I for I: Occupations that Blind

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Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir, Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott, MACK, 2024, 96 pages, £14.

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Gardens of pleasure in past centuries, black sites of pain in the 21st. A torture and interrogation centre in an army camp nestled amid Mughal-era grounds built for sensory delight: one of the many arresting oxymorons and indelible images found in Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir by Izabella Scott and Skye Arundhati Thomas, published this summer by MACK. A remarkably prescient work, the book sheds much-needed light on the total militarisation of Jammu and Kashmir, the contested region on the fragile northern Indo-Pakistani border, where the Indian central government has sought to invisibilise its Israeli-styled – and, as the text further exposes, Israeli-supplied – armed occupation. Elucidating the political, military and commercial entanglement of the two I’s – India and Israel – and the interrelated plights of Kashmir and Palestine, Pleasure Gardens makes for a doubly illuminating, doubly compelling read in 2024.

‘There is no reversing a blackout, there is no antidote’, the text states. The remark rings especially true when the blackout in question constitutes a government strategy designed to cut off more than twelve million people from the world for 213 days – ‘the longest running internet shutdown in a democracy yet’ – with the aim of occupying their homeland and revoking its statehood. In the dark, the Muslim-majority state of Indian-occupied Kashmir was turned, with the final flick of a constitutional amendment, into a union territory unilaterally administered from Delhi. If not an antidote to the fateful blackout, Pleasure Gardens offers a rigorous reconstruction of the series of military and juridical manoeuvres performed and obscured by the Indian central government in Kashmir*, before delving into its precedents, geopolitical counterpart and bleak aftermath.

An invisible dome has closed over the region, sealing it off from news of its own fate.

A work intent on foregrounding and dispelling state-imposed obscurity, Pleasure Gardens pieces together the first fifteen days of the 2019 blackout in Kashmir with stark clarity. Pithy and precise, sober and efficient, the prose makes a stylistic statement to counteract the government’s contrived language and opaque rhetoric. Written in the present tense, the logged entries cover the course of events with the forthright momentum of a war diary or a dispatch penned from the conflict zone. Yet, as the account’s panoptic perspective emerges, so does the question: where is this disembodied observer positioned?

The writing of Pleasure Gardens – and its reading – constitutes an act of resistance.

To expect a first-hand, ground-view testimony would be a fair assumption, but would also miss the whole raison d’être of the project: insulated and besieged as the region was, such a comprehensive chronicle of the blackout could only have been assembled ‘online and from afar’. Collating an array of journalistic and legal sources, Pleasure Gardens fills a narrative void, a negative space in the recent history of Kashmir. On the ground, Kashmir was blind, or rather, was blinded: blinded by the shutdown, blinded by pellets aimed at the eyes. The world was blindfolded to its most militarised region, with no constitutional or international law to be seen. If not to reverse the fateful constitutional amendment of the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill adopted by the Indian government merely five days into the blackout, Pleasure Gardens seeks to reorganise the narrative of these censored events. By establishing a clear causality, the book challenges the state-fabricated rhetoric of ‘crisis’ and breaks the circular logic propelling the occupation.

It’s as if Srinagar is being amended, reorganised, redrawn… a psychological drill… the strategy was first devised by Israeli army contractors… It’s an export from another occupation.

As it broadens the spotlight on the blackout, the text identifies the precedents of the Indian militarisation in Kashmir to expose the wider network of power strangling the region – and its Palestinian counterpart. The text relays a message by the Palestinian Mobile Company on 27 October 2023 announcing ‘a complete interruption of all communication and internet services with the Gaza Strip in light of the ongoing aggression’ in the book’s endnote. Under a blackout, state perpetrations are redacted as events take place, as though retained in a pre-narrative space. In the second part of Pleasure Gardens, the invisibilisation of violence extends from the collective digital body of knowledge to other forms of narrative disruption, illegibility and erasure inflicted directly on the physical body. The temporary darkness becomes a more perennial and systematic feature, entrenched in the idyllic scenery. The layered landscape of Kashmir emerges in great splendour and great horror as the text probes the expanding perimeter of Indian army camps in the mountains of Kashmir, tracing their special powers back to Israeli land-grabbing tactics. Enforced disappearance comes into view as another, final form of blacking out. The mountains of Kashmir are laid bare as domes of permanent invisibility. In the absence of a recoverable narrative, all that is left to scrutinise is the black site amid the Mughal pleasure gardens.

‘Badami Bagh’ means ‘Garden of Almonds’ in Urdu. It used to be an orchard of almond, walnut, and Chinar trees. (…)

Badami Bagh… a ‘dark, forbidden place of torture, fear, and death – a place where the disappeared were seen before they disappeared, a space of dark deeds’.

