Background

Nun chai is a ‘pink’ coloured salted tea, a daily fixture in Kashmiri people’s lives. It is had at breakfast, mid-morning, in the afternoon and sometimes after dinner too. Sharing a cup of nun chai is an essential part of the everyday culture of Kashmir.

Author Alana Hunt takes this simple act of sharing stories over nun chai to talk to 118 people. Each cup becomes a part of a growing memorial for the 118 civilians killed in protests that shook the Kashmir valley during the summer of 2010.

These conversations were carried in the Srinagar based newspaper ‘Kashmir Reader’ over a period of six months and in subsequent appearances, it took the shape of an exhibition, archive, website, and finally a book which ties everything together. We were asked to design the book.

Strategy

This work is born out of a juncture that is as personal as it is political, as geographically and culturally dislocated as it is grounded. It spans the spheres of contemporary art, literature, social science and journalism.

The book had to blur the lines of an artwork and a historical document, appeal to both at the same time: a means of personal remembrance, and to be referenced, and studied as a historical text.

Design

The design reflects the restraint in the author’s writing, an outsider but privy to an intimate understanding of Kashmiri lives. A quiet melancholy mirroring the author’s sentiments runs through the book.

It’s stained in ‘pink’ taking after the tea’s distinct colour, the unifying thread and the fulcrum of these conversations. A reminder of passage of time, and the lasting marks of its blood-stained history. The cover pictures the salt that is essential in the making of this tea, shot in a way to appear like water washing over stones, a symbol of the valley.

The layout blends the personal and public lens to Kashmir. A collection of personal encounters that marks the life, and death of individuals, within the confinement of the mood and situation of the day: newspaper scans, advertisements calling out for peaceful protests around the State. With breaks that carry a continuous stream of personal details of the dead: name, age, and location of death. Views that are obscured from people outside of Kashmir.

A shot of each of the 118 nun-chais marks each conversation, a reminder of the of grief and personal loss, and transforms into a unique, and personal memorial of civilian deaths in Kashmir. By focussing on the individual, it presents the collective struggle of the people of Kashmir.