Jan Nisar Afzal
Last week, I sat a banking examination in Srinagar. Two close friends had made the journey with me, and since these are the tentative first days of spring in Kashmir, the newly widened four lane highway unspooled through a landscape that seemed to be decorating itself for some occasion. The yellow mustard bloom had come out along the fields; we drove through it without speaking much. Perhaps there are landscapes that make conversation feel redundant.
On our return, somewhere near the saffron fields of Pampore, we slowed without discussion. The fields were dry and resting. But they were filled, in the meantime, with people, families, couples, figures standing alone with phones raised above their heads, all of them tilting at the same light, all of them trying to catch something the season had briefly offered. The landscape was genuinely beautiful. The effort to possess it was equally visible, and equally earnest.
I watched from the window and said nothing. But something had shifted in my thinking, and it returned me to a memory from just some months before. The morning my cousin in Srinagar sent me a photograph of Dal Lake and zabarwan hills mantled in snow, with a message beneath it carrying the casual profanity of close family: “Finally! It is snowing in Srinagar and it took me one hour and fifty images to arrive at this one, and all the while I was freezing my ass.”
At the time, I had smiled. Standing at Pampore, watching a stranger frame the mustard, almond and apricot bloom from his fourteenth or fifteenth angle, I was no longer quite sure what I had been smiling at. Fifty failures for one image. An hour surrendered to the perfectibility of a moment. A body exposed to cold for the composition that would justify the cold. It would be easy and too simple to read this as vanity, however It is something more complicated than that.
We live in an age that has quietly rearranged the pedagogy of experience. What was once encountered is now produced. What was once witnessed is now curated. The snow does not fall, in any socially meaningful sense, until it has been photographed. The lake does not freeze until it has been rendered into something capable of traveling to others. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman spent the last years of his life describing a world in which nothing holds its shape. The commitments thin into preferences, identities dissolve into roles, every experience becomes provisional and interchangeable. The theorist Guy Debord, writing half a century earlier with a fury that has aged remarkably well, called this the spectacle. The historical moment when lived reality is superseded by its representation. What my cousin was doing on the banks of Dal Lake, shivering through fifty attempts, was not merely taking photographs. He was participating in a logic so total it no longer needs to announce itself, the logic by which experience becomes legible only when it becomes visible to others.
Kashmir is an unusual theatre for this transformation. There are places where abstraction lands differently — where ideas about image and reality must negotiate with landscape that refuses to be only symbolic. Kashmir is one of them. The snow here is not merely aesthetic, it is meteorological fact, infrastructural disruption, the smell of a particular wood burning in a particular kind of stove. The cold my cousin endured was not conceptual. The lake does not freeze as metaphor. And yet, even here, the camera has arrived in full.
This is what I kept thinking, watching those figures move through the mustard fields at Pampore. They were not wrong to photograph what they saw. Beauty generates, almost involuntarily, an instinct to hold it and holding it has always required some instrument, whether memory, language, paint, or the phone now raised above a yellow field. The impulse is ancient. What is genuinely new is its scale, its speed, and the invisible audience it now silently requires.
In another time, my cousin might have stood at the edge of Dal Lake, watched the snow come down, and carried that morning within him like a private thing, folded into the texture of how he understood winter, the valley or himself. Today, the morning must be transmitted. It must be offered to others who will receive it with a small gesture of approval and move on. The moment is no longer complete until it is shared. And that is how experience bends, however slightly, towards the audience that will receive it. That bending has a cost. The fifty attempts are an honest record of what the cost looks like. There is, too, a particular gravity to photographing Kashmir specifically.
“True beauty is found not in the final result, but in the relentless, persistent labor required to capture it. In Kashmir, this process reflects an honest, enduring conviction to persist despite fragility and challenge.”
The valley has been photographed for centuries — by colonial explorers, by painters arriving in houseboats, by soldiers in various decades, by journalists covering various emergencies, by residents trying to offer the world a face of the place the news refused to show. The image of Kashmir has always been contested. Every photograph of Dal Lake in the snow arrives carrying the weight of every previous photograph — what each was meant to show, what each chose not to, what the viewer brings from outside. When my cousin finally selected his image from among fifty attempts, he was not only choosing a composition. He was, consciously or not, making an argument. This is Kashmir. This is what it looks like today. This is the version I want you to hold. That is not a trivial act in any geography. In this one, it carries particular weight.
The snow, when it comes after a long absence, does not simply cover the earth — it covers time. It lends the present a borrowed innocence, disguising the fractures beneath its immaculate surface. Kashmir has always known this. The beauty of the valley and the difficulty of the valley are not opposites; they are the same landscape seen from different distances. The mustard blooms over soil that has its own history. The lake freezes over water that has held other reflections. What has changed is not the landscape. What has changed is the speed at which we are required to respond to it — to encounter it, frame it, and release it into the world before the light shifts.
On the road home, the fields dropped behind us and the highway still ran through the mustard fields. My friends were talking about something else entirely. I was still, in some interior way, standing at the edge of a frozen lake, watching a man try once more.
There is something that I can only call heroic in fifty attempts. Not because the final image is beautiful — though it was — but because the persistence itself reveals something we do not always admit about ourselves. We are not content to simply pass through the world. We want to wrest from the passing moment something that will outlast it. We want experience to survive experience. That is, at its foundation, what every photograph is, a small argument against disappearance.The snow at Dal Lake will melt. The mustard along the way will fade to bloom again. The photographs will remain, for a while, in feeds and folders and the fallible memory of servers.
They too will eventually be forgotten, absorbed into the vast accumulation of images that defines this era and will, perhaps, come to define us to whatever comes after.
What then remains? Perhaps only this, the figure in the cold, raising the phone once more. The stranger in the field, stepping left to change the angle. The fifty attempts that no one else will ever see — which are, paradoxically, the most truthful document of what it means to encounter something beautiful and want, against all reason, to hold it. I recognize that wanting. I have practiced it, with different instruments and equal stubbornness, for as long as I can remember. If the mustard fields and the frozen lake have taught me anything, it is this, beauty is not in the image we finally select. It lives in the labour that precedes selection, the cold endured, the angles rejected, the quiet conviction, tried again and again, that the next attempt might be the true one. In Kashmir, that conviction has a particular flavor. It tastes like persistence in the face of things that do not hold. And it is, I think, the most honest thing we have ever owned.
(The author is presently a Manager In J&K bank. The views, opinions and conclusions expressed in this article are those of the author and aren’t necessarily in accord with the views of “Kashmir Horizon”)
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