Tag: books

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who spends the summer wandering in Kashmir

wanderers in Gulmarg. 2008.

To feel the cool breeze on a body
covered with drops of perspiration;
to taste the water, cold and clear,
in a mouth all parched with thirst;
after travelling far, to rest
the tired limbs beneath the shade:
blessed indeed is one who spends
the summer wandering in Kashmir

~ Bhatta Bana, Sanskrit stylist in court of King Harsha of 7th Century CE, Kannauj.

Came across it in ‘Subhashitavali: An Anthology of Comic, Erotic and Other Verse’, translated from the Sanskrit Subhashitavali of Vallabhadeva (fifteenth-century CE, Kashmir ) by A. N. D. Haksar.

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Kshemendra Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir by A. N. D. Haksar

‘Victory to that lord supreme,
the illustrious bureaucrat,
infalliable, who can at will
delude the whole world with deceptions’

~Narma Mala, Satire 1

‘This humbug is a scoundrel in search of prestige and recognition. Indifferent to merit, he will fawn on those without it. Hostile to his own kin, he will exude fraternal compassion for outsiders. He is also pitiless. With bowed head, he will be all sweetness when it suits him. But once his purpose is served, he will only wrinkle his brow and say nothing.’
[…]
Hambug seemed upset at having to wait for long. He fixed his gaze on his progenitor and the god’s lotus throne, and stood proud and motionless, as if impaled on a spear. The four-headed god realized that the newcomer wished to be seated. His teeth gleaming in a smile, as if at his carrier, the swan, he said kindly,’Son, sit in my lap. You are worthy of it by virtue of the dignity that your great and remarkable austerity and other merits have given you.’
On hearing these words, hambug carefully sprinkled water on the creator god’s lap to purify it, and quickly sat upon it.’Do not speak loudly,’ he said to the god,’and if you have to, please cover your mouth with your hand so that your breath does not touch me.’ Brahma smiled at this unparalleled concern for ritual purity. ‘ Hambug you certainly are!’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘Arise. Go to the sea-gridled earth and enjoy pleasures unknown even to the denizens of heaven.’

~Kalavilasa, Satire 2

Victory to the Heramba!
The ten directiond smile, lit up
by the brilliant radiance
of the playful raising of his tusk,
slender as lotus.
And victory to the courtesan,
lightning in the clouds of vice;
to libertines, the thespians
in the artful play of crookery;
and to that river of deception,
the procuress, whose forceful current
sweeps away, like trees, the people.

Desopadesa, Advice from the Countryside, Satire 3

More about the eleventh century CE funny guy from Kashmir:

‘Kshemendra’s work was earlier known only from quotations in some anthologies and a refrence in the Rajatarangini. In modern times, its first manuscript was discovered by A.C. Burnell, at Tanjore, in 1871. This was the Brihatkathamanjari, the abridgement of the lost work [of Gunadhya’s] already mentioned. In the succeeding half-century Indologists G. Buhler, A. Stein, B. Peterson, S.C. Das and M.S. Kaul located manuscripts of his other works, at different times, mainly in Kashmir. So far, eighteen of these have been found, and their texts edited and printed. Another sixteen are known, at least by title, from reference or quotations in the discovered texts, but still remain lost.’

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It is tempting but wrong to see present in past. To read these ancient sketches, to see the scene in front of you and go, ‘Indeed nothing has changed.’  Even if it is not the intention, the work for the troubled place of its origin, and the way it is presented in this book, the translated words of this ancient Kashmiri does seem to offer the bitter sweet pill of present coated in past. The book runs a little trick on simple readers, casual book-self browsers. Trick, the cover say’s ‘Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir’ but inside you find one of the satires, Kalavilasa, the one in which Muladeva, the king of thieves describes the ways of swindlers of the world, was in fact set in Ujjayani, near present Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. The blurb on the last page claims, ‘these little-known exposes of eleventh-century society find resonance in India even today.’ If sketch of  bureaucrats, scribes, gurus, traders, and the all thieves of the world in Kshemendra’s writing be true, be still relevant, then what about his sketch of women, his blood sucking witches. who make a man ‘struct and dance like a pet peacock.’ While Kshemendra’s sketch of men may still be acceptable, identifiable, to today’s Shabhya people, but probably not his sketch of women and ‘their ways’. No cultured man will quote Kshemendra to score a point in a debate on ‘women’s liberation’. This is not ancient times. There has been progress.  We live in modern age. We…

‘A Nit-picking man. One of the many hambugs infesting Kal-yug. Listen, stop scratching your bum, wondering what-this-what-that, you Kashmiri bum, trader of black-ink, dweller of ivory island. You have to run down one of your own. Look around, ask the man on street what he thinks of ‘women and their ways’. The man pours his heart and piss on walls of public urinals. Don’t be surprised if he says the same sundry things that I wrote a thousand years ago. Just read me in translation. Me in translation by a bureaucrat and marvel. ‘

