As a child, Diba Mushtaq was forbidden to turn to the old Srinagar maze — considered too explosive in the 1990s — but did that denial arouse curiosity or well-up love and yearning for the fabled and historic walled city? Both actually.
Now 40, Diba has got a slice of her beloved Srinagar downtown closer to her heart and splashed her love on the canvas. With the narrow unkempt lanes, the rickety houses and wooden bridge across the river Jhelum on one side and the revered Sufi shrine of Khankah Moula — an architectural masterpiece — on the other, Diba is trying to reconnect and recreate what she had been badly missing.
Call it luck or compulsion, she returned home when the world was getting the worst battering of the Covid pandemic. She chose not to sulk or get bogged down or depressed but instead went out to explore what she missed during her formative years: Srinagar’s old neighbourhood.
“My dad did not allow me to venture towards downtown Srinagar which otherwise is very near to home. He thought it was a bit risky to go out because so many things were going on during that point in time,” she recalls
But when she returned home two years ago from Delhi where she lives with her husband and son, she decided to be on her own. She would quietly sneak into downtown and capture random pictures of streets, shrines, streets, old market squares, old houses, and monuments. She would look at the pictures and paint even the minutest details.
“The work on display has come up in the last two years. When the family was locked up in their homes and we would get over long family conversations, I would stay awake till late in the night and turn to paint and canvas,” Diba told News18 at her maiden solo exhibition called ‘Loul’ (a Kashmiri expression for love and longing) at Mahatta — one of Srinagar’s oldest photo galleries that houses a wealth of archival pictures and films on, about, and around Kashmir.
Diba paints using both water and acrylic colours. She has done a four-year degree in Fine Arts from Jamia Millia Islamia but painting came to her when she was a schoolkid.
It was during these years that art became a calling for her.
For her debut show awash in lyrical black-and-white hues, Kashmir and its layered ethos inevitably became her muse.
And ‘Loul’ came naturally and it had to be in Kashmir, the place she hasn’t been able to take out even when she has spent considerable time away during studies, job or building a life after marriage.
“Loul is an indefinable Kashmiri word with nuances that are hard to explain. Only a native who has grown up in this soil will fully understand the layers of this emotion,” she explains. “My work is an attempt to capture this yearning, this love for what Kashmir represents in a gentle, warm embrace. An embrace reminiscent of how my father would hug me, saying ‘Loul aaya tha’.”
For Diba, Kashmir is not just its irresistible natural beauty but its heart and soul, and its rich culture.
“I want to capture everything in my art. The alleys of the old city, the monuments, the Sufi shrines, the neighbourhood bakeries, the Jhelum meandering through, the electric poles with innumerable wires enmeshed like our cultural ties, the narrow cobbled streets to the majestic mountains, the wide-open skies and memories associated with each of these places. My art is very personal to me because it is my way of sharing Kashmir with the rest of the world,” she says.
As to why she chose to showcase her work in Kashmir, she says, “I felt there was no place better than home. Kashmir is my constant muse. This journey of my art had to start from where it all began. Kashmir is embedded in me. It invariably sneaks into every piece of art that I work on. Even if I am sketching a monument in Delhi, a little bit of Kashmir works its way into it.”
True, you can take a Kashmiri out of Kashmir but you cannot take Kashmir out of a Kashmiri.
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