Beauty and the Beast

Kashmir is a photographer’s delight. What began as travel photography by Europeans to aid the Orientalist project has now grown to become an integral part of various fields and professions. The valley reaches mainland India through various mediums and what is received from each source is an altogether different product. It is possible that the human mind does not fully comprehend what it sees. The ‘truth’ which exists out there, in absolute objectivity, is inaccessible to us. What reaches to us has been filtered by our senses and our experiential knowledge. Intaking reality through photographs, no matter how “life-like”, further waters it down. This is my attempt to identify the visual paths, the resultant manipulation and the reception of different ‘ideas’ of Kashmir.

Journalism, advertising, tourism and entertainment- these are the prime sources through which a non-resident familiarises herself with Kashmir. Each fragments Kashmir in different ways by choosing what to photograph in line with what it deems most relevant for the viewers.

When talking of journalism, one can not do so while considering it a unified whole. The mainstream media response to the valley differs according to where it comes from: Pakistan, India or Kashmir. Each play up certain aspects of a story and ignore the rest according to what suits its ideology. The Kashmiri media is the most “faithful” in its representation, sympathetic to the people’s concerns and their demands. Photos of students frustrated with snapped internet connection, curfew-harassed local traders, daily casualties and pellet-ridden bodies of young children inhabit the local dailies. Pakistani mainstream media tends to play up the dissenting voices coming from the valley, highlighting the dissatisfaction with Indian administration since it has its own stake. The picture below was featured in a news article first published in ‘Rising Kashmir’ and then in ‘Dawn’, a leading Pakistani daily. No wonder the general Kashmiri sentiment that Pakistan is more concerned about their problems than India.

Image Credit- Mukhtar Khan, AP

The mainstream Indian media rarely makes visible such graffiti from downtown Kashmir. Representation of such non-violent forms of protest is possible only in the background with stone-throwing protesters in the forefront. Photos of Kashmiris carrying Pakistani and IS flags are often circulated in print as well as broadcast with captions running under calling them anti-Indian or anti-national. Aamir Wani, a civil servant aspirant from Kashmir says that “This is in spite the realisation that they use the symbol without partaking the ideology. Pakistan is a major irritant for India and that is what they tap on to draw Delhi’s attention. And draw it does.” In complete contrast to the beastly nation-hating, army-killing image of the civilians such photographs create, newspapers try to partake in the sanitation of Kashmir too. Newspapers religiously print beautiful photos of snow-blanketed Srinagar to show the advent of winter every year. Lush saffron fields are a common favourite. Kashmir, the photos say, is dear because it is beautiful. The Kashmiris who try to take the land away from India must be stopped by any means.

In the face of such distortion, news websites like scroll.in, thewire.in, newslaundry.com etc. do a laudable job. “Death is our only Aazadi: The story of a Kashmiri Mother” by Nidhi Suresh is a great example. The piece is about a Kashmiri family, told through the voice of a mother, who used to host militants in their house in the 90s. When asked about the problems she faces while reporting from Kashmir Nidhi says that “people are unwilling to talk. They do not want to be quoted or photographed. As much as there is a collective want for azadi, they just want to be done with it. They are afraid of pushback.” Nidhi’s report does not give away the identity of her sources. There are photos of only the hands of the mother, her face cropped out. There are thousands of stories of personal struggle from Kashmir to which there are no names or faces to put to.

Source: Newslaundry

The reportage that comes out of these channels is different. It is heavy on nuance, perhaps because of their business model which relies on subscribers rather than advertisers. It is true that even these channels are not unbiased but they do have greater transparency. The biases are aired before the content. The concern about other news portals is the obvious spin they put to stories without disclosing their allegiances.

A resident of Delhi and a model, Anannya Prakash, 21, when asked about where he gets information about Kashmir from, says “it is usually Times of India or through Facebook pages like Fauji Brat or RVSP. They usually have videos which show how ungrateful Kashmiris are, willing to take help from the Indian army but ready to throw stones at them the next moment. I met a Kashmiri guy last summer when I was modelling and he told me that things were not the way I believed them to be. I have a mixed opinion now.”

Sidharth Khurana, a Canadian resident Indian says “some areas are supposed to be unsafe from what I’ve heard. Seems like an interesting place to visit though what with their culture, music and mountains of course.” When asked about what made him form such an opinion, “news” is all he says.

When considering representation through the visual medium, it is impossible not to talk of films, music videos, documentaries etc. though they are not strictly photographs. The representation of Kashmir as a third character in Bollywood songs of the 80s and the 90s has concretized the image of the region as an epitome of romance and beauty. Blockbusters like ‘Lakshya’, ‘Jab Tak Hai Jaan’ and ‘Aiyaary’ glorify the Indian soldier protecting the state while off-beat low-budget movies like ‘Harud’ offer a sensitive portrayal. Which kind of portrayal of Kashmir finds public acceptance is obvious in the risk-value and popularity of the movies. On the other hand, while well-intentioned documentaries try to explain the ‘Kashmir conflict’, most dehumanise the Kashmiris by making them just cogs in the state machine. True, Kashmir is a land at undeclared civil war but is that all there is to the lives of Kashmiris?

