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Chittaprosad's 'Quit Kashmir'

8/20/2019

This powerful depiction of the National Conference's 1946 'Quit Kashmir' campaign against the ruling Dogra dynasty is the work of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya (1915-1978). He was a communist who used his exceptional artistic gifts for political purposes and is best known for his powerful depictions of the 1943 Bengal famine.

Chittaprosad broke with the CPI in the late 1940s but continued to be acutely political in his art. Last year he was the subject of a retrospective exhibition in New York - a testament to his importance as an artist.

The work below dates from 1947 - the year India gained independence - and reflects communist disdain for the Congress model of nation building.

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'Through Blood Sweat & Tears': Kashmir in 1947-1948

6/7/2019

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KashmirConnected has just come across a copy of this remarkable - and rare - publication - Through Blood Sweat & Tears, described as 'an account of the activities of the Emergency Administration of Jammu and Kashmir from October 31, 1947 to March 5, 1948'.

As the title and the cover - the National Conference flag - suggest, this is a propaganda account of Sheikh Abdullah's first few months in power. The content roams over the peace brigade, the militia, the women's self defence corps, refugee relief, the recovery of abducted women and many other issues which pre-occupied the National Conference administration at that time.

The document has sections devoted to Anantnag, Banihal, Bhadarwah, Baramulla, Uri and Jammu. It is a remarkable record, and includes photographs - we are posting the entire publication here:

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Sheikh Abdullah at the Palace

4/6/2019

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A few years back Omar Abdullah posted this photo of Sheikh Abdullah on Twitter. He said this was 'another one of my grandfather from 1947 or thereabouts' - but nothing about the location or the photographer.

It is a marvellously evocative image, apparently showing Kashmir's new ruler as the old order - the princely family, and its portraits - is being dismantled and moved out. It seems to be taken at one of the royal palaces.

Abeer, who was then working at the Amar Mahal Library in Jammu, got in touch to say that the portrait of the woman to the right of the chair if Maharani Tara Devi, the wife of the last maharajah and Karan Singh's mother, and that propped up in the corner is either a portrait or photograph of Raja Amar Singh, the father of Kashmir's last maharajah, Hari Singh. He believed the location to be Gulab Bhavan / Grand Palace, which is now a hotel.

But that still left the question of when this photograph was taken and who the photographer was - it's clearly much more than a snapshot. Now - with huge thanks to Jehangir Bakshi - we can answer those questions. Jehangir found this remarkable image below among a large number of photos taken in Kashmir for the news magazine Life which have been posted online.

And here's a close-up which demonstrates that this was taken as part of the same photo shoot as the image at the top of the page - who the other person in the photo is I haven't been able to work out. (If you have any ideas, do let me know!)

Curiously, the close-up of Sheikh Abdullah is not among the large batch of Life photos posted online - but there can't be any doubt that this was the work of the same photographer at the same moment. And the details of who took the wider shot are available - taken in Kashmir in November 1951 by Howard Sochurek.

Howard Sochurek in 1955

Sochurek worked for Life from 1950 for about twenty years and is particularly noted for his photo-journalism during the wars in Korea, Indochina and Vietnam.

It is particularly satisfying to be able to 'solve' this minor mystery. There are plenty more - above all, what happened to Margaret Bourke-White's photographs taken in Srinagar at the close of 1947. But one step at a time! (A.W.)

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Newsreels: the Kashmir militia and Nehru's visit in May 1948

1/10/2019

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YouTube hosts a wonderful array of newsreels from Kashmir in the late 1940s - some propaganda assemblages and others as made and broadcast at the time. There's a selection of these videos here.

This wonderful Pathe newsreel dates from 1948 andincludes shots of both the men's and women's militia (the latter more accurately the Women's Self Defence Corps) parading and being inspected by Nehru during a visit to Srinagar. This is likely to date from early May when there was a week of celebrations of Kashmir's 'independence', meaning the ending of princely rule. The commentary goes as follows:

'The people of Kashmir celebrate newly won independence. They are rejoicing at the cutting of the maharajah's oppressive powers, tempered by the realisation that Kashmir is the stumbling block to peace between India, represented here by prime minister Pandit Nehru, and Pakistan, who sent no representative. The frontier battles have been going on incessantly, and the war that has even put the women of their state under arms occupies the minds of all on this independence day.

'Addressing the crowd, Pandit Nehru speaks of the plebiscite by which Kashmir will be able to affirm its accession to the Indian Dominion, It was this provisional union that last year precipitated the frontier incidents. As in the world's trouble centres. it's the fanaticism which makes soldiers of women which defies solution by the peacemakers.

'A UNO commission is now on its way to the valley of Kashmir, the scenic beauty of which is world famous. Hopes of a settlement seem dim for in a country where even young boys are put in uniform and given arms, peace must remain remote.

'A river procession is the climax to the seven-day long celebration. The frontier war recedes as Pandit Nehru accompanied by Sheikh Abdullah, Kashmir's prime minister, says farewell to the people of India's youngest state. If the fighting spreads to this peaceful valley, Hopes of Indian unity will - '

The video that follows appears to be five minutes of mute out-takes (with some repetitions) filmed at the same time as the previous item - and including Nehru, Sheikh Abdullah, Indian troops, the men's and women's militia, and some brief shots of the maharajah and of Begum Abdullah.

