Kashmiri Artist Builds Bridges with Facebook Exhibit

Four years ago, Masood Hussain, one of Kashmir’s most renowned artists, worked on a series of watercolors of places, people and activities in and around his city, Srinagar. Imbued with realistic touches, alive with filigree details, and emitting a translucence bequeathed by the medium in the hands of a master, the series “Transparent Strokes” was snapped up by visitors to the city.

Many among them were Kashmiris - Hindus and Muslims â€" from the United States and Britain who wanted to carry a piece of art with them as a precious, bittersweet link to a home that now signified a lost world.

The artist began to upload the images of those watercolors on Facebook to share them with his Kashmiris across the world and create a forum for friends and strangers to connect and reconnect with each other and with their shared cultural roots.

For, like the lengthening shadows of evening, “distances between people have increased in more than two decades of political turmoil,” says the 60-year-old artist. The separatist insurgency, the oppressive counter-insurgency and militarization of armed forces, the tragic exodus of Kashmiri Pandits, and the claustrophobic existence of the ordinary Kashmiri Muslim caught in the crossfire of intractable stances for the past two decades have left their mark on every Kashmiri with a shattering intensity.

Mr. Hussain has courageously chronicled everyday events of that strife-torn period in luminous works mirroring the human predicament beyond the brutal intransigence of politics.

The Facebook experiment triggered emotions in a society under siege as Mr. Hussain continued adding images of Kashmir to the virtual world. An ongoing endeavor, it dares to hope for an affirmation of connectedness, however tremulous.

The very first image that Mr. Hussain had uploaded was of a roofless boat and boatman on a frozen Dal Lake. He added around 200 more images. His instinct was proven right; the images set off long conversations about shared and separate memories of Kashmir.

Visitors to Mr. Hussain’s online gallery could almost inhale the crisp air of winter. They exclaimed at the sight of familiar landmarks in the older, downtown area of Srinagar, regal gardens, bazaars, shrines, temples, mosques of princes, vegetable sellers at Dal Lake, semi-nomadic Gujjar women, bunches of red chilies hanging along the facade of a mud house in a village. Each line, hue, shade and negative space became for that moment a real space in Kashmir the visitors had stepped into.

“I received a lot of response, especially from Kashmiri Pandits. They remembered their roots, recognized places linked to their childhood, their localities, their homes, their neighbors. Several mentioned that their houses had been burned. Many took to expressing their feelings in poetry,” said Mr. Hussain. “Somewhere along the way they discovered long-lost friends and also made new ones,” he added.

Among Mr. Hussain’s new friends is Autar Mota, a Kashmiri Pandit, who works at a bank in Jammu, the winter capital of Jammu and Kashmir. Mr. Mota shares Mr. Hussain’s work with a wide circle of Facebook friends, layering his comments with historical, cultural and literary references. He traveled around 300 kilometers from Jammu to Srinagar to meet his artist friend in Srinagar. “There are other regulars, too,” Mr. Hussain adds.

The online images, as well as the conversations built around them, seem to have created a mini cultural commons where, upon each discovery, new maps of belonging and longing; of presence and absence; of jagged ruptures and tentative gestures are created on a day-to-day basis.

The realistic aspect of the images sets down the physical lay of the land, as it were, trapped in a present of calcified political stances, with the common people caught between them. It is the translucence of the images which provides the viewer a way to reclaim even momentarily a childhood sky or fun-filled camaraderie from the actual, unyielding present. And those memories become artifacts of a past with the potential to imagine a new kind of cultural sharing.

But every cultural commons has its notes of discordance. Some time ago, Mr. Hussain uploaded a photograph of a reunion with his childhood friend Purushottam Bhan, a Kashmiri Pandit, who lives abroad. In the photograph, Mr. Bhan had put his arm around Mr Hussain’s shoulder. They had met after 40 years. The photograph triggered an angst-ridden response from an online Kashmiri Pandit visitor: “We have always had the heart to embrace ones who been part of our DNA…yet been our tormentors…friends turned foes…” The artist sent a friend request to the man who had made the comment. His request was accepted, but the bitter comments did not stop.

“We are all victims, we are all dispossessed,” said Mr. Hussain, adding that no one had been left untouched by political strife in the Kashmir Valley. The artist has evoked the burdens of history that have been imposed upon generations of Kashmiris in an earlier work titled “Me, Joseph Kafka.” The painted relief depicts human figures bent double by the weight of a serpentine scroll.

Mr. Hussain has always associated art with an intense desire to bridge distances. His grandfather, a papier-mâché artist, had a color palette â€" a wooden box bearing colorful cups, some of them broken. His grandfather had pasted a photograph on the surface of the box. The man in the photograph was the brother of his grandfather who had crossed over to Pakistan. Mr. Hussain’s grandfather spent his entire life hoping for his sibling’s return.

Through Mr. Hussain’s growing up years, the memory of his grandfather’s pain became the consciousness of a sundered heritage just as his grandfather’s unflagging hope of a reunion with his brother signified the resolve of the human spirit.

Both aspects determined the course of Mr. Hussain’s life and his preoccupations. It was a journey that took him from copying illustrations from his doctor father’s medical journals as a boy to learning graphic design at the J.J. School of Art in Mumbai; from devotedly teaching art at the local fine arts college in Srinagar for 35 years until 2011, to being a conscientious artist who sees himself as a witness to his times.

He chose to stay on in Kashmir throughout the violent 1990s. The unstinting support of his wife and two daughters helped Mr. Hussain overcome the loneliness and isolation of those difficult years.

What sets Mr. Hussain apart as a contemporary artist in his milieu is the lucidity with which he seamlessly fuses his concerns and their articulation - content and form. For instance, Mr. Hussain responded to the conflict in Kashmir and its human cost by creating a series of abstracts, each referring to a particular incident. For those abstracts, the artist created lattice work window frames, characteristic of traditional Kashmiri architecture.

In “Transparent Strokes,” Mr. Hussain has turned to the qualities of the watercolor medium to convey that it is not impossible to reclaim memories of a world that was once whole. The minute details and the gossamer sheen of his watercolors excavate the very sensations that have created the warp and weft of Kashmiri life â€" be it the memory of oar on water, the autumn russet of chinars, shrines and bazaars, and the snow so intimate to the Kashmiri soul. It is not the beauty of a scenic landscape that the artist seeks to show, but the beauty of a collective memory of coexistence.

Mr. Hussain is working on a third series of watercolors. As an artist, he knows that it is not possible for anyone to create new meanings in oppressive circumstances without recovering the strength of one’s cultural resources, for they are the very sap of existence. In his words, “This is just the beginning.”

Chitra Padmanabhan is a freelance writer based in Delhi.