Somewhere on the way past Avantipora in Pulwama district.
girls, school
Kashmiri Swords, Divine Bow and Arrows, Shalimar the Clown
The sword was invented by Jamshed, the first of monarchs and its terror and majesty are greater than those of all other weapons. It is for this reason that when a kingdom has been taken by force of arms, it is said to have been taken by the sword.
As to the different kinds of swords there are many sorts: Chini, Rusi, Rumi, Firangi, Shahi, Hindi and Kashmiri. Of these the Hindi sword is the finest, and of all Hindi swords, that known as the mawj-idarya, the waves of the sea, is the most lustrous.
The bow was the pre-eminent weapon given by Jibrail to Adam in Paradise. It will never be superseded in this world or the next and in Paradise the blessed will practise archery.When choosing a bow you should try to acquire above all others the mountain bow of Ghazna. It’s made of horn and its aim is straight.
The Indian bow – the kaman-i-hindani-is made of cane. Its arrows do not travel very far but at a short distance it inflicts a very bad wound. The head of the arrow used with it is usually barbed and if lodged inside flesh, the shaft is liable to break off. This leaves the head, which is usually poisoned, in the flesh. It is impossible to extract.
The bows of central Asia use horse hide as the bow string. It is poor material. Use instead a bowstring of rhinoceros hide, for it will snap asunder the bow strings of all other bows to which the sound reaches whether these are made of the hide of wild ox, the horse, or even the flanks of a young nilgai.
– Fakhr-i-Mudabbir’s Adabal-harb Wa’l -Shaj’a , 13th century Military manual dedicated to Sultan Shams al-din Iltutumish, the first sovereign Muslim ruler of Delhi. Found these lines in William Dalrymple’s wonderful little book City of Djinns: A Year In Delhi.
When I read Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown, the idea of Boonyi practicing archery in the quite of a kashmiri village seemed odd. Not any more. The lines from that 13th century Military manual underline the significance of the hung showdown between Shalimar the clown carrying a knife in hand and India metamorphised into Kashmira carrying bow and arrow, lying in wait, in the final pages of the novel.
She drew an arrow from her quiver and and took up her stance. The door of the night-black room was opening, and her stepfather was coming in, knife in hand, neither the knife that had killed her mother nor the knife that killed her father but a third, virginal blade, its silent steel intended just for her. She was ready for him.
Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children had a showdown, The Satanic Verses also had a showdown, and these showdowns had an outcome – some one died, someone lost and someone won, but his Shalimar the Clown, significantly, had a hung showdown.
What the Cloud Said
[earlier cross posted at my other blog]
Jammu
9th June, 2008
Time: Around 7:00 AM
Shot these photographs of rain clouds just moments before the first rain drop hit the ground.
update:
You can enjoy these photographs of clouds in a video too
cd covers
Tula Mula , 2008
Comedy, Bollywood parodies in Kashmiri, devotional songs – Hindu and Muslim, film songs, Kashmiri folk, love songs…
Jacquemont wrong again and men not less handsome
Monsieur Jacquemont does not speak in very flattering terms of the mountain-maidens of this district, but I cannot agree with him. They are women of very graceful and prepossessing appearance, with regular features, and I must do the men the justice to say that they are not less handsome than the women.
There were, amongst my coolies, two young men as beautifully formed,and as graceful in their movements, as any that I have ever seen. It is natural that the lower limbs of the inhabitants of these steep mountains should be very much developed, but it is an error to think that this development gives an herculean appearance; on the contrary, the exercise of journeying over these rugged ways, serves to give a delicate outline and pliant grace to the form.
– The Baron Erich von Schonberg wrote in his Travels in India and Kashmir (1853), London: Hurst & Blackett
poverty, Nanga bhookha, Bhookha nanga
Just finished reading Curfewed Night, an autobiographical-reportage Novel by Basharat Peer on Kashmir of post 1989. Even that book isn’t free from Bollywood. On seeing his first bollywood film in a theater in the Indian town of Aligarh, the Kashmiri author-protagonist gets his ‘Aazadi’. And just a paragraph earlier, he writes about seeing emaciated Rickshawallas for the first time in his life. His grandfather, who accompanied him on this trip to get him admitted to the University, pays the rickshawalla twice the fare for a ride and thinks, ‘There is terrible poverty here.’ The author-protagonist notes: ‘ The poverty in Kashmir wasn’t as desperate.’
