In The Hindu Nectar, a film by Akanksha Damini Joshi, a boatman offers a quiet explanation for the disappearance of the Saraswati. When a girl’s hair is braided into a choti, he says, only two strands are visible. The third disappears into the weave. It is not absent; it is simply no longer visible. Yet without it, there would be no braid.
The hidden third strand
While reading Akanksha Damini Joshi’s Aalolika, I kept returning to that image. The book traces that hidden strand—not as nostalgia, but as something that has always been part of Indian life and yet has become increasingly difficult to describe in modern language.
We are fluent in the grammars of policy, economics, identity, and even spirituality as technique. But there remains another register—of story, memory, invocation, relationship, and attention—that continues to structure lived experience even if we no longer recognize it.
Aalolika moves toward that register.
Years ago, when I interviewed Akanksha about her films, I expected a conversation on documentary practice. Instead, she kept circling back to learning itself—to shishyatva, to remaining in a state of inquiry rather than conclusion. At the time, I didn’t realize that art and sadhana had merged in in her. In retrospect, that phase reads like a preparation for Aalolika.
Entering the realm of the feminine
One of the book’s most arresting moments comes when Vishnu asks the goddess how he may enter her realm.
“You may enter here only in the feminine form.”
And then, with a twirl of her hands, she reveals realm after realm of unbridled creativity—where stories become sutras, photographs become meditations, and the everyday quietly opens to the extraordinary.
Doubt, inquiry and the art of attention
The Indian intellectual tradition that surrounds such moments is not built on certainty but on a cultivated relationship with uncertainty. Classical hermeneutics even names Samsaya (doubt) as a legitimate epistemic device.
In this tradition, doubt is not treated as a failure of understanding but as its beginning. A well-formed doubt sharpens perception rather than distorting it; it becomes the condition through which deeper insight becomes possible.
It is in this context that even Devi’s questioning of Bhairava in the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra acquires its relevance. Her inquiry belongs to a long civilizational grammar where inquiry is not a sign of ignorance but of seriousness. The Goddess asks how reality is to be known.
Aalolika inherits this same temperament. It does not offer doctrine or resolution. It moves through story, image, memory, landscape, and reflection, allowing meaning to gather rather than declare itself.
The title itself offers a clue. Aalolika refers to the soft humming sound used to lull a child to sleep. A lullaby does not argue. It does not persuade. It changes the state of perception. It allows the mind to settle into a rhythm where something previously unnoticed becomes audible.
The structure of the book follows that same rhythm: stories open into sutras, sutras into images, and images dissolve into silence. It does not progress linearly so much as orbit inward.
Caption: For Akanksha Damini Joshi, landscapes are not backdrops but active presences, carrying layers of memory, ritual, and lived experience.
Akanksha’s background as a filmmaker is evident throughout. The photographs in the book do not treat landscapes as aesthetic backdrops but as active presences. Kashi, Chhattisgarh, East Godavari, Chilika, and the Rann of Kutch—these are not “locations” in a documentary sense. They are saturated spaces where memory, ecology, ritual, and everyday life continue to overlap.
But the most enduring figures in the book are not landscapes or abstractions. They are Amma, Nani, and Ma—the women who shaped Akanksha’s inner world. Through them, divinity appears in kitchens, courtyards, stories, lullabies, and arguments. Gods are not distant metaphysical entities; they are companions in everyday life—spoken to, teased, negotiated with, and sometimes even scolded.
This is a different density of reality, where the sacred is not separated from the ordinary—it echoes what Swami Vivekananda once framed as the task of “divinizing the human and humanizing the divine.”
That density becomes clearer when read alongside the figure of Jabala in the Chandogya Upanishad, whose story is included in Aalolika. When her son Satyakama asks about his lineage, she replies without hesitation: she does not know who his father is. There is no attempt to construct a socially acceptable narrative. When Satyakama repeats her words to his guru, this uncompromising honesty becomes the basis of acceptance.
Aalolika celebrates Jabala’s authority rooted in her authenticity.
The book returns to a quieter proposition: that in Indian traditions, knowledge often emerges through lived integrity rather than formality. It is carried on by mothers, storytellers, caregivers, and those who do not separate understanding from everyday life.
This also extends into Akanksha’s work as co-founder of the Centre for Embodied Knowledge at INDICA. The premise that knowledge lives in practice, gesture, ecology, and relationship rather than only in abstraction is not confined to the book—it is part of her broader intellectual orientation.
What makes this perspective significant is that it appears across very different domains of inquiry. In many conversations I have had with our mutual friend Dr. Madan Lal Meena, I have noticed a similar sensitivity, albeit in a different domain. In his work on Rajasthan’s crafts and textiles, a block print is never just a visual motif, nor is a broom merely a utilitarian object, nor is a textile simply material culture. Each belongs to an entire ecology—of migration, language, ritual practice, caste histories, ecological adaptation, trade routes, and inherited skill. Remove the object from that living field, and it becomes unintelligible.
Aalolika treats the feminine in much the same way. Rather than defining it as a category or concept, it is traced as an ecology of lullabies, gestures, landscapes, questions, devotional practices, narrative memory, and everyday acts of care. Like the hidden third strand in the choti, it is not absent because it is lost; it is not visible because it is woven through everything else.
Meditation in the midst of life
Meditation, too, is treated in this relational and distributed way. Drawing on more than 25 years of practice and 15 years of facilitating contemplative groups, Akanksha recounts a collective discipline practiced during the pandemic—385 consecutive mornings of shared meditation. Yet the emphasis is not on intensity or achievement. Instead, it is about continuity, showing up, and sustaining attention across time.
Accordingly, contemplation begins to appear in unexpected places. Village games in the Gangetic delta, camel herders crossing the Rann, domestic conversations, silence, exhaustion, joy—all become part of the contemplative field. Meditation is not framed as withdrawal from life but as a different quality of participation within it.
What emerges is not just a spiritual system but a refusal of fragmentation. The sacred and the ordinary are not juxtaposed and then reconciled. They are assumed to have never been separate in the first place. This is where Aalolika becomes most compelling.
Toward the end of my interview with Akanksha years ago, she remarked that India remains, above all, a land of seekers. Then she spoke of the many worlds, philosophies, and ways of being that continue to exist around us, often unnoticed.
Most modern Indians, she observed, “would not have the language even to say… umm… hello to.”
Aalolika by Akanksha Damini Joshi, 144 pages, published by Watering Can Foundation in March 2026. Hardcover: Rs 801, Buy on Amazon
About Aalolika’s Author
Akanksha Damini Joshi is an award-winning filmmaker, cinematographer, meditation facilitator, and co-founder of the Centre for Embodied Knowledge. For over two decades, she has journeyed through India’s ecological, cultural, and spiritual worlds, documenting and experiencing the many ways in which wisdom lives through ordinary people, stories, landscapes, and traditions.
Her films include Chilika Bank$, Earth Witness, and Hindu Nectar: Spiritual Wanderings in India. A practitioner of meditation for over 25 years and a facilitator for over 15, she brings together storytelling and contemplative practice in unique ways.
Aalolika: The First Lullaby is her first book and emerges from a lifelong engagement with India’s sacred narratives, everyday beauty, and plural streams of spiritual seeking.
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