These are wonderful images - but of course the individuals are not identified. With the help of veterans and historians, we have managed to name some of the featured members of the militia. Grabs from the newsreel are posted below. If you can help identify any others, or have information or observations, do please either comment on this post or get in touch using the contact form below:

Kaushalya Kaul

From the left: Freda Bedi, Krishna Misri, Indu Pandit

Vimla Atri

Sajjida Zameer Ahmed nee Malik talking to Nehru

Sajjida Zameer on the far left, others unidentified

A member of the militia with the symbol of the National Conference on his cap

Perhaps members of the Cultural Front

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The Palladium Cinema in Srinagar's Lal Chowk

7/20/2017

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The Palladium Cinema in downtown Srinagar is the subject of a new programme in the BBC radio series, The Museum of Lost Objects. The programme is presented by Kanishk Tharoor and produced by Maryam Maruf. It looks at the changing use of the building: cinema, political rallying point, interrogation centre, security forces bunker. Here's the link to the audio:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p058gh24

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A left-wing view of Kashmir in 1934

2/22/2016

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Indian Front was a communist-aligned journal published by Indian students and ex-pats in England in the 1930s - it had earlier been known as Bharat and then as New Bharat.

This brief but conspicuously well informed and written piece on Kashmir appeared in the issue for March 1934. 'The truth is that the people of Kashmir are exceedingly poor and that they have been cruelly exploited ...', the article asserts. 'They are in almost permanent rebellion against this exploitation.'

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The iconography of 'New Kashmir'

2/3/2016

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The forty-four page New Kashmir manifesto adopted by Sheikh Abdullah's National Conference in 1944 has been described by the political scientist Sumantra Bose as 'the most important political document in modern Kashmir's history'. It was a radical document - indeed Abdullah described it as a 'revolutionary document' - in the form of a draft constitution for (then princely-ruled) Jammu and Kashmir ... drafted by communists and based largely on the Soviet constitution.

The content is remarkable - but let's focus for the moment on the cover design of New Kashmir when issued in English as a booklet. It's not dated, but is certainly from the 1940s - and probably the mid-1940s. The design is striking - the colour, the lettering, the image, all suggest a radical and progressive approach to politics. It is not a staid, old-fashioned type of political manifesto.

It's noteworthy that a woman was chosen as the sole person to appear in the design. She is not drawn with any great distinction. Her head is covered, and she appears to be wearing a pheran, the cloak-style garment which is a hallmark of Kashmiri dress. She is wielding the National Conference flag adopted a few years earlier - a white plough on a red background. As the British communist Rajani Palme Dutt once commented, it has more than a passing similarity to the traditional communist 'hammer and sickle' flag (the one below is the emblem of a small Indian far left party).

In terms of derivation, the New Kashmir cover design carries an echo of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republican tradition.

Her most famous representation is in
Eugene Delacroix's renowned 1830 painting, 'Liberty Leading the People'. You can see the similarities between the two images of flag-wielding women. Did the designer of the New Kashmir cover have Marianne in mind?

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Sheikh Abdullah: 'independence ... may be the only solution'

2/2/2016

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This is the report of the remarkable interview which Sheikh Abdullah gave to a British journalist in 1949 in which he spoke of the option of an independent Kashmir. According to H.L Saxena (in The Tragedy of Kashmir, published in 1975), the Times of India spotted the story and wrote it up, which in turn prompted an angry Sardar Patel to upbraid Sheikh Abdullah. But it's also an indication that Sheikh Abdullah's interest in independence had been germinating for some years prior to his dismissal as Jammu and Kashmir's prime minister and arrest in August 1953.

The interview was conducted by Michael Davidson, who worked mainly for the Observer - though this article appeared in the Scotsman of 14 April 1949. It is a hugely interesting interview - for Sheikh Abdullah's comments about independence, neutrality and communist influence.

The page lay-out means that a few lines have, in the image above, been missed off both columns. For the record, the first column concludes with these additional words:

'autocracy: our sympathies went to the Indian Congress, because Congress supported the struggle of the peoples of the States against Princely autocracy. Jinnah's Moslem League didn't - its leaders backed the rulers of Hyderabad and Bhopal against the people's democratic movement, because these Princes were communally-minded and, therefore, Pakistan's greatest supporters.'

The second column concludes:

'they do not say so publicly) are resigned to the principle of partition - so is India. A neutral Vale of Kashmir would remove the [illegible] of those leaders, like Nehru, with vision and genuine concern for the welfare of the common people, are likely to examine the plan objectively and without rancour.'

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Chittaprosad's 'Quit Kashmir'

'Through Blood Sweat & Tears': Kashmir in 1947-1948

Sheikh Abdullah at the Palace

Newsreels: the Kashmir militia and Nehru's visit in May 1948

Do please email if you identify more of those who appear in these newsreels

The Palladium Cinema in Srinagar's Lal Chowk

A left-wing view of Kashmir in 1934

The iconography of 'New Kashmir'

Sheikh Abdullah: 'independence ... may be the only solution'

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