Dr. Gerald T. Carney
Professor of Religion
Photo Gallery

Since 1980, I have been doing research in and around this pilgrimage center in north central India.  This past August I returned for an all-too short research trip to complete acquisition of materials for a critical study of a Hindu guru who came to the United States in 1902.  I did that, but these eight days provided me an opportunity to see Vrindavana again and in many ways for the first time.  The word darshan (title of a book by Harvard's Diana Eck) means both "seeing" and "being seen."  Most often, it refers to gazing at the Hindu deity in a temple, but it also points to seeing holy people, sacred rivers, pilgrims' steps -- the rich panorama of Indian life.

The challenge of living in India is to "keep your eyes open."  As a scholar, unbelievably, I have spent days and weeks almost totally in my room in the Indian ashram, working hard on my research reports, oblivious to the life going on around me, looking at trips to the bazaar as distractions, ignoring the seemingly too-ordinary people who make up my everyday Indian world.  On longer research trips, I have put off "seeing" and taking pictures of people and life for tomorrow and tomorrow, tomorrows that never came.  I have hundreds of incredible pictures and slides, but the focus of vision tends to narrow and extraordinary moments become with repetition too mundane to grab the heart again and again.  A shorter visit forces both vision and action.  I took some of my best pictures ever of India during a rushed thirty-six hour visit in 1991 while I was en route to a conference in South India: there was no tomorrow to see these people and touch a vision of their lives.

Now I had two digital cameras (mid-range point-and-shoot) and a scant six days.  On my second morning (after recuperating from the long flights and the always-wild four-hour taxi ride from Delhi), I did parikrama, the pious circumambulation of the city.  While my feet were not ready to go barefoot those twelve kilometers, my eyes and lens were open.  Early August was adikmas, the leap-month added to the Hindu calendar every thirty-one lunar months to rebalance the seasons; it is a very favorable time for pilgrimage and there were thousands of people following the path, all barefoot, some making the journey over several days by repeated prostrations (called dandauti parikrama) on the sacred ground.  I was taken especially by Keshi Ghat, the prime bathing place on the parikrama-path, where beggars, boatmen, Rajasthani pilgrims, and local farmers all mixed with the purveyors of religious wares on the riverbank and the attentive servants of the riverside temples of Shiva and Yamuna-devi, the river as goddess herself.  I resolved to return at sunrise each morning to see what I might see at Keshi Ghat.  So I did. I offered my worship, my puja, to Yamuna, hired a boy named Krishna to row me across to the other shore, caught moments of sunrise reflections off worshipping bathers and now-everyday-familiar faces, and got a glimmer of the sacred power of holy place.  I know that there is more to see and that I will return to Keshi Ghat with my eyes open; for now, my heart has seen and I have been seen, grabbed by visions not of my own making.

So many extraordinary moments in those days: an incredible hour-long sunset over the Yamuna during an otherwise overcast monsoon week, children rich and poor who posed for the stranger's smile, morning at the vegetable and fruit market, powerful darshan at Rangji temple newly opened to foreigners and non-Hindus, a warm welcome from the rowdy millers on the grain-grinders' street.  Some old friends were gone: the old tailor who made my Indian shirts, the Jewish-American hippie-scholar-devotee Asim Krishna Das, the couple who had lived amid ruins on the temple path lending their flickering candle-light to my dark way home, and one-eyed Krishna who brought me tea morning and afternoon on previous trips.  Each left a tear in the fabric of my life.  A new beggar sits along the road to Chir Ghat  in place of the woman who waited on my daily scant coins.  Raju's daughter Priya shines a new generation's promise.  And Guru Purushottama Goswami, my friends Srivatsa and Sandhya, my colleagues Robyn and Michael, the old photographer Jagadish still make Vrindavana home, my home.

On my first night at Radharaman temple, I saw again an old woman, a widow who had lived for two decades in a hovel under one of the temple priests' houses.  I had photographed her and her home several times before. Her face was the plaintive beggar who looked from my office door in Maples for five years.  Now she stood at death's door.  Local people cared for her, but she readied herself for death and refused to leave her place at the temple gate.  Even in the noonday sun, she moved but a few feet into the shade to escape the worst.  Every morning she would touch the ground outside the entrance, taking the dust from the feet of the holy ones who had passed that way.  There was something obscene about taking her picture, but I just had to - had to before it was too late - touch and take the dust from her feet to pay homage to her dignity and steadfast love of God.

I had darshan.  I went and I saw. Now with some nine hundred digital images, with Photoshop and Epson printers as my staff, barefoot on sacred ground, I continue the pilgrimage.