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You can purchase the book here:

Buy Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir from Flipkart.com

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The Tiger Ladies by Sudha Koul

The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir
Sudha Koul
Beacon Press (2002)

The book is about a woman born in Kashmir, about growing up in the happy valley, about working in acursed dry plains of India and about getting older in blessed America remembering Kashmir. It is diasporic writing. It’s about endings. It’s about women making new beginnings. It is women’s diasporic writing. It is about ‘Tiger Ladies’ to make these beginnings. It is about grandmothers, mothers and daughters. In a way it is about the past, the present, the future. When not a memoir it is a lyrical elegy to a world that is gone. And yet it celebrates life and the strange women that make life possible. A magical world occupied by women who have midnight baths in chilling water to conceive children.  A world where women tell stories of a sad god-woman whose husband offered her only guilty sex and mother complex instead of love. O yes, this writing is done with an alien reader in mind, so we have a really ‘modern’ and yet magical re-telling of the life story of Rupa Bhavani (1620-1721). It is about stories like that. About the  undercurrents, about the flooding and the resettlement. The class divisions, the economic divisions, the religious difference and everything else, in true Kashmiri tradition, is alluded to without any clear spelling out of chasms. Nehru and Indira and the famous family planning scheme of her son make an appearance and probably sum up ‘India’ experience in the book. The picture of ‘Kashmir as it was’ that gets painted which almost all of Kashmiri diaspora may find identifiable: the paradise that it was. Everything in the writing almost makes sense. is convincing and beautiful. By the end of it when some woman like Ayesha Andrabi is included in list of Tiger Ladies, you are convinced of the book’s underlying theme of woman as harbingers of new beginning and as custodians of past.

I liked the book, the stories that women tell are always interesting, do read it for the nostalgia. It just that after reading this book I read two Kashmiri short stories that made Sudha Koul’s memoir all the more interesting as these two stories offered a parallel image of good ol’Kashmir. We keep reading about how in old days woman on a Kashmiri street has nothing to fear, that people were nice and respectful.  Trukunjal (A New Triangle) by Rattan Lal Shant is a sort of love story set in Kashmir of what can be guessed to be late 1970s or the 1980s. In an incident presented in the story, a woman has her cloths torn off by a mob even as her husband tries to be a ‘hero’ beating a tongawalla who tried to make a pass on his wife. Pagah (Tomorrow?) written in late 1970s by Hari Krishen Kaul tells the funny sad story of two Kashmiri boys, two friends, a Pandit and a Muslim, who successfully manage to fail every year at school and hence stay in the same class of their government school for almost two decades dreading tomorrow because they would have to go to school again. As a kid, the pandit boy used to gawk at a ‘convent going’ pandit girl who later goes on to marry a nice pandit boy while our two foolhardy protagonist still worry about tomorrow. Sudha Koul’s book is in many ways about the world of that ‘convent girl’ who went on to be the first woman Kashmiri IAS officer.

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You can purchase the book here:

Buy The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir from Flipkart.com

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notes on Kashmiri Painting

Kashmiri Painting by Karuna Goswamy
(with 90 color Plates)
Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla
(Aryan Books International)
1998, Rs. 1800
 Buy Kashmiri Paintings by Karuna Goswamy From Flipkart.com

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Apparently there has been a lot of writing on Kashmir paintings but as the author of this beautiful and informative book writes:
‘A little like the thousand-petalled lotus of Indian myth, the art of Kashmir, especially its manuscript painting, has been more believed in than explored. The extent to which its roots extend, the sources from which it drew its nourishment, the direction of its growth across time, its texture, even the full, colorful range of its expanse, are but poorly known.’
 That probably makes this book by the good professor from Panjab University the first of its kind work that tries to explore the distinct Kashmiri art  produced in 17th to 19th century with a fusion of Pahari, Buddhist, Persian, Afghan and Mughal style. It’s not an easy task, its a formidable challenge, as Karuna Goswamy writes in her introduction to the ‘roots and development’ of Kashmiri paintings:
‘The chronology of Kashmiri painting as seen in illustrated manuscripts is not easy to establish. The material are widely scattered, and securely dated works from earlier than the eighteenth century are rather rare. This does not have to lead to the conclusion that there was no work done in the seventeenth century or earlier: documents may well have been lost. In any case, when we encounter, towards the end of the seventeeth century, an occasional dated document, the style seems to be well-formed, evolved, with an identity of its own, not simply a provincial version of Iranian work that it is sometimes taken to be. Here, one is not speaking of the much earlier work in painting, of the kind represented by the Gilgit book covers, the Toling leaves, or the murals of Ladakh and tabo- they lie far back in the past. Nor does one speak here of Persian or Mughal works – the Sadi of Fitzwilliam Museum, or the work of Muhammad Nadir Samarqandi, or that done for Zafar Khan: that work is recognizably of a different order. The paintings that are here regarded as Kashmiri, belong to illustrated manuscripts, or exist independently of them, represented by the manuscripts and paintings discussed and reproduced below: they constitute the mainstream of this work, work that is instantly identifiable once one has learnt to ‘recognize’ it.’

