Sound of silence in the Valley

Amit Sengupta

The camera does not shy away from the conflict zone: the barbed wires on the streets and the olive green uniforms with tense fingers on the triggers, schoolgirls in uniforms, unarmed, fighting a pitched battle hurling stones at the armed forces, endless night streets of curfew, the internet and mobile phones disconnected, the snow falling and frozen in streams as a gun-battle rages at the line of control, dead bodies and mass funerals, girls and boys blinded by pellets, their faces swollen, saline waters streaming down their pink cheeks. 

“Some of the finest photo journalism is happening in Kashmir, with youngsters with pen and notebooks, and the camera, recording the protests and the conflict,” says middle-aged Irfan Nabi. “That is a reality which must be documented, and is being relentlessly documented. However, I am looking at memories, not only of beautiful landscape, but a culture of memory which is fast losing its originality and is getting buried in the tragic shadows of the time.”

A professional doctor, he started this journey with images in 2012. Nabi’s magnificent photo show, and they are not the work of an amateur, at the art gallery in India International Centre in Delhi, speaks a different cinematic language, the pictures at once becoming paintings or still shots moving in time and space from a forgotten cinema. Ladakh, Kashmir, and the Naropa Festival: Kumbh of the Himalayas — 2016, takes you by surprise. Pahalgam, Gulmarg and the Dal Lake, otherwise beautiful landmarks on the map of clichéd tourism, acquire a depth and expanse beyond the picture frame; they become masterpieces etched in time, as if losing their originality in reality, or forever changing contours, the moment they are clicked.

Or, the craggy mountains of Ladakh, with its sublime, untouched rivers, or the Indus flowing effortlessly as if eternally unseen, or the multiple passes in long distance, like an archival Hollywood film shot in cinemascope, with the rivers and the waters turning blue like the sky, the landscape and the mountains, each sharing different layers of the kaleidoscope in perfect harmony, brown, yellow, saffron, vermillion, snow-white, transparent blue.

You can touch the images as if they have always rested inside your unconscious, but, you know, at once, that they are patient reflections, borne out of long and hard journeys, waiting in a nook or by-way, in a snow-storm or stark solitude, waiting for that precise moment to unfold the magic of this unimaginable moment of the paradise, not only in Kashmir, but across the hidden journeys of Ladakh and the remote Nubra Valley. “This show highlights the unseen footage, the images which we could not capture in our book,” says filmmaker Nilosree Biswas, based in Mumbai, who had earlier made a poignant film on the mothers of Kashmir who are still waiting for their ‘disappeared children’. The book, with Irfan’s photographs, is considered a completely different visual and textual narrative on Kashmir, as if entering into the soul of a forgotten history which has been buried in the blood, tears and pellets of an ‘occupied’ conflict zone. “You should visit the monasteries of Ladakh with Irfan, or the camouflaged landscapes of the Nubra Valley,” says Nilosree.

Hidden high up in the hills, enclosed in its own isolation, meditation and abject solitude, the monasteries, suspended in time and space, might not find an echo in the rapidly shifting urban architecture of instability, unrest, chaos and noise. And, yet, as you enter the frame of their distant distances, their emptiness speaks out in a language which is not simply changing each moment. They also express the sounds of seasons, rivers, falling snow and snow storms, and the mystic mystery of nature where the mind is united with the self.  The deep longing of the inner spirit, wanting nothing but synthesis with the sound of silence....