A Student's Reflections on Kashmir

Jess Bidgood, EXPOSURE’06-, EPIIC’08

Photo by Jess Bidgood, A Woman Prays in the Grand Mosque in SRINAGAR, KASHMIR

I am sitting on the floor of a small room that is dubiously wedged, seemingly as an afterthought, between the first and third floors of a rickety building on a narrow street in Srinagar. To get into in to this room, you have to squeeze through an alleyway and past a medium-sized brown cow, who is sifting through a pile of chip bags and cigarette butts, refuse from the convenience store next door. There are some stairs haphazardly attached to the back of the building, and you climb them and you’re there, in a green room with green carpeting and no furniture.

It is filled with women, nine or ten of them. Dressed in the tunics, loose pants, and long scarves that constitute local dress, they sit on the floors, adorning the room with color, though not with sound. There is a deep silence in this room, a silence layered with stories and tension. One of them, however, tries her English with me. Her name is Iram, and she, like me, is 18. She is attending the University of Kashmir, studying political science and English. She asks me who my favorite actor is, and I falter. I don’t know. Matt Damon. She likes Brad Pitt, and she thinks that Angelina is just great for him. And then we lapse into silence, because we shouldn’t be talking about trivialities so far away from here that they might as well be pretend. These women are here because of real life. They are here waiting for the arrival of a man, a healer pupil of a Sufi mystic, to whom they will tell their problems of medical needs, of abortions, of unemployment, of poverty, of the loss of their loved ones. They are here looking for answers.

I found myself in that room, in that city, in that disputed territory with a similar purpose. Along with seven other undergraduate students and two Fletcher students, I was participating in a journalism workshop run by EXPOSURE, a program of the IGL that focuses on photojournalism, documentary studies, and human rights. Mentored by Mort Rosenblum, whose illustrious career in journalism includes two years as the editor of the International Herald Tribune and many years at the Associated Press, and renowned photojournalist Gary Knight, cofounder of the VII photo agency, we spent a week living on house boats on the Dal Lake, spending our days exploring the city around us, seeking to craft a photo essay and a written piece about a story that we followed during our time there.

Even before our stories unfolded, we found ourselves getting close to an additional cast of characters that would be crucial to our days in Kashmir. There was Lassah, an aging driver of shikaras, small wooden boats that transport tourists and townspeople across the Dal Lake, who had once given George Harrison a ride. There were the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Forces (JKLF), a gun-wielding, khaki-clad mainstay of life here, four of who would accompany the doctor to our boats when one of us fell ill, propositioning another member of our group with promises of land and chickens. There was the local judge who would join us for dinner sometimes, whose knowledge and perspective of Kashmir was astonishing, but who couldn’t have his name printed due to the danger that his radical beliefs might pose to him. There was Muzamil, the eyes and ears of journalism in Kashmir and an indispensable source of contacts and guidance; and there were his journalism interns, just a few years older than we were, who became our fixers and our friends.

It was through the eyes of these people that I came to understand life in Kashmir, as it is as a whole, the best I could in the week I was there. We came to Kashmir with story ideas, and we followed those stories, but we had to understand their contexts first. That’s what happens when you go somewhere to tell a story that won’t hit the front page. You get to absorb the quiet, the stillness, and the normalcy of life in a place, not just its action. You make friends and you learn from them. And then you can follow your own story.

I studied religion. Five times a day, as in most Islamic parts of the world, nahmaz, the chanted, sung, and murmured prayer of the region’s Muslim majority, would wash across the lake from the beautiful Shrine of Hazratbal, which I could see from my houseboat, ricochet off of the Himalayas, and weave its way into the streets of the city, where it intertwined with the same prayer coming from other shrines and the city’s Grand Mosque. These shrines were little centers of life, where women and men of both Muslim and Hindu religious affiliation would go to pray and cry, to give alms to beggars, to see their friends, and to buy foodstuffs from the markets that would spring up near by. I wanted to understand the roots of this religion and to see how it fit into today’s Islamic world.

From Sufi leaders, professors, soldiers, caretakers, Muslims, and Hindus, I learned about the Sufi mystics who brought Islam to Kashmir hundreds of years ago, who converted Buddhists and Hindus with persuasion, empathy, and the promise of equality, rather than force. A peaceful, tolerant form of Islam had engulfed the state since then. I learned about how, during the conflict over Kashmir between Pakistan, India, and the Kashmiri’s themselves that has characterized much of the second half of the last century, leaders used religion to turn neighbors against each other, sending Hindus into exile. I learned how this conflict, that has been simplified on the world stage as one between Pakistan’s Muslims and Indian Hinduism over the sovereignty of a beautiful place, has very little to do with religion at all. I learned about how Sufi Muslims and Ahl-hadis (those who believe that the writings of the Sufis diverge from those of the Koran, and are thus irrelevant to Islam) alike fought for their country, and how Kashmiri leadership continues to manipulate the two.

