Photo exhibit showcases unseen Jammu: 'It's Jammu & Kashmir, not just Kashmir

A train chugs through the snowy landscape of Banihal. A panoramic photograph of it is spread across an entire page of a book. The mountains are wrapped in snow, green roofs peek through the white, and a pink-blue-grey train pierces the silence. Photojournalist Ashish Sharma transports the reader straight to Kashmir. It’s almost as if they’re standing there, watching the train pass by.

The photo of the recently inaugurated 48.1 kilometre Banihal-Khari-Sumber-Sangaldan section—that connects Kashmir to the rest of India by rail—features in his new coffee table book, Reimagining Jammu and Kashmir: A Pictorial Journey.

The photographs are on display at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Delhi till 1 July. The exhibition was inaugurated by Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha on 16 June. Most of the photographs are of Kashmir after 2019, when Article 370 was abrogated.

But the year is significant for another reason, said Sharma. It’s also the year that the Smart Cities Mission was launched in Jammu and Kashmir, and the photojournalist set out to document that transformation.

“It was the Smart City initiative and the way the landscape of Jammu and Kashmir was changing that prompted me to document it through pictures. Daily life was returning to Srinagar, children going to school, and one could sense a feeling of normalcy among the locals,” said Sharma, as he walked through the gallery of his exhibition at IGNCA.