The Ganges
India is not a place, it is an experience. And the Ganges is not a river, it is an aspect of the divine. Born and brought up in Rajasthan, Raghubir Singh felt the spell of the river, its destructive power, and its majesty. Although he lived for many years in the West, he returned to the river again and again. He saw its contradictions as part of a process of growth and change: naked sadhus and ancient rituals alongside electric crematoria and modern ports. This book brings to life Raghubir Singh's personal pilgrimage along the Ganges, from the Himalayas, where the river riscs among snows, through the villages of the Gangetic Plain, past Banaras and through Bihar, to the Bay of Bengal between India and Bangladesh. On the journey he captured the essence of the river's many different stages and moods, its strange and stunning beautym its ferocity during the monsoon, the intimate daily lives of the people who live along it, and its powerful religious significance, attested by the millions of Hindus who take part in the ageless pilgrimages and festivals along its banks.
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RAGHUBIT SINGH received India’s national award, the Padma Shri, in 1983, and by the time of his death, in New York in 1999, he was considered to be one of the world’s finest photographers. Born in Rajasthan, India in 1942. He began his career in the mid-1960s he moved to Paris and developed an international reputation over the next three decades with a series of books of colour photography on India. His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. A retrospective of his work, River of Colour, was published in 1998 by Phaidon Press. |
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