The Book of Wounds

The Sarkeguda massacre is one of a series of episodes of “alleged” killing and rape by the paramilitary that have taken place in the heavily militarised forest belt across central India over the years, not unlike conditions in the Kashmir valley since 1986.

You could argue into the night, till the sound of gunfire snuffs out more lives: whose lives matter less? The unlettered adivasis who stand between the mineral riches under their land and large corporations, supported by governments of all political hues? Or the Kashmiris, who remain “ungrateful” after decades of our “democracy” and our “largesse”, who also happen to constitute India’s only Muslim-majority state and the bone of contention between two neighbours? A war without witnesses in Bastar. And a war that has been recorded meticulously and consummately in Kashmir.

Witness is a book that seems born out of a film editor’s venerable Steenbeck machine, in the analogue age, when pictures were still not pixels, and rows of film would hang on a “clothesline”, waiting to be strung together into a narrative. That parallel is no coincidence, considering the fact that the editor of Witness is documentary filmmaker Sanjay Kak, a Kashmiri, whose 2007 film Jashn-e-Azaadi’s continues to resonate with its non-linear, yet coherent narrative.

In a state where the current estimate of the number of men in uniform varies from 5,00,000 to 7,00,000, the work of the nine photographers posits itself unequivocally on the stark, human side of the tragedy. The nine photographers are all Kashmiris, who have lived in the Valley for much of their lives or for extended periods during the last three decades of strife.

The oldest is 58-year-old Meraj Ud Din who captures the largest sweep of a key phase in Kashmiri history, from the early years of militancy and the accompanying bravado of militants like ‘Major’ Mast Gul and counter-militant ‘Ikhwanis’ like Kuka Parrey; to the first attacks on Kashmiri Pandits; to village ‘crackdowns’ (a word that would soon became part of the vernacular).

Meraj Ud Din’s pictures are particularly informed by a larger understanding, by that which is outside the frame. A large gatefold of the assassination of Justice Neelkanth Ganjoo (who had passed the death sentence in the 1968 trial of JKLF founder Maqbool Bhat) on a Srinagar street in 1989, for example, starkly underlines the coming age of reprisals and counter-reprisals.

While pictures of the conflict by the nine photographers dominate the book, they are not unmixed with other observations, seemingly of another time, a more ordinary time away from the acrid smoke of conflict — of marriage parties and flower-laden shikaras, of elections and artful politicians, of Eid and Moharram rituals; of migrants and Christmas Santas in the snow.

There are moments of wry humour in Javeed Shah’s picture of a chief minister on a boat, astride a magenta throne, campaigning for votes on the Dal Lake. The hopeless inequality between an ordinary boatman waving tentatively and a politician who reaches out at election time was never more vivid. And never more cleverly presented, in a “sleight of hand” of design that reveals the picture in two parts.

Dar Yasin, who is almost always in the middle of his pictures, steps back momentarily in the ‘Funeral of a Militant’, framing the scene with mourners climbing high on tall cedar trees in silhouettes, almost ascending to the heavens with their shaheed. Ahead, Yasin’s close-up of a young boy’s bloodied face punctured with multiple pellets, the ammunition of choice in the aftermath of the killing of militant Burhan Wani in 2016, stares back at us uncomprehendingly.

The arrival of a hard variety of Wahhfsabi Islam, once alien in Kashmir, comes strikingly home in Javed Dar’s picture of the two leaders of ‘Duktaran-e-Millat’ at a press conference in 2007. Their gloved hands, with a leopard skin motif, and eyes peering out of ominously-veiled faces appear almost disembodied, out of the darkness, with a little photographic nudge to the contrast.

Next, in descending order of age, is the work of the doyen of Kashmiri photographers, Altaf Qadri, whose personal battles of identity and respect overlap larger battles not just in Kashmir, but on assignments for AP in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. His Kashmir pictures are deft, decisive and with lasting poignancy as the moment in 2005, when a woman breaks down as she is denied permission to cross the LOC to visit her father.

Sumit Dayal, with his assemblages and installations, Showkat Nanda, whose pictures are sometimes filled with voids as in the gatefold of ‘Saqib on the Run’, Syed Shahriyar, with his irony-filled painterly eye, and 20-year-old Azaan Shah, mature beyond his years — all complete the last verses of a powerful elegy.

Witness is a book of enormous collaboration and camaraderie. Kak’s editorial skill is matched by powerful design and production by the studio of Itu Chaudhuri. There are anecdotes, biographies and descriptions, footnotes and references throughout.

It is a substantial book of over 400 pages, taut in typography and layout, and seemingly tenuous in its fabrication as if held together by a string; and with a Coptic-style visible binding that conveys the illusion of a book that has arrived broken.

It’s a hard book that tugs, taunts, compels, haunts. A book of wounds. A cross to bear.