Perhaps the nastiest comments ever made on Kashmiri women were those by a French botanist named Victor Jacquemont (Born in Paris on August 8, 1801 and died in Bombay on December 7, 1832). Jacquemont came to India in the late 1820s and visited Kashmir in around 1831.
On the topic of Kashmiri beauty, in a letter written to his father, he writes:
“Know that I have never seen any where such hideous witches as in Cashmere. The female race is remarkably ugly. I speak of women of the common ranks, — those one sees in the streets and fields; — since those of a more elevated station pass all their lives shut up, and are never seen. It is true that all little girls who promise to turn out pretty, are sold at eight years of age, and carried off into the Punjab and India. Their parents sell them at from twenty to three hundred francs — most commonly fifty or sixty.”
Bernier had sung hosannas about Kashmir; and Jacquemont, disappointed by what he saw, not only called Kashmiri women “hideous witches”, but on not finding trees on route to Kashmir, even called poet Thomas Moore “a perfumer, and a liar to the boot”.
It is words of one Frenchman against the words of other Frenchman!
Whose opinion could one venerate?
Jacquemont’s letters, originally written in French, were later translated and published after his death as Letter from India: Describing a Journey in the British Dominion of India (1834). This publication, collecting Jacquemont’s letters written for various friends and relatives, provides a very confusing account of his travels.
After his first meeting in Lahore with the ruler of Punjab and of Kashmir, Ranjit Singh, at night a welcome concert was organized in the royal court. About this night, in a letter to his father he writes:
“The concert was execrable, Oriental music being one of the most disagreeable noises I know; but the slow-cadenced and voluptuous dance of Delhi and Cashmere is one of the most agreeable that can be executed. I will also admit that my Cashmerian danseuses had an inch of colour on their faces, vermillion on their lips, red and white on their cheeks, and black round their eyes. But this daubery was very pretty: it gives an extraordinary luster to the already beautiful and extraordinarily large eyes of the Easter women.”
Earlier in some other letter to his brother, one can read him write that although the dance is “monotonous” but the singing is “not without art”. And in the same letter he goes on to write that “their dancing is already to me the most graceful and seducing in the world”.
In another letter, to a friend he writes about his opulent Arabian Nights’ adventure:
“ At Lahore, I lived in a little palace of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments; a battalion of infantry was on duty near me; the drums beat in the field when I put my head out of doors; and when I walked in the cool of the evening, in the alleys of my garden, fountains played around me by thousands! A most splendid fěte was given to me, with an accompaniment of Cashmerian girls, as a matter of course; and, although they had their eyes daubed round with black and white, my taste is depraved enough to have thought them only the more beautiful for it.”
Photograph of Shalimar Garden taken by me in June 2008
In Kashmir, he pays a visit to the famous Gardens at Shalimar Bagh and about the Kashmiri Nautch girls there, he writes to his father:
“The Cashmerian beauties had nothing in their eyes to compensate for the monotony of their dancing and sing. They were browner, that is to say blacker, than the choruses and corps de ballet of Lahore, Umbritsir, Loodheeana, and delhi. I remained as long as I was pleased with looking at the fantastic architecture of the place […]”
The only argument in his favor and the only conclusion that one can draw: at least he thought daubed Kashmiri eyes to be beautiful. Perhaps, in his mind, he was thinking, rather ironically, some lines from Moore’s Lalla Rookh. Maybe he was thinking:
“Those love-lighted eyes that hang over their wave”
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This is page 3 of the series Fables of Kashmiri Beauty
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A traveler in the service of The East India Company, George Forster left Calcutta, on May 23, 1782, on a long and strenuous overland journey to England. Letters on a Journey from Bengal to England, through the Northern Part of India, Kashmir, Afghanistan, and Persia, and into Russia, by the Caspian Sea, first published as a series of letters in 1798, is an interesting and entertaining narrative account of his two year long overland journey that started in 1782 and ended in 1784. He traveled from Bengal to St. Petersburg disguised as: a Mughal merchant, a Turk, an Arab and a Georgian. This was a time when foreigners were barred from entering the valley of Kashmir and George Forster tried unsuccessfully to dodge the spies of Afghan ruler of Kashmir by donning the garb of a Turkish merchant. He passed through the north-eastern hilly tracts of the Punjab in February – April 1783. On arriving in Kashmir in 1783, on subject of Kashmiri beauty, George Forster wrote that:
The Kashmirians are stout, well formed, and, as the natives of a country lying in the thirty-fourth degree of latitudes, may be termed a fair people; and their women in southern France, or Spain, would be called Brunettes. But, having been prepossessed with an opinion of their charms, I suffered a sensible disappointment; though I saw some of the female dancers most celebrated for beauty, and the attractions of their profession. A coarseness of figure generally prevails among them, with broad features, and they too often have thick legs. Though excelling in the colours of their complexion, they are evidently surpassed by the elegant form and pleasing countenance of the women of the western provinces of India.
