Imagine your city under a 30-day curfew – Instagram artist reacts to Kashmir lockdown
- No phones, no internet, no flights out, her home a prison – Sumona Chakravarty visualises how her city, Kolkata, would look if faced with situation in Kashmir
- Indian government ended self-government there and shut down communications. Her sketches are a potent reflection on residents’ feelings of trauma and isolation
One fine morning, Sumona Chakravarty’s hometown of Kolkata fell off the grid: no working phones, no internet – a complete breakdown of news. The only way to get there from Mumbai was on an overbooked flight. Overnight, her home had become a prison, with deserted, barricaded roads that led nowhere.
So begins the Kolkata artist’s imaginary account of “30 days of Curfew”, a series that inspires readers to play the game: what if it happened here?
In a world dependent on access to information, how would you survive the trauma of isolation?
Chakravarty’s narrative of 30 days spent off the grid and living under curfew in Kolkata is a series of drawings with extended captions, scanned and posted on Instagram under the username @sumonach.
Each day has its own post, as she adds a piece to this jigsaw puzzle, looking for the familiar in the strangeness that surrounds her. For her followers, it is the story of a woman grappling with the hopelessness and emotional trauma of living under siege.