The thing to note in the photograph is a glimpse of ancient pre-islamic Kashmir. Notice the kid in the front with the partial tonsure. The one with Ronaldo cut.
Tarikh-i-Kabir of Muhammad-ud-Din Fauq (1892) mentions that muslim kids just like non-muslim kids used to grow a tuft of hair on the crown of their head. This hair used to be later shaved off on a particular day, at some shrines (like at Baba Rishi near Gulmarg), and the event was much celebrated (zarakasai). The tuft was known as Shika (Sanskrit), topp (“cap” in Kashmiri) or bichur (‘tuft’ as in Bil-bichur like of Bulbul).
The act of having tonsure was and is common in eastern religions.
In Islam, there are hadith against keeping partial tonsure. As the Kashmiri Muslim society moved closer to following a more literal and puritan version of Islam, the practise disappeared
Last year, I came across an interesting photograph in a book published in 1961 called ‘India, by Joe David Brown and the editors of Life’ that intrigued me. It was accompanying an essay on India and relation of its people to the Gandhian thoughts. That confused me all the more. Although the book didn’t offer any clues about the place where it was taken. But I saw something familiar in it. Something that made the photograph out of place. Even ironic. The quest to confirm its place of origin led me to some wonderful discoveries. The first clue: It was taken by famous photographer Brian Brake, best known in India for ‘The Monsoon Girl’.
The little girl at the back in green dress with white headgear in this photographs told me that she is portraying in Kashmiri Pandit woman. That told me that there was a good chance that it was shot in Kashmir. Told me that the great photographer must have been to Kashmir. What beauty he must have captured!
I have been going over and over these photographs for months now. And every time I look, the beauty of them drowns me in a weird feeling that the Kashmir we see now is just like navel lint. It’s just something.
But, I don’t want to write about. I have not time for ugliness. Too much of that abound. Instead I am going to write about beauty, about the photographs, the photographer who took them, a legendary photographer who inspired some of them and a living photography genius who was probably inspired by it. And about beautiful things that are now gone, only remaining in these photographs.
The story starts in 1957 with Henri Cartier-Bresson suggesting Kashmir as a subject to young Brian Brake. Among the photographs he shot in Kashmir we see some shot which as an obvious tribute to his mentor Bresson. Also, it is here that we see Brake try out his technique of ‘Set-up’ to get the perfect shot. The technique that mimics the unparalleled moment capturing abilities of Bresson by deliberately putting the subjects in a staged, controlled environment and setting the camera to get the right moment. It was this technique that much later gave us beauty of ‘The Monsoon Girl’ when he shot Aparna Das Gupta (later Aparna Sen) in fake rain in 1960. But there is a certain rawness to the ‘set-ups’ he shot in Kashmir, or possibly the viewer now gets that feeling because he can see all these photographs together, a viewer can almost see the various stages of a ‘set-up’. Back then, when a single photograph was published in magazine, a viewer could only see the final best product and form an opinion about the moment and beauty of it based on that. Some people done appreciate this ‘set-up’ approach to photography. But in the end, I guess it doesn’t actually matter much.
“A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck. It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness, open to any kind of reading.” – Susan Sontag, On Photography.
What is interesting is that in some photographs Brian Brake can be seen directly trying to recreate some images that were shot by Henri Cartier-Bresson a decade ago in Kashmir in 1947. That he was able to do it tells us about the pace of life back then in Kashmir.
Look at these:
Kashmiri boatwoman by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1947. via: Magnumphotos.com
And now look at this:
Kashmiri boat people by Brian Brake, 1957. The two photographs could have been from the same set and by the same photographer. Even the woman in two look the same. And even the place looks the same. It is almost like he sought out the same place where Bresson had been and in this was possible helped by Bresson.
Brian Brake even tried to recreate one of the most famous shot by Bresson.
Kashmiri women praying on Hari Parbat near Ziarat of Makhdoom Sahib. By Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1947. via: Magnumphotos.com
Now see Brian Brake’s one of the interesting obvious ‘set-up’ re-creation. (He actually did more than one version of it):
Kashmiri men on a Hill, Brian Brake, 1957.
B&W photographs, because of their obvious lack of more color, have this strange power of transporting their subjects to a realm where the viewer instantly knows he is probably looking into past. But that past for the viewer overtime becomes monotoned. The viewers stops thinking that the scene he is looking at was once alive, and actually had color. That it had life. That an apple back then too was red.It is colors that cast a more powerful spell over the viewer. The viewer instantly realizes that the past was once alive too and that the past and present have something in common, a shared color spectrum. The same sun. The same colors. And yet somehow, or rather due to the expertise of the photographer, those past colors look more appealing. See see colors you thought never existed.
