Rite click: This photo series showcases rituals across India

French photographer Charles Freger loves portraits. He has taken some of sumo wrestlers at their schools in Japan, trainees at the Finnish naval academy, the indigenous Himba people of Namibia.

For his latest series, he travelled the length and breadth of India, on either side of the pandemic, to document costumes and masquerades as traditional practice.

This is the fourth such series in a larger project that began over a decade ago, with Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage (2012), a photobook for which he spent two years capturing the wild man traditions kept alive in Europe, from costumes used in folk festivals to recreations of ancient myths.

The next book, Yokainoshima: Island of Monsters (2016), focused on the festival costumes of rural Japan. Then came Cimarron: Freedom and Masquerade (2019), portraits from North and South America, of costume traditions dating back half a millennium.

The fourth, released in March, is titled Aam Aastha: Indian Devotions, and showcases ritual performers from across 20 states in the country. There are the familiar and mainstream (Theyyam dancers in Kerala; Ram Leela performers in Uttar Pradesh) and many that are unfamiliar, including tribal performers participating in pagan rites in small communities across east and north-east India.

Freger always creates his portraits outside their natural context. He chooses not to document rituals or try to capture the atmosphere of a festival, he says, partly because the images stand out more starkly when shot in open environments, outdoors.

“I also don’t want to shoot people when they are busy with their festivals,” he says. “I try to do it so that people are ready for it. They make space for it, which is much more interesting to me than going in when it’s crowded and the performers are stressed.”

The result is evocative and unusual: Muddy feet, gender fluidity, youth and age peep out of elaborate getups. Unexpected, ancient garb — handwoven tasselled skirts for male performers; headdresses that resemble the rays of the sun — stand out against pale blue skies.

“Most of these traditions are very theatrical, and so I found that people were really jumping into being photographed. There is a very strong power and energy into the way they are posing and performing,” Freger says. “What struck me when I was shooting was that I was not photographing gods, I was photographing people becoming or acting as gods.”

Behind the mask

It took Freger five trips to India to get all 250 frames in the book, representing 70 communities. Each shoot took weeks, if not months, of research into identifying the communities and studying its rituals, and then weeks to find a translator (“it had to be a different one in each region”), reach out, and make his way to the spot.

To explain the rituals and the images, an essay by novelist Anuradha Roy offers context on some of India’s ritualistic performances and folk-theatre practices. She reflects on the traditional roles of religious performers; the urban urge to affect rural and tribal cultures; and how the ancient practices, often humorous and with no dividing lines between religion, performance and banter, are changing with time.

“The masks have varied expressions, from the wickedly amused skull masks to awkward birds, ungainly camels and self-conscious gods,” she writes. “It is a catalogue, not only of masks but of feelings behind and within. And even if you cannot see their faces and don’t know their names, you realize it is largely a catalogue of the oppressed and endangered.”

An essay by French philosopher Catherine Clement, who has lived in India and written historical novels set in the country, writes on the diverse relationship with religions and the various ways in which faith is practised.

Also in the book are brief notes by art curator Kuhu Kopariha, explaining the rites depicted, aided by illustrations by architect Sumedha Sah.

The Indian reader can expect to see new facets to the country. For Freger, it was a smorgasbord of cultural diversity. “When I started work on the project, with the Veeragase dancers in Karnataka, there was already sparkling gold and colourful make-up, which was taken a step further in Kerala, with Theyyam and Kathakali,” he says. “Then I went to the north-east and found tribes with much simpler costumes… papier-mache or wood masks, some carved 50 to 60 years ago. The intensity of each performance was just as strong. It’s not that more, or less, is better. I saw that sometimes the touch of abstraction or the raw quality of a costume is important; and sometimes, so is the baroque aspect of the south Indian performances.”

The photographer has already begun work on his next book in the series. “It’ll be about the different cultures in the island groups of South-East Asia,” Freger says, “and an attempt to understand why there’s so much diversity there.”