Photographer and Fulbright scholar Asim Rafiqui left his homeland to chase a corporate dream when he was 18. Now, with an old film camera in tow, he discovers places in India where national identities and prejudices break down. Engaging in history can help us look ahead, if not heal, he tells
Asim Rafiqui. (Clockwise from top) A mosque in Jammu; near a shrine at Chamaliyal, Jammu; the city of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh. All photographs are part of Rafiqui's Fulbright scholarship project in India
Paak-staan". Asim Rafiqui, writer, blogger, journalist, traveller, historian, and photographer, skips the second syllable when he speaks of his of his home country. He also breaks into fluid Hindi — the Hindi of an Urdu-speaker — and makes you sit up with his pathos while he tells stories: What? Strip-searched for six hours at Gaza? (he lived there for a year). Kali's original masjid in Balochistan? Really?
This week, the Fulbright scholar from Stockholm was at the Delhi Photo festival, an initiative of the India Habitat Centre and Nazar Foundation to create awareness about photography and initiate dialogue. Rafiqui has been in India since February and is working on a project that is "an artistic exploration of a space" which he calls 'The Idea of India'. Rafiqui takes photographs and travels to "sites where national identities break down". As a part of the project, he is writing about rituals and communities and places in India "and how they contribute to social harmony, inter-religious tolerance and resistance to separation and violence." Even now, Rafiqui uses an old-fashioned film camera — no fancy telescope lenses for him.
Sharing history
"I am trying to understand and excavate shared histories with India, but not this 'Aman ki Asha' stuff," he says. To explain these ideas, Rafiqui uses words and phrases like "polemic" this and "syncretic' that, "debilitated citizenry" and "orientalist reaction". But you get what he's saying because he follows up the doctorate phrases with translations. In doing so, he opens himself up and allows you to examine what his trip is all about.
His first stop: Ayodhya.
"Have you been to Ayodhya?" Rafiqui asks. Er, no. "You must go! It's such a beautiful place. I was very happy there." Generous as he is with imparting trivia, we now know there is such a thing as "the best hotel in Faizabad" at Rs600 a night. Rafiqui wants people to swap stories and engage history so that we, people on this side of the border, can at least begin to look ahead, if not heal. The man has his dreams, one such being of an overlapping border, of a 1,000 km-long stretch of Mughal gardens. "Well, why not?"
Chasing a passion
Rafiqui wasn't always into understanding and excavating histories. In 2001, frustrated with life, he left a career in software development. He wrote in his Fulbright essay. "The disconnect between my passions and my profession had become too vast to tolerate. Every day of the 10 years I spent in offices in Manhattan, Boston, or San Francisco writing software for clients or at classes at the business school at Columbia, I knew that there had to be a different idea to my life." Shortly after helping his last employer launch their operations in Europe, Rafiqui left to explore what this other idea of life could be.
He found it behind the viewfinder of a camera. "I don't remember why I took up the camera. But, as I stood in an Afghan refugee camp on the border of Pakistan and raised the camera to my eye for the first time, I felt my old life receding into the distance," says Rafiqui. At that moment he felt what Charles Harbutt, the American photographer, described as 'the coming together of the complete individual'.
Rafiqui left Pakistan in 1984 when he was 18. His parents are from Kashmir, a place he has visited often, written essays, taken pictures. They now live in Lahore. His maternal grandfather was an eye surgeon and paternal grandfather worked in an insurance company. His uncle was a national war hero in the Air Force. "We're a deeply nationalistic family," he says.
Pushing boundaries
As a writer and photographer, he works for the US-European media and writes not just about the subcontinent, but also about underlying prejudices. His wife is Swedish and the couple, with their young daughter, live in Stockholm. In the last eight years, he has not worked with a Swedish publication because all they want him to write about is Pakistan. "I've had it with people fixing their notion of identity on me and expecting me to only write about my faith." He's interested in other stuff and doesn't only want to write about subjects that he's assumed to be interested in because of his Muslim name.
Recently, Rafiqui claimed the Ramayan as part of his Indic heritage. "I'm not going to allow you to tell me it's not," he says. The last time he was in Pakistan (on his multiple entry visa) was in September 2010. He speaks of schools there that have textbooks with lines such as: 'The Hindus live in small dark homes.' "For Pakistan, there are no Indians, they are all Hindus. Pakistanis are raised on a deep suspicion of Hindus. I'm bored of this lack of imagination and unwillingness to confront the other side", he says.
So, Rafiqui is pushing boundaries on both sides. "There is an unresolved nature of pain of partition in 1947 and we never address that." There's anger and disappointment in his tone. "We don't live in a bubble. Pakistan is not independent of India, of Afghanistan. It's a chicken and egg thing... there is no neatly packaged story."
Read more about Asim's work on asimrafiqui.com/blog/ and asimrafiqui.photoshelter.com
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