Update: Now, also see an image predating both these images:
From the book ‘The Charm of Kashmir’ (1920) by V.C. Scott O’connor. Photographer: probably R.E. Shorter.
Look at ‘boatwoman’ in color by Brian Brake. It’s almost like both Bresson and Brake were at the same spot looking at the same woman.
Color photography was taking off arrive in a big way back then. Quite a few people were starting to experiment with it. And the colors of Kashmir were proving to be one of the palette. Something about its summer sun made Kashmir just perfect for color photography. The charm of Kashmir was again at work and now people could see it in all its colors.
Brian Brake’s work in National Geographic vol.144 no.5, November 1958. Notice that Bresson re-enactment.
Brian Brake’s color work in Kashmir was going to inspire another great photographer. Steve McCurry acknowledges Brake as one of the photographers who’s work inspired him a lot as a kid. He was eleven when ‘Monsoon Girl’ was published. Much later he went on to chase that feeling.
Sometimes images just provide a name or a setting of a subject.
Let’s take a look at one of the most famous Kashmir photograph by McCurry:
Flower seller, Srinagar, Dal Lake, 1996.
Now let’s one of the earliest color images of Kashmiri flower sellers. Shot in 1957 by Brian Brake.
Now look at this photograph by McCurry.
And then this beauty captured by Brian Brake in 1957.
And that’s how images live on. And so do memories.
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Some other photographers inspired by Henri Cartier-Bresson
Vogue fashion shoot in 1969. Photographer was David Bailey. Who at the age of 16 was inspired by Carier-Bresson’s famous photograph of Kashmir
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Kashmir, 1955. By Sam Tata, a Parsi photographer mentored by Cartier in late 1940s.
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Next, I am going to post some of my favorite works of Brian Brake in Kashmir.
Photographs of Srinagar city by Douglas Waugh (for what seems to have been a series on ‘modes of transportation’ and covering almost all of India). Came across these at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries – AGSL Digital Photo Archive. The photographs are dated ‘not after 1964/63’ but I believe these are from late 1950s. I have added (with help from family) location to some of the photographs. Take a peek. Rewind.
I knew it was vintage. But the description on ebay offered no date, it just said ‘Guide to Kashmir’, old, very old, or something like that. Once I bought it and went through it, finding the date proved to be fun little exercise. Clues: In which year a double room at Nedous Hotel cost Rs. 40 a day, a month in a Five room ‘A Class’ House boat cost Rs.800, Ahdoos was still there, there were only three Film theaters in the city and visitors needed permits to bring firearms into the state…in which year?
I talked around but got only approximations. In the end the fact that it was published The Tourist Traffic Branch, Ministry of Transport New Delhi proved to be vital. Searching the web led me to the listing for this booklet available in the National Library of Australia [link]. The match on the number of pages proved to be the clincher.
I read most of the essays in this book during my daily commute in Delhi Metro. On some days I did come across Pandits in transit while reading this book. Young men going to work, or returning from work, old women with their gold danglers, the dejhoors. going to relatives, or returning home. At various times while reading this book these thoughts did occur to me, these old thoughts, ‘I was born in a household where relations had names like Raja Papa, Aunty Mummy, Sahba Nanu, Bairaj Nanu, Nanu, Bhabhi, Didi, Babli Didi, Nishu kay Papa and so on and so forth. What strange ways to denote relationships! Notations that hardly give any clue about the true nature of kinship. Why this encapsulation? I now know that Pandits deemed it inappropriate to call people by their true names in terms of pure kinship terminlogy. I recalled a funny discussion between my Uncle and grandmother about ‘correct’ time for filing finger nails. It’s the Bhattil way, the Kashmiri Pandit way, as I now know. The Pandit ‘do and don’t’ prescribed and followed by Pandits. Their way of life. Our way of life explained in a complex set of dos and mostly don’t. I remember the frown of my nani occasioned by me jumping over some old ladies legs! The ye lagni karun frown. I remembered my questioning, my whys. I now realize that the self-doubt, the questioning, is also Bhattil. I now understand the meaning of ‘Havelyat ti Dasdar‘, a term often deployed by my grandmother. I recalled that one of the most crucial events in my grandmother’s life was indeed the division of a Chulah. It happened sometime in 1970s, but an event she still recalls like it happened yesterday – how after death of her mother-in-law all the women of the clan set-up their own hearths. She would often talk how the division was done, how the corners were set. I recalled my own half-hearted attempts to draw a sketch of the house in which I was born. And then in this book, I found the floor plan of a typical Pandit household, and even-though the house I was born in was in the city and the plans laid bare in this book were based on Pandit houses in rural areas, I realized all the Pandit houses were essentially designed the same way. The kitchen, the stairs, the temple room, the Wooz, the brand, the Thokur Kuth...all had a fixed probable spot in the Pandit floor plan for a house. I read the reason for the intense love a Pandit has for his physical house, and not just the concept of it. I recalled my attempts to draw my family line (I could barely get past the 4th line). In one of the essays I read the author lament about the fact that barely any of his subjects could trace his family tree beyond 3rd or 4th genertion. Lamentations, there are quite a few in this book, old laments uttered like they were a judgement on the present state of Pandit affairs, laments one still hears, laments like, ‘They are an unorganized leaderless group, proud of their past, confused about their present, and uncertain of the future.’* And yet I couldn’t help but read this book like it was a grand celebration of life and a celebration of man’s heroic efforts to make sense of it, to make sense of his constructs and the ensuring environments.
