Sohrab Hura’s Frozen Vision of Kashmir
Many things about “Snow,” the photographer Sohrab Hura’s new volume of images from Kashmir, feel incomplete—but purposefully so, as if partially occluding our gaze might also focus it. Each of the hundred and seventy five photos sits by itself, square and silent, on a white page, without a jot of text to indicate when and where it was taken, or what it depicts. There’s no introductory or concluding essay, merely a couple of notes; the very first image we see, on opening the book, is a man walking a snowbound road, hauling two others behind him on a sled during what must be the bitter depth of the Chillai Kalan, the forty harshest days of winter. And finally, there’s barely any direct sign of the conflict that has, for decades, eaten into the very bones of Kashmir, a territory claimed so ferociously by India and Pakistan that they’ve fought several wars over it, pushing its people into anger, ruin, and, since the nineteen-eighties, armed uprisings against Indian rule. The standard lexicon of documentary photos from Kashmir includes army convoys and barricades, soldiers and protestors, fear and hostility. In “Snow,” I spotted armed troops only twice: once in a small, loose coterie ambling near a railway line, and again in an image of a single man attired pudgily in both camo and winterwear, standing in a patch of brambly land, his helmet on the ground next to him. All these officers seem unsure of what to do or where to look—which is entirely unlike the Indian military’s brutal, relentless approach to holding Kashmir.
Hura, who lives in Delhi, took these photos beginning in 2015, when he first travelled to Kashmir. He kept telling himself that he was only a visitor—that he wasn’t on a recce for a future project—but he was struck by how Kashmiris rarely stayed outdoors in the evenings, hurrying home after work, navigating security barricades to return to towns and villages that tourists rarely visited. For Kashmiris, the Indian police and military are the menace hovering by the elbow: the forces that will detain men on the merest suspicion of being militants, fire into protesting crowds of civilians, torture and rape, inter bodies in mass graves, or strap someone to the front of a jeep as a human shield. (The Indian government has denied allegations of rape and torture by its personnel in Kashmir.) Living elsewhere in India, you may know in the abstract that the Kashmir valley is a zone of military repression, but being there, Hura found, gave you a viscerally heightened awareness of it. He went to the usual tourist spots—the summer capital of Srinagar, the ski station of Gulmarg—and sensed that the real Kashmir lay elsewhere. In the following years, Hura went back again and again to shoot, but he always postponed the inevitable: the work of capturing the military’s iron control over Kashmiris, the boiling resentment against the Indian state, and the strife of daily life. He had to do it, he reluctantly admitted to himself—but perhaps not just yet.
Then, in the summer of 2019, Prime Minister Narendra Modi fulfilled one of the Hindu right’s dearest wishes: rescinding the constitutional provisions that long granted the state of Jammu and Kashmir special autonomous powers. Jammu and Kashmir, which had long been ruled by a locally elected legislature, was now torn into two union territories that were brought under the direct control of Modi’s administration in Delhi. In anticipation of unrest, thousands of soldiers were deployed into the region, security forces detained Kashmiri politicians, and nearly all communications were blacked out. At the time, Hura was in Kashmir for a friend’s wedding. “Just before this siege began, I managed to get on one of the last flights out of Srinagar,” he told me. The next year brought the COVID pandemic. Hura never returned to photograph the inescapable coda of his project: the wrenching violence wrought by the Indian state upon Kashmiri society. It felt incomplete. He shelved the photos and moved on.
Then Hura changed, and the world changed, and his relationship with photography changed, and after all these things happened he pulled out his Kashmir archive and looked through the images again.
His method had been improvisatory. He’d go to Srinagar or Pahalgam, catch a bus out, disembark in the countryside, and meander back into town through fields and villages. Invariably, people would wonder about this lone outsider on foot and invite him into their homes for tea. Much of “Snow” unfolds in the domestic or pastoral register. Two bowls of rice on a blue carpet, gleaming as they catch the sun from the window. A teen-ager dragging home an orange cooking-gas cylinder with the aid of just a rope. Tomatoes floating in a large, clear puddle. A sheep being shorn, its shearer tossing onto a blue tarp drifts of wool that look no different from the snow on the surrounding ground.
The snow is, of course, everywhere. In the Indian psyche, the idea of Kashmir as a winter wonderland has been unshakeable, polished often through Bollywood numbers that interrupt some urban plot to whisk their hero and heroine away to dance and sing on the Himalayan slopes. In some of Hura’s photos, the snow is still beautiful when it swaddles a landscape, Bruegel-like. But mostly the snow is a pervasive, persistent force: stacked so high outside a window that it cuts off the light, enveloping cars, coming down day and night. Even when the snow is absent, winter, its coldhearted parent, makes itself felt in the bare branches of trees and the sere grass in the fields. Kashmir is as much hardship as it is beauty, as much despair as it is resilience.
