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Gardens of the Dal Lake

Serialization of Chapter 7: Gardens of the Dal Lake
from C. M. Villiers-Stuart’s monumental book  ‘Gardens of the Great Mughals’

More: Serialization of Chapter 8: Summer Gardens of Kashmir

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Image: View from the Dal Lake. Shot by me in June 2008

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Great Gardens of Kashmir based on writing of C. M. Villiers-Stuart

It is pleasant to find what a pride and delight both Indians and Kashmiris take in the old Imperial gardens. Only the Europeanised Indians have lost touch with these simple pleasures: young Rajas, ‘doing’ Kashmir or the gardens at Lahore, accompanied by some bored English tutor, and followed by a noisy horde of retainers, walk hurriedly up one side of the stream and down the other; but even they sometimes cast wistful glances back at the flowers and the fountains, ere they whirl off again in their motor cars. Bustling sightseers, however, are a rare occurrence here, and the famous baghs are always full of real garden lovers. All great festivals and holidays are celebrated, if possible, in a garden. Students bring their books, and work under the trees. A day in one of these great walled gardens is an event which appeals as much to purdah ladies as to the very poorest class. The great Emperors who planned them and lived in them-Babar, Akbar, Jahangir and his Nur-Jahan-are far more vivid personalities in India than Elizabeth or the Stuart sovereigns are in England. And every Indian speaks with a lingering regret of the days of the older Bad-shahi, ‘when the gardens were in their splendid prime.’  

– C.M. Villiers Stuart (1877-1966) in her pioneering book ‘Gardens of the Great Mughals’ – first of its kind work that lead to the historical study of Mughal Gardens and Indian gardening. 

On 26th of February 1908, Constance Mary Fielden, a water-color painter and a budding writer, become Constance Mary Villiers Stuart after marrying Englishman Major Patrick Villiers Stuart, son of Henry Windsor Villiers-Stuart.The same year she moved to India with her husband and before the end of 1913, her great book ‘Gardens of the Great Mughals’ was already published.

Her book opens with following lines, a dedication:

TO
MY MOTHER
AND TO ALL EAST AND WEST
WHO LOVE THEIR OWN GARDENS

While she was working on this book, plans for creation “New Delhi” were in process. Towards the end of the book, in its final chapter titled ‘Some Garden Contrasts and a Dream’, Mary Villiers made an impassioned appeal for a thoughful, planned inclusion of Indian design sensibilities into the creation of the New Imperial Capital of India. But, these appeals had little effect. 

It is easy enough to picture the change : the exposed private garden, a contradiction in its very terms ; the public parks with their bare acres of unhappy-looking grass, their ugly bandstands, hideous iron railings, and forlorn European statues ; their wide, objectless roads, scattered flower-beds, and solitary trees, and, worst of all in a hot country, their lack of fountains and running water. It is pleasanter to turn to some modern Indian garden, an attempt, perhaps, to reconcile these two opposing styles.

Mary Villiers was describing a Anglo-Indian landscape in these line, but she could well have been describing a randomly picked spot from the future urban landscape of India.

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C.M. Villiers Stuart’s ‘Gardens of the Great Mughals’ has two chapter on the subject of Mughal Gardens in Kashmir. The chapter are titled Gardens of the Dal Lake and Summer gardens of Kashmir

I have serialized these ‘Kashmir Chapter’ based on the Gardens and the narrative.You can read these chapters here:

Chapter 7: Gardens of the Dal Lake

Chapter 8: Summer Gardens of Kashmir

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You can read and download the entire book here at Archive.org

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Images:
1. The Queen’s Pavilion (Shalimar Bagh)
    Painting in water colour by C. M. Villiers-Stuart
    The Frontpiece of the book ‘Gardens of the Great Mughals’ published in 1913.
2. The Queen’s Pavilion (Shalimar Bagh). Shot by me in June 2008.

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Previous Related post:
Garden, Paradise and Kashmir

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paddy fields

Paddy fields of Kashmir, past the check point at Lower Munda.