The focus was now shifting towards looking at Kashmiri beauties in a more ‘realistic’ manner. Francois Bernier, who can rightly be blamed for spreading a favorable opinion of the Kashmiri beauty, in spite of all his cleaver stratagems for seeking beauty, failed to notice the legs. If comments made by Forster can be termed unfavorable, then the comments made, around fifty years later, by Frenchman Victor Jacquemont, can be termed outrightly rude.
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This is page 2 of the series Fables of Kashmiri Beauty
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Fable of Kashmiri Beauty as told by Francois Bernier
“If woman can make the worst wilderness dear,
What a heaven she must make of Cashmere!”
– Thomas Moore
Marco Polo (1254 – 1324), famous trader and explorer from Venice who was one of the first western travelers to walk the Silk route to China, during his brief visit to Kashmir noticed:
“The men are brown and lean, but the women, taking them as brunettes, are very beautiful”
A footnote accompanying these lines in The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 1, 3rd edition (1903) goes on to quote Francois Bernier on the subject of Kashmiri beauty. And in turn, Francois Bernier’s Travels in the Mogul Empire, edited by Archibald Constable (1891), goes on to quote the above lines of Marco Polo.
Footnotes, of course, never tell the entire story, but they do point to the stories already told.
Francois Bernier (1625 – 1688), French physician and traveler, during his visit to Kashmir in 1664–65 as part of Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s entourage, had written:
” The people of Kachemire (Kashmir) are proverbial for their clear complexions and fine forms. They are, as well made as Europeans, and their faces have neither the Tartar flat nose nor the small pig-eyes that distinguish the natives of Kacheguer (Kashgar), and which generally mark those of Great Tibet.”
Bernier wrote a number of letters during his travels in India. These letter, originally written in French and meant for various people he knew, were later translated and printed by various publishers in a book format. The first one was published in 1670 and created great interest in the west. Subsequently, Travels in the Mogul Empire By François Bernier, Translated by Irving Brock was published 1826. In 1870 came Voyages de François Bernier ( in English language as Travels in the Mogul Empire), and in 1891 Travels in the Mogul Empire, edited by Archibald Constable.
These books for a long time the only authoritative source on description of Kashmir.
Bernier wrote about Kashmir in a series of nine letters written to one Monsieur de Merveilles. In a sense, these letters of Bernier were quite unique and a first: although before Bernier some Portuguese Jesuits, having the patronage of Mughal court, had been to Kashmir*. Due to the early descriptions of these Jesuits, an interest in ‘Jews of Kashmir’ and even the people receiving Bernier’s letters wanted more information about the subject.
Bernier who is widely regarded as the first westerner to have described Kashmir in details that covered people, culture, geography ( complete with a map), history, myths and religions of this region.
Mughals thought of Kashmir as ‘Jannat‘ or ‘Paradise’ and on publication of Bernier’s letters, naturally, Kashmir was covered under the title of Journey to Kachemire, The Paradise of the Indies. Having lived among Mughals, Bernier, on the subject of Kashmiri beauty, further wrote:
“The women especially are very handsome; and it is from this country that nearly every individual, when first admitted to the court of the Great Mogol, selects wives or concubines, that his children may be whiter than the Indians and pass for genuine Mogols. Unquestionably there must be beautiful women among the higher classes, if we may judge by those of the lower orders seen in the streets and in the shops.”
More often than not, all subsequent European visitors to Kashmir were to quote from Bernier’s letters these very lines that sing odes to Kashmiri beauty. As footnotes, these lines filled the margins of a majority of early books that enticingly described Kashmir and introduced western readers to its splendor. Irish poet Thomas Moore (1780 – 1852) was one of those early readers of these letters. His famous Oriental poem Lalla Rookh (first published in 1817 and whose publishers in footnotes did indeed quote Bernier on Kashmir) went on to introduce many more western readers to the fabled land of exotic beauty – Kashmir.
