ABSTRACT
“Cups of nun chai (2010–ongoing)” is a memorial, grounded in the killing of 118 civilians, during protests that roiled Indian-controlled Kashmir in the summer of 2010. The work was produced by artist and writer Alana Hunt and took shape over two years of tea and conversations with 118 people, most of them in Australia, some in India, and finally, those in Kashmir.
In these poignant conversations, events, places, and sentiments that are often obscured are given breathing space. People and homes and memory and flavor combine to make tangible what so many outside Kashmir do not know. Here the political unfolds through a profoundly personal experience. Moving across the spheres of contemporary art, literature, social science, and journalism, “Cups of nun chai” is a poignant act of memorialization – a means of remembering, reading, and reminding. Shot through with an extraordinary, even stubborn, compassion, this work reflects on Kashmir, but also on nation making and colonization, and on power and violence.
“Cups of nun chai” accumulated online, has appeared in exhibitions and circulated as a newspaper serial in Kashmir Reader reaching thousands of people on a weekly basis in Kashmir throughout 2016–17. In 2020 Yaarbal Books published the work in full. This chapter contains a selection of some of these texts.
