Thaipusam, Serangoon Road, Little India. January 2014
Voyeurism
Thaipusam is a Tamil Hindu festival celebrating Lord Murugan. I look back on my experiences seeing it in Singapore over the years and marvel at how viewing and photographing such things has changed. The festival attracts tourists from all over due to its unusual nature. My roommate in Chittagong, PMS, a Tamil Christian, insists that Murugan pre-dates Hindu religion in south India and that Lord Murugan is 100% a pure Tamlian deity that was hijacked by the "Brahmanic North Indian Conspiracy". (THAT is another story entirely - if even true). In fact, Murugan as part of Hinduism dates back at least to 100 BCE, so he is a very old, established deity in the Hindu pantheon. In addition, one of the great directional Hindu pilgrimage temples, Ramanathaswamy, is in Tamil Nadu. North and south India may have religious differences, but Thaipusam as a Tamil/Malayalam celebration of Lord Murugan's receipt of a holy demon-killing trident from Parvati IS an old and most certainly Hindu celebration.
Why is it noteworthy? The Kavadi Attam. Pilgrims journey to a Murugan Temple carrying a kind of personal canopy/harness on their shoulders or even pulling an even larger version on wheels behind them. They walk barefoot while pierced with hundreds of hooks that are connected to these aforementioned devices. As the photo shows, it looks ghastly and stands out as one of the world's extreme religious rituals involving self-immolation. In Singapore, the procession stretches about 4 kilometers between two temples and the streets are thronged with bystanders. In India, some of the pilgrimage routes extend for many kilometers. It IS a sight to behold.
How the world has changed with social media and cell phone cameras! In my youth, I thought nothing of snapping photos of unusual rituals and interestingly dressed people on my travels because it was part of the whole experience. On top of that, no one cared! The only place I remember "no photos" was in Walpi, Arizona among the Hopi people who had been photographed to death by anthropologists and instituted a rule long before social media that they were no longer to be photographed. I actually understood that - they probably felt like some kind of lab specimens in their own villages. The rest of the world at that time, however, still didn't care too much about being photographed.
Then the world entered the "camera-age" in force. Suddenly people were taking photos of everything, everywhere. One of the most early violators of privacy were the newly rich Japanese who took photos of themselves and everything around them on their famous group tours. Japanese camera-toting tourists were "memes" before there were memes. That is when I noticed the change. People in the world were waking up to what being photographed meant. I, too, developed a new sensitivity to it, especially in Indonesia where tourists swarmed local ceremonies and rituals very brazenly to take photos. Granted, some of these performances were FOR tourists, others were not. I found some tourists (read: voyeurs) to be rude to the point that I refused to take photos out of a sense of solidarity with the helpless victims of "ethnographic plundering by film". I have hardly any photos of the many rituals I attended in Indonesia for that reason.
Then came the age of social media. Everyone now has a camera. Everyone is online. Suddenly the whole world became ultra-sensitive to photography. These days it is important NOT to include people in photos lest they approach you angrily for taking their photo without permission (and justly so). I am happy for the change, but saddened by the loss of missing out on creating photographic memories due to respecting privacy.
I took the above photo because literally EVERYONE was taking photos at the time. There was no reasonable expectation of privacy. Should I have taken more photos earlier in my travels of people and cultures I witnessed? I remain undecided, but if they have been lost to memory - then they truly have been lost.
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