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Pandit Peasant Women, 1895

From British Library. Dated 1895. Photographer Unknown.

Casually explained as: ‘Photograph of two women, posed with wicker baskets on their heads, in the modern-day state of Jammu and Kashmir, taken by an unknown photographer in the 1890s. Jammu and Kashmir in a Himalayan region in north-western India famous for its lovely mountain scenery and lakes. Kashmiris work mainly on the land, producing crops and tending animals. Kashmir is also famous for its woollen textiles and the people produce fine shawls and carpets still using traditional methods going back centuries.’

Besides the fold in lower portion of their Pheran, the thing that identifies these women as Pandit is the thing that can still be used to identify old Pandit ladies living in various Indian cities, the thing dangling from their ears, Dejhoor.

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Update: From British Library, another view of the same scene. The photographers

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Mogul’s Kaini

That morning we were left in care of Mogul. We were not to return back home until someone came for us. Standing on Mogul’s creaky old balcony, I looked out in the direction of our house. The courtyard was out of sight, hidden by cement and tin of rooftops, top-view of rooms of cousin Sheebu and Binnu. Towards the right the old house stood tall. Too tall. I stuck my neck out to see the top. Did I expect to see anything? It was hopeless. Straight ahead I could see the little cart-shop of Mogul’s eldest son. He sold little packets of Sauf which always had a pink or green plastic whistle inside or maybe sometimes a ring. In his cart shop were stacks of peanuts and channa, and fried green peas, peppered, and grams of all color. His wide rimmed glass bottles held candies, always orange, half molten, looking licked, and stuck to wrappers. There were bottles of Bubble gum and mint. There were toy guns and balloons. There were games, a hand-held roulette, a maze with rolling balls, a puzzle set – order the numbers and get to see Taj Mahal at the back. And then there was the fish shaped ‘water game’ – press the big rubber button on the water-filled hand-held device and hook the little plastic multi-colored rings dancing in water inside to the two poles. People said Mogul’s elder one was a little slow of brain, and that he just couldn’t bargain. But he worked so close to home. That ought to count for something. And why was water inside the belly of those plastic fish so sweet? Was is really poisonous? How exactly did he die? I again looked back at the house from Mogul’s Kaini. It was a nice spot. In morning, sun would light it up perfectly. I would often come to this place and find Mogul sitting on the floor spinning her wheel, churning cotton to thread. Singing something. I would ask for Posha, an excuse, and sit and watch the woman work her Yedir. Posha, Mohul’s young daughter started talking about something that ought to regale us kids, make us laugh. She was always for laughs. I would have joined in but that day something else was keeping me engrossed. The wailing, when it started, in middle of one of Posha’s Jokes, was unlike any crying sound that I could identify. So it had begun. The house still looked calm. But the wailing now came in waves. Rising and falling. It came from the courtyard. I could identify the sound of my grandmother, grand-aunts and together they sounding like sound of someone unknown previously, but now intimately known . The women of the house had started mourning the death of my grandfather’s bachelor brother. That day I spend the entire afternoon in Mogul’s Kaini watching and listening to the songs of death for first time. For the longest time, I wrongly believed the old man died of smoking. He died of kidney failure. For the longest time, I believed death meant an empty room. Death meant now absent. I thought it meant a room cleared of useless belonging. I thought it meant finding beautiful shiny old lighters long buried in ground.

Mogul’s eldest was the first one to die. It is believed he died in cross-firing. Of other two, one died of drowning, and the other went on to join JKLK and died too. Posha went on to marry a grade three government officer. For her dowry, she took my mother’s dressing table with her. Mogul’s Kaini now it seems is a point of minor neighborly dispute. Mogul gripped my grandfather by his hand and asked him to confirm whether or not he had explicitly let her build that balcony out and intruding on his land. He answered. She found hope in his answer and he found hopelessness.

She asked him to repeat it out loud and aloud to all, especially to the new owners. And then she proclaimed the matter as settled, forever.

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Neighbours, not mine. Name, not my name

Neighbours, not mine. 

“Simi Ji! Simi Ji!” A little girl living in that house would sometimes call out loud at odd hours. I never knew the caller by face. I could only hear a voice coming somewhere deep from the inside of that Muslim house and then I would hear the laughter. My mother would run to the window with a false start and then half-way, catching onto the prank, she would curse, “Trath Temis”. If it wasn’t enough that she had neighbours who would clear-out their spittoons and night soil into her courtyard, now she had to deal this bratty child’s game. Sometimes I would run to the window to catch the little jester. But I never saw anyone. Our game would continue.