An Army officer, posted in this region, once told a cousin of mine, “You Kashmiri men are no good! Look at at your field, only your women do all the work!”

Paddy cultivation is said to be a very delicate process. In Kashmir, unlike most other places in India, mostly women work in paddy fields and sow, harvest and stack paddy. And they sing while work. They sing a type of Kashmiri folk song known as Naindai Gyavun. They sing and ask for the kindness of their prophets and Gods, Nabis and Bharavs. And to their lover they sing:

Reaping and reaping, my hands are now tired,
And yet, my love, the end of this field is in no sight.
Cutting and cutting, my hands are now bruised,
And yet, my love, the end of this field is in no sight.
Drops of sweat, in drains, now run down my forehead.
And yet, my love, the end of this field is in no sight.
The golden harvest, this harvest a tease, dances with wind.
And yet, my love, the end of this field is in no sight.

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Kashmir belongs to United States of America

Does Kashmir – the bone of contention between India and Pakistan for over 50 years – really belong to the US? This is the startling revelation made by Dan Brown, the internationally bestselling author of The Da Vinci Code , in a shortly to be released non-fictional work, The Secret of the K-word .

Using spectroscopic analysis (a technique described in detail in The Da Vinci Code’ the author claims to have discovered the original document over which the Instrument of Accession, signed by Kashmir Maharaja Hari Singh and preserved in the National Archives, New Delhi, was later superimposed.

The secret document reveals that Hari Singh, equally apprehensive of joining either India or Pakistan, covertly ceded Kashmir to the US. According to Brown, when the map of Kashmir is reversed it becomes, uncannily, congruent with the hilly state of Kentucky in the southern US.

In a telephonic interview with The Times of India , the Houston-based author said…
he had employed the ancient Kabbalistic form of numerological interpretation to discover “amazing co-relatives between Kashmir and Kentucky which by no stretch of the imagination can be put down to pure coincidence”.

For instance, when the longitude of Frankfort, the capital of Kentucky, is divided by the latitude of Srinagar, the Kashmiri capital, the prime number so obtained has the same numeric valency as Article 370 of the Indian Constitution which accords a special status to Kashmir.

Describing it as “one of the best-hidden secrets of the modern world”, Brown acknowledged that his book would “create a global furore” and “open many cans of worms”.

Disclaiming that America’s Central Intelligence Agency had any role in these developments, the author said, “The truth can no longer be suppressed. We owe this much at least to the long-suffering people of Kashmir. May the truth set them free, at long last.”

–  Times of India dated 1 Apr 2005.

More about the issue here

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Nov Sheen Mubarak: Traditional Kashmiri April Fool

I have been twice in Kashmir when the new snow has fallen. About the 10th of December the summits of the Panjal are enveloped in a thick mist and the snow usually falls before the 20th. This is the great fall which closes the passes (as already noticed) for the winter. It frequently happens that a casual fall takes place a month or three weeks earlier. This remains on the ground for three or four days, and then disappears beneath the sun’s rays. I am speaking now of its falling on the plains of Kashmir. It occasionally falls on the mountains as early as September, and the cold blasts which it produces do injury to the later rice crops.
They have a custom throughout these countries which answers in some respects to what we call making an April fool. When the new snow falls, one person will try to deceive another into holding a little in his hand; and accordingly he will present it to him (making some remark by way of a blind at the same time) concealed in a piece of cloth, on a stick, or an apple folded in the leaves of a book, or wrapped up in a letter, &c. If the person inadvertently takes what is thus presented to him, the other has a right to shew him the snow he has thus received, and to rub it in his face, or to pelt him with it, accompanied with the remark in Kashmiri, “No shin muburu”* – new snow is innocent! and to demand also a forfeit of an entertainment, or a nach, or dance, or some other boon, of the person he has deceived. The most extreme caution is, of course, used by every one upon that day. Ahmed Shah of Little Tibet, told me that some one once attempted to deceive him, by presenting him with a new gun barrel, and pretended that he wished for his opinion about it; but that he instantly detected the snow in the barrel, and had the man paraded through the neighbourhood on a donkey, with his face turned towards the tail.

