Film

Ekatm Dham Movie

A year of drone photography and timelapse tracking the Statue of Oneness at Ekatmadham through construction, from empty mountain to finished monument.

January 1, 2023 • 1 min read

The Film

Documentation of the Statue of Oneness at Ekatmadham, on Mandhata mountain — a monument built as a tribute to Advaita and to human unity.

The Subject

Adi Shankaracharya is held to have arrived at Omkareshwar, on the banks of the
Narmada, as a boy of about twelve, and to have found his guru Govindapada in a
cave there. What followed from that meeting is the reason the site matters: the
commentaries on the Upanishads, the Brahma Sutras and the Bhagavad Gita, the
articulation of Advaita Vedanta as a coherent philosophical position, and the
four mathas established at the cardinal points of the subcontinent — all of it
completed, by tradition, before he died at thirty-two.

Advaita is a claim about oneness, and specifically the non-duality of the
individual self and ultimate reality. A monument to it therefore has an odd
brief: it has to make a statement about the absence of separation.

The Statue of Oneness is the answer Madhya Pradesh arrived at — a 108-foot
multi-metal figure of Shankara not as a sage but as the boy who arrived at
Omkareshwar, standing on Mandhata hill above the river. It was unveiled on 21
September 2023 and sits within the wider Ekatma Dham development, which includes
an Advaita Vedanta institute and museum. The choice to render him as a child
rather than a renunciate is the whole design argument: the figure marks the
moment the thought began rather than the authority it later carried.

How We Made It

The monument did not exist when filming started, so the schedule belonged to the build rather than the shoot. Coverage ran across roughly a year, combining aerial drone photography, timelapse sequences and on-ground filming to track it through construction.