The book opens with three photographs (taken by Nawal Ali). In the first, a middle-aged woman stands in profile to the camera. Her face and torso are draped in a sheer pink odhni; light catches the cloth’s silvery motifs. In the background there stands a torn, fluttering Pakistani flag. The flagpole towers over the trees but it is askew; the woman’s back, however, is perfectly straight. She is the photograph’s centre: she holds the image together, even though her surroundings are falling apart.
This scene is an excellent entry into Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir, a slim powerhouse of experimental non-fiction by Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas. The choice of photograph exhibits the care the authors have taken in portraying Kashmir in this book: Ali’s image encapsulates the Kashmiri people’s resistance to the overwhelming oppression they have experienced over almost eight decades since the partition of India in 1947. Throughout, Kashmiri voices are never treated as mere sources for a project but are instead woven into the fabric of the narrative as the authors sought to tell a story as truthful as possible about the five-month lockdown and communications blackout in the region in 2019—no mean feat given the amount of disinformation blasted by the Indian government and certain media.
It is a testament to Scott and Thomas’ impeccable writing that, in the space of a hundred or so pages, they manage to convey an extraordinary amount of information. The book is structured in two parts. The first is a log of the first fifteen days of the 2019 communications blackout in Kashmir, while the second is an essay that explores the military occupation of the region. Thirteen photographs from Ali, Ufaq Fatima and Zainab—the three co-founders of ‘Her Pixel Story’, a Kashmiri women’s photography collective—open and close the book and mark the transition between its first ‘Log’ section and its second essay part. The text and visuals explore the complex history of Kashmir, the current government’s reach and projects throughout the region, the land’s territorial complexities, and the ideological and material ties between India and Israel, which inform the way Kashmir has been subjected to military occupation by the Indian army. The authors’ careful stylistic choices enable non-Kashmiri-residing readers to feel the sheer horror of the occupation, of lives lived under a near-perpetual state of emergency.
Before getting into the details, I’d like to provide some necessary political and historical context on the Indian government and the current situation. India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is the richest and largest political party in the world. The Indian government led by Modi has sought to reshape India into an ethnic democracy. Under Modi, militarised Hindu nationalist groups have fragilized independent institutions including the supreme court and the press; the state now routinely marginalises non-Hindus while emboldening and protecting the Hindu far-right. The Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, is particularly astute at communications, where the party spends hundreds of millions (dollars, not rupees). In the five months leading up to the Indian general elections of 2024, for instance, the BJP poured about 14 million dollars into Google Ads alone and the state has a super-staffed communications hydra that churns out non-stop propaganda across sanctioned news channels and social media. ‘[Modi] invented a Hindu variety of national populism in which the majoritarian community came together against the Muslim Other, who was forced to submit, in the face of violent means, or leave,’ writes Christophe Jaffrelot in Modi’s India (2021). School textbooks have been revised, writing out history in favour of mythology, Jaffrelot tells us: ‘final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister.’
Those who seek to counter Hindu nationalist myth-making with facts, who champion truth through language, are often silenced. India’s press freedom has worsened acutely since Modi first became prime minister: in the Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom index in 2024, India occupied the 159th place out of 176 countries, a drop of 19 positions in a decade. 21 journalists were imprisoned between 2014–2023 (compared with four between 2004–2013) and reporters increasingly face arrests and harassment. Writers and activists critical of the Modi regime are branded ‘urban Naxalites’ and if these activists are Muslim, they are demonised, de-nationalised, branded as Pakistani infiltrators or terrorists. The most famous writer to face the BJP’s wrath is Arundhati Roy. Less than two weeks after Modi won a third term on shakier ground than expected, the government decided to sanction the prosecution of Roy for comments on Kashmir that she made in 2010; the decision means that Roy could spend many years in prison awaiting trial.
Six months before the Kashmir blackout that is the subject of Pleasure Gardens, and a few weeks before the Indian general election of 2019, a 22-year-old man blew himself up in Pulwama, Kashmir, killing forty-one Indian soldiers. ‘As the 2019 general election approached, polls showed Modi and his party’s popularity dropping dramatically […] Many of us anticipated a false-flag attack or even a war that would be sure to change the mood of the country’ Roy writes in her 2020 essay collection Azadi. An urgent alert about a possible attack had been issued by the Jammu and Kashmir police, and it had been ignored. ‘False flag or not, the [suicide bombing] was perfect. Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party swept back to power’.
