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.

CNN brings us this short video, which was produced by Alex Zolbert, who traveled by train north of Delhi to witness and photograph the Dvitya Shahi Snan, or Second Royal Bath, on March 15, at the Ardh Kumbh Mela.

Photographs by Palani Mohan are included in the piece. Palani's photographic career started at the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, and since then he has been based in London, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and now Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia.

As I wrote on my earlier posts about the Hardiwar Kumbh Mela, exuberant hyperbole (and imaginative press releases) describe it as the largest gathering of humanity. It is not. The distinction belongs to the Maha Kumbh Mela which occurs after 12 'Purna Kumbh Melas', or after every 144 years. It was held at Allahabad in early 2001, and was attended by over 60 million people, making it the largest gathering in the world. I would also say that, in my opinion and having been to both Allahabad and Hardiwar, that the latter is an unappealing city and its ghats are not photogenic.

Whether it's over-hyped or not, all of the photographers who attended it over the past few weeks had a wonderful time, and captured magnificent images.

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.

Stijn Pieters is a self taught freelance photographer based in Gent, Belgium whose work focuses on under-reported social, political and environmental issues. He completed projects in Nepal, Kashmir, Palestine, Northern Ireland, Swaziland, Yemen, Morocco, Iran, Vietnam, The Philippines, India and Bangladesh; most of which tackle diverse issues, from HIV/aids in Swaziland to the pervasive gun culture in Yemen, from Agent Orange victims in Vietnam to stateless people in Bangladesh.

For his projects in Yemen in 2006 and Morocco in 2007, Stijn received respectively grants from the Pascal Decroos Foundation and the King Baudouin Foundation. His work has been published in Belgian magazines like MO*, Vrede, Menzo, Tertio, Vacature, Varen and Isel Magazine.

The above slideshow is on the Durga Puja in Bangladesh, and is very nice work by Stijn. It's an annual Hindu festival in South Asia that celebrates worship of the Hindu goddess Durga. You can click on it for a full screen experience.

The most celebrated Durga Puja is in Calcutta where more than 2000 pandals (temporary structures...like thrones) are set up for the populace to venerate. Durga Puja in Calcutta is often referred to as the Rio Carnival of the Eastern Hemisphere.

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.

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.

One of the highlights during my Tribes of South Rajasthan & Kutch Photo~Expedition™ was a few days spent photographing in Baneshwar during its annual fair, or mela.

The Baneshwar mela is popular tribal gathering held in the Dungarpur district in south Rajasthan. The gathering is followed by a fair held at a small delta formed by the river Soma and Mahi. It's a relatively modest event, without the hype and the attendance of the Kumbh Melas, but it's nevertheless a deeply religious gathering with simple and traditional rituals. Bhil and Garasia tribals come from the neighboring states of Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat to offer prayers to Lord Shiva, to perform pind daan, and to socialize.

Here's Baneshwar: Pind Daan, an audio-slideshow of photographs made and ambient sound gathered during the mela. Photographed in a documentary style, I chose to process the images in black & white despite their vivid colors.

The audio-slideshow was featured in my March email newsletter sent to my subscribers.