Face hidden and dressed in a traditional pheran, there is an unassuming man walking a cabbage on the streets of Kashmir, and for those passing by, it makes for a peculiar sight. As one might imagine, this is neither a joke nor a prank. The artist, who chose to stay anonymous while speaking with us, fully understands that the conflict-ridden state is hardly the best backdrop for humour, yet borrowing from a performance project much bigger than one place or person (actually called ‘Walking the Cabbage’) he’s certainly making a statement about the state of affairs in his home state. A movement initially conceptualised by Chinese artist Han Bing, as a form of social intervention, to instigate conversations and debates, Bing has travelled the world with the project. The Kashmiri Cabbage Walker (KWC), as the artist prefers to be called, then sought permission from Bing to perform the series of acts in the Kashmiri context of militarisation.
KWC remained an enigma for a long time only to surface on Facebook following the first performance on December 20, 2015, at Lal Chowk in Srinagar. It’s the same plaza, KWC tells us, with the clock tower, where the famous Shakespearean speech from the film Haider takes place. Shahid Kapoor delivers his performance of “law and order, law and order, India Pakistan ne milke khela humse border border” after quoting the words from the Armed Forces Special Powers Acts (AFSPA). “I did the first performance in front of Indian armed forces personnel monitoring the space,” KWC tells us. “They could have easily used AFSPA to deem me suspicious and taken me in or shot me as I walked my cabbage on a leash, if they by any measure deemed me to be any sort of a threat.” An interesting, perhaps deliberate first location to start off the series considering the political and social context of Haider and its similarities with the subject that KWC seeks to address through their performances.
The performance was documented and photographs were circulated online with writings about the performance appearing in Kashmir Reader. The next cabbage walk took place on February 2, 2016, and, as put by KWC, it was far less confrontational, with the purpose of showing the Kashmiri streets and landscape mutated and morphed by war and conflict. “This time the walk was done by another incarnation of myself, since the Kashmiri Cabbage Walker is a collective entity (i.e. anyone in Kashmir who walks a cabbage is a Kashmiri Cabbage Walker), and the story appeared a few days later in the Kashmir Reader’s op-ed section,” says KWC.
Jammu & Kashmir has long been a territory of immense tension and conflict, a territory immersed in politics which we don’t have complete and apt knowledge to comment on. But we got a chance to speak to KWC and get a first-person perspective of Kashmiri life, what their opinion on the matter is, however confrontational or controversial. As a highly fraught terrain that’s debated and sensationalised in the media constantly, we rarely get to hear the human side of this story from the locals. The politics of a conflict zone overtakes the importance of its consequences on the lives of civilians who are often rendered collateral damage. More importantly, no matter how much we hear about it through different mediums, but there’s a big difference between reading about it and actually living it. KWC gives us this perspective; it’s equal parts political, social and artistic expression--an effort to humanize and shed light on what life in Kashmir really is like.
Can you explain why you’re taking cabbage for a walk, what is the aim of your performance piece?
“I think walking the cabbage in Kashmir can claim legitimacy while militarization cannot do that. The Walking the Cabbage Project and Movement was innovated and brought into the world by Chinese artist Han Bing. I have sought permission to do these series of performances in Kashmir in the context of the toxic environment of war, conflict and militarization. I feel that I as a Kashmiri am willing to accept walking the cabbage on a leash as a part of the everyday life in Kashmir, as a part of the landscape, and as a native practice, as something that has the potential of normalizing and naturalizing itself as part of the Kashmiri quotidian. And here precisely is where I emphasize that militarization in Kashmir can never normalize and naturalize itself as part of Kashmir and will never be accepted as the norm by the Kashmiri people. It is something alien to us and it will always be, while an art performance by a Chinese artist has more claim to becoming part of Kashmiri society, its people and its landscape.
The second reason I am doing this performance in Kashmir is because I wish to highlight the absurdity of war and the absurdity of militarization, with the keeping of an entire Kashmiri population under siege, held hostage under the shadow of guns and uniforms and that too under the mantle of inhuman laws such as AFSPA/PSA that allow Indian armed forces absolute impunity to do with Kashmiri bodies as they like, whether it is murdering us, raping us, torturing us, beating us, holding us against our will, imprisoning us without warrants, breaking down our doors during crackdowns, abusing and assaulting us, bullying us and intimidating us, mocking and ridiculing us, etc. That is all far far more absurd that my act of walking a cabbage on a leash down the streets of Kashmir, because at least I have the decency to recognize that what I am doing is absurd and even pointless, while the Indian state thinks it is doing some heroic patriotic nationalist service of some sort to itself. Kashmiri civilians get killed left and right on Kashmiri streets and the armed forces and the Indian state are patting each other’s back and giving each other medals, promotions and monetary upgrades and calling one another heroes, all at the expense of dead Kashmiris (as Agha Shahid Ali once famously wrote “They make a desolation and call it peace”, alluding to Tacitus’ and Lord Byron’s verses). If that isn’t absurd, I don’t know what is. And as such, the Indian state and its military complex stand exposed for what they are: absolutely absurd and incapable of claiming legitimacy over Kashmir and its people.”
What kind of reactions have you gotten from people on the streets? Has the police given you any trouble?