The first section of Pleasure Gardens, the Log, was explicitly crafted to write back against the miasma of disinformation generated by the authorities during the Kashmir blackout of 2019, where, during 213 days, over twelve million people were locked into their homes under a military curfew and about thirteen thousand people were placed into preventive detention. The Log is concerned with the craftsmanship, usage and weaponization of language: the obfuscations and wilful fabrications of the Indian government and the army; the testimonials of Kashmiris who still resist and speak out; the reportage of the journalists who risked their lives in order to describe the state of events in the region.
Scott and Thomas state:
In the aftermath, we identified a task: to try and fill the void, the gaps in information. To try and do this as simply and as precisely as possible. To look closely at the law, which is so often designed to confuse and distract, but is in fact, also, an efficient record. As the courts force the state to meet the requirements of a legal etiquette, a narrative must be formed; even when processes are subverted, bills and amendments and orders must be produced. Together, they form an account.
In the aftermath, we looked closely at the language in these legal and journalistic records – the surprise phrases or statements; the pieces falling into place.
This extract is taken from ‘Aftermath’, a short companion essay to the Log; it’s a necessary piece, I think, given that the Log is an intellectually dense, intricate work. It reads as sharply and as fluidly as a cold glass of water, by which I mean to say that there’s a ton going on in there, some of which didn’t sink in fully in my first reading of the text: the prose is clean and clear and keeps you moving along. The diction throughout is stark, deliberately pared back. Events are described almost play by play as we learn about the lived experience of the blackout in Kashmir and how it was orchestrated by the government. The prose gathers mounting dread as events escalate and details pile up, such as the initial ballooning of the number of army personnel, deployed to counter a fabricated threat of ‘home-grown terrorism’—this, in what is probably the most densely militarised zone in the world, under constant surveillance. Take for instance the log of 1 August, which discusses the surreal instructions issued by Indian Railways:
The directive says there will be an ‘issue of law & order for [a] long period’. Trains must be fuelled up and parked in safe garages as ‘they may be attacked with the intention of damage’.
Staff are directed to send any family members back to India.
‘Administration will not hold any responsibility for eventuality’.
Stranger still, it mentions: ‘There should be no negotiation with [the] mob’.
What mob?
Short sentences, spaced out one after the other, convey the speed at which the messages were delivered and the curfew was enacted. They reminded me of shock as felt in the body: of that total clarity that seems to envelop the mind in such intense moments, as it pushes feeling away for the moment, making space only for action.
Scott and Thomas then describe how the government stripped away the region’s constitutional rights a little less than two weeks before Indian Independence Day. Kashmir previously had its own constitution, flag, and penal code, and was able to retain its independence over all matters except foreign affairs, defence and communications. It also had the right to define ‘permanent residents’ of the state and to reserve certain rights for them, including property rights and government jobs. All of these rights were annulled on 5 August: as the Log of that day indicates, the abrogation was carried out under the cover of lockdown, in the surety of the knowledge that hardly any Kashmiris would even be aware of the events in Delhi. At that point, they didn’t know for certain that they were under military curfew, either, since it hadn’t been announced:
It’s a de facto curfew – not officially named. Because naming the curfew would hold it accountable to how it’s defined by legal terms. This is a juridical vagueness typical of the Modi regime; it allows for more leeway, greater impunity—an impunity facilitated by the lack of definition, by the legal grey-zone. A sweet spot of ambiguity.
The news reports cited throughout the Log highlight the scarcity of what we actually know about the events in Kashmir: journalists had no access to news feeds and were forced to depend on Indian news channels and their mostly right-wing content.
The authors do a wonderful job of juxtaposing different sources to show the reigning confusion manifest in the contradictory statements by authorities.
They warn the public to ‘stay safe at home and not venture out’. Those who want to leave their homes will need to show passes [Daily Star]. But authorities are not issuing the passes. According to them, there is ‘no curfew in place’ [India Today]
This logic is maddening, conflicting, violent. What can be seen with the naked eye – armed officers blocking roads, bridges, highways; concertina wire at every corner – is being denied [JKCCS, 2020].
