Resumo de Kashmir: Hameen Ast

IS Kashmir
a mirage? Is it paradise on earth, as emperors, poets and historians have
declared over time? Is it a land struggling to define its own identity? Why is Kashmir so many things to many people?

Rajesh M. Parikh?s book ?Kashmir: Hameen Ast,? which accompanies a 2006 touring
exhibition of his photographs on the subject, focuses on these questions
through his lens. Its title translates to: ?If there is paradise on earth, this
is it, this is it.? Most of his visuals
are not conventional picture postcard shots. Nor are they clichéd frames. Nor
are they all superlative in terms of mere technique.

What distinguishes this book and
show, which has traveled across metropolitan India,
en route to eventually Paris and New York? The fact that
the photographer is a poet, painter, and India?s first neuropsychiatrist. A
Mumbai-based medical practitioner, who has taught at Johns Hopkins, Yale and
Harvard medical schools. Bonding him to Kashmir irrevocably is the narrative of
how in 1980, as a young medical graduate, he proposed to his future wife Firuza
atop a bus from Srinagar
to Leh.

In the large-format, colour-perfect
book on Kashmir, Parikh declares
unequivocally, ?Over the past 25 years, more so recently, we have returned
several times. Firuza is drawn by her work in the treatment of infertility; I
am just a wonder-struck photographer. The pages that follow are my tribute to
this magnificent region with its beautiful, simple people with whom Firuza and
I are so much in love.?

This emotion spills over into
Parikh?s photographs. Such as a great-eyed child who gazes potently over the
back of an autorickshaw, his tender fingers imprinted behind its texture. Or
the hazy silhouette of a carpet weaver behind his loom, creating a mystique to
the prized craft. Or three misty plates that embody the season-tinted moods of
Char Chinar island amidst the lake waters.

Just as powerful are Parikh?s
stories that fill in the backdrop to some painterly photographs. Take a shikara
or traditional Kashmiri boat at sunset amidst fire-red waters.

Each print from the show is on
archival textured art paper, with a colour warranty of 90 years because it is both
chlorine and acid free. He points to a stark frame of St. Mary?s, the only
church in Gulmarg, on Christmas eve in 2004. ?When we went into the church,
there were only five or six people there,? Parikh recalls. ?It symbolized the
way I feel about religion. That it should be practiced in a personal space.?

That naturally takes him to a shot
of a door ajar at a temple founded by the revered Hindu sage, the Shankaracharya.
A bell gleams within its ancient stone walls. ?There?s nobody around,? observes
Parikh. ?Yet the lock on the door reminds us that there are people who can keep
you out.?

Such sensitivity to people and
places alike threads this book through. As in the frame of a boat filled with
flowers for sale by ?Mr. Wonderful.? Their colours shimmer on the waters like a
sprinkling of Holi hues. Or a lyrical shot of a man paddling his wooden boat on
a lake by the pale, pre-dawn light. Or even a stark black-and-white shot of
winter trees that embody this poet?s tribute to Robert Frost, whose work
accompanies Parikh down the roads less travelled.

The photographer?s poetic
sensibility emerges in other aspects, too. Such as a riveting, green-imbued
photograph of a man and a boy rowing in mid-lake, the algae under the water
surface texturing the bloom-rich foreground, a salute to evergreen Monet.

None of Parikh?s photographs is a
digital image. Shot on slide film with cameras like the Nikon F3, F5 and F6 on
Kodachrome 64, Fuji Sensia 50 or Kodacolour 100 or 200, few frames are cropped,
none airbrushed. Startlingly, one winter shot of adjacent wooden and ribbed
metal doors has the impact of an abstract collage.

Parikh?s Kashmir
between the covers is a far cry from the battlefield of media images. It is a
lyric, a paean to the human spirit amidst unearthly beauty. Or could it be
merely the poet-photographer?s state of mind?

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