I Sail the Seven Seas!

This autumn I will be heading back to India for the second time this year, and as part of my forthcoming trip, I will be going to Varanasi to photograph the Hindu festival Dev Deepawali or "Diwali of the Gods". Hindu devotees light millions of oil lamps all along the holy Ghats of the River Ganges to create a spectacular sight and I am very excited about photographing it for the first time.

I have been in large crowds before in my life. Events that I have attended such as Glastonbury, The British Grand Prix at Silverstone and huge crowds at football matches such as in Madrid for Liverpools Champions League Final, Manchester when Rangers took over the city, and the tragic events of the Heysel Stadium in Brussels. As large as all those crowds were, nothing can prepare you for the vast sea of humanity at an Indian religious festival. While the British Grand Prix attracts 175,000 and there were estimates of 250,000 Rangers fans in Manchester, and Glastonbury gets that number each time, the festival I am attending in Varanasi will attract a crowd of 1 million people.

A million people is a serious crowd, and brings lots of issues for a photographer trying to shoot the festival, access to the Ghats, Hotel accommodation, not to mention safety and crush issues about being in a crowd that large. All serious issues to be taken seriously and I will be attending with a local, very well respected Indian fixer who will hopefully facilitate a successful on location shoot.

You may think that Dev Deepawali would be the largest crowd I've ever been in with a million devotees attending, but it is not even close. I was at Kumbh Mela in Nashik in 2015 and that festival had an attendance of 30 million people!! Quite incredible and I was in the heart of it attempting to photograph it.

Kumbh Mela in 2015 was quite the story. After meeting (and photographing alongside) a well respected photographer on a previous expedition (and I will not name him) we decided to attend Kumbh Mela in Nashik together, with the gent promising me he had two Access all Areas Press Passes, and accommodation in the secure press compound. Excellent, or so I thought! We agreed to meet in Mumbai and then travel the three hours to the Kumbh Mela site. Things however, started to unravel as I landed on the agreed day in Mumbai as I couldn't get hold of my him. No problem I thought and just chill in the airport hotel as he was flying in from the states and may have been delayed. The next morning I awoke to the message he had "complications' on his journey, and would meet me in Nashik at Kumbh Mela in two days time. Not ideal, but ok and I made my way up to Nashik to meet him.

We met in Nashik the next day, and he admitted he hadn't got the press passes, and needed to collect them 'the next day, or the day after' but we could stay in the general public accommodation area until then. Now the alarm bells where ringing. I've never seen as many people in my life. A sea of people for as far as the eye could see. I have a drone these days, and I wish I had had one then to capture properly the vastness of this festival which is very hard to do from the ground. We checked into the temporary accommodation he had which turned out to be a corrugated iron building with people sleeping side to side on the floor of the building like sardines. Seething heat, no aircon and open sewers. You can guess the rest. Needless to say, he never got the Press Passes and I spent the next 5 nights in squalor. The absolute worst conditions I've ever been in, and it cost us our friendship as I felt he had deliberately withheld the truth about Press Passes and access to the Ghats. I did get some great images from within Kumbh Mela as millions of pilgrims gathered, however I had no access to the Ganges and the Ghats for the images I had hoped for and there was nothing I could do about it without the promised Press Passes.

After 5 nights, with little sleep (people hold religious ceremonies 24 hours) horrendous open sewers, no showers etc. I decided to leave Kumbh Mela which is almost impossible until it closes. Once you are in, you stay in, I was told. After many attempts to get out I finally made it out on a crew / staff bus that goes around the festival site at dawn moving workers in and out. Vehicles are banned within the huge site due to the sheer volume of millions of people. The bus I managed to bribe my way onto arrived at 5am and I was waiting with all my gear. It appeared just as dawn broke down a dirt track surrounded by clouds of dust. Packed to capacity and with what looked like 30 people sat on the roof! They managed to pull me on, and the folk on the bus had my camera bags on their heads as I became the talk of the bus. A mad white guy with cameras crammed into a bus full of Indian workers. I must have had 20 people within inches of me all asking me things in dialects I could not understand. There was no aggression only curiosity about who I was. Eventually the sea of faces parted and a young boy of about 13 was pushed in front of me who they decided could speak English. Silence descended on the bus and they all listened as he spoke the only English he knew, which was "You sail the seven seas"! Laughing, I said "yes, I do, I sail the seven seas" to which the whole bus fell about laughing and clapping and congratulating the young man on his translation skills. The bus waved me off at the staff car park and disappeared into the dust with all my new Indian friends all waving and shouting goodbye.

I never did see my photographer friend again, and we lost touch, after his disingenuous promises. You know who you are if you ever read this, and it's a shame the way we parted company. I am nervously and excitedly looking forward to Dev Deepawali in Varanasi, and praying that my new fixer gets me to the Ghats on the Ganges to photograph this festival. Fingers crossed, it is much smaller than Kumbh Mela at Nashik. A mere million people attending this one! So easy peasy right? Time will tell :)