Seeing Kashmir as an Outsider: Snow as Metaphor

A window is open. The snow outside cuts through the darkness inside the home. Dilapidated vehicles pile up on one another in a car dump. The soft snow seems to hold the harsh metal together; abandoned buildings, their windows sealed with planks.

Sohrab Hura’s Snow (2015–ongoing) was recently exhibited at Art Basel OVR: 2021. This body of images concerns Kashmir in three phases of the arrival and departure of winter. The exhibition note proclaims, “The snow becomes a metaphor for a complex set of realities in Kashmir—of decades of political freezing and thawing of relationships offering possibilities without any resolutions.”

Sohrab Hura is a Delhi-based photographer and filmmaker whose work is characterised by his commitment to visualising society the way he sees it. In his work, there is a sharp, integral commitment to capturing the political happenings around him with methods that infuse the imaginary with the factual, the documentary with the imaginative. Even though his earlier works were palpably closer to the normative ideas of journalistic photography, Hura has increasingly moved towards a metaphorical visualisation of events, places and lives in his latter works. At a time of rising Hindu nationalism, he thinks political messages have to become cryptic to avoid censorship both by the Indian government and the prying neighbour who shares the government’s ideology.

Kashmir, one of the most militarised zones in the world, has been pivotal to the political developments in the Indian subcontinent. Deaths, disappearances, militant struggles, military encounters, curfews, pellet guns and torture are a part of everyday life in Kashmir. The Indian state and its people routinely engage and disengage with this reality bordering between propaganda and the outsider’s gaze. Either Kashmir exists in an abundance of frontal images of violence or it exists in its erasure as touristy images of its natural beauty.

Snow is acutely aware of the power of images in the contemporary world. Unlike common images of a conflict zone, Hura’s images do not capture the political violence in its unfathomable gore. Nor do his images correspond to the alternative visual trope of seeing Kashmir as the natural “paradise” through the dual lens of Bollywood and tourism. Snow destabilises both of these popular iterations of the Valley and instead captures the palpable political tension through a different visual language. While Hura acknowledges the importance of documentary photography of Kashmir’s violence, he does not want to add to that noise of information that exists out there and yet remains largely overlooked by majority of Indians. Simultaneously, the centrality of snow in Hura’s work does not border on a celebratory gesture. Snow becomes a multi-layered metaphor for a surface-level understanding of life in Kashmir, the insipient presence of the region’s history in its present and the intensely polarised political climate: Snow captures Kashmir as is.

The images in Snow embody the contradictions latent in this project. Hura is simultaneously an insider and an outsider to Kashmir. He is an Indian who has been privy to the exploits and violence of the Indian state and its people; his local interlocutors are his eyes. Hura tries to visualise Kashmir within this conflicted subject–position. Even as he grasps the weight of the prolonged political dispute looming large on the everyday in Kashmir, he sees the resilience of the people embattling their predicaments through their mundane activities in trying to lead “normal” lives, in surviving that horror.

Against corrugated tin-sheets, people still hang their clothes over the snow. They sit in spare furniture shops, shave wool off sheep, carry hay and share a laugh on the road. Horses graze on the fields, apples flood the orchards, trees find their meandering ways and the sun shines bright. Yet the viewer is unable to escape the political underpinnings of such imageries. The red stains on the river stream immediately remind one of blood. Differentiating between burning papers from a confrontation and a bonfire become increasingly blurry. The gloves against the wall recall common images of macerated limbs after blasts, while the chair with an apple resembles the ruling throne.

By pushing the boundaries of existing photographic languages, Snow is an unsettling reflection on and of Kashmir. It bears testimony to the complexity of life amid everyday violence and straddles the outsiders’ gaze with that of the insiders’. Snow forces the viewer to move beyond the easy pigeonholing of the Kashmir conflict by holding back on offering a singular resolution.

All images from Snow by Sohrab Hura. Archival pigment print. 2015—ongoing. Images courtesy of the artist and Experimenter gallery.