Hura’s intent, he told me, “was to photograph with love—which may sound strange, but all these other images of Kashmir out there, the ones on Time magazine covers and so on, were so harsh in their constant depiction of Kashmir in a condition of strife, that I wanted to show the soft, the routine.” Besides, the violence in Kashmir isn’t just one dramatic event; it is embossed into the everyday, in the barricades that you have to cross when you go home from work, in how tightly you hold your body all the time. If Hura retained any misgivings about the absence of images openly chronicling the atrocities, his Kashmiri friends dissolved them. “One friend thought he found a lot of meaning in this incompleteness,” Hura said. In any case, after 2019, the norm on the subject of Kashmir has been silence: frozen conversations, muted politics, public debate sucked into a vacuum. The aborted finale of “Snow” is a jolting reminder of that silence.
Still, Hura has selected many of his images to be strongly allusive. The blood clouding a stream is instantly ominous, but it’s from a sheep slaughtered at Eid. An untidy pile of chicken eyeballs on a slab, one of them gazing directly at us, is a vignette from a butcher’s shop—and also an echo of the horrific eye injuries inflicted on Kashmiri protestors by the police’s metal-pellet shotguns. Buses and vans smash into snowbanks or roadside barriers, accidents that speak of Kashmir’s own careening trajectory. The most striking photo shows a young boy in a checkered pheran lying on his back in a field. The sun is shining, the grass bursts with green, and everything is vital—except that the boy’s face is eclipsed by a clump of cotton or perhaps a white cloth, a sudden intrusion of something like snow into this early spring day. The masking of his face renders him inexplicably lifeless, like the scores of young men who have been killed by security forces. Death has blown its sour breath into life.
If Hura had assembled “Snow” in 2019, he would have chosen only photos like these: lateral and coded, often with no humans in them. His taste for the direct had waned since his early years in photography, he said, and I saw what he meant when, later, he texted me a link to a project from 2005: a powerful study of rural laborers that was almost overbearingly frank in its black-and-white depiction of bodies toiling in the midsummer heat and faces sharply etched by the camera. Even as Hura’s reputation grew—in 2020, he became the first full member of Magnum from India—he found himself departing from the idea that “a factual, clean photo” could convey some sort of absolute truth. Broken images felt more real. “But ever since the Palestinian genocide I’ve been seeing so many photos of parents looking for kids, children looking for siblings, people collecting body parts—that affected my edit,” Hura said. “I have more photos of people in here than I would have had otherwise.” They’re sometimes playful, as in the image of three friends outfitting a snowman, or simply framed, as in that of a girl standing on a snowclad street, holding a Quran to her chest. “I did it to draw out the humanity of this place,” Hura told me.
In 2021, Hura suffered a dreadful case of COVID, which nearly halved his lung function and prevented him from venturing out to shoot; he panted even as he moved about his apartment. He grew tired of the screen and yearned to make something with his hands, so he started drawing and then painting. He has returned to photography only twice: first to shoot the literary scholar Ganesh Devy, when I profiled him for this magazine, and again to shoot Arundhati Roy ahead of the release of her memoir last year. Even when he was laid low by COVID, he felt a looming awareness of A.I., and it compounded his sense that photography had hit an epistemological wall. In previous eras, the wisest photographers knew that their work captured just a simulacrum of a physical moment, and they urged their audiences to look at the image but also beyond it. “The burden of the photo representing a fact, or evidence, was heavy, and we were trying to escape it,” Hura told me. Today, the rise of deepfakes and the velocity with which these fabricated photos assault us could corrode the credibility of even genuine images. “It’s a bit of a crisis for people,” Hura said. In a reversal, photographers now want us to buy into the reality that their images present. They no longer wish to escape the burden of testimony.
What does “Snow” testify to? Possibly to a way of life that not only survives many kinds of precarity—cruel weather, scanty income, a despotic army—but that even molds itself to them. I kept returning to an image of the side of a house with unfinished red brick walls and a corrugated metal roof. Quilts and blankets burst out of its upper windows, perhaps to be aired or perhaps as plugs to keep out the winter wind. It’s a sight so unexpected that it feels faintly comic, until you clock just how many blankets there are—and how bitterly cold it must be in that house at night. The day is bright, and the distant peaks are carpeted in green, but there’s still a berm of snow on the road by the house, as if to warn that the winter will never entirely leave this land.
