Faces of Kumbh

Captured during my 2025 trip to the Mahakumbh Mela, these images reflect the quiet strength and order in the lives of sadhus (holy men) in the akhadas (monasteries). Their way of living moved me deeply, humbling, and unlike anything I’ve witnessed.

This photographic series emerged from my 2025 journey to the Mahakumbh Mela, a site of spiritual magnitude where millions converge, but within which moments of profound stillness unfold. Drawn instinctively to the akhadas, or monastic camps that house sadhus, or renunciants, I found myself not merely observing but quietly entering a world shaped by asceticism, ritual, and a striking internal order.

The work resists spectacle. Each image is a fragment of lived experience, captured not as documentation but as reverence. These are not portraits in the traditional sense, but studies in presence: the ash-dusted skin, the gaze turned inward, the gestures shaped by lifetimes of practice. There is a silent architecture to their way of being, one built not of brick or mortar, but of belief, austerity, and time.

What moved me was not only the visual richness, but the deep tension between detachment and discipline. These men live with so little, yet carry themselves with an immense, unwavering sense of purpose. In photographing them, I became acutely aware of my impermanence in their space, an outsider catching fleeting traces of a life I could only begin to understand.

This body of work is, above all, an offering of a gesture of respect. A visual meditation on devotion, endurance, and the quiet, defiant beauty of lives lived beyond the margins.