He explains in his manifesto of sorts, “I, as a Kashmiri, am willing to recognize walking the cabbage as part of the Kashmiri landscape, but I will never accept the check posts, the bunkers, the army camps, the torture centers, the barbed wire, the curfews, the arrests, the toxic environment of conflict and war, as part of the same.”

    The performance is an offshoot of Chinese artist Han Bing’s Walking the Cabbage Project and Movement. Historically, the cabbage has been seen as a parcel of the poor in China, helping them survive eras of scarcity, famine and hunger. Han Bing — who was raised in a poor rural family — went to Beijing to study art, later establishing a career. Han Bing walks the cabbage, a symbol of his upbringing, to create a contrast while others show off their posh pooches on the streets of the Chinese capital.

    Although a great number of journalists in India have covered the horrors of the state, Kashmiri Cabbage Walker feels that as the conflict has dragged on for decades, words have begun to lose their meaning and have not lead to consequential action against militarization. He says terms like “human rights abuses” and “human rights violations” are “obfuscating, unspecific and abstract terms to label the colossally severe [and] unimaginable atrocities.”



posted 2974 days ago