How do photographs carry the afterlives of violence? Threading together personal and collective histories, photographer Showkat Nanda reflects on documenting Kashmir not merely as a site of conflict, but as a lived world shaped by endurance and the struggle against forgetting.

If you bleed with me, it’ll hurt less.

I choose the man who bears my husband’s body.

What I dream of, then, when I think about what Jürgen Habermas called “the postsecular society,” is a foggy middle path. I’m not willing to fall for the false choice between religion and democracy simply because either feels like more solid footing than walking the tightrope between them.