Reviews

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The contemplative pace, readerly cadence and conversational manner of the book allows one an immersive and extensive understanding of the valley through 118 interactions which recount its political shifts and histories over broad spans of time. Interacting with those who have had some exposure to the region, it asks us to think about how the news and media have conditioned our memories and approaches to places, but often misled us. However, through this act of memorialisation and recollection, the place of Kashmir becomes once again, a living concern. The very ethics of the narrative voice, of disclosure, makes us realise that Kashmir is an atlas for protests everywhere, making us further aware about how ‘positions’ are subconsciously, and sometimes stridently taken in an increasingly self-aware world. / FAST FORWARD

The(se) conversations, sprinkled with flecks of memory like the pieces of a broken mirror, illuminate a myriad of representations, against the illusory facade of a coherent singular narrative. Memory as a methodological tool as used by Hunt to approach the complexity of the situation in the region is not to be confused with nostalgic lamentation for the past or an act of mystic introspection. Rather, in the face of the state’s official claims of a peaceful situation in the region, as well as the wilful amnesia of previous state-sanctioned atrocities, individual memory functions as a tool of defiance against the logic of teleology to recognise the ruptures in the social fabric. / THIRD TEXT

The book defies easy categorisation. Its physical size and engagement with language resemble those of a novel, but it carries an artwork within its pages. However, it does not carry the weight or preciousness of an art object or a photo book, allowing it to travel more freely among readers. It is this cusp of the form, which would allow the book to “sit in the politics or history section of a book shop as much as the art or photo section,” that Hunt wanted to explore…The consistent subversion in the form, as well as the language—visual and textual—that we use to define violence, is at the core of the work. It is this re-imagination that can challenge how a place has been “seen,” and thus offer new possibilities to imagine its freedoms. / THE CARAVAN

Tea-drinking as an act of witness? The conceit is less naïve than it is seems. Like the Parisians clueless of Algeria in Chris Marker’s La Joli Mai (1962), most of Hunt’s interviewees know next to nothing about Kashmir, which, paradoxically, makes for fruitful dialogue. They ask common sensical questions (…) that she patiently answers, filing in the historical and political background, offering a useful primer on the occupation. Their more wide-eyed observations – ‘When people are mourning, they are being killed!’; ‘They are killing children!’ – carry a simple moral force, burning through the justifications of the Indian state. The discussions also fill a void in the cultural discourse on Kashmir, which tends to be presented in the media as a conflict zone and nothing more. / NEW LEFT REVIEW

Throughout Cups of nun chai, Hunt repeats one fact—“over 70,000 people have been killed since the armed rebellion broke out in Kashmir in 1989.” This bare truth about Kashmir should haunt us. Killing of children as small as eight-year-olds is not only a blemish on our collective consciousnesses but an ugly blot on the canvas of civilisation we so proudly claim ourselves to be. When brutality is screamed from rooftops, it becomes a “normality”. Hunt reveals this normality not by screaming but by quietly whispering in our ears like a mother comforting a dying child…This masterpiece by Hunt needs to be read urgently, not for understanding the common Kashmiri but for understanding ourselves and our persistence with the narrative of jingoism, hate and violence. / INDIAN EXPRESS