THE MONUMENTAL INDIA BOOK
Amit Pasricha and Aman Nath, The Shoestring Publisher, US$228
While immersing myself in this coffee-table pictorial book, I wondered how words could capture or describe visual amazement. In The Monumental India Book, Amit Pasricha fully develops the merits of photography in his pictorial book, presenting India with a beauty in a deeper sense.
To him, India is a silent country with ancient ruins scattered across the land, those ruins like a slowly fading scar left on a growing and changing face. Silence is of great importance to Pasricha, at least through his lens.
The human face is seldom seen in his photos of India and if it is, the person must be traditionally attired and harmoniously immersed in the historic settings – for example, a monk walking up the steps of the Mahadeva Temple, or the Muslims gathering in Chisti Dargah, the most sacred pilgrimage destination of the religion.
According to Pasricha, his aim is to “photograph while India sleeps”. Only when a city slumbers does the rapid march of modernisation get an opportunity to breathe and take stock, albeit for a while.
The silence successfully captured in his photos draws solitude from the past and the lost space of thinking, which is vital for us, especially in the fast-changing times of today, to awake the senses and regain the reverence for the simple pleasures of life.
Through Pasricha’s lens, one is able to grasp the splendour of India, sometimes in 360 degrees at one glance as Pasricha “shot each panorama part by part and then digitally stitched the images together”.
Sylvia Wu