Vale (Valley) of Kashmir (shot in 1930s) by Bray Studio Inc.

Oldest Video of Kashmir

(Update: this one doesn’t work! check the video given below)
According to IMDB, the movie Vale of Kashmir was shot in the year 1936, under the direction of John Randolph Bray. The movie obviously made for the cinema going western audience, offers wonderful sights of Srinagar valley and the adjacent areas. It also gives us a peek into the life of a common Kashmiri, perhaps capturing it for the first time on the moving camera . Because of the kind of audience that the film was made for, the short movie is peppered with intentional and (maybe) unintentional humor. In one of the scene, a man is shown using the famous luxury that a common Kashmir enjoys the most, a Kangri (‘a warm radiator to sit by’, says the narrator), the narrators says that the holes in the coat (pheran) give the necessary ventilation. The hole in the coat were not for ventilation (as the narrator claims) but rather the effect of burning coal at times shooting off an ember to the coat, invariably burning a hole in the coat. Any Kashmiri with a burnt and hole ridden pheran would testify to this.

Uploaded on Youtube by
TVNETWORKS

(Update the above video has been removed by the above uploader )

It can now be viewed here:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Facebook
YouTube
Instagram
RSS