— Ghulam Ahmad Mahjoor

Sitting on the floor, I write this as I smell the scent of Kashmiri roses and hear the buzz of honeybees. They’re coming from my mother’s flower garden. Yesterday, when I sat at my writing desk, I was met with the ripe smell of plums and the fresh aroma of mint. It was flowing from her waer (kitchen garden). 

Under the scorching sun, sweating profusely, with her hair tangled, I see my mother working in her gardens every day. Every morning, she wakes up and waters them before doing anything else. She spends most of her day there until the night falls, when she complains of back and shoulder aches. 

Whenever my father, sisters or I are looking for her, these gardens are the first place we go. In our village, her gardens are known by her name. Most gardens are named this way – simply referred to by the woman’s name who tends them. There’s something womanist about these vernacular gardens, embodying our expression, ideas and labour.

For decades, the Kashmir valley has been under Indian militarisation. Fraught with abuse and violence against people, the state-security monitors our bodies, surveils our actions, silences our voices and erases our stories. To maintain control, Kashmir’s landscape is interspersed with bunkers and checkpoints, barricades and concertina wires, police jeeps and army convoys. Meanwhile, the valley, its mountains, rivers and gardens are commodified as images of paradise. Kashmiri faces, bodies, and even our accents are fetishised by the colonial gaze. Militarism and tourism are present everywhere; they function together. 

“In our village, most gardens are simply referred to by the woman’s name who tends them”

Kashmiri society isn’t a monolith. Inequalities run along the lines of gender, caste, class, language and geography. Women and gender non-conforming people encounter physical and psychological violence, are silenced, and made simultaneously hypervisible and invisible. Things are worse for poor women who belong to lower castes, trans people who lack community support, and tribals who can’t access resources. 

These are the socio-political realities of Kashmir. Women’s gardens exist within twisted barbs. Bought and sold, carved out and cared for, fenced and surveilled, neglected and abandoned, these gardens may be “natural”, but they are also political, classed and gendered.

The author and Black feminist Alice Walker thinks of her mother’s garden as art. She describes its brilliant colours, original design and evident creativity. Fellow Black feminist bell hooks defines the yard as a public space, a place of display and a site of transformation.

I see this in my mother’s practice: she plans her garden layouts, experiments with bed designs and flower arrangements, and finally, displays her work. In doing this, she creates and cultivates a site of self-exploration and expression, in dialogue with her culture and community. 

“These gardens are complex spatial texts, which document Kashmiri women’s ideas and labour”

I drew this sketch of her kitchen garden, in which vertical strip-like patches are for rohun (garlic) and marchiwangan (chilli). The small square plots are for vegetables, such as haakh (collard greens), muji (radish), wangan (aubergine), aalivi (potato), andruwangan (tomato). On the right, left and lower sides, separate beds are dug out for flowers, cucumber and maize plants. The borders are marked with painted bricks forming a uniform pattern. On the upper brick-walled side, there are three plum trees. 

Then, there’s her flower garden. In the middle, there’s a rectangular grass plot with raised soil beds for flowers on all ends. On the upper and left bed, apart from different flowers, there are trees of almond, pear and cherry. 

My mother continues to expand her gardening canvas. Her flower garden is at the front of the house, her kitchen garden, at the back. At either side of the house are two small gardens, with carved circular flower beds encased by hand-painted stones. Years back, when we bought a plot adjacent to our house, my mother turned it into another garden. She broke the wall and made an oval entrance, allowing her to swiftly move from one garden to another.  

Gardens aren’t just artworks. They’re also sites of feminised labour, where women are confined. My mother labours hard in the house; she’s overworked and fatigued. She doesn’t have a room of her own or enough money to support herself.

Gardener and author of Green Thoughts Eleanor Perenyi also stresses this. She sees the garden as an “extension of women’s sphere beyond the walls of the house”, but points out that its boundaries don’t “extend out into the broader landscape”. My mother can’t go out freely or move safely beyond the walls of her gardens. In fact, she can’t do this within its walls either. Maybe these conditions run counter to creativity.

Katie Holmes, co-author of Reading the Garden, disputes this. She writes: “if the flower garden was a place of containment and subordination, it could also be a space of empowerment… to plant particular visions on the landscape.” 

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Restricted and confined, my mother labours in her gardens. But they’re also the very place where she exerts her artistic will and expresses herself. She transmutes her gardens, as art historian Roziska Parker writes, into a space of feminist performance that, with time, becomes an “archive for questions of gender, nature, and culture.” Creativity and confinement aren’t mutually exclusive. Rather, these beautiful gardens are complex spatial texts, which document Kashmiri women’s ideas and labour. 

A Kashmiri woman’s self cojoins with the collective in, and through, the garden. Mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and sometimes even strangers enter and work in my mother’s garden with her, as she does in theirs. After working, they sit on bearri (raised soil beds) to rest, have tea and talk about their lives of love and abuse, hope and hopelessness, humour and misery. Together, they create bonds, sharing everyday memories and stories, but also exchanging ideas about how to arrange their beautiful gardens more efficiently. In our village, women buy and barter vegetables, and share seeds, saplings and flower stems. Gardening is transformed into an exercise of communal and cultural creativity. 

“These gardens can change how the valley’s art histories are written.”

I think these gardens can ultimately change how the valley’s art histories are written. Kashmiri women’s art is rarely exhibited in galleries or museums, or documented in literature. When I ask my mother about her gardens, her eyes sparkle, and she says, “mei chi basaan tem panin zindagi.” For me, they are my life. “Yeli bi waeri manz chas aasaan, bi chas dimaagi ti paani kin kush aasaan.” When I am in my kitchen garden, I am happy both mentally and physically. 

Upon hearing her, I recall Walker’s words that to find the creative traces left by our mothers, we must not only look high, but also low. In this spirit, we should take women’s garden-diaries seriously. It is where they have marked themselves in history with their own hands, using soil as their ink. It is our job to search and find our mothers’ gardens; to keep them watered and thriving. 

• Sabahat Ali Wani is a feminist writer, researcher, critic, and visual artist from Kashmir. She is the founder and editor of a Kashmir-based feminist literary and cultural magazine, Maaje Zevwe.

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