– G. T. Vigne, an Englishman visited Kashmir in 1835, wrote in Travels in Kashmir, Ladak, Iskardo, the Countries Adjoining the Mountain-Course of the Indus, and the Himalaya, north of the Panjab with Map, Volume 2.
 Snow at Gulmarg, Kashmir. - April, 2006.Photograph: Gulmarg,  April 2006

I don’t know if this funny tradition was popular or if it still is popular in the valley; I haven’t heard about it from my elders.
* Shouldn’t that Kashmiri line be -” Nov Sheen Mubarak“. Yes, it should be.

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I talked to my parents and it turns out that the tradition prevailed even during their younger days.
 Nov Sheen Mubarak
One the morning of first snow, while shaking hands with someone, if you found snow in your hand, you could expect the line Nov Sheen Khoti, New Snow is On You – which meant you owned that someone a treat.

Nov Sheen, New Snow, also had a special significance for newly wed brides. If a mother-in-law played out this prank on her new daughter-in-law (and she often did), then the bride’s parents were obliged to send over gifts to their daughter’s new family.

With time, this curious practice became an ingrained tradition and during the first year of marriage, after the first snow of winter, a bride’s family was expected to send gifts to the bride’s new family.

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One fine day, a telegram was received in Srinagar.
On receiving the news of snowfall in Kashmir, a young and recently married man, who at that time happened to be posted ‘on duty’ in the distant land of Jammu, sent the following message to his in-laws in the Srinagar city:

 Nov Sheen Mubarak. Namaskar. Send Transistor.

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Connection between Zeethyaar Shrine and Shankaracharya Temple

The Shiv temple atop Shankaracharya Hill was originally dedicated to a form of Shiva known as Jyesthesvara and is believed to have been (partly) built by King Gopaditya (253 A.D. to 328). The hill was known as Gopadri and even today, at foot of this hill, in south direction, there is a village called Gopkar.

The Shrine at Zeethyaar is dedicated to Zeestha Devi, a form of Parvati.

But interestingly enough, Aurel Stein, in notes to his translation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini, mentions ‘Zeethyaar’ as the spot of a shiv temple dedicated to Jyesthesvara (the name of the lingam present there) and the spot for holy Tirtha of Jyether. According to the Mytho-folklore ( based on Jyesthamahatmya), at this particular spot, Siva liberated Jyetha, i.e. Parvati, from the Daityas (demons) and on marrying her took the name Jyesthesa. [Check out his ‘Note C-i.124 Jyestharudra at Srinagari’]

Later, on page 453 he asserts:

“In Note C, i.124, I have shown that an old tradition which can be traced back to at least the sixteenth century, connected the takht Hill with the worship of Siva Jyestharudra or, by another form of the name, JYESTHESVARA (Jyesthesa). And we find in fact a Linga known by this name worshipped even at the present day at the Tirtha of Jyether, scarecely more than one mile from the east foot of the hill.
This Tirtha, which undoubtedly derived its name from Jyesthesvara, lies in a glen of the hillside, a short distance from the east shore of the Gagri Bal portion of the Dal. Its sacred spring, designated in the comparatively modern Mahatmya as Jyesthanaga, forms a favorite object of pilgrimage for the Brahmans of Srinagar. Fragments of several colossal Lingas are found in the vicinity of jyether and show with some other ancient remains now built into the Ziarats of Jyether and Gupkar that the site had held sacred from an early time. It is in this vicinity that we may look for the ancient shrine of Jyestharudra which Jalauka is said to have erected at Srinagar. But in the absence of distinct archeological evidence its exact position cannot be determined.”

Oddly enough, among the the Kashmir Pandit community, Zeethyaar is now mostly remembered as a “Devi” spot.

Images:

  1. Shiv temple on Shankaracharya Hill, as seen (zoomed in) from Dal Lake. June 2008. 
  2. New Shiv temple at Zeethyaar Shrine, on the foot hills of Zabarwan.June 2008.

