These pictures were taken during the academic year 1977-78, when I was a visiting scholar of Indian religions at Banaras Hindu University, in Varanasi.  Like many Western children of the 60’s, I fell for India, but I took it further than most, living there for extended periods and studying its religions and philosophy in college and grad school in the U.S.  I was spending the year in the Jerusalem of Hinduism in between a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. program in comparative religion at Harvard.  The plan was to polish my Hindi, study Sanskrit, and travel the country, camera in hand, in search of an interesting temple ritual on which to base my dissertation. Instead, I learned I wasn’t a scholar and the India I fell for no longer existed, if it ever did.  The break was so painful that, back in the States, I printed only small versions of a handful of the more than 1,200 pictures I’d taken, framed some, and hung them on my wall.  Then, I put India behind me.  I thought.  A few years later, I gave up photography.  I could be either a writer or a photographer, I thought—not both. But the pictures never left me.  I took the negatives on my numerous moves and noted guests’ responses to the prints I’d framed.  Other images beckoned on the contact sheets.  Beginning in the mid-1990’s, I hired photographers to print some of them. By 2010, the “Print me!” chorus from the contact sheets had grown deafening.  I enrolled in Manhattan’s International Center for Photography and set foot in what’s now called the “wet” darkroom for the first time in 25 years. What I found when I went back to my still-viable negatives was the record of a love affair. What awed me about India physically—its rock-hewn monumentality, dazzling architecture, brilliant play of light, tropical lushness—was there.  So was my bond with the people, my ability to speak Hindi, I think, getting me closer than most Western photographers to temple priests and others.  The classic composition and general romanticized tone speak to my need to make tangible the ideals that drew me, even as—perhaps because—I was being repelled.  There was almost an inverse effect at work:  I’d grown tired of seeing fat priests and skinny devotees, but most of the priests I photographed were thin. Ironically, in conjuring a timeless, classical India, I captured the country at a moment in time that, Indian friends say, really doesn’t exist anymore, pristine skylines now being marred by satellite dishes, for example.  My camera’s great optics—I used a Pentax Spotmatic, the legendary journalistic workhorse of the 60’s and 70’s—lets me print 35mm negatives at very large sizes.  But my mastery of its pioneering through-the-lens light meter was insufficient to the challenges of India’s extreme lighting conditions, leading to many problem exposures that had to be remedied under the enlarger.  Printing these images, large, optimally, then, required a master course in the vanishing art of fine gelatin-silver printing:  another time-capsule aspect.