Golf Caddies, Gulmarg, 1946

Golf Caddies, Gulmarg,
August 1946
From a private album probably belonging to a British Soldier

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“On this same afternoon a few boys were posted on the greens to prevent leaves from obscuring golf balls. They swept with a tiny broom made of a few twigs lashed together.

Ghulam, who has been working at this club since 1929, played in Indian tournaments in the 1930’s.
“In my time I played very good golf,” he says, noting that he now has a 3 handicap. Before World War II he met “the top class of golfers” from the British Commonwealth, but now he cannot remember their names.
The 70-year-old Kashmir Golf Club caters to some of the world’s wealthiest tourists, but by American standards the club is impoverished.

The locker room is shabby and smell. The furniture is crude and ancient. Light bulbs are no more than 40 watts in brightness. The 19th hole is a collection of a few rickety table and rattan chairs. The bar is stocked with only a trifling quality of liquor, and all the bottled are dusty.”

Extract from “Playing Golf in Kashmir: Greens Fee is 81 cents and sheep trim fairways” by John S. Radosta for The New York Times, December 7, 1969

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Salima lives in Kashmir, by Anna Riwkin-Brick, 1971

Salima lives in Kashmir.

Photos by Anna Riwkin-Brick, story by Vera Forsberg.
Children of the World Series
Published 1971 by Macmillan
Anna Riwkin-Brick (1908, Russia -1970, Israel), Swedish photographer, spent a good part of her life traveling the world, and to place she went she captured the lives of children on camera. Later, these photographs were used to produce a series on day-to-day lives of ‘Children of the world’, with text captions from collaborating writers added to weave a story. In all there were 19 such book with titles like Dirk lives in Holland, Eli lives in Israel, Gennet lives in Ethiopia, Marko lives in Yugoslavia, Matti lives in Finland, Noy lives in Thailand, Randi lives in Norway, Gia lives on Kilimanjaro and Salima lives in Kashmir.
Anna Riwkin-Brick captured children on camera like few could, perhaps because she started photography by first capturing dancers (her photograph of Third Reich dancer Alexander von Swaines in 1930s, although considered imperfect in its time for the ‘motion blur’, can now be called perfect). 
The beautiful photographs in ‘Salima lives in Kashmir’ in all probability come from Anna Riwkin-Brick’s visit to Kashmir in 1969. The story that the pictures tell has a nine year old Kashmiri boat girl named Salima and she struggle for joining a school, about how she convinces her grandfather to let her go to school.  
“Certainly there are few things more attractive than the friendliness and broad smiles of the Kashmiri children.” Even V.S. Naipaul, the man who thinks ‘World is What it is’ confessed it once.
And this book offers something akin to that, broad smiles, Kashmiri children and a friendly camera. The effect casts a spell of heart-aching beauty upon the viewer. A spell that is broken only by the realisation that this beauty, this innocence is now gone. It is only an illusion in the mind and a shadow on the book. Or so it seems to a grown-up and the world of children remains the same.
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Kashmir in British Vogue

“Barbara Mullen floating in the water in a cotton mousseline dress by Atrima in Dal Lake, Kashmir, India. Norman Parkinson, British Vogue, 1956.”
Image via: sighs and whispers
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The story goes that in 1957 in Kashmir, one Sultan Wangnoo, gave Norman Parkinson a traditional handmade embroidered Kashmiri wedding cap. Norman Parkinson got so superstitious about it that he took to wearing it all the time while shooting as he believed if he wasn’t wearing one the photographs wouldn’t come out at all.

Norman Parkinson at work in his Kashmiri Cap

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Waters of  Kashmir were again the background canvas for a  Vogue fashion shoot in 1969. This time the photographer was David Bailey. At the age of 16, David Bailey was inspired to take up photography after  seeing the famous Cartier-Bresson image of Kashmir: Muslim Women Praying at Dawn in Srinagar (for Cartier’s influence on Kashmir photographs and phographers, check this ). The model was a teenaged Penelope Tree, a style icon from swinging 60s whose fashion career ended due to acne.
The Lake this time was Wular.

Images for this issue via: modern vintage clothing
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