Radiant Traces: A Photographic Consideration of Sadhus

Eden Redmond

Photography is a referent medium. While a photograph is a physical object with its own ontology, the image depicted references a moment that has already ended. The mobility of a photograph relies on the divide between presence and absence, the material and the ephemeral. This photographic essay considers the tensions and parallels of such divides in photographing and photographs of sadhus, holy men who wander throughout East Asia. Sadhus relinquish worldly possessions in the name of spiritual pursuits, surviving on whatever the divine provides. The following images illustrate both their radiant spiritual presence, and the trace of a material boundedness.

Keywords: India; Sadhus; Photography; Spiritual; Trace

What the Photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the Photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially. (Barthes 4) 

Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Vol. 3, No. 4, Winter 2014, pp. 418–426. ISSN 2333-9489, eISSN 2333-9497. © 2014 The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Request permission to photocopy or reproduce article content at the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/ reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/dcqr.2014.3.4.418. 

In 2011, I went to India for a month with my stepmother and my father. My stepmother, a professor of communication studies, was there to study spiritual culture; her autoethnographic work focused on the performance of spiritual identity. My father was traveling to visit his spiritual teacher, Swami Sri Atmananda (Swamiji). Swamiji has been a positive presence in my life for some time; as a child, my father brought me to meditations, lectures, and workshops that Swa- miji hosted during his regular visits to the United States. Swamiji, and the lessons he taught from the Bhagavad Gita, served as an entry point for my access to concepts of spirituality, and guided me to consider existence in a more creative and fruitful way. I was also taken with Swamiji as a person. He was quick to laugh, a charismatic speaker, and noticeably kind. When invited, I was especially excited to visit Swamiji in his home in Tiruvannamalai, India. 

A religious gathering place, Tiruvannamalai is one of 32 districts in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The local mountain, Aruna- chala, is an auspicious site that hosts Ramana Maharshi’s ashram at its base. People come to Arunachala for religious pilgrimage; every full moon, thousands of pilgrims and residents of the town walk clockwise around the mountain in a ritual called pradakshina. In letters to devotees at Ramanasramam Ashram, Sri Ramana Maharshi explains the mean- ing of pradakshina by defining the parts of this Sanskrit word: pra means removal of all; da suggests the fulfillment of desires, kshi promises freedom from future births, and na gives deliverance through energy (Maharshi). 

While many who visit Tiruvannamalai attend the mountain ritual and stay for weeks or months at local ashrams, others—like sadhus—live in the caves of Arunachala and surrounding outdoor spaces of this place. Kama Maclean explains that sadhus

" are renunciates; at the time of their initiation, they are declared socially dead to their kin, and are disassociated from their former life. Throughout their yogic practices, they continue to articulate their realization that life is transitory. Smearing their bodies with sacred ash (vibhuti) is a reminder that the body will, in the passage of time, become ash. (323 original emphasis)"

I found the sadhus fascinating. They were physically present and also elsewhere; dreamy and buoyant; present, and absent. I found them at once materially forceful and ephemeral—an embodiment of the here and the not yet here (Mun ̃oz 170)—and for this reason, subjects I wished to photograph. 

In photography, trace refers to the idea that a photograph is a direct imprint from or representation of something and someone real. The idea of the trace comes from conversations begun in the early nineteenth century (and continued today) distinguishing the photograph from

other artistic mediums. A photograph is ‘‘a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be,’’ a trace of a subject and a moment that has already passed (Sontag 154). The subject and the world of a photo- graph (or a performance or an essay) are realized in their disappearance (Phelan 12). 

Susan Sontag writes that the subject of the photograph of a missing being will ‘‘touch me like the delayed rays of a star’’ (2). Roland Barthes echoes the language of radiations and radiance in his description of the absence of a literal subject and the auratic presence in a photograph. He writes, ‘‘from a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant’’ (80). The sadhus radiated an aura of both the material and the ineffable; traces of a tangible subject and an intangible spiritual presence. 

This understanding marked and guided my experience photo- graphing them. I found my focus on the chest, beads, and bearing of the sadhus, not on their faces. Their eyes and faces felt distant, receding so that it was challenging to focus a line of sight on them. Their material presence vibrated and hummed on the threshold of here and not yet here. The following photographs depict the wavering trace of presence/ absence and the radiating, if fleeting, immanence of spirit. 

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.

Maclean, Kama. ‘‘Seeing, Being Seen, and Not Being Seen: Pilgrimage, Tourism, and Layers of Looking at the Kumbh Mela.’’ Cross Currents 59.3 (2009): 319–41.

Maharshi, Sri Ramana. ‘‘Walking Around the Hill.’’ sriramanamaharshi.org. Sri Ramanasramam, 2013. Web. 11 Oct. 2014. <sriramanamaharshi.org/ arunachala-hill/walking-around-the-hill/>.

Mun ̃oz, Jose ́ Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYUP, 2009.

426 Eden Redmond

Phelan, Peggy. Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories. New York: Routlege, 1997.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Penguin, 1979.