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You may also like to check out my post (with photographs) on the Zeethyar Temple

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Martand, House of Pandavs, Pandav Lar’rey

In 1889, Walter R. Lawrence, the British Land settlement officer in Kashmir, writing in Valley of Kashmir (1895), for the chapter Archaeology, quotes these line written by Sir Alexander Cunningham:

“The ruins of the Hindu temple of Martand, or, as is commonly called, the Pandu-Koru, or the house of Pandus and Korus – the cyclopes of the East – are situated on the highest part of a karewas*, where is commences to rise to its juncture with the mountains, about 3 miles east of Islamabad. Occupying, undoubtedly, the finest position in Kashmir, this noble ruin is the most striking in size and situation of all the existing remains of Kashmir grandeur.”

 Pandavs, of course, still get credit for all kind of ancient structures strewn across India.

Sir Alexander Cunningham (1814-93), British archaeologist and army engineer, better known as the father of Indian Archaeology, as a young officer, was stationed in Kashmir after the first Sikh War of 1845-1846. In November 1847, he measured and studied most of the ancient that existed in Kashmir. On the subject of Martand, Pandavs and Ptolemy – the celebrated Greek geographer of the second century AD who lived in Egypt, Cunningham wrote:  [The ancient buildings of Kashmir]

 ” are entirely composed of a blue limestone, which is capable of taking the highest polish, a property to which I mainly attribute the present beautiful state of  preservation of most of the Kashmirian buildings; not one of these temples has a name, excepting that of Martand, which is called in the corrupt Kashmirian pronunciation, Matan, but they are all known by the general name of Pandavanki lari or ” Pandus-house,” a title to which they have no claim whatever, unless indeed the statement of Ptolemy can be considered of sufficient authority upon such a subject. He says ” circa autem Bidaspum Pandovorum regio ” — the Kingdom of the Pandus is upon the Betasta or (Behat), that is, it corresponded with Kashmir. This passage would seem to prove that the Pandavas still inhabited Kashmir so late as the second century of our era. Granting the correctness of this point there may be some truth in the universal attribution of the Kashmirian temples to the race of Pandus, for some of these buildings date as high as the end of the fifth century, and there are others that must undoubtedly be much more ancient, perhaps even as old as the beginning of the Christian era. One of them dates from 220 B. C.** “

The origin of the Sun temple of Martand is a bit blurry, but King Lalitaditya (A.D. 693 to 729) is believed to have built it. Cunningham mentions that the Rajatarangini credits King Lalitaditya as the builder of Martand temples. But, he further mentions:

“From the same authority we gather — though the interpretation of the verses is considerably disputed — that the temple itself was built by Ranaditya, and the side chapels, or at least one of them, by his queen, Amritaprakha. The date ‘ of Ranaditya’s reign is involved in some obscurity, but it may safely be conjectured that he died in the first half of the fifth century after Christ.”

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* karewas: Kashmiri word for plateau like geographic formations found mostly to west of the river Jhelum and believed to have been created by draining of the great ancient lake that was once supposed to be Kashmir.

** Francis Younghousband in his book Kashmir (1911) mentions the temple believed to be dating back to 220 B.C. is Jyesthesvara Temple built atop a hill by Gopaditya (253 A.D. to 328). This is the site of present day Shiv temple atop Shankaracharya hill. The temple is first supposed to have been built by Jalauka, the son of great Emperor Ashoka, in around 200 B.C.

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About the old Image of Martand Temple near Bhawan:
The Photograph was taken by John Burke in 1868 for Henry Hardy Cole’s Illustrations of Ancient Buildings in Kashmir. This and one more photograph was later was used in  many other later publications. I found it in the book: Archaeological Survey India: Kashmir 1870.

John Burke (1843-1900) was an Irishman who came to India as an apothecary (pharmacist) with the Royal Engineers, but in 1861 became an  assistant of an already established photographer William Baker, a retired Sergeant who had a studio at Peshawar. Between the years 1864 and 1868, the duo was one of the first to photograph Kashmir. Together they started the famous Baker and Burke Studio (1867-72). In 1873 Burke parted ways with Baker and started his own studios J.Burke & Co. in Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Lahore. The studio in Lahore opened in 1885 and was in business till 1903. Burke was also one of the official photographer to the army during the Second Afghan War of 1879 – 1880.