Social media updates from Kashmir report the everyday lives of the people. Youngsters huddled together for a selfie in front of a beloved bike or posing before a beautiful lake, “red-cheeked” toddlers giggling into adoring camera lenses, photographs of traditional makhmal suits, cricket bats or sunglasses (since Facebook and Instagram can take business where word of mouth can’t) all paint a picture of normalcy. These photos are meant to be shared with family and friends. However, these very channels are bloated with photographs and videos of police brutality and civilian torture, most of them recorded by civilians but some released by the army too to intimidate protestors into inaction. Photographs in times of turmoil become evidence. In the Kerala floods of 2018 people from Odisha, who suffered their own share of floods earlier that year, advised Keralites to photograph their drowned vehicles with the licence plates visible to get assured insurance. Photographs became as powerful as stamped affidavits. The rise of photo-journalism as a legitimate field of reporting is a testimony to that. The almost simultaneous rise of tools of photo manipulation, though, raises new concerns. A lot of fact checking websites like altnews.in, boomlive.in and factly.in have come up in the last two years, each trying to verify sources and stories circulated on social media. They have debunked a lot of lies supplanted by photographs and videos, about terrorists infiltrating Kashmir, decreasing expenditure on arms as claimed by a government officer etc. Photographs too, like all evidence, is subject to tampering.

“To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.” This is exactly what advertisements set against the Kashmiri backdrop do.

Considering the above advertisement produced as an example, the obvious question which arises is who the advertisement is aimed at. Cashing on the “traditional” to sell western clothes stitched by “artists” can not be a campaign intended to work on the Kashmiris. The photo-advertisement excludes the local artist and replaces him/her with the professionals at Wills Lifestyle. It exoticises Kashmiri hand crafts to project it’s beauty and labour-value to the product being sold. The company using such methods is not even a foreign brand but an Indian one. A lot can be gleaned of the relationship India shares with Kashmir from its treatment in hands of Indian businesses and advertising campaigns.

Another industry at work in Kashmir is tourism. Government-issue or private travel books and travel blogs hypnotise readers with Kashmiri beauty offered on platter. Immaculate tulip gardens, Kashmiri women dressed in colourful traditional wear, pasture lollying in open grounds, mist-kissed mountains and more, all become anchors for tourists. Family vacation photos of shikara rides while wearing Kashmiri costumes, day stay in houseboats on the Dal Lake, picnic in the open grounds of Sonmarg and the snow of Gulmarg, camping in Pahalgam and paragliding in Aru Valley tell of a land of absolute beauty and peace.

Package tours stick to a certain route where disturbance is invisible and land almost photoshopped. They tell nothing of a boy sitting at home on his laptop typing out his frustration as gunshots ring outside in the street. Or a grieving family having lost a member to imprisonment, mental torture, rape or as collateral damage. Even the postcards a tourist takes back home freeze this sanitized image of Kashmir. This Kashmir is not of the Kashmiris. It is a museum, a source of revenue collection for the Indian administration. It helps that the locals have to participate in this image-creation since their economy depends on tourists.

Photographs, with the advent of mass printing and social media, are no longer intended for personal record but for circulation. Representation of the object being photographed changes with the intended audience. All photographs received through mass media channels are distorted by the ideology of the frame. Journalism, tourism, entertainment and advertising have different interests to serve. Reportage, whether for news or through documentaries, depends on the reporters or researchers, their allegiance and the consumers. Tourism, advertising and entertainment are businesses which must air brush to make the photographed object more appealing. What then becomes of the “truth value” of photographs?

The camera lens subverts the beauty-beast dichotomy. It can just as easily make the photographed object beautiful as it can beastify it. The coverage of Kashmir through different lenses forces us to rethink the truth value assigned to photographs. The beautiful Kashmir, the conflicted Kashmir, the tyrant Kashmir, the backward Kashmir, the suffering Kashmir, the homeland Kashmir- there are as many epithets for the region as there are cameras. The wielders of the cameras hold sway over public discourse in how far they can circulate what’s captured by their lens while limiting it within the set context. Should one expect the camera to record an “absolute truth” or accept each version as truth in its own right? Each capture is a fragment of the truth which may or may not produce a coherent whole when put together in a unifying project. This however is not a failure of photography but its strength. In knowing that every frame is an ideology, it ensures that the photographs are seen as evidence of that ideology and not necessarily of reality. Photographs need to be ‘read’ to understand and acknowledge the binaries of presence/absence, truth/untruth and beauty/beast which hierarchizes realities.