‘Group of Hindu artist’
from  ‘Afoot Through the Kashmir Valleys’ (1901) by Marion Doughty.

In this book, she helps us recognize this art. In detailed notes and accompanying sketches she tells us how planes are drawn in a Kashmiri painting, how a war is sketched, a killing, gods, kings, queens, saints, a man, a muslim man, a pandit man, a muslim woman, a pandit women, a women (‘with no emphasis on breasts’), and so on. Then she also tells us about the people who created this art. Perhaps the most surprising of the tales here is of families of Kashmiri scribes who, just about the turn of previous century, would travel to the plains of Haryana to offer their skills as copiers of manuscripts. A tradition, a profession now done. I came across a photograph of one such artist family (with their art) in a book titled ‘Afoot Through the Kashmir Valleys’ (1901) by Marion Doughty. I didn’t grow up in a house that had ‘Kashmiri art’ on walls, there were the usual framed lithographs as found in any middle class Hindu household anywhere in India around two or three decades ago. The old Kashmir tradition of family Priest bringing a work of art to the house of his patron in a Holy Day (Gori’tri), as mentioned in this book too, was still there, but he took brought printed lithographs. Hand-painted stuff was already gone. [You can check some of these old hand-painted stuff here and some sketches from Kashmiri Ramayan here]. I don’t know much about art but there were somethings in this book that made me wonder – How precise can a writing be on a dead art that was once very much alive? How much re-interpretation is done to fill in missing gaps left by lack of information?

It was specifically the below given painting:

 ‘The Goddess and Shiva receive homage’, as it is called in this book, is lying in Chandhigarh Museum and is believed to be from around 1900 A.D.

On first look, it looked like any other similar painting given in this book, gods, goddesses and devotees. But a second look and I knew what I was looking it. I know this place. I have been there. With that in mind I found the explanation of the painting provided by the author very interesting.

‘What the artist presents here is homage being offered to the Goddess, and to Shiva, from all directions, celestial and earthly. The Goddess, seated cross-legged on lotus, which is placed in turn upon an octagonal, large chowki. is seen full-faced, four-armed, objects in her hands clearly specified: a vessel, a large sword, a lotus, and a cup. Crowned with a chahatra atop her seat, garlanded, a serpent adoring her neck and upper part of the chest, she looks resplendent her, the effect being added to by a large group of pennants – gaily colored in yellow, pink, red and white – that flutter around her, having been planted perhaps as offering.[…]It is possible that a ‘family shrine’, or at least one which is resorted to by the members of a pandit family, is shown here[…]the Kashmir, the women in particular, dressed in a long woolen gown, her middle secured by a scarf, a veil draped over her head and falling down to the ankles behind her, a small skull cap and jewellery adorning  her head and face. The men are not dressed in the usual fashion of Kashmiri pandits as seen in paintings from Kashmir, with kantopa caps, but in turbans. ‘

The writer gets it almost right. It is a shrine. The woman and men are Kashmir. There are flowers. But as the shrine is not identified, the writer misses the fact that the flowers are not planted there, in fact they are floating. This is a painting of famous Kheer Bhawani Shrine of Goddess Ragyna at village Tulamulla. The shrine is identifiable by the ‘seven-sided’ holy spring, an important icon in its tantric representation. The shrine is also identifiable because the it is one of the few places where Shiv and Shakti are kept and worshiped together. The Pandit woman on the right is holding a sugar candy in her hand (called ‘kand‘ locally) that is ritually offered to the spring, usually once a year on Jesht Ashtami ( May-June). The men on the right are in ‘realistic’ Kashmiri Turbans of the time and not the ‘unrealistic’ kantopa of earlier times. The artist has gone photographic in his representation of the spring. The spring is still covered with flowers when the devotees come visiting,  That the author got the representation of a water body wrong in her description is what I really found interesting. I see it as a gap in information. Hence, this footnote of a post. [The above painting can also be found in ‘A Goddess is Born: The Emergence of Khir Bhavani in Kashmir’ by Dr. Madhu Bazaz Wangu. According to that book the painting is lying in Kashmir Library Collection Kashmir.]