“Perhaps I idealize my people too much, but when you see people smiling the way adults smile at kids who are playing, while at the same time being amused that a fully-grown adult is walking a cabbage on the street, it feels like something has been won. You start feeling free, you start thinking you are not a ‘kalle kharab insaan’ (in Kashmiri, a madman) for doing this. I have heard all sorts of things on the street when I walk the cabbage: ‘yi ha chu angrez, wuchu, angrez taiyn chi laagan pheran waiyn te toi banan chiw madern’ (“he is an angrez--foreigner--just look, even the angrez wear a pheran--Kashmiri traditional garment--now and you all try to be all modern”). At one point, walking in one of the alleyways near Lal Chowk Srinagar my cabbage fell from its roller-cart and a shopkeeper told me “do whatever you are doing but make sure the cabbage doesn’t fall on the ground, it is food and food is sacred, so it must be respected”. He even kneeled down to help me put my cabbage back on its cart.
This whole performance on the streets of Kashmir is also an indicator of how the Kashmiri public perceives such things. I had one man tell me ‘Kashmir has seen it all, this (performance) too is part of Kashmir...there are people here who have been subject to such violence and trauma, that sometimes some of them do things that are out of the norm like walking desolately barefoot on the streets in rags talking in unintelligible speech, we show compassion to such people....you too must be one of those.’ As such, one could easily do this performance to explore how mental illness is perceived in the Kashmiri populace.
As for the police, I haven’t heard anything yet. I did get stopped by armed personnel on the second performance but I had a professional war photojournalist with me who mediated and de-escalated the situation of me walking collard greens (haakh in Kashmiri) on a wooden roller down the street. A few days after I did the first performance, a friend played a prank on me by pretending to be the SHO (police officer) at the local police station in Srinagar and he said I must report to the police station. I was not afraid at that point since I had already mentally prepared for all the worst, and imagine, just imagine, all this over walking a cabbage on a leash and then writing about it. How absurd is that? But at the same time, I do have to think seriously before I do this, since in these present times, any sort of dissenting or differing perspective on any given issue is viewed unfavorably and can have serious consequences.”
Why pick up Han Bing’s project for your cause? How relevant is it in the context of Kashmir?
“The beauty of Han Bing’s Walking the Cabbage Project and Movement is that it tries to question what can be considered to be normal, to be the norm, to be an accepted practice in society. While his context is altogether different and has nothing whatsoever to do with what I am doing in Kashmir with the performance, it nonetheless has the ability to disrupt what has become commonplace and accepted as the norm. Han Bing in his interviews (like the one with The New York Times) reiterates that he does not give any particular meaning to the Walking the Cabbage performance. He allows people to make their own meaning and to interpret it however they see fit. I have done exactly that. I have taken the idea that normalcy or what is considered normal can be interrogated, and in Kashmir right now, after 26 years of conflict and war, militarization is trying to become the norm. I am absolutely against that idea because that is not the Kashmir I was born in.”
Realistically speaking, do you think anything will change or be solved by your performance?
“Yes. Some Kashmiri’s will laugh and their laughter to me is an act of defiance especially when I have framed my child-like cabbage walking antics in a certain way. I have said before, I seek to amuse and make laugh even a single Kashmiri. I wish to disrupt this idea of normalcy (i.e. militarization/occupation) as part of their day to day experience. When they stop and stare and then smile or look befuddled, I know my job is done because I have momentarily distracted them from the overarching dark cloud that is living in a conflict zone under heavy militarization and surveillance. Imagine distracting someone’s concentration in a concentration camp to show them something that they have never seen before.
Another effect of the performance is the ability to create laughter that destabilizes preconceived notions by rendering that which is to be taken seriously as something absurd and beyond rationality and reason (i.e. maintaining a military occupation over a peoples for more than a quarter of a century all the while enriching uranium for nuclear weapons and calling it all the maintenance of ‘peace’ and ‘security’).”
Is there any particular reason why you have chosen to stay anonymous?
“I prefer to be anonymous to multiply the effect of the performance in delivering specific messages. If there is no face behind it, then all the attention goes to the message I am trying to spread, and as I said previously, the Kashmiri Cabbage Walker is a collective entity. Anybody in Kashmir can grab a cabbage, set it on a roller-cart, and take it for a walk and then tell why they are doing so. The rules of the performance are to wear a pheran (Kashmiri traditional cloak) and cover one’s head to not show the face and take all photos with the back faced to the camera so as to not show any facial features. These are safety measures, because in Kashmir you never know how the state will react to something as innocuous as walking a vegetable on a leash.”
How has Kashmir changed from your childhood till today? What is normalcy, so to speak, for citizens of such a high conflict zone?
“The Kashmir of my childhood did not have any army camps, torture centers, bunkers, check posts, sniper dens, barbed wire, armed personnel monitoring each and every step of everyone circulating in public places, no AFSPA or any such act that gives the ‘authorities’ the impunity to shoot on sight and then get away with murder. To me that is normalcy, a normalcy without war, conflict, turmoil and denial of basic freedoms where the demands of Kashmiri people are addressed and met. As for these so-called ‘citizens,’ they are more civilians than “citizens”, as citizenship implies a certain sense of equality with a whole (i.e. a nation), and as it stands, Kashmir is a dispute, so the whole idea of citizenship is disputed as well, if you take things from the Kashmiri majority’s perspective.”