My work in Kashmir was a chance for me to study the points of contact between religion and politics-- a crucial concept to understand in a world where a small number of extremists, on both sides of the Pacific Ocean, link the two and pit themselves against each other. What became more important to me, however, was the chance I had to study the relationship between religion and life-- the provincial, quiet, yet dangerous daily life of Kashmir’s people.

This is a people who, 15 years ago, sent their children to school not knowing if they would come back. Who lost neighbors and family members upon the crash of fists on their front doors. Who rarely make it from one end of the city to another without being pulled over and searched by JKLF. The fact that the idea of religion being a part of life, not politics, was also more important to the Kashmiris with who I was interacting was telling. They did not want to talk about religion and politics because they did not link the two.

I travelled from shrine to shrine that week, using one hand to hold a camera and a pen, and another to keep my headscarf on (a feat which I found much more difficult than the elegant women of Kashmir made it appear). One day, I went to the Grand Mosque, the center of Ahl-hadism in Srinagar, where a 20-year-old man named Omar spoke fervently of the ultimate truth of the Koran, and angrily of the injustices of the West. On one of my last days in the city, I went to the Shrine of Chrari Charif, tucked into the hills high above the city. A bizarre collision of political tension and local hospitality meant that, after being served chai by the policemen who guarded it, I was flanked by four armed guards as I made my way around the shrine. My fixer, Musavir, and I watched an old woman rock back and forth on the floor of the shrine, crying and kissing the tomb of Kashmir’s patron saint, Nundreshi, who is buried there. We spoke to her on her way out. She was crying, she said, because both of her sons, who each had families, remained unemployed after years of searching for jobs. It’s not difficult to understand the relationship between the conflict over Kashmir and its stagnant economy, but here was a woman who embodied that. Her sons didn’t know what to do, and neither did she. And so she would come to this shrine every day, and tie a bit of cloth, representing her prayers, around any part of the shrine that wasn’t already covered in other people’s prayers. You can look at these bits of cloth, tied to every conceivable surface on any shrine in Kashmir, and learn more about the people of this region than you could, I think, in any other way.

I had been worried about going to Kashmir. I was concerned about the obvious physical risk of going to a society that lingers somewhere between “active conflict” and “post-conflict”, where tourists, civilians, and soldiers are targeted once in a while to remind the world that Kashmir isn’t safe. I was concerned, too, of what I would learn about my own abilities as a journalist while I was there. Fear of failure snapped at my heels-- this was the real deal! And yet, when I got to Kashmir and plunged myself into my ten-day life there, these fears changed. I was this place then, and I was careful, and I was nervous sometimes, but I was learning that I could do things and I could write here and I could take photos and I could connect with people just as well here as I could at home. From Gary and Mort, I was learning a craft. From our fixers and the men at our houseboats, I was learning simply about life. From Katja, the women waiting for their healer in that green room, from all of the others who allowed me to learn about their religious life, and even from Omar, I learned how, just like anywhere else, religion in Kashmir is something that people look to for answers, solace and support.

I learned about myself, of course, as we all do on these trips. And I learned that, no matter what problems of differences in policy and culture the world’s future may hold, we can all probably agree that Angelina Jolie is indeed a good force in the life of Brad Pitt.

EXPOSURE, the Institute's program for photojournalism, documentary studies, and human rights, continues to thrive.

Last August, EXPOSURE held another weeklong workshop in Kashmir, India for nine students. The workshop, once again, featured the leadership and mentorship of VII Photographer Gary Knight and journalist Mort Rosenblum. Both will be leading another EXPOSURE workshop - their fourth - in the summer of 2008 in Cambodia for eleven students, ten from Tufts and one who was part of the CGI delegation that attended the 2008 EPIIC Symposium from the National University of Singapore.

EXPOSURE will also be running a second workshop this summer, in northern Uganda, in collaboration with the Aftermath Project and its founder, Sara Terry. The Aftermath Project is a non-profit organization committed to telling the other half of the story of conflict -- the story of what it takes for individuals to learn to live again, to rebuild destroyed lives and homes, to restore civil societies, to address the lingering wounds of war while struggling to create new avenues for peace (http://www.theaftermathproject.org/). The IGL is developing a long-term collaboration with the Aftermath Project.

The second book from these Knight/Rosenblum workshops - Argentina: From the Ruins of a Dirty War - was published this spring, featuring the photography and writing of the participating students. Moises Naim, editor of Foreign Policy, commented,

"Capturing the essence of a nation - its identity, its contrasts and its policies - is never easy. Doing it in 220 pages and 94 photographs is even harder. Attempting to do it relying on college students is a bold idea. But these pages prove that bold ideas sometimes pay. Written and photographed by Tufts University students, Argentina: from the ruins of a dirty war is an extraordinary testimony of what happens when passion, creativity, and hard work combine. Its contents are as informative as they are revealing about the many-layered frailties of Argentina. This book provides a new and very rich perspective on Argentina, and will become an interesting reference about a country on which a lot has already been written."