A Muslim Kid selling ‘Kand’ and other samagri at the Kheer Bhawani Shrine

Devotees clearing flowers collected in the Spring

Another painting that I found in the book is this:

Called in the book ‘A Sacred Design’, the author sees it for what it is – a depiction of ‘Sagar Manthan‘, the great churning of the ocean, but it is the pattern that the author fails to decipher. Karuna Goswamy sees ‘Rama’ written in Sharda script all over this painting, in various patterns and colors and writes:
‘What the significance of all this is, whether the word ‘Rama’ is repeated a thousand times on this page as a virtuoso exercise, is not clear. Nor is it possible to make out why the writer/designer shifts from black into red. whether the consideration simply is to retain a memory of different colored backgrounds in different parts of the page, one would never be able to know. That there is some deeper meaning to the whole thing is all that one can guess at.’

We may never know, but a guess can be made. An educated guess. My guess, at one time it was a popular tantric ritual undertaken by a person seeking spiritual awakening.

Given above is a handwritten drawing of Omkaara in Sharda script from around 1925 by a Pandit saint re-named Bhagwan Gopinath (1898-1968). He was around 27 at the time he drew it and was experimenting with all kind of ways to attain ‘oneness’. The note alongside this drawing in the saints biographical sketch (first published in 1974) by SN Fotedaar explains:
‘All the space around and within Omkaara I is filled with Raama Raama except that inside each double line forming the Omkaara. This suggests that Raama is an abjunct of Omkaara. Likewise, Shiva Shiva is written in the case of Omkaara II, the space between the two lines forming the Omkaara being blank. The blank spaces in the case of each Omkaara seem to represent the Formless, Immutable and Eternal Brahman round which everything centres.’

I don’t know what it all exactly means. But right now when I see at these symbols, empty space and space filled out by written word, I see a parallel to knowing something and not knowing and not knowing and knowing somwthing. I see an information theory. I ask myself, what do we read, what do we know.
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picked kashmir at Delhi book fair, 2012

February 26, 2012


The loot this year:

Balti Phonetic Reader
by K. Rangan
Central Institute of Indian Languages
(1975. Rs. 8)

Hindi-Kashmiri Common Vocabulary
by Jawaharlal Handoo and Lalita Handoo
Central Institute of Indian Languages 

(1975, Rs.20)

Rupa Bhavani
by S.L. Sadhu
Sahitya Akademi
(2003, Rs.25)

 Early Terracotta Art of Kashmir
by Aijaz A. Bandey
Centre of Central Asian Studies, University of Kashmir, Srinagar
(1992, Rs. 20)

Haba Khatoon
by S.L. Sadhu

Sahitya Akademi
(2003 (first published 1968), Rs.25)

 Kashmiri-English Dictionary for Second Language Learners
by Omkar N. Koul, S.N. Raina and Roop Krishen Bhat

Central Institute of Indian Languages
(2000, Rs.80)

 Khazir Malik Safai
by Shad Ramzan (Translated by Mohammad Aslam)

Sahitya Akademi
(1999, Rs.25)
This Kashmiri Sufi poet (d.1920), among other things came up with a version of Moulana Jalaludin Rumi’s  Tota Nama.

 Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity, and the Making of Kashmir
by Chitralekha Zutshi
Permanent Black
(2003, Rs. 695)

 History of Kashmir: Tarikh-i-Kashmir of Saiyid Ali
English translation with Historical Analysis by Abdul Qaiyum Rafiqi
Gulshan Books
(2011, Rs. 795)

The Stranger Besides Me: Short Stories from Kashmir
Edited and translated by Neerja Mattoo
Gulshan Books
(2007, Rs. 450)
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Guide To Kashmir, 1954

I knew it was vintage. But the description on ebay offered no date, it just said ‘Guide to Kashmir’, old, very old, or something like that. Once I bought it and went through it, finding the date proved to be fun little exercise. Clues: In which year a double room at Nedous Hotel cost Rs. 40 a day, a month in a Five room ‘A Class’ House boat cost Rs.800, Ahdoos was still there, there were only three Film theaters in the city and visitors needed permits to bring firearms into the state…in which year?

I talked around but got only approximations. In the end the fact that it was published The Tourist Traffic Branch, Ministry of Transport New Delhi proved to be vital. Searching the web led me to the listing for this booklet available in the National Library of Australia [link]. The match on the number of pages proved to be the clincher.

I present to you: Guide To Kashmir, 1954. Enjoy!