What most of these footnotes did not mention was how Bernier came to have such an informed opinion on the subject of Kashmiri beauty.
Bernier, it seems, was an inquisitive traveler, more so when it came to the topic of beautiful women. For beautiful delights he employed beautiful “stratagems”.
In Lahore, a city (then and perhaps still now equally) renowned for the beauty of its women, Bernier employing an “artifice” picked up from the Mughals, went around following elephants, particularly the ones “richly harnessed”. The reason for this seemingly absurd act: As the elephants with silver bells hanging around both their sides went tinkling by, women invariably “put their heads to the window”. The stratagem must have been a success since he thought women of Lahore to be “the finest brunettes in all the Indies, and justly renowned for their fine and slender shapes”.
In Kashmir, for lack of a better method of “seeing the fair sex”, he employed the same method to amuse himself. But, he wasn’t satified with the method. An old ‘pedagogue’ with whom he used to read Persian poets later devised a better technique for him. The old man had freedom of access to no less than fifteen houses; Bernier spend some money to buy sweetmeat and accompanied the old man to these houses. Bernier pretended to be old man’s newly arrived relative from Persia having come to Kashmir acquire a bride for himself. He distributed sweets to children and soon:
“everybody was sure to flock around us, the married women and the single girls, young and old, with the twofold object of being seen and receiving a share of the present. The indulgence of my curiosity drew many roupies out of my purse; but it left no doubt on my mind that there are as handsome faces in Kachemire as in any part of Europe.”
Many travelers to Kashmir were to second and third Bernier’s opinion on Kashmiri beauty, and never did they (or rather their editors) fail to mention Bernier’s words in the footnotes.
While much has been made of his words, however, these were not the last words of Bernier on the subject of beauty of Kashmiri women.
Bernier, with his background as a physician, was no doubt a curious traveler. In describing his twelve-year journey to places like Persia, India and Egypt, he never fails to mention the women of the far and distant lands that he is visiting. His fascination with human form and skin, even if most of the time it was just fascination for female form and female skin, came to a logical conclusion in the year 1684. In this year, he anonymously (although from the content of the article his name could easily be fathomed) authored an article in the Journal des sçavans titled Nouvelle division de la terre par les différents espèces ou races qui l’habitant (“New division of Earth by the different species or races which inhabit it”). This article is widely regarded as the first work that distinguished humans into different races. He distinguished human beings mainly on the basis of their physical characteristics especially skin color, although with no hierarchical distinction between them, into four (five) races: Far Easterners, Europeans, blacks and Lapps, and about American Indians, he was unsure.
In the article, having discussed division of humans into different races, Bernier seeks reader’s attention for his favorite study subject: female beauty. Bernier recounts tales of all the female beauties that he encountered during his travels and describes them in all their glories; even pits them against one another. He talks about “very handsome ones from Egypt” who reminded him of “beautiful and famous Cleopatra”; he talks about “blacks in Africa” who could “eclipse the Venus of the Farnese palace at Rome”; he talks of “beautiful brunettes” of Indies; he talks about Indies girls who when yellow look like a “beautiful and young French girl, who is only just beginning to have the jaundice”; he talks about “esteemed” women who live by the “Ganges at Benares, and downwards toward Bengal”; he talks about brown women of Lahore who though “brown like the rest of the Indian women” to him seemed more charming than all the others and talks about their “beautiful figure, small and easy” that surpasses “by a great deal” even “that of Cashmerians”; and about the Kashmiri women he wrote:
“[…] for besides being as white as those of Europe, they have a soft face, and are a beautiful height; so it is from there that all those come are to be found at the Ottoman Court, and that all the Grand Seigniors keep by them. I recollect that as we were coming back from that country, we saw nothing else but little girls in the sort of cabins which the men carried on their shoulder over the mountains.”
These lines, now, read like a footnote to some of his earlier exalted work on the subject of beauty of women. Nonetheless, even these lines were to become part of folklore among travelers to Kashmir.
