Pleasure Gardens: Blackouts and the Logic of Crisis in Kashmir

Ebook available via this listing, on Apple Books and Kindle Store. ‘We identified a task: to try and fill the void, the gaps in information. To try and do this as simply and as precisely as possible.’ Pleasure Gardens is an urgent two-part project that investigates the military occupation, land appropriation, and communication blackouts in Kashmir, a region whose heavily militarized borders have frequently been a site of conflict between India and Pakistan. Taking a 213-day blackout in 2019 as its starting point, the project aims to detail the reasoning behind these blockades, seeking a new register of writing and image that makes visible the conditions of occupation and the protracted violence of the blackout. In the book’s first part, Scott and Thomas bring together hundreds of sources, filling in the gaps from Srinagar to the remote Himalayan valleys along the Line of Control between India and Pakistan, to create a unique log of fifteen days under siege, during which Kashmiri consti