Update:
January 22, 2014

Uploaded the book to archive.org
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The T.N. Madan Omnibus

I read most of the essays in this book during my daily commute in Delhi Metro. On some days I did come across Pandits in transit while reading this book. Young men going to work, or returning from work, old women with their gold danglers, the dejhoors. going to relatives, or returning home. At various times while reading this book these thoughts did occur to me, these old thoughts, ‘I was born in a household where relations had names like Raja Papa, Aunty Mummy, Sahba Nanu, Bairaj Nanu, Nanu, Bhabhi, Didi, Babli Didi, Nishu kay Papa and so on and so forth. What strange ways to denote relationships! Notations that hardly give any clue about the true nature of kinship. Why this encapsulation? I now know that Pandits deemed it inappropriate to call people by their true names in terms of pure kinship terminlogy. I recalled a funny discussion between my Uncle and grandmother about ‘correct’ time for filing finger nails. It’s the Bhattil way, the Kashmiri Pandit way, as I now know. The Pandit ‘do and don’t’ prescribed and followed by Pandits. Their way of life. Our way of life explained in a complex set of dos and mostly don’t. I remember the frown of my nani occasioned by me jumping over some old ladies legs! The ye lagni karun frown. I remembered my questioning, my whys. I now realize that the self-doubt, the questioning, is also Bhattil. I  now understand the meaning of ‘Havelyat ti Dasdar‘, a term often deployed by my grandmother. I recalled that one of the most crucial events in my grandmother’s life was indeed the division of a Chulah. It happened sometime in 1970s, but an event she still recalls like it happened yesterday – how after death of her mother-in-law all the women of the clan set-up their own hearths. She would often talk how the division was done, how the corners were set. I recalled my own half-hearted attempts to draw a sketch of the house in which I was born. And then in this book, I found the floor plan of a typical Pandit household, and even-though the house I was born in was in the city and the plans laid bare in this book were based on Pandit houses in rural areas, I realized all the Pandit houses were essentially designed the same way. The kitchen, the stairs, the temple room, the Wooz, the brand, the Thokur Kuth...all had a fixed probable spot in the Pandit floor plan for a house. I read the reason for the intense love a Pandit has for his physical house, and not just the concept of it. I recalled my attempts to draw my family line (I could barely get past the 4th line). In one of the essays I read the author lament about the fact that barely any of his subjects could trace his family tree beyond 3rd or 4th genertion. Lamentations, there are quite a few in this book, old laments uttered like they were a judgement on the present state of Pandit affairs, laments one still hears, laments like, ‘They are an unorganized leaderless group, proud of their past, confused about their present, and uncertain of the future.’* And yet I couldn’t help but read this book like it was a grand celebration of life and a celebration of man’s heroic efforts to make sense of it, to make sense of his constructs and the ensuring environments.

 The essays in this book are based on a pioneering field study carried out by T.N. Madan in 1957-58 in twin village hamlets of Utrassu-Umanagri (still remembered as Votaros-Brariangan by Pandits), 12 miles east of Anantnag. The essays, catalogued in this book under ‘Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir’, were first published in 1967 and have since been re-published a number of times. Back when the writer started his studies, there were only a handful of anthropological studies of Indian communities available (most notably ‘Religion and Society among the Coorgs of South India’ (1952) and ‘Changing Kinship Usages in the Setting of Political and Economic Change among the Nayars of Malabar’ (1952)) but with his writings and more so by his approach, Madan added new dimensions and opened new frontiers for further such studies. Given any other community, writings of this nature would have been treated as a Bible of sorts and yet Madan remains least quoted an authority on Kashmir. He remains a well known name (a cousin informed me that he is the father-in-law of Bhajan Sopori’s son*) but I suspect his work remains not so widely read within the community about which he wrote. His writings (and his life) ought to be the toast of the community. But, this sadly isn’t the case. Why should the student’s of his birth state not be encouraged to sample his writings and as an assignment try and write along similar lines on their own social set-up? I mean here is a man who in the aftermath of 1990 never dropped his objectivity, this even after witnessing his subject material dissolve at a pace perhaps never witnessed by any social scientist in the world. The Pandits of Votaros-Brariangan are now scattered in Udhampur, Jammu, Delhi and even US. The temple around which the villages were build was destroyed in 1992 in the aftermath of Babri Masjid. (The delicious irony, the village was set by a sanyasi, a renouncer). Even though his sadness at all this loss is quite visible in his later writings (in prefaces and introductions to various later editions of the book, and in his various later essays on Kashmir issue ), and even though he acknowledges the dagger of communalism digging deep into the hearts of even his own near and dear ones (his sister, who actually can claim to be the first person to have written an anthopological paper of Pandits of Kashmir, post 1990 became an ‘Anti-Muslim’ [read this interview from 2009]), even as he wrote about ‘no hope’, his own faith in hope, in people and more importantly in  ‘written word’ never Waivered. That is courage. Scholarship. Without doubt such as a man deserves respect and his writing ought to be not just respected but read and engaged with.

