The Guise of a Goddess

•

It's slightly ironic that we had a sort of quarantine in mind while doing this shoot.

Do you ever wonder what women in our mythos do when their husbands or lovers; the great sagas, warriors, kings, and the whole lot - were out creating a story?

With what patience do they wait for their part in the tale? And what do they do to while their time away?

We imagined a woman playing dress-up, using makeup to feel like a Goddess in her isolation. Creating a sense of self-worship she could not from destiny.

Here is what we hope, is a part of her tale in photographs.

I've always found it unusual that all our Goddesses in Hindu mythology, save for Kali were depicted with tones of cream and wheat. Meanwhile, many of our Gods in blue were spoken of fondly for their darker skin tone, heck - Krishna literally means black one.

Kali - who is traditionally known for her wild black hair and blue skin while respected and loved, it is always with a reverence for her ferocity as the Goddess of Destruction.
My actual name is another for Durga and though it's been decades since I was religious, I've always been fascinated with my namesake.

We hated the emphasis on being fair or lighter in skin-tone in our culture, and Durga's dual avatar with Kali has been a concept I've always resonated with.

So for this shoot, we decided to show our own version of a dark skinned Goddess - one that didn't need to be adorned with skulls and fear to be accepted.

There's such a sense of calm that loving yourself brings you. Being free from the constraints of expectations.

As women we're always told that we're a Goddess to empower ourselves.
But could we really handle it? Would we want the worship? The blind devotion of millions and the unrestricted prayers that come with it.

Is then being or feeling like a Goddess have to do with power? Of knowing that you are achievable of greatness.

Or maybe, just once in a while, we just want to feel beautiful without needing to explain why.

Without needing to follow a sense of duty to allow ourselves to.

The sense of being someone else while I was still me. It's what cosplay does for me. Resonating so much with a character that I wish I could adopt more of their personality, but on a temporary basis, cos I still love me.

While doing this shoot, the whole time I thought of how my mother would say in an excited string of words how she had decided growing up that naming your child after a God was silly and she would never do so and yet here she was with two children named after popular Hindu Gods.

It took many years for my parents to have a child, and after six and visiting numerous places of worship, my mother liked to believe that I was born after a session of prayer at a little Durga temple hidden away in the hills of Karnataka.

Constantly while throughout the process of the shoot, I wondered if I was doing this with a sense of connecting with my deceased mother in some way. Whether it was just a ploy to do away with prayer, and find my own way to talk to her. Whether by doing this shoot, I wanted to understand why she placed such immense faith in deities when I always believed her to be stronger than any God or Goddess she'd make us worship.

And I realised, it had to do a lot more with the sense of security that you feel in trusting a powerful being that you believe protects you.

How powerful can one really be for themselves when it takes your love for the people you care about to drive you to do extraordinary things. Disguised pleasantly as the blessings of a higher power.

One of my dreams was to go for the Durga Pujo in Kolkata with my mother at least once. And though I was able to experience it without her during a work trip a few years back, it was honestly the only trip of worship I was willing to do with my mother and it's unfortunate I can't do so now.

But my attendance of the festival once still left me in great fascination, reflecting in a series of poem accompanied photographs that you can find on my profile somewhere.
What has always struck me is the height of devotion that our people dedicate to idols while the women in their own homes are treated very differently. While you had the whole country singing and celebrating for a Goddess, going unnoticed were the increase in numbers for domestic abuse and sexual harassment of women.

For the concept of this shoot, one of the first things I thought of was having a woman express freedom and pure emotion by being a different version of herself to play in her own story. And then rudely have it stripped away until she remained what her situation allowed her to be. Just another forgettable character in someone else's tale.

It's fascinating how we find it easier to worship a concept of a woman, than allow ourselves to give the privilege of letting one be herself.