The need for passes that are non-existent, the imposition of a curfew that doesn’t exist—these juxtapositions show the overarching theme of deliberate, maddening deceit by the authorities. The list of sources given at the end of the Log stands as a testament to what was collected, what managed to be published. It’s a sentiment encapsulated in the photo that ends the Log, taken by Ufaq Fatima: a partially-blacked-out image of a newspaper, whose headline reads ‘Kashmir remains incommunicado’.
I can’t remember the last time I read a recent work of non-fiction that really pushed a form to the tightness, the potency of the Log. The immediacy of it is stunning. I am not casually throwing around adjectives here; I’ve read a considerable amount of books and essays on the state of post-2014 India, but none made me feel dread in quite this way. This is not to say that we should measure the book’s success by its affect value—but the style and form the authors have chosen works so well because it is so deeply immersive.
In comparison, the second section of the book is a more straightforward essay, distinct in style. Where the Log’s sparse prose perfectly conveyed the accumulating tension of each day that passes, the essay is vividly detailed. It is also ambitious, covering an enormous scope. It examines the psychogeography of the military occupation of Kashmir. It describes the violence enacted by military personnel on the region; the politics inherent in the tenuous, malleable ‘Line of Control’, a militarised boundary that separates India-occupied Kashmir from Pakistan-occupied Kashmir; the warfare and rhetoric imported from Israel, whose military occupation of Palestine has served as an exemplar to the Indian government on how to dispossess and marginalise people in their own homeland.
The essay also reveals what the ‘pleasure gardens’ of the book’s title refer to. The book opens and closes with a description of three of these Gardens: Badami Bagh, Garden of Almonds; Pari Mahal, the Palace of Fairies; and Siraj Bagh, Garden of Light. Under the Indian occupation of Kashmir, sprawling army camps have taken over the gardens, claiming their names, violating the natural beauty: ‘the almond and Chinar trees noisily uprooted, flower beds stamped out, and fountains emptied to clear the way for mess halls and interrogation centres.’ The terraced gardens ‘double as torture sites, shrouded in camouflage and secrecy’. The gardens are now fraught with horror.
The military occupation has mutilated the landscape, as is manifest in the perversion of the Gardens described above. Thomas and Scott also describe how, in some instances, the military encampments prove to be tenuous, even useless, there merely to serve an ego-need for power or to support the infamous Line of Control, a display of possession in an extremely inhospitable environment. Directly on the Line of Control, there is a camp near the Siachen Glacier where temperatures can drop to -6o degrees Celsius:
The Pakistani and Indian army camps on either side of the line sit at about 24,000 feet above sea level, and soldiers routinely die of hypoxia, hypothermia, and frostbite. A person’s own sweat can slick over their body and freeze, turning to ice on the skin. Set deep in the Himalayas—a still-growing mountain range, and one of the most seismically charged spots in the world—the camps guzzle large reserves of money in order to keep their stations active.
The (il)logic of the state of emergency prevails, even in the occupation’s most remote outposts. The Indian army have sought out novel technology to survey this challenging topography, and in the Israeli army they have found the solutions they needed—and much else. The last sections of the essay delve into the deep, lucrative and ideological ties that Israel and India have forged together, a relationship that started with India’s first acquisition of ‘military assistance’ from Israel in 1962, and which has grown to such an extent that Israel now has a factory in India that produces drones and other weapons currently being used in the Gaza genocide. Both militaries have grown and learned from each other, and India’s ethno-democracy was consolidated following Israel’s own example. ‘India for Israel and Israel for India: the two nations, the two Is, aligned’, write Thomas and Scott. ‘The narratives that proliferated after 9/11 legitimised and normalised the figure of the threatening Muslim ‘other’, and India was learning from Israel not only in technique and logistics but in rhetoric. The problem in Kashmir, like the one in Palestine, became about Islamic extremism, necessitating a military crackdown, and in later years, requiring heightened “self-defence”.’