I completed reading this book in Jammu, just a few days away from my Mekhal ceremony and my sister’s wedding. After I finished reading the book, I read out the proverbs (collected by him during his field study) given in this book, in my broken tongue, to my grand-mother, her daughter-in-laws and sons. Between them, they managed to complete almost all the proverbs before I could even get to the second word. There was much wonder and laughter. My wonder and their laughter. The reading session even drew the interest of my grandfather who is slowly loosing his memory. Later, a grand-aunt (FaFaBroWi) burnt some Izband in a Kangri while singing. ‘Izband Kangiray Tiss Tiss Droy, Sharika Aayay Lol Barnay’ and then they all went back to singing leelas of Parmanand and Krishna Razdan, digging into their lyrics books and memories.

I write all this while warming my feet over a Kangri, wrapped in a laif, even as the afternoon winter sun in Jammu is at its magnificent best.

Tok and Bricks. Jammu. 2012.

Photographs from the book -“Utrassu-Umanagri”(1957-58)

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The T.N. Madan Omnibus
The Hindu Householder
Family and Kinship: A Study of the Pandits of Rural Kashmir
Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretation of Hindu Culture
(2010, Oxford University Press. Rs. 750.)
For those in India:
Buy The T.N. Madan Omnibus: The Hindu Householder from Flipkart.com

* correction [14 June, 2017]: Prof. Madan’s daughter Vandana Madan wrote in to say:

“His older brother Prof.D.N. Madan is Bhajan Sopori’s father in law”

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Initially Madan wanted to do a study of ‘values’ among the pundits of Kashmir but was advised against it by his mentors. But after proving a typical Kashmiri Pandit to be a householder who has little time for thoughts of renunciation, in the next set of essays cataloged under ‘Non-Renunciation: Themes and Interpretation of Hindu Culture’, Madan moves to values and goes on to explore the associated themes at length. The most interesting of these is the essay on ‘Asceticism and Eroticism’. Here he innovatively chooses to study works of fiction to present his thesis – three works specifically: Bhagvaticharan Varma’s Hindi novel Chitraleka (1933), U.R. Anantha Murthy’s Kannada novel Samskara (1965), translated into English by A.K. Ramanujan, and Vishnu Sakharam Khandekar’s Marathi novel Yayati (1959), rendered into Hindi by Moreshvar Tapasvi.

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Epilogue to the book offers Madan’s memories of ‘Growing up in a Kashmiri Hindu Household’. It was a shock to know that he too grew up on the story of ‘Gagri Gagri‘, a sad tale of a lady mouse who lost her ear in a domestic fight over missing khichdi. It’s a story I too grew up on. My grandmother still remembers it, in parts. As I asked her to sing me a line, my favorite line, in which the lady mouse has her ear blown by a Kajwot thrown by her husband, one of my aunts (Anita Didi, FaBroWi) filled in with her favorite part, where the husband tries to convince her to return back to her. The ending of the story (death of the lady mouse, as recounted by Madan) came as a surprise to Anita Didi. But then she agreed that the ending was appropriate as the heavy pleading by the husband made more sense in such a scenario. [This story is going on my ‘to do someday’ list. Inputs are welcome.]

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 *Madan was in fact describing the impact of land re-distribution on the Pandits of rural Kashmir in 1950s: “An instance of the lack of solidarity among Kashmiri Pandits may be seen in their attitude to the recent political and economic changes in the State. These changes have had, among other consequences, the effect of endangering the economic solvency of the Pandits. All households that owned more than 23 acres have lost the land exceeding that limit to their tenants; the tenant’s share on agriculture produce has been raised, benefitting the Muslims more than the pandits, because not many Pandits have been tenants; and government jobs have been thrown open to the Muslims on a favoured treatment basis. In the face of the rising economic and political power of the Muslims, it might have been expected that the Pandits would evolve a common approach to their relations with the Muslims; but they have not. They are divided into two opinion groups; those who want to co-operate with the Muslims and work for a united village community, and those who want to seek protection from the government as a religious minority. They are an unorganised leaderless group, proud of their past, confused about their present, and uncertain of the future.”

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Snake ∞

“There is one God ; but he has many names. The whole earth stands upon the serpent Sheshnag ; she has 1000 teeth and 2000 tongues; with every tongue she pronounces every day a new name of God ; and this she has done for centuries on centuries, never repeating a name once pronounced.”

Pandit Shivram of Srinagar to Rev. Joseph Wolff. Found in ‘Narrative of a mission to Bokhara, in the years 1843-1845’.

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Image: A screen-cap from a Hindi film Sheshnaag (1990) taken from a Pakistani print available on Youtube.

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First to be created was the Word.
Word is the road to the Truth.
Listen to the word, then act.
~ Mahmud Gami (1750- 1855)

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Kashmiriyat in Codex

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was Kashmir. This was beginning with God and the duty of every faithful monk would be to repeat every day with chanting humility the one never-changing event whose incontrovertible truth can be asserted. But we see now through a glass darkly, and the truth, before it is revealed to all, face to face, we see in fragments (alas, how illegible) in the error of the world, so we must spell out its faithful signals even when they seem obscure to us and as if amalgamated with a will wholly bent on evil.


