Every year thousands of women retire to the community of widows in the sacred city of Vrindavan in northern India. Some of them arrive in search of a life of peace, dedicated to the devotion of Krishna, but most of them do so in search of refuge after widowhood casts them as social pariahs.

Fazal Sheikh first traveled to Vrindavan in 2003. Over time some of the widows agreed to confide their life stories to him, stories that bear witness to the multiple ways misogyny is manifested in India. Moksha—the title of the book published by Steidl in 2005 in which the photographer shaped the work he produced in Vrindavan—is the Sanskrit term used in Hinduism to describe a form of liberation able to break the cycle of birth and death. The devotional practices of the widows in Vrindavan are aimed at obtaining said liberation. However, as captured in the book, and in spite of its positives and negatives, the support they encounter in the midst of the female community becomes a sort of liberation in life. Encompassing both aspects of reportage and a journal of impressions, the book is an example of how Fazal Sheikh is able to incorporate a wide range of registers and materials in order to produce work that is visually rich and true to reality.