Veer Munshi
By Nipa Charagi
At a lecture at Stanford University, US, during India Dialog 2024, Veer Munshi said. "I identify as a Kashmiri artist in India. As much as my art has explored pain and violence because of my own displacement, it also explores the value and strength of art as a collective sphere."
Munshi is holding his first solo show Healing Wounds, in the US at Alcon Gallery in New York "I call it Healing Wounds because it is in continuation of what I have been doing with reference to Kashmir: political migration, displacement, archiving the material time and again. What is new is the materials. This particular body of work has come from my Shrapnel series (2010). Those were the fragments which have seen and experienced on visits to Kashmir: the debris that is strewn after stone-pelting or a bomb blast, and which changes the landscape," says the artist, who studied fine arts from MS University Baroda.
Munshi's work is moored culturally, emotionally and geographically in Kashmir, "subject wise and belonging wise.”
If Shrapnel conveyed pain, anguish, destruction, in I he has brought together the shrapnel pieces, hand-painted on wood in Kari-e-kalamkari and papier maché techniques, to create Kashmiri "carpets," lush, blooming like Srinagar's famed Mughal gardens and rich in motifs.
That Munshi prefers large dimensions is evident from the size of the carpets which are evocatively titled: Jannate-be- Nazir (matchless place; 89x94 inches); Dastgiir (protector; 94x46 inches); Meeraas (inheritance 94x94 inches).
Take Dastgiir, for instance. At the heart of the work is the 19th century shrine of Dastgeer Sahih, symbolic of the Valley's Sufi tradition, revered by people of all faiths. It was damaged in a fire in 2012 and subsequently rebuilt. It is also a showcase of Kashmir's rich handicrafts; the ceiling in in khatamband style, and the walls in papier mâché, crafts which Munshi employs and spotlights in his works. You will also identify a hangul (Kashmir stag) endemic to Kashmir and classified as critically endangered, being chased by a tiger, perhaps indicating that danger is always looming large. Each carpet trills a story,
Similarly, in Meeraas, one can see the ruins of the ancient temple of Awantipora Sufi shrines and the Shankaracharya temple that towers over Srinagar. There are the famed houseboats on Dal Lake, and tongas, once a popular mode of transport.
But these carpets are not whole, they have gaps. “The tapestry is fractured because our identity is fractured," says the 69-year-old artist, who like most Kashmiri Pandits was forced to leave the Valley in 1990. Forced displacement has escalated the world over in recent times, but this is a subject that has consumed Munshi for over three decades "Naturally, you are an artist, you have an expression, you have to respond. And when it's personal, it becomes much more important. That's why I don't do what happens in other places. My main journey is what my personal experience is. I like to be engaged with the problem. I do what happens in Kashmir."
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