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Aassi aiys ta asi aasav
  Aassi dur kur patu-vath
Shivas sari na zyon ta marun
  Ravus sori na atu-gath!


We did live in the past and we will be in future also:
From ancient times to the present, we have activated
          this world.
Just as the sun rises and sets, as a matter of routine,
The immanent Shiva will never be relieved of birth and
        death!


~ Lal Ded


That Lalla of Padmanpore,
who had drunk the fill of divine nectar;
She was undoubtedly an avatar of ours.
O God! grant me the same spritual power.


~ Nund Reshi


Mohammad-radiates light all around
Pujari lost his wits,
While offering flowers,
Iswara showered rain,
Come, let us blow the Shankh
around Sankara.
Mohammad-radiates light all around.


~ Ahad Zarger


What do we accomplish?
by coming and going,
From one Janama (birth) to another?
I think nothing.
the way out is
‘So-ham-Soo’ (I am thou).
Explore, Brahma, Vishnu, Maheshwara,
They are all-pervading, the manifest.
Shall thou bear the reality?
When it dawns upon thou?


~Shah Ghafoor


Shastras, I have explored,
I- the Rahim Sahib, am wearing around,
A Shastra myself,
For Shastra is the crown of believers.


~ Rahim Sahib


Dew radiates brightness all around,
Atma (Soul) cannot get out of transmigration,
Siva, O Shah Qalandar, resembles none.


~ Shah Qalandar


Like a yogi I postured myself
In the solitude of vana (jungle),
And reduced my sharer (body) to ashes,
In the process of Prana-Abhyas


~ Asad Parray


Rig Veda, Yajer Veda, Sam Veda, Athar Veda
My revered guru (teacher) endowed me
With these four Vedas,
And gave upto me,
Apparels of a yogi and gyana


~ Shamas Faqir


Kur Batus Peth Zoo Fida Qudoos Gojwari,
Az Timai Kathe Yaad Paeyu Waen;
Reach Sirij Kakan Mussalman Gobrae Greinz,
Dil Tithai Paet Mila naeyu Pana Waen


“It is for a Bata (Kashmiri Pandit) that Abdul Qudoos Gojwari laid his life; today you (Hindus and Muslims) should remember these events for togetherness. And it was Rajkak (birbal Dhar’s son) who treated Muslims as his own children; today, you should seek union of hearts as you had done then.”


~ Mahjoor


Kiyaah kara paanchan dahan ta kahan
Yim yath leji wokshun kareth gai
Yikiwoti samahan akisey rai lamahan
Kovi maali ravihey khan gaav


(What can I do with these fives, tens and elevens?
Who spoiled the broth?
I wish they would unite
And would not be lost in wilderness)


~Shiekh Nooruddin Noorani


Gani kar paanis awlaadas
Hani hani maaz traav deryaavas
Patciye man panun kerzzen nihaar
Kaafar sapdith korum Iqraar


Cut into pieces your own child;
And throw his flesh in the river
If you like it, have it as breakfast.
I became an infidel to mould myself to become a 
faithful of God


~ Abdul Ahad Zargar


Thatha chha ashqini tsanji tehrunuey
ratci ratci matci maaz khuon ye lo
Pannuy khoon gatchi tresi kani chonuyey
Suy gatci tcaangi zaalunyey lo
Pannuy khoon gatci tresi kani chonuyey
Suy gatci tcaagni zaalunyey lo
tami key gaashi gatci yaar praznunyey
Ratci ratci matci maaz khuonye lo


(It is not easy to face a onslaught of love,
You shall have to eat your own flesh,
And drink your blood to quench your thirst,
And burn it to light a lamp;
You can then recognize you’re beloved
under the shine of that light,
First, eat up flesh from your wrist)


~ Momin Sahib


Kaafer-e-Ishqam musalamaani maraa darkaar neist
Har rag-e-jaan taar gashta haajab-e-zunnaar neist


(I am infidel of love; I don’t need to be a Muslim,
Each vein of my body has turned into a sacred thread- (of Hindus))


~ Amir Khusro


Soch Kraal karaan tas paiwandi
Yes assi dilas safaai
Chalith paanas dium diun gatsi randa
Khudawanda illahi


(Soch kral is a friend of pure ones
Who have a crystal clear heart?
Sharpen your self and make it shine;
The Almighty God is there to watch.)


