Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir
Key takeaways
- Each of the hundred and seventy five photos sits by itself, square and silent, on a white page, without a jot of text to indicate when and where it was taken, or what it depicts.
- Hura, who lives in Delhi, took these photos beginning in 2015, when he first travelled to Kashmir.
- Jammu and Kashmir, which had long been ruled by a locally elected legislature, was now torn into two union territories that were brought under the direct control of Modi’s administration in Delhi.
Photographs by Sohrab Hura Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Many things about “Snow,” the photographer Sohrab Hura’s new volume of images from Kashmir, feel incomplete—but purposefully so, as if partially occluding our gaze might also focus it. Each of the hundred and seventy five photos sits by itself, square and silent, on a white page, without a jot of text to indicate when and where it was taken, or what it depicts. There’s no introductory or concluding essay, merely a couple of notes; the very first image we see, on opening the book, is a man walking a snowbound road, hauling two others behind him on a sled during what must be the bitter depth of the Chillai Kalan, the forty harshest days of winter. And finally, there’s barely any direct sign of the conflict that has, for decades, eaten into the very bones of Kashmir, a territory claimed so ferociously by India and Pakistan that they’ve fought several wars over it, pushing its people into anger, ruin, and, since the nineteen-eighties, armed uprisings against Indian rule. The standard lexicon of documentary photos from Kashmir includes army convoys and barricades, soldiers and protestors, fear and hostility. In “Snow,” I spotted armed troops only twice: once in a small, loose coterie ambling near a railway line, and again in an image of a single man attired pudgily in both camo and winterwear, standing in a patch of brambly land, his helmet on the ground next to him. All these officers seem unsure of what to do or where to look—which is entirely unlike the Indian military’s brutal, relentless approach to holding Kashmir.
Hura, who lives in Delhi, took these photos beginning in 2015, when he first travelled to Kashmir. He kept telling himself that he was only a visitor—that he wasn’t on a recce for a future project—but he was struck by how Kashmiris rarely stayed outdoors in the evenings, hurrying home after work, navigating security barricades to return to towns and villages that tourists rarely visited. For Kashmiris, the Indian police and military are the menace hovering by the elbow: the forces that will detain men on the merest suspicion of being militants, fire into protesting crowds of civilians, torture and rape, inter bodies in mass graves, or strap someone to the front of a jeep as a human shield. (The Indian government has denied allegations of rape and torture by its personnel in Kashmir.) Living elsewhere in India, you may know in the abstract that the Kashmir valley is a zone of military repression, but being there, Hura found, gave you a viscerally heightened awareness of it. He went to the usual tourist spots—the summer capital of Srinagar, the ski station of Gulmarg—and sensed that the real Kashmir lay elsewhere. In the following years, Hura went back again and again to shoot, but he always postponed the inevitable: the work of capturing the military’s iron control over Kashmiris, the boiling resentment against the Indian state, and the strife of daily life. He had to do it, he reluctantly admitted to himself—but perhaps not just yet.
Then, in the summer of 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi fulfilled one of the Hindu right’s dearest wishes: rescinding the constitutional provisions that long granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous powers. Jammu and Kashmir, which had long been ruled by a locally elected legislature, was now torn into two union territories that were brought under the direct control of Modi’s administration in Delhi. In anticipation of unrest, thousands of soldiers were deployed into the region, security forces detained Kashmiri politicians, and nearly all communications were blacked out. At the time, Hura was in Kashmir for a friend’s wedding. “Just before this siege began, I managed to get on one of the last flights out of Srinagar,” he told me. The next year brought the COVID pandemic. Hura never returned to photograph the inescapable coda of his project: the wrenching violence wrought by the Indian state upon Kashmiri society. It felt incomplete. He shelved the photos and moved on.