My Nani had a strange habit. She would visit her daughter’s place but would try to keep her visits reticent. She wouldn’t knock on the door or ring a bell. She wouldn’t walk into the house and simply meet her daughter. No, for my Nani, these visits were part of a ritual of checking up on her daughter’s married life. As part of this ritual her would stand under the second-floor window of our house and call out my name, my Other name. On hearing my Other name, mother would look out from the window and find my Nani with maybe a bag of fruits, baker’s bread or something such. Moments later, she would run down and standing below that window, a bit embarrassed, she would ask her mother to be more proper and not create such scenes. But only weeks later my Nani would again be under the window calling, ‘Simi Ji! Simi Ji!’

My Nani wanted that I be named Sameer. Naturally, the nick name would have been symphonic and girly Simi. But then I was born on a wrong day. An elder Bhabhi of my Dadi vetoed that for someone born on such a great day, Vinayak Tchorum, and that too a Sunday, only Vinayak would be a proper name. Simi would have been lost like Sameer but for my Nani and the unseen neighbour girl, the two custodians of my other name.

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Gadadhar Temple, Jammu

In the post ‘The Romantic Kashmir, 1906‘, I identified the below given image from 1945 as that of Gadhadhar Temple Srinagar.

The Gadhadhar Temple in Srinagar actually looks like this back in 1906:

I assumed that in next couple of decades it may have changed a bit. So made a connection between an unidentifiable location and an identifiable location. It turns out I was wrong.

Man Mohan Munshi Ji pointed out the mistake. Gadhadhar Temple in Srinagar still looks pretty much the same. The discussion lead me to an interesting fact that there is in fact a Gadhadhar Temple in Jammu too. It seems Dogras built twin temples separated by geographical locations and just next to their two seats of power.

The following photographs and description were sent by Man Mohan Munshi Ji of Gadadhar temple in Jammu.

View of Gadadhar Temple Jammu from the south-western gate of Mubarak Mandi . (old Secretariat). Temple is located on the first floor and ground floor houses some shops and offices.







Front view of the Gadadhar temple on the first floor

 Statue of the deity inside the temple, note the Gadha in the hand of the deity

The filled up tank in front of the temple used by Dewan Badrinath School as play ground.
Note the western gate of the old Secretariat Jammu on the right side

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Update: I now believe the original image to be of a Jain temple in Calcutta. Check original post (Kashmir in 1945) for updates.

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Kherishu, Varishu. I love you, I need you!

In April 2009, four months prior to his death, Gulshan Bawra, one of the lyricists of Harjaee [1981], recounted how another song in the film was created:”We had gone for the shooting of a film in Kashmir and dusk had fallen over the valley. Near a ropeway, I heard two locals call out to each other in a language I did not understand. One of the silhouetted men seeded to ask a question and the other seemed to reply in the affirmative. My panic swelled as the only recognizable word sounded like “shoot”. I interpreted this as “Should I shoot?” and “Yes, shoot” respectively. I hurried away from the scene, understandably quickly. A couple of days later a friend of mine in Bombay clarified amidst relieved laughter that what I had heard was “Kherishu?” and “Varishu” which meant “How are you?” and the reply “I am fine”. When I told the two words to Panchan, he asked,”Which language is this? Russian?” “No, this is Kashmiri,” I replied. An amused Pancham used the words for an Asha Bhonsle-Kishore Kumar duet and the song “Jeevan me jab aise pal…Kherishu, Varishu was born.

From – ‘R.D.Burman The Man, The Music'(2011)  by Anirudha Bhattarcharjee and Balaji Vittal.

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The two Kashmir words were finally passed off in the song to mean I love you and I need you.

