Connecting Hindu Gods and Humans

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Growing up in India, Manjari Sharma spent vacations with her parents experiencing the vivid sounds, sights and smells of Hindu temples throughout the country. She remembers all of her senses being engaged, and the anticipation of encountering paintings or statues of Hindu deities as she entered temples that were centuries or even millennia old.

As a teenager, Ms. Sharma became less interested in her parents’ religion, and after moving to the United States at age 22, she rarely visited any temples. She studied fine arts at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio, and the local art museum replaced temples as the place to experience the divine.

But as she turned 30 and began to think of having children of her own, she recalled her childhood spiritual encounters. She started to focus on the Sanskrit term “darshan,” which means sight. It is often used to describe an immediate spiritual connection that can occur while looking upon a representation of a Hindu deity.

In India, there is often little separation between religion and state, so paintings and other representations of Hindu gods are everywhere. But, of course, not photographs of the gods.

At least until Ms. Sharma undertook her elaborate darshan project, enlisting dozens of artisans and craftspeople to create elaborate sets, costumes and prosthetics around a human posing as a deity. Each photo took weeks to make on a set in Mumbai. The resulting series, which is on view at the ClampArt Gallery in Manhattan, opened on Thursday and continues through Oct. 12.

Ms. Sharma’s goal was to create photographs of the gods that would provoke a darshan-like moment, even in a nonreligious context.

Courtesy of Manjari Sharma Working on Kali’s set.

“A darshan, to me, has always been in the context of Hindu worship, but I think a darshan is a moment in which you’re altered forever,” she said. “For one moment, a combination of things you can’t quite recreate changes you.”

Her images look like paintings at first, but a close examination reveals an actual person beneath the elaborate mise-en-scène. And that is crucial. The photographs reveal that the connection between man and god goes both ways. It is an image of a god, but the god is a human being.

“Hinduism is certainly a religion, but it is also a philosophy of life, and all of these deities are, in one form or another, supposed to mirror life itself and your own struggles,” Ms. Sharma said. “All of them have been defeated at some point and all of them have won wars and all of them have been through greed and jealousy. None of them are free of the emotions that we experience. I have felt like Kali, a woman on a rampage because I’m mad about something.”

After weeks of preparation, the actual photographs take just a few minutes. Perhaps a dozen four-by-five frames are made in the late afternoon sun. Ms. Sharma says she never knows exactly how the images will come out, but that feels appropriate to her.

While she has only completed depictions of nine of the major deities, she says that one has a choice of hundreds in Hinduism, meaning “you can choose which one’s stories you find most inspiring.”

In the end, however, that interaction is not the object. Nirvana is.

“Of course, your ultimate goal is to merge into light.”

Courtesy of Manjari Sharma Ms. Sharma, left, and Kali.

“Darshan” is on view at the ClampArt gallery in Chelsea through Oct. 12. A post on the first part of Ms. Sharma’s Darshan project, including a video of her at work, was published on Lens in December 2011.

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