It was to a pleasure garden – one that regularly attracts tourists for its scenic terraces and exquisite domed archways – where a Kashmiri teenager named Javaid Ahangar was taken after his home was raided by Indian soldiers in the middle of the night. According to the Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons, founded by Javaid’s mother, at least 8,000 Kashmiris have been forcibly disappeared by the Indian armed forces in torture and interrogation centres located in pleasure gardens that retain their historic names, such as the ‘Garden of Almonds’, the ‘Garden of Light’ and the ‘Palace of the Fairies’, the camp where young Javaid Ahanger disappeared, or ‘was disappeared’, as Scott and Thomas note. (The authors reject the use of the active verb and strip the term ‘disappeared’ from its euphemistic opacity: ‘killed in custody and dumped in mass graves’.)

This dissonance – one of several arresting moments in the book where the pain of those under occupation is reified – might be reminiscent of the misery-mirth conundrum in Ursula LeGuin’s fictional Omelas, a city in which happiness depends on the suffering of a child locked somewhere underground, as festival processions parade through avenues of trees and gardens. Pleasure Gardens anatomises the rhetoric employed by ethnic democracies – namely, India and Israel – which base the welfare of their members on the rhetoric of ‘self-defence’ and the inevitable suffering of a Muslim ‘other’ whose rights and very existence can – or must – be obliterated. With a keen LeGuinian eye, the authors comment on the annual Tulip Festival, during which throngs of tourists, mostly from India, enjoy the sight of the slopes in bloom, occasionally interrupted by ‘fresh gaps’. Those who do not look away might notice these ‘new blank spaces: places of torture, death, and disappearance’,  growing, year after year, amid the fields of flowers.

It will become increasingly difficult to wander through the Tulip Gardens and not look upwards at the harshening slopes… without thinking about the thousands of missing bodies, the murderous secrets that lie beneath it.

By the end of this book, the reader has learned to see through the cosmetics of occupation; to grasp the portents of ‘blood-red’ tulips and ‘graveyard’ irises, and the rest of the fraught flowers that sprinkle Pleasure Gardens. Be it the blossoms of the Tulip Festival, or the fields of lavender supplanting local crops, coating Kashmiri hills to fulfil Modi’s ‘Aroma Mission’ or ‘Purple Revolution’, or lotus flowers blooming in the Kashmiri lakes, flowers tint the jarring optics of occupation. The ‘new fast-growing Israeli Chrysanthemum’ named ‘MODI’ in honour of the Indian prime minister during his visit to Israel (‘#GrowingPartnership!’ tweeted Israel) epitomises the Indian-Israeli alliance that develops throughout Pleasure Gardens.

‘I for I…’

India for Israel and Israel for India: the two nations, the two Is, aligned.

From its embryonic stage as covert arms deals initiated during India’s border dispute in Kashmir in the 1960s to Modi’s fanfared visit to Israel in 2017, Pleasure Gardens delineates the ‘I for I’ special relationship. But looking beyond the antics of the Modi-Netanyahu political courtship, the book examines how the affinity between these ethnic nations manifests in the political geography and geology of Kashmir. Through a sharp lens, one usually reserved for environmental history, Scott and Thomas cast an even harder light onto the Kashmiri terrain, revealing the extractivist and industrial plans – echoes of Israeli settlements in the West Bank – behind India’s occupation. That the special status of Kashmir was rescinded during the 2019 blackout, only a year after a geological survey was conducted in the region during which lithium was found, is anything but a coincidence, the book convincingly suggests. Ever attentive to language and committed to its clarity, the authors analyse how powermongers of occupying states easily transmute the rhetoric of ‘self-defence’ into ‘energy independence’, hinting at a dangerous blurring of the two terms through a word that jumps out in the text: ‘nuclear’.

The logic of emergency is employed by the state to justify any authoritarian measures.

While still surprising to some, the India-Israel coalition continues to gain visibility in the summer of 2024. Photos of a missile dropped by Israel in Nuseirat labelled ‘Made in India’, videos of Indian workers arriving in Israel, Modi’s tweet replying to Netanyahu’s felicitations on his new term as prime minister and reaffirming the ‘India-Israel Strategic Partnership’, and suchlike posts chime with Pleasure Gardens’ anatomy of the ‘I for I’ alignment. When news and social media feeds seep into the reading experience, the book – a project largely sourced from the Internet – unlocks (or regains) its potential as a hypertext, reinforcing its interconnections and forming new ones, ultimately extending the online gleaning of these issues beyond the text’s constraints. In this sense, the writing of Pleasure Gardens – and its reading – constitutes an act of resistance; a reclaiming of the digital narrative space that has been blacked out by the state and overwritten by its propaganda machine.