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Politics of Information

A couple of weeks back, on a Sunday at around 11 at night I finally started writing that story. I had been wanting to write it, get it out, for more than two years, but couldn’t find time. Writing takes too much necessary time. You have to bargain with time. That night too I was bargaining with time to finish a story. I had a job to report to in the morning. It was around 2 when I laughed to myself and thought,’Can’t stop now. I am never get down to writing it. May this be a long night!’ The story ‘Fish’ finished at around 4:30. I didn’t poofread it, I almost never do. Let it be ‘Kehu Main Pade Khuda. Time is nothing. It is just a unit. I hit the publish button, went to sleep. Woke up at around 8:30. ‘At least earlier they used to look like map of India, now they look like Antarctica.’ With that I bid my mother and her Parathas good-bye. After a two and a half hour commute that included cycle-rickshaw, Auto-Rickshaw, Metro and the again Cycle-Rickshaw, I was in office where I going to stay for entire next week, tying to design a social game. Now week’s days would be spent trying to understand behavior of people online, and nights would be spent bargaining with time. And on every second night, like a wound up monkey with cymbals for hand, a monkey in love with the noise he is making, [system crashes, dies, as it tries to recover, I pick up a half-read book, flip to the page with a folded top corner and read a few pages only to stop after the narrative reaches the part about lyricist Gulshan Bawra‘s ironic inspiration for an early 1980s Bollywood love song peppered with Kashmiri greeting, ‘Kherishu, Varishu’. I want to write some more. But my system does not respond. It crashes. I return next night to finish this post from a friend’s system. Like an automaton, I would religiously hit the publish button.

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Last week, thanks to my super vanity – a habit of self-googling, I realize ‘Fish‘ got posted to some newspaper called kashmirmonitor [kashmirmonitor.org/krkashmirmonitor/08232011-ND-strange-tales-from-tulamula-10326.aspx]. Although my name as the author is there next to the miss-titled story, ‘Strange Tales from Tulamula’, no one wrote to me asking ‘Hey, nice stuff, can we use it?’, No, it just got posted, filled up a space. Served what purpose? No clue. What monkey business! And what harbingers of new social change.

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Two nights ago, I run into more monkey business. I was going through comments section of various articles on Kashmir Current Affairs. My sorry excuse for this despicable exercise is that inspite of all my genuine efforts, I still regularly fail at entirely burying myself in Past, and sometime I too get tempted to get in touch with Present whose commentary offers us the LOLs of future. So I was digging comments. And I ended up the gallery of vintage photographs collected from “various sources” set up by an online newspaper called ‘kashmirdispatch’ [kashmirdispatch.com/gallery.html]. Yes, among other stuff ( some new even for me, sourced from who knows where) I saw Vintage photographs of Kashmir that I have been posting for more than two years now, with notes on dates, places, photographers and sources. That’s more than 60 post with more than  And I saw stuff that Man Mohan Munshi Ji  posted on this blog from his personal collection, like  The paperwallas just post it on their website as part of a gallery without any adjoining description. The exercise serves what purpose?

When I started posting, I could have easily put a big ‘Search Kashmir’ logo on all of them. But that would not have served the purpose of their existence. The fact that these photographs were shot by someone long ago, and that they were used in detailed narratives about an exotic foreign land written mostly by men (and in some cases by women) seemingly burning with a strange zeal for information, and the fact that these photographers were mostly always duly acknowledged, that these photographs were preserved for years, and only now scanned for free by billion dollar companies, that part of the story of these photographs tells us just as much about the politics of information as the manner in which we the ‘subjects’ now use or misuse these information. And right now I think we, in this part of the impoverished world, still don’t get it.

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On one hand I have newspaperwallas who just Monitor and Dispatch and on other hand I have people who are kind enough to drop in a line before even posting stuff to their Facebook Walls. For people who use this blog, please feel to use use whatever you want but…try to give credit where it is due. If this post leaves you confused enjoy this video by Nina Paley.

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Manto’s Kashmiri Coolie

When the smoke lessened, the policemen saw that their quarry was a Kashmiri coolie. He was lugging a heavy sack and running with admirable ease despite the weight on his back. The policemen’s throats ran dry with blowing their whistles, but the Kashmiri coolie’s pace didn’t slacken.
By now, the policemen were panting. Tired and fed up with the chase, one of them took out a gun anf fired. The bullet hit the man in his back. The sack slipped and rolled down. The man turned, and looked at the still-running policemen with frightened eyes. He also saw the blood seeping down his calf. But with a quick jerk, he bent bent, picked up the sack and began to limp away hurriedly. The policemen thought,”Let him go to hell.”
The Kashmiri coolie was limping badly when he staggered and fell heavily – the sack fell on top of him.
The policemen swooped down on him and took him away to the police station. The man kept pleading all the way,”Gentlemen, why are you arresting me? I am a poor man…I was only taking a sack of rice…to eat at home…why have you shot me…” But no one paid him any heed.
The Kashmiri coolie went on with his explanations at the police station, pleading and crying,”Sir, there were others in the bazaar…they were carrying away many big things…I have only taken one sack of rice…I am a poor man…I can only afford to eat plain rice.”
Till, finally, he gre tired and desperate. he took off his skull-cap, wiped the sweat streaming from his forehead, cast one last, lingering look at the sack of tempting rice, then stretched his palm before the Thanedar abd said,”All right, sir, you keep the sack with you…but pay me my labour charges – four annas.”

