0:12  
In February 2019, following a suicide attack in Pulwama, Kashmir, an Indian fighter jet was shot down over Pakistani occupied Kashmir airspace, sparking rising tensions and protests around the world. Joining me is Professor Arne Kislenko of Ryerson University. He specializes in diplomatic history and international relations.

0:38  
The heart of the Kashmiri conflict are two super important nations India and Pakistan. Which have had a pronounced regional political rivalry that involves many other things, not just Kashmir. It is super complicated from a local, regional and international level. It's kind of a litmus test of how complicated international affairs can be and how small countries you know seemingly remote from the mainstream can have really consequential effects.

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Daniel Brandt is a PhD candidate at Ryerson University, who specializes in documenting the Kashmir valley through his photo series hashtag sheet.

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I started working in Kashmir in the spring of 2013. My introduction to Kashmir was after I think it was something like 23 days of curfew in the valley so people hadn't been allowed into their houses because of the political situation. So I was working there as a photographer and then over time, my work has evolved to being more academic and more archival based.

1:38  
You're best known for your work hashtag Shahid can tell you about why you chose that name for your project because it has a specific meaning?

1:45  
The name came out of actually a search term that I was using on the internet Shahid is obviously an Arabic or is used in Urdu as well is martyr. And in 2013 and 2014, a new phase of the the insurgency in Kashmir had started and many young men from the valley were joining organizations like Lashkar-e-Toiba or Hizbul Mujahideen, and we're fighting and almost always being killed or martyred. And I was I was following these young men on the ground as they were fighting but also through the the photos, graphs and videos that they were posting online on their social media accounts, which I was collecting and archiving. So the name hashtag Shahid really came out of this search term that was that was often being used as a metadata tag on the on the photographs and video that these young men were posting.

2:36  
I have with me some photos of hashtag Shaheed describe the photo for our listeners and walk through some of the context behind it.

2:46  
Yeah, this was a funeral that I was at in 2015, or 2016. I can't remember the exact year I'd have to check. This is Taleb Shah, who was from a small village in South Kashmir. He had been killed that the evening before. He was part of a small group of Lashkar-e-Toiba militants. There were three of them, and they'd been trapped inside a building out and you can see in the foreground all the people photographing it. So this was really one of those images during when I was doing the Shahid project, I was looking at both the photographs that I was tracking, which were posted on social media that these people in the foreground were taking, but simultaneously also looking at it from my vantage point. I mean, what I was looking at is the way that I mean, conflict has changed in the 21st century, where now everybody has a camera.

3:32  
So can you explain how that changes the context of the conflict itself?

3:37  
A lot of the material that documented the the conflict in the 90s was was erased. I mean, a lot of it's been destroyed, a lot of it's been lost. So, I mean, that was a period where most Kashmiris wouldn't have had a camera that they were carrying around, and they were still it was still time when when film was was was being used. So I mean, I think one of the things that is very interesting, and I think you got to look at it in in a broader context of the way that that war in general or an insurgency or what any sort of armed conflict is being documented in the 21st century. I mean now everybody has a phone and this isn't just the war in Kashmir has been documented, but it's really a global trend. I mean, we look at wars like Syria that are in many ways being documented solely by non professionals or amateurs.

4:21  
 How does this change the narrative?

4:22  
It's it's hard to judge in the West. I mean, for Kashmiris, I think it's there's a new generation, you have to also look at it generationally. There's now a whole generation of people in Kashmir who have grown up with the war being their childhood. I think they're really interested in the idea of being able to document what what they see as history unfolding in front of them and these scenes very much of these funerals for young men and women. These were historical moments that everybody wanted to have their own photograph on their phone.

4:51  
So that's why photographs are so important. They're evocative, they can tell the story sometimes to themselves. You know, we need to point out as I do to Nathaniel and others, that by themselves, they're just photographs. They're they can be misused, they can be inappropriate. So they're not exactly, you know, substitutes for other scholarly lines of inquiry. Right? But they do serve an evocative and emotional point. Which is to connect you in a sort of immediate fashion to real people that are, you know, subject to whatever forces that you're looking at. In the case of Kashmir, what I think is particularly important is that Nathaniel's work is positioned to answer what what ultimately is the major question in Kashmir, which is, you know, is it? Is Kashmir, its own place is its own people? Is it right to view them as kind of partitions, you know, provinces of one or two states? Or are they independent entities, right? Are they independent people with a distinct ethnicity and language and so on.