Digital space is also public space, and in a blackout like this one, Kashmiris are doubly confined: by the barricades that obstruct their neighbourhood roads, and by the cellphone lines that drop before a call can connect.

The work’s concern with digital space and its violation by regimes that weaponise shutdowns pertains to the realm of ‘digital rights’ – defined as an extension of human rights in the Internet age, such as online free expression and access to information. This is yet another reason for the urgency of Pleasure Gardens in 2024: the year with the highest number of global elections in history, and, potentially, of election-related blackouts. The work is also a valuable asset to understand the current political climate in India, whose government not only remains ‘the world’s leading perpetrator of shutdowns’ but continues to openly infringe on freedom of expression as a whole, suppressing all forms of dissent – even on views voiced more than a decade ago.

The potential prosecution of novelist Arundhati Roy under an anti-terrorist law for stating in 2010 that Kashmir ‘has never been an integral part of India’ is one of the latest – and globally visible – draconian retaliations against critics of the Hindu ultra-nationalist agenda. The ruling party’s testiness on Kashmir and its invocation of the rhetoric of crisis to charge Roy on the basis of ‘terrorism’ seems like an enactment of the central argument of Pleasure Gardens, whereby the logic of emergency is employed by the state to justify any authoritarian measures, be it under the cloak of a blackout or as overt repression. Significantly, Roy has also been vocal about the intimate friendship between the Indian and Israeli leaders and the interrelated plights of the states they brutally occupy. Kashmir and Palestine have been coupled before by Roy in the same speech (locating in British imperial power at the epicentre of their ongoing occupations) and in the same breath. ‘Both [Kashmir and Palestine] are fault lines in the raging international conflicts of today,’ she has written and rewritten. The reader of Pleasure Gardens learns how these fault lines of Kashmir and Palestine are still, on so many levels and in new ways, one and the same.

Occupation did not end, it switched hands.

While the book illuminates the situation in Kashmir ‘from afar’, one might wonder about the possibility of shining light on the region from up close and within, from under the Indian state’s dome of invisibility, through the eyes of the Kashmiri residents suffering the occupation. Other than the bits of testimonies already published in media outlets, Pleasure Gardens does not provide accounts from local voices in written form, but it does so through photography. The text is interpolated by three evocative series of photos by Nawal Ali, Ufaq Fatima and Zainab, visual artists who form part of Her Pixel Story, a female-led photography collective based in Kashmir. Through their lenses, we are given local insight into panoramic and domestic scenes of the occupation.

As part of the DISCOURSE series published by MACK, which pairs words with visual art in engaging ways, Pleasure Gardens brings together text and image with a view, not to subordinate one to the other or establish direct explanatory links between them, but rather to grasp Kashmir – its tangible and intangible lights and shadows – from the contrasting vantage points and ranges of both forms. Framed by the long-sighted text that focuses on the eventful, the extra-ordinary – the poetic shining through the political – the photographs turn our gaze to the habitual, the infraordinary, the immanent and intimate reality in Kashmir; politics latent in the visual poetics. The writing certainly enhances the significance of the images printed in eye-catching full page spreads: the shredded flag in the shredded territory; a concertina roll partitioning a field; hard shadows redacting a newspaper on the floor; a pile of snowy blood; a prayer rug in a sunlit home. Glimpses into the 213-day blackout spent in luminous confinement, into everyday life withstanding the obscurity of occupation. Still, the airy distance between words and photos allows the reader to cross-pollinate within – and, hopefully, beyond – the yield of Pleasure Gardens.

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*Kashmir in this review refers to Jammu and Kashmir or India-occupied Kashmir. As a whole, the region of Kashmir is contested by Pakistan and India, and divided into Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK) – also known as Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) – and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (POK) – also called Azad Kashmir. Both parts of Kashmir are separated by a Line of Control (LoC). This review follows the usage in Pleasure Gardens of ‘Kashmir’ to refer to the region comprising J&K/IOK (excluding POK).

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Skye Arundhati Thomas is a writer and editor based in Paris. Remember the Details (2021) is out with Floating Opera Press.

Izabella Scott is a writer, editor and researcher based in London. She is currently writing a book of nonfiction, titled The Bed Trick, which is forthcoming from Atlantic.

Zoe Valery is a writer whose work has appeared in New England Review, The White Review, American Chordata, The Common, Longreads and elsewhere.

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