In August 2019, Kashmir lost its special constitutional status and, for a time, much of its ability to speak to the outside world. The blackout that followed ran for 213 days. That interval — and the machinery of military occupation and land appropriation surrounding it — is the subject of Pleasure Gardens, a two-part book by the writers Skye Arundhati Thomas and Izabella Scott, published by MACK in 2024 within its DISCOURSE series.

The first part is an exercise in reconstruction. Working from hundreds of sources gathered in Srinagar and in the Himalayan valleys along the Line of Control, the authors assemble a day-by-day log of fifteen days under siege: an attempt, in the project’s own framing, to close the gaps in the record as plainly and precisely as possible. The second part turns to Kashmir’s occupied territories and traces how India’s infrastructure of surveillance and control is borrowed from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Read together, the two halves treat the blackout not as an aberration but as a technique, one whose reasoning has to be reconstructed rather than merely deplored.

Photographs matter here, but they are not the whole of the book. Three photo essays — by Ufaq Fatima, Nawal Ali and Zainab — enter the narrative as distinct voices rather than as illustration, and the compact paperback-with-flap format suits a project assembled from fragments, documents and accumulated detail instead of spectacle.

For a collector, the interest lies less in rarity than in method. Pleasure Gardens occupies a series conceived for extended argument, and it uses that room to test what a documentary book can hold: testimony, archival trace, reporting and image inside a single structure. On a subject most image-led publishing avoids, it is a deliberate and unusually disciplined piece of work.