they light their rudimentary candles—clarified butter and cotton wick—and deposit them on the waves in flower bowls, these hundreds of small flames seem to reflect thebrightness of the stars scattered across the celestial vault. Lights that ricochet, from the heart of darkness, through the universe and across eternity.
Mamallapuram Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2010 Thierry Clech
Kolkata, 2010 Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2017 Thierry Clech
Kochi, 2009 Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2010 Thierry Clech
Kolkata, 2010. Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2017. Thierry Clech
Kolkata, 2010 Thierry Clech
Varanasi, 2017 Thierry Clech