Reading this is chilling when one considers the future non-Hindu minorities, and Dalits, will have in Kashmir, as well as India, under the BJP’s third term. The groundwork has already been set. Kashmir and Jammu is the only Muslim-majority state of the union; since the abolition of article 370, non-Kashmiri Indians—Hindus in particular—have been encouraged to settle in the region. We can expect swathes of settler homes in the valley in the years to come, and significant land has already been awarded to non-local companies for mining and construction activities. We can only imagine the extent of marginalisation and discrimination that Kashmiri Muslims will face in their own homes, on top of the already horrific military occupation. Thomas and Scott write that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), new laws passed by the Modi government, ‘worked together to establish new ancestry protocols, where Muslims were no longer to be seen as legitimate citizens of the Indian nation state. Soon after the bills were passed in parliament, Muslims across the country were quietly rounded up and taken to newly constructed detention centres; over a thousand people in the north-eastern state of Assam alone.’
Much of the essay’s power lies in its clear, lucid writing, with an ease in movement from line to line. But it is also evocative and richly visual.
Take this excerpt for instance, detailing Modi’s 2017 Israel trip:
On the third day of Modi’s visit to Israel, he was photographed wearing a sand-coloured suit at a memorial in Haifa, stooped over a wreath placed at the Indian cemetery, where bodies of Commonwealth soldiers employed by the British Imperial Service during the Battle of Haifa of 1918 were laid to rest. After, Modi and Netanyahu travelled about forty minutes down the coast, where they were photographed barefoot on a beach, smiling at each other on the shoreline, waves rushing toward their feet. Netanyahu signed a photograph of the two men—trousers pulled up to the ankles, feet in the water—’To Prime Minister Narendra Modi, with deepest friendship on your historic visit to Israel.’
I can see it clearly: both men engaging in a bit of camaraderie by the shore of an ethnically-cleansed beach. Barefoot. Blood on their hands. Deepest friendship.
Pleasure Gardens pauses and magnifies such details—details chosen with wonderful, astonishing exactness, details that would feel out of place in a more academic work or would slow the pace in a more journalistic collection. It has none of the rush felt in Arundhati Roy’s writings on Kashmir and Hindu nationalism in Azadi, though of course they are very different works, since many of Roy’s essays were written as events unfolded and some of them were delivered as lectures. This is a calmer, slower, more controlled text.
The book ends with the genocide in Gaza. Pleasure Gardens‘ last words are given to the Palestinian Mobile Company in October 2023, as it prepares for a total communications blackout following Israeli bombing of communication and internet services: ‘Our honourable people in our beloved homeland. We regret to announce a complete interruption of all communication and internet services with the Gaza Strip in light of the ongoing aggression […] May God protect you and protect our country.’ The book acts almost as a bridge from one blackout to another.
But after these final sentences, three more photographs remain, this time by Zainab. Like the book’s other photographers, Fatima and Ali, Zainab composes her images so that the people depicted in the photographs cannot be fully made out; their features are covered or blurred. They are most definitely not ‘captured on camera’. Instead, we see the shadow of a woman on a wall, raising her fist. A person lying on the ground, a cloth piled on their head, a semi-full packet of pills on their torso. In this way, they are not ‘ours’ for observation; they escape our gaze. These photos undo decades of Bollywood films that have exoticised the Kashmiri landscape and Kashmiri women; even as recently as 2019, after the abrogation of article 370, an Indian chief minister ‘joked’ that ‘now they say Kashmir is open, we can bring girls from there’. Nothing is romanticised here: a mound of bloodied snow looks like a caved-in skull; the ‘legendary’ landscape is covered in the detritus of war and violence; one woman stands strong but the others look grief-stricken and tired.
We need more books like Pleasure Gardens for other regions around the world. It is an account that fundamentally magnifies the voices of the Kashmiri people, dignifies their portraits, and does the work of speaking truth to power. The very last photo is of a woman smearing the face of a sheep with a soil mixture. She is out of focus, like the others; only her hands are in view. I’ve tried researching the practice but can’t find anything on it. All the internet tells me is that the photo is part of a collection of images that Zainab has called ‘the weight of snow on her chest’. The sheep is marked: its wool has a thick slick of pink dye running through it. It transmits a feeling of fatigue, vulnerability, but also of tenderness. Of a community, resisting.