Pushkar

Photographs of Pushkar in Rajasthan, India. Pushkar is a magical oasis, the antidote to all that is heavy and gloomy about India, a place of wide smiles, gorgeous landscapes, and irrepressible spirit. It’s a land of flower farms, oxcarts, ladies carrying pots on their heads, schoolkids with huge smiles walking alongside water buffalo, past wheat fields full of peacocks and monkeys. Pushkar itself is a tiny town of about 20,000 people, sometimes cynically dismissed as nothing but a tourist bazaar, for most people Pushkar is nothing more than the annual camel fair (Pushkar Mela). This is a woefully ignorant perspective though. Pushkar is an ecosystem, a collection of dozens of villages, carved out of the Thar desert and the ancient Aravali mountains, with deep traditions and a distinct, beautiful, and engaging culture. It’s one of the most important of Hindu holy places and pilgrimage sites, where Brahma dropped a flower from heaven to form Pushkar Lake. It is quintessentially Rajasthani, with a strong distinct culture of dress, dance, song, art, music, agriculture, and food.