In 2018, photographer and documentary filmmaker Shino Cherian decided, on an impulse, to attend the Koovagam festival in Tamil Nadu, which spans 18 days of the month of Chithirai (April-May) in the Tamil calendar.
At 28, he hadn’t done anything close to as daring as venturing into a completely unknown terrain, inhabited by people who were nothing like him. However, along with his friend and fellow photographer Ram Manu Prasad, Cherian went on to document the events of the crucial two days that mark the end of the festival. The result, after eight years and multiple failed attempts at bringing the work to a wider audience, is the recent book, Souls of Someone: Myth, Magic and Mourning in Koovagam.
For two-and-a-half weeks each year, transgender women from all over south India, as well as other parts of the country, travel to the village of Koovagam to celebrate an ancient festival that takes place at the Koothandavar temple. The community worships at the altar of the deity, who is known by many names, but most widely as Aravan, son of Arjuna in the Mahabharata.
Legend has it that to win the Kurukshetra War, the Pandavas were required to sacrifice one of their finest men. Since Krishna and Arjuna were indispensable to the battle, it fell to young Aravan, Arjun’s son with a Naga princess, to offer himself up for the cause. He agreed, but on the condition that Krishna would grant him three boons, one of which was not to die a virgin. Since no woman was willing to marry Aravan for one night and become a widow the morning after, Krishna assumed his female form, Mohini, and became Aravan’s wife, then subsequently widow.
Following this lore, to this day, trans women enact the sequence of events that describe Aravan’s tragically short life. After over two weeks of song, dance, rituals and worship, the women get “married” to Lord Aravan on the penultimate day of the Koovagam festival, which leads into a night-long revelry involving sex with local men from the village before dawn breaks, leaving the aravanis—the brides of Aravan—widowed after a few hours of marital bliss.
The newly bereft women then wail and keen over the loss of their husband, break their bangles, tear the thalis that were tied around their necks just the evening before, and shed their colourful saris for the white attire of the widow. The “Amsterdam of Tamil Nadu” then returns to being a sleepy hamlet for another year, until it wakes up again in April-May.
Cherian, along with his friends Prasad and Praveen Kumar Raja (whose photos also feature in the book), is among the many chroniclers of this unique phenomenon. Over the years, Koovagam has been turned into a media spectacle, attended by throngs of reporters and tourists who gawk at the events, turning the camera into a tool for “othering”.
As Cherian writes in the book, scores of “cameras are at the ready… about to package the women’s grief for mass consumption” on the final day of the festival. The early morning rain, which pelts down unfailingly each year, adds to the intensity of the loss. “It is like the gods pour their hearts out in grief,” he says on the phone.
What makes Cherian’s work stand out, though, is the humility with which he approaches his subject. “I come from an engineering background, so I took time to understand where I stand in the world of photography,” he says. Currently based in Kochi, the 34-year-old started out as a “street photographer”, very much in the mould of Steve McCurry, whose documentary style is invested in capturing the ongoing moment.
As he moved on to making portraits, Cherian had to recalibrate his eye from the serendipity of “activity-oriented photography” and train it to look inward. “I felt I was documenting something beyond what we can see,” he says, describing his state of mind while at the Koovagam festival for the first time. His encounter with an unknown way of life, with its own set of rules and conventions, forced him to rethink his own subjectivity. As transgender activist Grace Banu writes in her introduction to the book, Cherian enters Koovagam holding his camera “as a shield against the unknown.” By the end of his time there, the camera is “no longer a shield, but [had become] a witness.”
Unlike the typical urban photographer, entitled in their habit of parachuting themselves into “exotic” situations, Cherian grapples with doubts and dilemmas even as he makes his way to the festival grounds. He confronts his uneasiness candidly. He writes about an encounter with a trans woman on a train in 2016 that left him unsettled and fearful of the community. Even as he lands up in Koovagam, he cannot get over the feeling that he is an interloper, who is violating a space that belongs to others.
“Do I deserve to document these lives?” he asks himself in his visual diary, feeling like he is trespassing on private moments. He approaches the trans women as a younger brother (thambi) would do an elder sister (akka), shares his own story with them and asks about their lives, instead of simply acting trigger-happy with his camera.
Ironically, the photographer may think of himself as being a free agent—an archivist in control of his subject—but, as Banu points out, the dynamics of power get subtly inverted without their knowledge at Koovagam. “My community of sisters, mothers and daughters demanded that he see them,” she writes, handing back control to the trans women, who allow the “other” to enter their exclusive space every year and partake of a life-changing experience. Cherian, too, confirms this fact. As one trans woman put it to him when he went back this year, “This festival is like a family reunion for me, I belong here. It is you who are the outsider here.”
Reading Souls of Someone, especially in the context of the recently passed Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Bill, 2026, feels like a ringing evidence of the inadequacies that plague the imagination of our legislators. Entering Koovagam through the book is like stepping inside a realm where the medico-legal tyrannies of the state fall apart, leaving the onlooker vulnerable to the bizarre reality of a primeval collective experience.
“The current law is inhuman,” Cherian says, “it expects these women to present themselves to medical boards and be vetted for who they are.” When he returned to Koovagam earlier this month, one aravani warned him, he says. “’If the state can question our identity today, what’s stopping it from asking you tomorrow to prove that you are male?’ she said.”
In the end, it is the common humanity of the community and this extraordinary moment as they come together to enact it that turn out to be the great leveller. “We do not grieve to end grief,” as Banu writes. “Rather, we grieve because it shows our capacity to care.”