Kashmir Black & White: Stories from a Troubled Land
by Anindya Raychaudhuri
‘I don’t want to confine anyone’s imagination; I want you to picture Kashmir yourself,’ said Malik Sajad, an astonishingly powerful graphic artist, in conversation with Justine Hardy. Kashmir Black & White: Stories from a Troubled Land was an opportunity to examine how people survive violence, come out of it, and in the process re-invent themselves and their cultures.
Sajad movingly pointed out that the ruins of Srinagar were not always there, that army camps in Kashmir have not always been there; that there was a time when violence was not a part of daily life, a time when what marked Kashmir was a strong tradition of cultural production.
He wants to recover and reinvent these traditions that violence and censorship have almost annihilated and, in the process, re-attach the link between Kashmiri people and their cultural past. Listening to him describe numerous humiliations at the hands of the army, one realises that harassment, abuse, and torture on the one hand, and censorship of artists and writers on the other, are part of the same project: to negate the validity of a distinctive Kashmiri identity – a Kashmiri nationhood.
His work is drawn from a wide range of influences – popular Kashmiri street-theatre to Orwell’s Animal Farm or Spiegelman’s Maus, as can be seen in the panels from his graphic novel Endangered Species that were on display as part of the festival. Particularly impressive is his ability to absorb different and often dissonant influences into something that is both startlingly original, yet deeply rooted in the socio-political contexts that lead to its creation. If there is anything to look forward to in the mess that has been made of Kashmir, it is in the work of people like Malik Sajad.
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