Here’s a slide show of old photographs of Martand temple taken from Archaeological Survey India: Kashmir 1870.

Some of these may have been taken by Samuel Bourne, a prolific British photographer who worked in India from 1863 until 1870. He first photographed Kashmir in 1863.

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You can take a look at the book “Archaeological Survey India: Kashmir 1870” here at the digital archive of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts

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View of the Valley and An Atmospherical Phenomena

Image: View of the Kashmir valley on way to Qazigund.
June 2008.

Qazigund of Anantnag district, is the first major a town and a major road stop on way to Kashmir. Hence, it is often called the “Gateway to Kashmir”.

Karl Alexander A. Hügel (April 23, 1795 – June 2, 1870) born in Bavaria, Germany, was an Austrian army officer, a diplomat and a botanist. After experiencing rejection in love, he decided to roam around the world and became a explorer. He set out in 1831 and by the end of his journeys in 1836, he had visited lands as far and distant as Australasia, Far East, near East and much of Indian sun-continent including Punjab and Kashmir.

In late 1835, after visiting the plains of Punjab, Hugel traveled to Kashmir valley, entering it using the Muzaffarabad route – the then preferred route for Kashmir.

The account of his travel to Kashmir and Punjab can be found in ‘Travels in Kashmir And The Panjab By Karl Alexander A. Hügel’, Translated from German (Kaschmir und das Reich der Siek (Cashmere and the Realm of the Sikh), published 1841) by Thomas Best Jervis, published 1845.

On Tuesday, November 24th of year 1835, Karl Alexander A. Hügel was traveling in the area that is now known as Anantnag district and was on his way to a place that had already been renamed, only a couple of centuries ago in  seventeenth century by Aurangzeb, as Islamabad. With a small entourage of servants and guides, Hügel, riding on a horseback, arrived at the ancient town of  Bijbehara, a place whose ancient Sanskrit name, he thought, must have been ‘Vidya Wihara’, Temple of Wisdom. He rode across the ancient bridge built on the river Jehlum and noticed how “Large lime-trees overgrow the piers of this ancient bridge.” At Bijbehara, he found no ancient great ruins, no signs of this place being an old capital of a Kingdom. Instead, he had to content himself by buying some old coins “of a date prior to the Mohammedan dynasties” from the local bazaar and thought “bazars are the chief attraction in every place throughout India.” About half a mile up ahead from “Bijbahar”, on the either side of the Jehlum river, Hügel noticed the ‘Badsha Bagh‘ or the ‘Garden of High King’ – the ancient gardens built by Dara Shikoh, according to Hügel it was the “the residence of the luckless Dara, the brother of Aurungzib.” and was told that in ancient times a bridge used to connect the two spacious gardens of both sides. From here he decided to proceed for Mattan and have a close look at Korau Pandau. But, it took him so much time trying to find a guide for this place that by the time he reached the ancient “caves”, running late, he thought it best to leave immediately for Islamabad. Had he stayed longer at Mattan, maybe his guide would have mentioned that Kashmiris know these ancient structures as Pandav Lar’rey – Abode of Pandav and believed to have been built in around mid 8th century by King Lalitaditya (A.D. 693 to 729).

During this journey in Anantnag district, Hügel took note of an interesting atmospheric phenomena and made a very curious comment. He wrote:

I observed with much interest to day the optical illusions, at this season almost peculiar to Kashmir. There is so little transparency in the air, that places at a mile’s distance only, appear to be removed to four times that distance, and mountains only four miles off seem to be at least fifteen or twenty. If the weather be tolerably clear, one can see to this last distance, but the twenty miles appear twice as much. To these peculiarities of the atmosphere, I attribute the exaggerated terms in which many travellers speak of the extent of this country. It was dark when we reached our halting place but every thing was in the best order and a supper of trout from the sacred tank of Anatnagh was a great relish after the day’s journey.