Skye Arundhati Thomas: Pleasure Gardens

‘We identified a task: to try and fill the void, the gaps in information. To try and do this as simply and as precisely as possible.’

Pleasure Gardens is an urgent two-part project that investigates the military occupation, land appropriation, and communication blackouts in Kashmir, a region whose heavily militarized borders have frequently been a site of conflict between India and Pakistan. Taking a 213-day blackout in 2019 as its starting point, the project aims to detail the reasoning behind these blockades, seeking a new register of writing and image that makes visible the conditions of occupation and the protracted violence of the blackout.

In the book’s first part, Scott and Thomas bring together hundreds of sources, filling in the gaps from Srinagar to the remote Himalayan valleys along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, to create a unique log of fifteen days under siege, during which Kashmiri constitutional rights were revoked, the state partitioned, and stripped of its special statehood. In the second part, the authors examine Kashmir’s occupied territories and the complex ways in which India’s infrastructure of surveillance and occupation is borrowed from Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Including photo essays by Ufaq Fatima, Nawal Ali, and Zainab, this remarkable publication offers a crucial exploration of blackouts, their aftermath, and the twisted logic of crisis on which they rely.