The essays in this book are based on a pioneering field study carried out by T.N. Madan in 1957-58 in twin village hamlets of Utrassu-Umanagri (still remembered as Votaros-Brariangan by Pandits), 12 miles east of Anantnag. The essays, catalogued in this book under ‘Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir’, were first published in 1967 and have since been re-published a number of times. Back when the writer started his studies, there were only a handful of anthropological studies of Indian communities available (most notably ‘Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India’ (1952) and ‘Changing Kinship Usages in the Setting of Political and Economic Change among the Nayars of Malabar’ (1952)) but with his writings and more so by his approach, Madan added new dimensions and opened new frontiers for further such studies. Given any other community, writings of this nature would have been treated as a Bible of sorts and yet Madan remains least quoted an authority on Kashmir. He remains a well known name (a cousin informed me that he is the father-in-law of Bhajan Sopori’s son*) but I suspect his work remains not so widely read within the community about which he wrote. His writings (and his life) ought to be the toast of the community. But, this sadly isn’t the case. Why should the student’s of his birth state not be encouraged to sample his writings and as an assignment try and write along similar lines on their own social set-up? I mean here is a man who in the aftermath of 1990 never dropped his objectivity, this even after witnessing his subject material dissolve at a pace perhaps never witnessed by any social scientist in the world. The Pandits of Votaros-Brariangan are now scattered in Udhampur, Jammu, Delhi and even US. The temple around which the villages were build was destroyed in 1992 in the aftermath of Babri Masjid. (The delicious irony, the village was set by a sanyasi, a renouncer). Even though his sadness at all this loss is quite visible in his later writings (in prefaces and introductions to various later editions of the book, and in his various later essays on Kashmir issue ), and even though he acknowledges the dagger of communalism digging deep into the hearts of even his own near and dear ones (his sister, who actually can claim to be the first person to have written an anthopological paper of Pandits of Kashmir, post 1990 became an ‘Anti-Muslim’ [read this interview from 2009]), even as he wrote about ‘no hope’, his own faith in hope, in people and more importantly in ‘written word’ never Waivered. That is courage. Scholarship. Without doubt such as a man deserves respect and his writing ought to be not just respected but read and engaged with.
I completed reading this book in Jammu, just a few days away from my Mekhal ceremony and my sister’s wedding. After I finished reading the book, I read out the proverbs (collected by him during his field study) given in this book, in my broken tongue, to my grand-mother, her daughter-in-laws and sons. Between them, they managed to complete almost all the proverbs before I could even get to the second word. There was much wonder and laughter. My wonder and their laughter. The reading session even drew the interest of my grandfather who is slowly loosing his memory. Later, a grand-aunt (FaFaBroWi) burnt some Izband in a Kangri while singing. ‘Izband Kangiray Tiss Tiss Droy, Sharika Aayay Lol Barnay’ and then they all went back to singing leelas of Parmanand and Krishna Razdan, digging into their lyrics books and memories.
I write all this while warming my feet over a Kangri, wrapped in a laif, even as the afternoon winter sun in Jammu is at its magnificent best.
Tok and Bricks. Jammu. 2012.
