Holi celebration in Pushkar, Rajasthan

One of five most holy places for Hindus and a lure for thrill seeking hippies since the 60’s.

What’s so great about going to a dusty little town square and dancing like a maniac to techno with a mix of Indian boys and men and mixed gender tourists who likely have little appreciation for the religious aspect of the festival but can relate to the easy symbolism of a festival of colours where participants smear bright chemical powders on one another’s faces and bodies and dance ecstatically until all the men's shirts are hanging from two ropes across the square and the faces and any uncovered skin is caked with a pink grey mixture of all the colours and the air is thick with clouds of the same?

The thick twisting thumping trance is expertly mixed by a team of Indian DJs. Immaculately dress uniformed police officers curiously film with their cell phones while maintaining order. Striving young photographers and videographers clamber around and through the chaos with the guiding certainty of their muse, assuring that the event will be well documented, the data flowing out and up to blogs, forums, twitter feeds and online news agencies. A substantial number of the participants are foreign – to risk a guess I’d say 30 percent. The dreadlocked, bronzed and scantily clad certainly make up an element of the attraction – to the Indian locals but especially to each other.

There is a darker side to the celebration here other than the lack of authenticity. There are few Indian women celebrating. This tumultuous pit is rife with brief gropes and unwanted invasions. I witness a young man angrily dressing down a peer for smearing color too aggressively on a young foreign woman. Right now awareness here in India of their international reputation for having an atrocious record on women’s rights is very high amidst the release and subsequent Indian ban on Leslee Udwin’s documentary film India’s Daughter about the 2012 rape and murder of Jyoti Singh. Many young women and men are actively promoting and living changes in values in their own circles. In addition to moments such as this man’s censure of his peer I can read about it, in print, television and online media, see it in how students interact and dress and in conversations with Indian peers. Still, it’s tiny steps against an impassive conservative mass which seems to have a problem recognizing a connection between long held traditional values and sexual harassment and assault.

After reading Guardian coverage of alternative Holi celebrations for widows and more traditional celebrations elsewhere in India I felt somewhat chagrined for attending such a clichéd tourist attraction, realizing the incredible diversity of the festival across India.

In the midst of the revelry, however, I felt that the colourful gyrating mass of happy humans transcended the cliches they risked being defined by and truly created a joyous tornado of unfettered celebratory ecstasy.

I took my camera back to the hotel room and prepared to enter the fray. On the way back down to the square I bought a bag of coloured powder and began to give as good as I got. A group of roving boys surrounded me, tugged at my shirt and laughingly demanded I give it up. Good-natured and friendly but insistent they ripped off my Victoria Half Marathon shirt and threw it onto one of the two sagging lines hung across the middle of the square and I danced shirtless in the swirling pink dust with the rest of the festival goers.

Holi is visually stunning due to the combination of the bright colours and celebration through dance. As the photo of the police officers and bystanders with their cell phone cameras shows, the urge to capture the festival on film is not limited to foreign tourists. I took the following photos between 9 and 11am. in Pushkar. After that I was purely a participant

The horror...