As Gods Among Us

A photographer explores the gamut of India’s ritual performers who embody deities as a form of worship

- Kai Friese

A demon asur nonchalantly twirling a human skull and the blade that took it; the buffalo-headed monster Mahisasur, and his nemesis, the half-man, half-lion Narsimha; a pair of gopis, or milkmaids, waving peacock feathers to catch a polyamorous god's eye; the naked and bloodthirsty goddess Kali, with her many arms and garland of skulls-the dramatis personae of the Hindu cosmos is famously colourful and many-headed. But the selection of wild incarnations stalking the pages of Charles Fréger's book of portraits Aam Aastha offers a glimpse of a more startling, and perhaps deeper, paganism than the narrowing visual imagination of mainstream Hindu iconography proliferating in India today.

While modern Hindu nationalism fosters a state-sponsored religious aesthetic increasingly focussed on gigantic temples and statues, Charles Fréger's meticulously composed images of the 'little traditions' of religious devotion staged by costumed 'folk' artists from more than 60 local cultures across the country, are both strikingly beautiful and quietly unsettling.

Fréger has, it would be fair to say, something of an obsession with ritual costumed performance, or masquerades. He has been working on related themes since at least 2010, in a beguiling series of books including Wilder Mann, on mythic, feral characters of European cultures, Yokainoshima on traditional festival costumes of rural Japan, and Cimarron, on the ritual costumes and characters assumed by descendants of African slaves in the Americas.

Despite the resonance of these earlier projects, Fréger told me that Aam Aastha (which translates as 'common devotions') was "more ambitious" because it focussed on masquerades and dances linked to religion. "This is what distinguishes it from my other projects right from the start," he said. "Here, we depict a wide variety of representations, often tribal, of Buddhist and Hindu deities."