One winter morning in 2013, when filmmaker Chitvan Gill, witnessed a grim patch of land turning overnight into a Kashmiri shantytown, she assumed the migration resulted from yet another turbulence in the valley.
"I used to go to this area in East Delhi very often and suddenly out of the blue one morning, I come across a camp, just overnight. With the ongoing unrest in Kashmir in 2013, I thought it had got something to do with that. They must have fled their homes," says Gill.
But, as she delved deeper into their homes, stories unfurled breaking stereotypes associated with the lives of those hailing from Jammu and Kashmir.
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Gill has captured their stories and way of life that has endured unnoticed in hidden corners of the national capital, in her ongoing photo exhibition, "Winterlude: A season in Delhi" at Alliance Francaise de Delhi here.
"When I started enquiring, I realised there's nothing to do with any trouble, there's nothing to do with any terrorism," she says.
"This was a journey that thousands of impoverished peasants and farmers of Kashmir have been making to Delhi for more than four decades. Each year, as a mantle of snow descends over the idyllic Kashmir Valley, they flee here, to this flattened remain of a landfill, to escape the bitter chill," says the photographer.
The exhibition, which is a visual inquiry, into the lives of the unlikely nomads, captures and communicates their varied moods through a collection of 65 photographs.
Almost like an oxymoron, gleaming faces of children with cracked cheeks, running noses and greased limbs, running amidst squalor, are recurrent in Gill's exhibition.
"The children were what was most remarkable about the camp. You forgot the filth and acid smoke and were drawn into their sheer joy, their laughter. Oblivious to the ugliness and degradation, it is a carnival, a time of unbridled exuberance and play for them," says Gill.
