Sheba Chhachhi
Further images
So free am I, so gloriously free
Free from three petty things –
From mortar, from pestle and from my twisted lord Freed from rebirth and death am I
And all that has held me down
Is hurled away.
Mutta, from Therigatha: Songs of the Nuns, sixth century BC
The woman initiate is stripped of her secular and gendered identity. Naked, shorn, fasting, and sleepless, she prepares all night to be divested, by dawn, of name, family lineage, caste, place of origin, and ancestors up to seven previous generations. On the banks of the river, she performs her own death rites. The photographs, taken while I was an honorary insider, follow a group of women as they perform this sloughing-off of old identities step by step, over three days, until their immersion in the river. Each woman arises from that baptism reborn as an ascetic, renamed as a daughter of the river.