This Isn’t Divide and Conquer is a photographic project rooted in family history that expands into a broader visual journey across the five Indian states bordering Pakistan. Through landscapes and fragments of conflict, the work explores how colonial legacies, modern politics, and recent escalations continue to shape the Indian terrain and national identity.
The title refers to the British colonial strategy of "Divide and Conquer"—a tactic that sowed religious division to maintain imperial control. This strategy led to the Partition of 1947, which displaced 14 million people, killed over a million, and fractured countless families across the subcontinent. Although Partition may now seem distant, its legacy remains active, fuelling four wars between India and Pakistan and continuing to shape the geopolitical landscape. Today, these divisions are further reinforced by the rise of India’s right-wing government, which has systematically polarised communities along religious lines.
The project also reflects on recent tensions, including the April 2025 attack in Pahalgam, Kashmir, where Pakistani-linked terrorists killed 26 tourists. India’s response included missile strikes, border skirmishes, and the suspension of key diplomatic agreements like the Indus Waters Treaty. These landscapes—abandoned railways, fractured bridges, militarised highways—are not only marked by past violence but remain active sites of geopolitical conflict.
My paternal grandfather’s military career sits at the core of this work. He trained at the Royal Indian Military College alongside Pakistani officers before Partition. After 1947, these same men would become his adversaries across battlefields in four wars. His trajectory mirrors the complex entanglement of shared histories that abruptly became defined by borders and enmity. His time in the army, and the militarised legacy he left behind, continues to shape my understanding of the region and informs the visual language of this project.
In For What Was, Will Soon Be Forgotten, the work turns to Kashmir’s fragile, memory-laden landscapes, which are now under threat from rapid industrialisation and lithium mining. Through temporary installations resembling scaffolding, the project preemptively marks sites at risk of vanishing—physically and historically.
This Isn’t Divide and Conquer is ultimately a study of contested geographies, military histories, and the fragile line between memory and erasure.
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