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* Jesuits priest Jerome Xavier (great-nephew of famous Roman Catholic Christian missionary Francis Xavier) is widely regarded as the first European to have visited Kashmir. In around 1597, Jerome Xavier and Brother Benedict de Goes visited Kashmir on invite of Mughal Emperor Akbar and Prince Salim (Jahangir). Akbar, after having added Kashmir to his burgeoning Empire, was to visit Kashmir twice or thrice during his life-time. Letters of Jerome Xavier (published in around 1605 A.D.) were the first to introduce Kashmir to Europe.
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Bibliography:
The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 1, 3rd edition (1903) of Henry Yule’s annotated translation, as revised by Henri Cordier; together with Cordier’s later volume of notes and addenda (1920).
Travels in the Mogul Empire, edited by Archibald Constable, (1891)
Presently, there are plans to modify/ beautify the central marble structure inside the spring. The basic design (above in the image) has been finalized. The project has been sponsored by Capt. Kapil Raina and family.
The first marble structure inside the spring was built by the Dogra ruler Maharaja Pratap Singh and it was completed in 1920s. Before this marble structure was created there was only a mulberry tree.
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November, 2008
Update:
Dr. Karan Singh, who is the Trustee of the Dharmarth Trust – that looks after the affairs of this shrine and many other Pandit shrines of Kashmir – has refused this proposal. Because of the antiquity of the present design, he thought Pandit community won’t be happy with the New look.
Dr. Karan Singh was appointed the Sole Trustee of the Dharmarth Trust in January 1959.
An Old Photograph of Hari Parbat (Chakreshwar) that hangs inside one of the buildings to the left of the central structure. Probable date of the photograph: 1920s. The township surrounding the temple was originally created by the Mughal Emperor Akbar who setup this new township as his base here after his successful conquest of Kashmir in 1585.
Today this area is heavily congested and most of the old pathways lost to human in-habitation. Our parents and grandparents may have circumvent the hillock in their time at their pace but this is not a possibility for us anymore.
Photograph taken at the location in June 2008.
Old Photograph of central deities at Tulamulla (Kheer Bhawani). Probably taken in the late 1930s.
This photograph adores one of the sides of the structure inside the spring.
Photograph taken at the location in June, 2008
The Spring that Changes Colors
During my visit the waters of the spring was milky white.
In 1886 Walter Lawrence, the British Settlement Commissioner for land, noted during his visit to the spring that its color was having a violet tinge.
(Made an entry of it at the wiki along with the entry about the proposed new look of the central temple)
‘In Kashmir, your birth-tree is a financial investment of sort. When a child comes of age, the grown walnut is comparable to a matured insurance policy; it’s a valuable tree, it can be sold, to pay for weddings, or a start in life. The adult chips down his childhood to help his grown-up self. The sentimentality is appealing, don’t you think?’
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
(Aside: In 1988, sixty people were injured and one died in protest held in Kashmir against the book. There were protest in Kashmir when he was granted Knighthood)
Famous Pashmina of Kashmir finally gets patent under the Geographical Indications (GI) Act. A GI patent gives exclusive rights over a label to a specified product produced in a specified geographical region.
The patent came after an agreement among Kashmir Handmade Pashmina Promotion Trust (KHPPT), Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), Crafts Development Institute (CDI) and the Tahafuz, a society of diverse Kashmiri handicraft artisans – on September 12 actively brokered by the Union Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh.
In a longer run, in addition to checking the sale of fake Pashmina, this is a step towards giving Pashmina from the valley an international edge over the Pashmina from POK.
Pakistan wants to share GI on Pashmina with India. But Kashmiri traders want them first to give proof of quality as Pashmina from valley is widely believed to be the finest. These traders from Kashmir do not want brand Pashmina to suffer in long run by sharing the GI with pakistan.
Further links and read:
More on Pashmina Wars going on between Pakistan and India.
For me the best part of the movie was listing its two Kashmiri folk songs.
The song are Ha Faqeero and Mastaan Mastaan (Lyrics by A.G. Madhosh and Fazil Kashmiri respectively)
The songs are sung by veteran kashmiri singer Gulzar Ganai and the music is by renowned percussionist Taufique Qureshi. Not so incidentally, brother of Tabla maestro Ustad Zakir Husain, Taufique Qureshi is also of kashmiri origin. There are times in song when you can listen to his personal touch to these songs. Also, the recording is top notch.
This must be a first when authentic Kashmiri music has been used in a mainstream Indian film.
And for that credit must go to Santosh Sivan.
Photograph of Shalimar Garden taken by me in June 2008
