Summary of this article
Photographer Shino Cherian arrives as an outsider but becomes a witness, shedding his assumptions amidst Koovagam's sacred rituals.
Sixteen days of vibrant weddings collapse into a haunting final day of white sarees, severed thalis, and collective mourning for Lord Aravan.
Amidst grief and violence, transgender women display fierce resilience, teaching the author that ritual heals and humanity shares one beating heart.
The train was a furnace.
Shino Cherian sat crushed between strangers, sweat dripping down his back, his camera bag wedged between his knees. The local train to Villupuram moved slowly through the Tamil countryside, but his mind was moving faster. He was chasing a ghost, a single image he had seen somewhere: a sea of transgender women in white sarees, moving like spirits through green fields.
He felt like a trespasser. An outsider with a notebook and a lens, standing at the edge of something he didn't yet understand. "I felt like a profound outsider," he admits.
But that feeling wouldn't last.
Somewhere along that hot, crowded journey, an old man began to speak. He wasn't lecturing. He was simply setting things straight. When others on the train whispered about the Koovagam festival, about sex, about marriage, about the transgender women who gather there, the old man corrected them gently.
The marriage to Lord Aravan, he explained, is not a performance. It is not a curiosity for outsiders to gawk at. It is a divine necessity. Shino had arrived expecting a festival. He found a pilgrimage. "That encounter shaped everything," he says. "My narrow understanding of sex and union was reframed. I thought I would be documenting a tradition. I realised I was documenting a transformation."
For the first sixteen days of the Chitrai month, Koovagam vibrates with life.
Beauty pageants. Sexual health workshops. Travelling markets. The air buzzes with chatter and colour. Over a hundred thousand transgender women arrive from every corner of India, some as revelers seeking joy, some as traditionalists honouring ancient lineage, some simply as seekers looking for a place to feel at home.
But the festival's heart beats hardest in the final forty-eight hours. Shino watched, breathless, as countless transgender women entered the Koothandavar temple to marry Lord Aravan, the mythical hero whose sacrifice helped the Pandavas win the Mahabharata's great war.
"There was a riot of crimson, gold, and jasmine," he remembers. "That night, the rain gods stayed true to the legend, washing over the revelry like a blessing." Then came dawn. The final day arrives like a wound.
The vibrant silks disappear. The thali, the sacred wedding thread, is severed in a ritual as visceral as a snake shedding its skin. Colour collapses into white. Thousands of women, now widows, pour into the sugarcane fields wearing only white sarees.
They mourn Lord Aravan, who was sacrificed before his wedding night could be completed. "I saw those fields filled with thousands of grieving souls in white," Shino says quietly. "It was the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed."
But the most haunting memory wasn't the breaking of bangles or the silence after the crying. It was something else entirely. In the middle of all that white, Shino saw a dancer.
She was exhausted, parched, searching for water. Her vibrant costume made her a target. A mob of men surrounded her. They mistook her grace for an invitation. In broad daylight, they molested her.
Horror. Then defiance. She ran to a group of elders, transgender women who had carried the weight of a thousand such battles. And then she turned. She struck back. Her roar cut through the field:
"Don't you dare touch a woman. We have lived through the fire of reality. Nothing you do can shake us." Shino pauses when he tells this story. "In that moment, the weeping grounds became a landscape of iron strength. Even in a world trying to break these beings like glass bangles, their spirit remains unbreakable."
Somewhere between the wedding heat and the cold white silence of the meadows, something shifted inside Shino Cherian. He didn't just see the story anymore. He felt it.
"The outsider in me died," he says simply. "I didn't just want to write a book. I was here to bear witness to this truth."
That truth became Souls of Someone, a photobook that is part memoir, part travelogue, and entirely an odyssey of self-discovery. Through HarperCollins, with the support of Ananth Padmanabhan and Udayan Mitra, Shino has given voice to stories that are often barely told. "Every photograph is preceded by a conversation," he explains. "I spent hours sitting in the dust, sharing stories. My process was never point-and-shoot. It was listen-then-look."
What The Aravanis Taught Him
Koovagam didn't just challenge Shino's assumptions. It dismantled his soul and rebuilt it. He learned that ritual isn't about following ancient scripts. It's a vessel for healing. When the aravanis shed their colourful sarees and break their bangles, they aren't just mourning a mythological hero. They are shedding their expectations of a world that often refuses to see them.
"In their grief, I found a mirror for my own humanity," he says. "Beneath the 'otherness' we project onto people, there is a shared, beating heart looking for a way to be heard."
He didn't choose this story, he says. The spirits of Koovagam led him to it.
And somewhere in those eighteen days, among the crimson weddings, the white mourning, the broken bangles, and that one woman's defiant roar, a photographer with a notebook became something more. He became a witness.
