How do you map an occupied city? What does it mean to walk around a city where the walls whisper to you the names of thousands of boys who have been pushed against it, hundreds of men whose blood is still wet on its bricks? How do you map occupation? Where does the cemetery end, and where does the city begin?
Cartography is deeply embedded in power, where maps become important vantage points for understanding the geometries of power. Cartography of Modern History, for instance, tells us the brutal history of power— colonization. Staring 500 years into the past, through maps, and letting maps speak for themselves, is like allowing The Serpent to recall what happened in The Garden of Eden. European Colonization was in many ways aided and abetted by Cartographers. Today, a loud hiss still reverberates in colonies and settler colonies around the world.
Maps are artificial and visual constructs, but the passage of time gives them weight. Not all maps gain weight over time. What is considered a map and what is not is hierarchical. Scholar Hashem Abushama, in his work, talks about how consulting Google Maps as a Palestinian in the West Bank is useless, dangerous, and violent — “you are most likely to end up on a settler road – a road that would get you in trouble.” Colonized people’s embodied maps of living provide for a better guide in these ever-changing colonial demarcations. However, these embodied maps remain undrawn and undigitized.”
What is drawn is colonial, what is digitized is fictional, and what is available to us is a lie.
Colonial demarcations are ever-changing, making political mapping (when allowed) a futile process. Kashmir, violently fragmented for over seven decades, finds its territories divided into many enclaves amongst three different nation-states—India, Pakistan, and China.
As explained by Yemberzal, the Indian occupation in Kashmir disallows political mapping of the region by its people. The State manufactures a two-dimensional reality to shroud its multidimensional settler colonialism. One of the main objectives of Settler Colonialism is the elimination (or violent assimilation) of the natives and the control of Indigenous land—it is a frontiering project, where borders are pushed and threaten expansion. In this context, maps follow rapid change and more importantly, maps imagine violent change.
Therefore, the maps of the region tell a story of the power of the occupying force, molding its contours however it deems best. Violence can be read in the fictionality of the maps of the occupied lands. The maps do not account for the delay in movement due to spontaneous military barricading, the change in traffic due to the passing of an army convoy, the maps relabel the streets, the maps place a house symbol where a home has been demolished, the maps do not rename a building when it has been turned into a detention center.
Maps seek power from their ability to represent—retell a history, distort the present, and force dreams of an offensive, unwelcome, colonized future.
But, the city that is made invisible on colonial maps can be read in the mundane architecture of the city. Colonial violence can be read in the mundane architecture of an occupied city.
Historian and architect Eyal Weizman explains the key role of architecture in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the evolution of Urban Warfare. Weizman’s analysis can be stretched to occupied territories elsewhere— in other cities, where freedom is held captive in open streets.
Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, has been the political center for the Indian Occupation. The city is marked and designed by the ecological contours of the valley— however, the Occupation bends nature to serve itself and physically disrupts everything that refuses to serve it.
Reading Violence in Architecture
A swift access to all forms of spaces (within colonized places) is the currency for Occupation. Civilian traffic in Srinagar is controlled by armed police and military bunkers. The city’s infrastructure is provided to (forcibly taken by) Army convoys to access the city and beyond. The city is punctuated by military camps which are provided preferential access to the highways and roadways of the valley. When a military convoy passes through the city, it becomes the city, all else is erased.
Not all architecture is built for speed. The slow violence of some architecture springs into action during times of conflict. Unassuming roads become ports of access for the army to enter the city, and oblivious neighborhoods are turned into battlefields. The slow movement of the bulldozer is turned into an inescapable force when it is deployed to demolish entire houses (homes, they are always homes) of alleged miscreants and militants.
Occupation needs surveillance for tactical warfare and an illusion of surveillance for psychological warfare. Many camps and state buildings are guarded by high walls and barbed wires, serving as a network of citywide panopticons—instilling the constant fear of being watched by the state, in civilians.
The Occupation benefits from turning private-public space upside down. The private space is shrunk and shrunk and shrunk—until no space, house, room, device, or thought is private. The public space, alternatively, is where resistance is killed—the public space is drained of love and happiness. The youth centers are co-opted, the parks are filled with fear and the valley is forced silent. Space is colonized, and its purpose is colonized.
The Indian Occupation is urban— therefore architecture becomes the biggest repository of evidence to read the violence. We must read.