Photographs from the book -“Utrassu-Umanagri”(1957-58)
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The T.N. Madan Omnibus The Hindu Householder
Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretation of Hindu Culture (2010, Oxford University Press. Rs. 750.)
For those in India: Buy The T.N. Madan Omnibus: The Hindu Householder from Flipkart.com
* correction [14 June, 2017]: Prof. Madan’s daughter Vandana Madan wrote in to say:
“His older brother Prof.D.N. Madan is Bhajan Sopori’s father in law”
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Initially Madan wanted to do a study of ‘values’ among the pundits of Kashmir but was advised against it by his mentors. But after proving a typical Kashmiri Pandit to be a householder who has little time for thoughts of renunciation, in the next set of essays cataloged under ‘Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretation of Hindu Culture’, Madan moves to values and goes on to explore the associated themes at length. The most interesting of these is the essay on ‘Asceticism and Eroticism’. Here he innovatively chooses to study works of fiction to present his thesis – three works specifically: Bhagvaticharan Varma’s Hindi novel Chitraleka (1933), U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Kannada novel Samskara (1965), translated into English by A.K. Ramanujan, and Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar’s Marathi novel Yayati (1959), rendered into Hindi by Moreshvar Tapasvi.
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Epilogue to the book offers Madan’s memories of ‘Growing up in a Kashmiri Hindu Household’. It was a shock to know that he too grew up on the story of ‘Gagri Gagri‘, a sad tale of a lady mouse who lost her ear in a domestic fight over missing khichdi. It’s a story I too grew up on. My grandmother still remembers it, in parts. As I asked her to sing me a line, my favorite line, in which the lady mouse has her ear blown by a Kajwot thrown by her husband, one of my aunts (Anita Didi, FaBroWi) filled in with her favorite part, where the husband tries to convince her to return back to her. The ending of the story (death of the lady mouse, as recounted by Madan) came as a surprise to Anita Didi. But then she agreed that the ending was appropriate as the heavy pleading by the husband made more sense in such a scenario. [This story is going on my ‘to do someday’ list. Inputs are welcome.]
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*Madan was in fact describing the impact of land re-distribution on the Pandits of rural Kashmir in 1950s: “An instance of the lack of solidarity among Kashmiri Pandits may be seen in their attitude to the recent political and economic changes in the State. These changes have had, among other consequences, the effect of endangering the economic solvency of the Pandits. All households that owned more than 23 acres have lost the land exceeding that limit to their tenants; the tenant’s share on agriculture produce has been raised, benefitting the Muslims more than the pandits, because not many Pandits have been tenants; and government jobs have been thrown open to the Muslims on a favoured treatment basis. In the face of the rising economic and political power of the Muslims, it might have been expected that the Pandits would evolve a common approach to their relations with the Muslims; but they have not. They are divided into two opinion groups; those who want to co-operate with the Muslims and work for a united village community, and those who want to seek protection from the government as a religious minority. They are an unorganised leaderless group, proud of their past, confused about their present, and uncertain of the future.”
Female, Swimsuits and Swimmers. Another thing missing in contemporary images of Kashmir.
I came across this photograph in ‘Guide to Kashmir’, a tourist brochure published by The Tourist Traffic Branch, Ministry of Transport New Delhi, 1954.
England born Miss Edna Bellefontaine called Kashmir her home. She lived in houseboats, hiked through Himalayas (once even spent a night in a sacred high cave, which one we don’t know, she even claimed to be the first white woman to ever enter the Kingdom of Nepal). Miss Edna painted all that she saw. And on some days she would put on a black wig and some native dress to do some exotic twist for the soon to depart royalty. For all that she earned a title: ‘Mata Hari of Kashmir’. But with a name like that, there could be no happy ending. Or did that name come up only later, as a minor footnote to an event in history. In 1953, after a meeting with General Ayub Khan of Pakistan, she was banished from the land of Kashmir. At gun point Mata Hari was ousted from her houseboat and sent packing to Delhi with her six trunks and two dogs where for some years she was charged with planning Kashmir’s sedition from India. For years she petitioned India and Pakistan to let her go back to her paradise. A similar fate was met with by a man who too had met the Gereral that day. Sheikh Abdullah. But Edna was to never return. In exile she became Mrs. Edna Bailey and wrote a book called ‘Externed from Paradise’. Hoping to teach Indian dancing in some college or university, in Trenton New Jersey, Mata Hari of Kashmir did the native dances for soldiers, the wealthy and women’s group.
