ASHES LIGHT

A mission to India to photograph holy men ends up being a deeper, more spiritual journey than anticipated

- Words & photography by Andrew Eldon

I was up an hour earlier than planned, at 3am—the music from the temple across the street had been especially celebratory that night—but my excitement probably would have woken me up soon enough anyway. In an hour or so, I was meeting my fixer, who I knew only as Manoj, and who had found three sadhu, or holy men, willing to be photographed at sunrise on the Varanasi flood plains. I just had to hope they'd show up.

I'd come to Varanasi to photograph such individuals; in particular, I was in search of members of the Aghori, an ancient Hindu sect whose beliefs and practices can seem extreme to outsiders. They embrace the taboo of death and decay to gain spiritual enlightenment, and their methods of doing so—meditating on top of corpses, using human skulls as bowls and even consuming human flesh from corpses found in the cremation sites along the river—symbolise their acceptance of death.