Devastation of Pandit houses captured on lens

“Actually, I'm not a photographer,” says Veer Munshi simply, at his exhibition of stunning photographs on Pandit houses. He is one of the few photographers in India who is able to transform his photographic experiences in Kashmir into the language of a painting. The exhibition titled ‘Shrapnel’ will be on at the Tao art gallery in Mumbai till April 4, 2009.

For the last 17 years, Veer Munshi has lived in Srinagar, Baroda and Delhi. After leaving his Kashmiri Pandit ancestral home and his belongings, the only things he has retained are his soul and his belief in his religion.

A painter, sculptor, installation artist and a photographer, Munshi brings into your drawing room, in Mumbai, a mute documentation of the horrors of the Kashmiri Pandit Diaspora.

The present exhibition is bifurcated into two parts:  The ‘Pandit houses’ — a suite of 25 photographs (on archival paper) and ‘The Chamber’ — which uses painting as its base (acrylic on handmade paper pasted on hardboard) that for the viewer is nothing less than a torture chamber to experience.

Curator Ranjit Hoskote says, “In ‘Shrapnel’, Munshi adopts the elegist’s chosen forms: the memorial and the archive. These forms allow him to shift the focus from the image to the conditions that make the image possible.”

His photographs on the Kashmiri Pandit houses present an invisible side of the Kashmiri story.

Speaking exclusively to DNA, Munshi recreates his experiences whilst capturing these homes on lens. "Before shooting, I visited these homes many times, in all seasons…for me, it was like a homecoming, they speak to me, like a beloved coming home…I have shot most of these pictures during autumn, where strangely there is a lot of snow.”

Munshi stood hypnotised by these homes and the stories they unravelled before his Canon 5D lenses (shot manually and sometimes programmed).

In 20 years, the geography has changed, he reminisces, but these 200-year-old medieval edifices bear mute testimony of a time devastated by violence,  counter-violence, militant terror and a perpetual state of emergency.

Shot over a period of about 4 years, they are in large and middle format, brilliantly displayed by the curator Ranjit Hoskote  and Harsha  Bhaktal, publisher, Foundation B & G who says,  “The photographs  Veer is showing for the first time, present a documentation of Pandit houses in a way never done before. Both are a cry for peace and secularism, values that we at Foundation B&G hold dear.” The photographs are priced in the range of Rs25,000 —Rs1, 75,000 each.