Telegrams from a Landscape Scout: A Para-Archive of Kashmir as Image

Kashmir has been historically fetishised for its scenic beauty, which has had the Hindi film industry gravitating towards its mountains for picturesque backdrops to extended song-and-dance sequences. But the state’s subterranean history of conflict has been mostly unacknowledged or rendered invisible in mainstream fiction. Born and raised in Kashmir, Moonis Ahmad Shah explores a potential scenario where, following the armed insurgency in the Valley in the 1990s, a scout is hired from the state and sent to Switzerland―a country often equated with Kashmir in its scenic value and similarly marketed in the tourism sector, albeit without the precarity of military conflict. Transplanted to another landscape and tasked to hunt for substitute locales, the unnamed scout allegedly sent across many telegrams from Switzerland, which were sent back to the post office due to the absence of addresses on them. These telegrams, now photographed and archived, stand as purported evidence of an urgent communication gone amiss.

Titled Telegrams to Bollywood from a Mad Landscape Scout, the series was created with the aid of the FICA Emerging Artist Award 2017 and conceived during its attendant residency in Switzerland. As appropriations of artefacts, the telegrams are visibly tattered and have been “restored” with an archival impulse. Each telegram is covered with calligraphic marks in thick, dark densities, which reveal themselves as layers of indecipherable text upon perusal. Cumulatively, the text in ink inscribes a landscape on paper through repetitive motions, and implies a persistent—but futile—attempt at legibility. As a conclusion to the dissolution of linearity in the text, the scout is presumed to have gone mad. But what does madness mean in the context of warfare, displacement and sensory disorientation? Against an imperative for survival, the political illegibilities of the state find expression in the mark-making, foregrounding an embodied trauma.

The photographic image in this archive departs from its linear impulse to categorise and engages instead with fiction and storytelling. This results in amplifying histories that do not follow the imperialist, causal logic of the institution―forming its own language for what a record can be. The military progression of text is dismantled in favour of an informal code, where fiction and fact come together to upset the link between language and landscape. Using the representational strategy of the archive, Shah creates a crisis of authenticity and subverts its relationship to normative accounts of history, where the image becomes a militant counter to visual records of the Kashmiri terrain (and its surrogates) in mainland cinematic imaginations.

To read more about Moonis Ahmad Shah's practice, please click here.

To read more about Kashmir and its representation, please click here, here and here.

All images by Moonis Ahmad Shah.

Click on the image to view the album