These words reminded me of lines by early European travelers to Kashmir who documented the abject poverty of Kashmir. In 1831, a French botanist named Victor Jacquemont (Born in Paris on August 8, 1801 and died in Bombay on December 7, 1832) arrived in Kashmir valley and wrote ‘…nowhere else in India are the masses as poor and denuded as they are in Kashmir. It is the only country where the price of work is really as low as we believe, mistakenly, to be generally in India.’* Godfrey Thomas Vigne, an English traveler who visited Kashmir in 1835 wrote, “Not a day passes whilst I was on the path to Kashmir, and even when travelling in the valley, that I did not see the bleached remains of some unfortunate wretch who dad fallen a victim either to sickness or starvation.”
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Correspondence inedite 1867 Victor Jacquemont
I also remembered the slogan that cut through Arundhati Roy like a knife and clean broke her heart: Nanga bhookha Hindustan, jaan se pyaara Pakistan. (Naked, starving India, More precious than life itself – Pakistan.)
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*Nulle part dans l’Inde la masse de la population n’est aussi pauvre, aussi dénuée qu’à Cachemire. C’est le seul pays où le prix du travail soit réellement aussi bas que nous le croyons, par erreur, être généralement dans toute l’Inde.
– Correspondance inédite avec sa famille et ses amis
by Victor Jacquemont (Published by M. Lévy, 1867), Volume 2, pp97
[rough google translation] [download]
In the book Letters from India by Victor Jacquemont (E. Churton, 1835), an early translation of his letters, the same thought appears in lines: “India is no longer the poorest country in the world to me: Cashmeer exceeds all imaginable poverty.” (page 111)
These lines, translated, were used in:
Kashmir in the Crossfire: In the Crossfire (1996), Page 36
by Victoria Schofield and also in her book Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the Unending War, page 5
Pankaj Mishra then used Victoria Schofield’s translation of the same lines in his famous article Death in Kashmir (2000). The same line later appeared in his Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond (2006), Page 168
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“Kashmir was never part of India”, said a young man who seemed to be the group’s chief spokesman,” Our culture has always been different. We believe in Muslim ideology, the Indians preach socialist ideology. We believe in Muslim educational values, they believe in Darwin’s theory. We are part of the global Islamic movement against the materialistic ideology of the west.” […] “We do not have the kind of poverty in Kashmir. Only Farooq Abdullah is stupid enough to believe that the problems of Kashmir are economic. That jobs are what we need”
– a militant speaks in a page from Tavleen Singh’s Kashmir: A Tragedy of Errors (1996)
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Related post: Free History books on Kashmir
water girl
On way to Gulmarg
Man at Baba Reshi
June 2008
Man at the shrine (ziarat) of sufi saint Baba Reshi (Baba Payam-ud-din), situated at about 7000 ft (2133m) between Gulmarg and Tangmarg.
why?
– found in Hindustan Times
why?
Who wouldn’t die to wear a Shahtoosh
Found this ad by Wildlife trust of India and IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare) in July 2001 issue of Reader’s Digest.
Wiki entry for Shahtoosh reads:
Shahtoosh (also written Shatush) – a Persian word meaning “Pleasure of Kings” – was the name given to a specific kind of shawl, which was woven with the down hair of the Chiru or Tibetan Antelope, by the weavers of Kashmir. These shawls were originally very few and it took very skilled artisans to weave the delicate hair (which measured between 9 and 11 micrometres). These factors made Shahtoosh shawls very precious. Shahtoosh are so fine that an average size shawl can be passed through a wedding ring.
According to Endangered Species Handbook
Few people have ever heard of an antelope known as the Chiru, or the Tibetan Antelope (Pantholops hodgsonii), yet it produces shahtoosh, a wool far more valuable than gold. This statuesque animal is native to treeless steppe above 5,000 meters in Chinese Tibet and adjacent northwest India. Its extremely lightweight, delicate wool has traditionally been woven into shawls and sold in a limited trade in Tibet and Kashmir, India. Within the past few decades, however, a growing market has developed in major cities in India, Nepal, several western countries and Japan.
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An interesting article from The Washington Times, dated June 18, 2004 that look’s at the issue from various angles.