Extract from cameo titled ‘Payment’ from ‘Black Borders: A collection of 32 cameos’, Rakhshanda Jalil’s translation of Saadat Hasan Manto’s Siyah Hashiye (1947).
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Image: Kralkhod, Srinagar, 2008
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Previously: Pundit Manto’s First Letter to Pundit Nehru

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Veena and Tabassum

‘You should not have left Kashmir’
The shawl seller from Kashmir concluded while trying to show his ware. Something about the statement ticked off Veena.
‘You should be glad my brother’s are not at home. They would have answered it better. No, I don’t want to buy anything. Please, leave!’

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My first Id was at the house of Tabassum, friend and colleague of my bua Veena Didi. I remember eating sevaiya at the house of her friend somewhere in downtown Srinagar . I remember how excited about visiting the house of the famous friend of my dear bua. They would run experiments on rabbit blood. I would ask her if I were to visit her office, would I see rabbits, white rabbits. She promised, I went, but I never saw any rabbits. Her office smelt of hospitals. It was a hospital. That year, besides her impeding marriage, she was excited about the new imported machine in her office. This machine could churn blood at an unimaginable RPM, round and round, separating blood into fine individual components for study. Among her sibling she was the only one to have gone outside the state to study. It was a time she was to always remember fondly. I remember how excited I was about eating real sevaiya. I remember the shops in the area, the pistols, that looked too real and the police holsters, that were certainly real, handing from the roof of those shops. I was obsessed with Bandook that year. Guns were all I could think of that year. Diwali was just around the corner. I wanted a gun that year. The visit turned out to be a formal affair. We were sitting, on floor, in the drawing room of a house that looked newer than the house in which I was born. Tabassum served the dishes. Sevaiya were different and certainly better. And then we left.

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She was the first one to leave.Veena didi finally got married in Jammu in middle of a cerfew over an issue that would roll-ball into what would be remembered as ‘mandal comission’.  A year after her marriage, some people from Kashmir paid her new home a visit.

‘Where is Veena?’ That is all the woman at the door wanted to know.
Veena’s mother-in-law was in a fix on hearing this question. At first she was suspicious of the Muslim brother-sister  duo that had come inquiring about the whereabouts of her daughter-in-law. Al though her family had a house at Chanapora, she had spent most of her own married life in Amritsar. How do they know? How did they find out? Terrorist? These thoughts filled her up instinctively. But on hearing a lengthy explanation on the nature and depth of relationship, she was convinced enough to tell them,’Veena is at the place of her parents. Perhaps you should come some other time. Sorry!’
‘Okay, take us there. I won’t leave without meeting her.’
Shocked as she was at this unabashed display of emotion, under duress and with a word of advice, ‘Take Care’, she deployed Veena’s husband to accompany the brother-sister duo to the place of Veena’s in-laws.

It was a colony which was in winter filled with ‘Durber move’ Kashmiris. It was the place were I celebrated a couple of more Ids growing up with boys from Kashmir who would bowl like Imran Khan and Wasim Akram. Boys who taught me reverse swing even before the rest of the world knew it.

‘How could you not invite me to your marriage? You thought I wouldn’t come?’
‘How could I?’
With that the two friends, Tabassum and Veena hugged each other. Veena welcomed her into the two-roomed house of her parents.

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I have no recollection of the second event. It’s a story my Bua likes to recall sometime. She went on to teach herself programming just around the time when I first started to pick it up in school. In her exercises to keep herself busy, a thought that filled minds of a few pandits in Jammu, on weekdays she teaches computer science to village kids, who in Summer sometimes bring her offering of Mangoes, and on weekends she spends a lot of her time in the ashram of a Kashmiri Saint freshly relocated to Jammu. I think she misses her imported Beckman machine and the rabbits. She tells me she again heard from Tabassum a few years back. Tabassum is married and in U.K. May on somedays, she too misses that blood churning machine and those white rabbits.

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