Paper txt msgs from Kashmir - photocopy
“Paper txt msgs from Kashmir….tells the story of an old conflict in the thwarted missives of those enduring its latest indignity. The result is a poignant, inventive and heart-breaking look at the interruptions wrought by the ban on people caught between two countries, two militaries and hundreds of millions of nationalism-fed egos. The 150 messages take us, well meaning web voyeurs, into the inner rooms of the Kashmiri limbo.”Rafia Zakaria, "Art and Resistance" in Dawn 2011
Paper txt msgs from Kashmir began in December 2009 as a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the Indian government’s ban on all pre-paid mobile phone services in Kashmir on the basis of ‘security’.
Close to a thousand “paper txt msgs” were distributed throughout Kashmir as a kind of tongue-in-cheek response to the government’s ban on pre-paid mobile phone services in the region.
Virtually overnight hundreds of thousands of mobile phone users – people conducting business, college students, families, distanced lovers were left without means of telecommunication.
There was little more than a whisper from the Indian media; it was not an isolated incident. The monitoring, blocking and banning of phone services is just one of the many ways in which India intervenes into, disrupts and desecrates the rhythms of daily life in Kashmir.
Through the distribution of an “alternative communicative tool” dejected pre-paid subscribers were invited to write a “paper-txt-msg”, to anyone real or imagined, about anything they would like to write in a txt msg but were suddenly unable to do so.
Over 150 paper txt msgs returned and the work grew—incorporating video, installation and a publication circulating on and offline . First released as an e-book online in May 2011, an original print edition of 70 were published in August that same year. A kind of bootleg photocopied edition of the book—printed in the same photocopy store in Munirka/New Delhi as the original paper txt msgs—were made in 2012, 2023 and 2024.
The publication contains a collection of writing from Kashmir by Suvaid Yaseen, Majid Maqbool, Zooni Tickoo, Iram Razzaq, Rahim Seab, Gowhar Fazili, Uzma Falak and Tanveer Ahmed.