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The Shape of God and the Holy Window
Looking through the sacred to see the state

Documented in June 2026

ITO Bridge, Delhi, India (right)
View from the ‘sacred’ window (top)
June 2026

स्नान / Ritual bathing at the Yamuna,
as an act of devotion and purification.
(Wazirabad Barrage Ghat, Delhi)
June 2026

I grew up watching my father ‘offer’ the remnants of ceremonies to the river, through the window of our car as we travelled along the highway we passed every month.
Every time I asked why he did it, his answer was the same;

“It’s too holy to throw away in the dustbin.”

This window, is part of the permanent and reappearing infrastructure in the name of religious practices across the capital. A peek through this window, to look through sacred to see the state.

This project emerges from my experience of living and travelling through Delhi. It looks at how civil authority can absorb religious ideologies in the interest of nationalism, and how religious movements, in turn, shape the boundaries of religion itself. Today, religion often holds a symbolic authority that can exceed that of liberal civic institutions, becoming a powerful tool of both belonging and exclusion. At the centre of this inquiry is the Hindu deity as a legal person, an entity that can own property and be represented in court. The work explores this strange intersection of faith, law, and political authority, asking what happens when the sacred becomes a subject of the state.

Jamuna today is held both as a sacred river goddess and as a critically polluted ecological system. The colonial and post-colonial histories of underfunding, fragmented infrastructure, and the displacement of river-dependent communities, reveal that the crisis not simply as a failure of technological solutions, but of collective intention and care. Today, in contrast, religious festivals, pilgrimages, and rituals demonstrate a starkly different capacity for mobilization, funding, coordination, and execution, involving the same institutions, people, and resources. The disparity suggests that mobilization is less a question of capacity than of political will, collective intention, and priority.

Flyover and Ghat Construction over Narmada River,
as a part of Simhastha 2028,
strengthening connection between
Ujjain–Indore-Omkareshwar Pilgrimage Corridor.
(Madhya Pradesh, India)
June 2026

From the late 19th century, under British rule, decentralized wells and communal water systems were replaced with engineered infrastructure. The Partition of 1947 divided the subcontinent and the politics that followed continued to turn those divisions into power, land, and infrastructure.

The state is increasingly treating ecology through infrastructure and technological management, rather than through ecological or cultural practices.

One of the few infrastructures in India that draws funding across multiple ministries is the Mandir (temple), not only built in stone; it is built through the budget. Large scale festivals like Kumbh, Simhastha and pilgrimage like Kanvar Yatra, generally do not appear as one clean “religious/cultural infrastructure” line in government budgets. Their spending is usually distributed across existing administrative categories like:
Public Works (roads and bridges)
Urban Development/Water Resources (ghats and riverfronts)
Water & Sanitation (STPs, toilets and waste)
Energy (lighting)
Police/Home (security and crowd management)
Transport (buses and traffic)
Tourism/Culture (pilgrim facilities)
Municipal/Urban Development (beautification and redevelopment).
Culture, Religious Affairs, or district administration
(Support for festival committees)
The government clears roads, closes schools, builds camps, provides security and sanitation,and rains flowers from helicopters.

The Yatra is not just a pilgrimage; it’s a state-sponsored spectacle.

Mahakal Ghat, Ujjain. The entire roads to the temple were blocked, people held back for 6 hours, since the president was flying in via a helicopter, for private darshan, showing that India can mobilize at extraordinary scale when a river becomes sacred. (top)
(Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, India)
June 2026

Sandstone construction for the
13km long river stretch in the city,
ghats more shiny than the roads. (right)
(Ujjain, Madhya Pradesh, India)
June 2026

This fragmentation makes the true public cost of events like the Kumbh and Kanwar Yatra difficult to trace as a single expenditure. The same pattern is currently visible in Ujjain's preparation for Simhastha 2028: including projects like dams,highways and roads, ghats, airport, power infrastructure, railway station updates, bypasses, toilets and crowd-management systems.

This makes festivals and pilgrimage a mechanism through which temporary religious infrastructure are becoming permanent urban investment.

Religious gatherings mobilize rapid, large-scale investment in urban infrastructure, but much of that investment is focused on infrastructure and logistics, rather than on restoring the ecological health of the river itself. The government presents this as development and beautification, billed as fusion of faith, data and efficiency, a model for India’s Smart Cities Mission. These urban transformations are not just about infrastructure or tourism. It is a political project.

Refuge from the hourly wage,
looking for fish in dark water.
The only thing he could fish for,
was his reflection.
(Wazirabad Ghat, Delhi, India)
June 2026

Currently the infrastructure being developed for Simhastha 2028 extends beyond Ujjain and the banks of the Kshipra. Through the Narmada–Kshipra water-transfer system, Narmada water is being brought toward the Kshipra basin to support Ujjain’s growing water demands and the enormous temporary population expected during the festival. At the same time, development is taking place along the banks of the Narmada itself, particularly around pilgrimage and tourism centres such as Omkareshwar and Maheshwar, with new ghats, public spaces, access infrastructure and riverfront improvements.

There is also a proposed 13-km water-transport system along the Kshipra, connecting major ghats and temples, with stop dams intended to maintain navigable water levels. Infrastructure and urban planning are no longer neutral; they can be used to express political and cultural agendas. Indian cities are becoming stages for political campaigns and expressions of ideology, shaping how people understand identity and belonging.

The marigold chain is used for all
festivals and rallies. Marigold is
India’s largest commercial flower crop.
In 2025-2026, the cultivation
covered approximately
106,190 hectares nationwide.
(Ghazipur Mandi, Asia largest flower
wholesale market, Delhi, India)
June 2026

Young people in India today often inherit religious identities shaped by political conflict rather than lived ecological relationships. Religion in India today holds a symbolic authority that exceeds that of liberal civic institutions, becoming a powerful tool of both belonging and exclusion. With this project I aim to deepen this conversation around ritualism beyond political spectacle, as a space to protest, care and despair for the growing ecological turmoil in India, with a dream of hanging out by the Jamuna instead of the nightclub.

These photographs are part of a series documenting the human scale of ritual and the state-level infrastructure it sets in motion. I keep thinking about the collective power of celebration, and the missed opportunity to mobilise that same energy towards ecological repair. The question I lead this research with is,

Can ritualism move beyond
political spectacle?