~ Sochh Kraal


Akh tsi ta bey ba ganzar mabaa
Habaa yi chuy gumaanay
Yath faani saraayi diun chhuy shabaa
Ath manz mo dim dukhaanay
Pato ho marun az yaa sabaa
Habaa yi chuy gumaanay


(Don’t count yourself and myself
All this is a dream and nothing else.
In this mortal world, do spend one night
But don’t set up a shop in it
You shall have to die today or tomorrow
All this is nothing but a dream)


~ Sochh Kraal


Maal-odaulath chhuna rozaanay
Donway bewafa goy gumaan
Waataan koni chukh be zaanay
Wolo yuri yaari janaanay


(Wealth and affluence do not last longer,
Both are unfaithful, mind it.
Why don’t you delve deep into this point?
Come to me, O my beloved! )


~ Rahman Dar




Seerat traavith sooratas mozum
Doulatas sapdaan daas
Thazray thazray oosus
Azlan diutnam wodoluyey


(I gave up nobility and embraced beauty
I became a slave of wealth.
I was like a kind on top,
but my fate pulled me down)


~ Shamas Fakir


Anem soi, wawum soi
Lajem soi pane saai 


~ Kashmiri saying


Panun raeth pansei math


~ Kashmiri saying


Bulbul Na yeh, Wasiyat Ahbab Bool Jayen
Ganga ke Badle Mere Jehlum Mein Mein Phool; Hayen


~ Kashyap Bandhu


“May be it is the bone and blood of the very ancient Dravid (whatever goes with it) civilization which has survived as the ethinic/culture core and around which the present edifice has been built in collaboration with the Aryans, the Ionian Greek, the Konkan Brahmans, the gypsies and the Central Asians”


~ Akhter Mohi-ud-Din 


“You are for Kashmir, that you live for Kashmir, do well for Kashmir, and love everything of Kashmir”.


~ Mirza Arif


‘Speak of! people of Kashmir speak
O, kashmir thou art a thing of beauty
And a thing of beauty is a joy for ever
keats cheats himself when he believes and says so
Arif tells him to listen to a beloved’s woe 
tyranny for you, O! Dishonored land
You are  a charm for the one that has the upper hand’


~ Mirza Arif


“O Nila, the words of the sage will be effective for one Caturyuga. After that you will live in the company of men only. Here the Pisacas will always become weak…Prajapati is called Ka, and Kasyapa is also Prajapati. Built by him this country will be called Kashmira”


~ Nilmat Purana


The first Rishi was the prophet Muhammad;
The second in order was Hazrat Uways;
The third Rishi was Zulka Rishi
The fourth in order was Hazrat Pilas;
The fifth was Rum Rishi
The sixth in order was Hazrat Miran
The seventh (me) is miscalled a Rishi
Do I deserve to be called a Rishi? What is my name?


~ Nund Reshi


Shiv Chaai thali thali wochaan
Mau Zaan Huind tu Musalmaan
Toruk Hai Chookh Paan praznan
Soi Chaai Shiv seet Zaan


(Siva abides in all that is, everywhere
Then do not discriminate between a Hindu and a Musalman
If thou art wise, know thyself
That is true knowledge of the Lord)


I renounced fraud, untruth, deceit,
I taught my mind to see the one in all my fellow-men,
How could I then discriminate between man and man?
And not accept the food offered by brother.


The idol is but stone,
The temple is but stone,
From top to bottom all is stone.


He does not need the kusa grass, nor sesame seed,
Flowers and water He does not need,
He who, in honest faith, accept his Guru’s word,
On Siva meditates constantly,
He, full of joy, from action freed, will not be born again.


It covers your shame,
Saves you from cold,
Its food and drink,
Mere water and grass,
Who counselled you, O Brahmin?
To slaughter a living sheep as a sacrifice,
Unto a lifeless stone


The thoughtless read the holy books
As parrots, in their cage, recite Ram, Ram,
Their reading is like churning water,
Fruitless effort, ridiculous conceit


When can I beak the bonds of Shame?
When I am indifferent to jibes and jeers
When can I discard the robs of dignity?
When desires cease to nag my mind


The Guru (Sayyid Husain Simnani, or so we are told, not a mention of Sidha Mol)
gave me only one word;
Enter into thyself from the outer world;
the guru’s precept came to me as God’s word;
That’s why i started dancing nude.


In life I sought neither wealth nor power;
Nor ran after pleasures of sense;
Moderate in food and drink, i lived a controlled life;
And love my God.


Whether they killed a large sheep or a small one,
Lalla had her round stone (as her usual fare.)


Whatever I uttered with my tongue became a Mantra


I burnt the foulness of my soul;
I slew my heart, its passions all;
I spread my garments, hem and sat;
Just there, on a bended knees,
In utter surrender unto Him;
My fame as Lalla spread afar.


~ Lal Ded 


Passion for God set fire to all she had,
and from her heart raised clouds of smoke,
Having had a draught of adh-e-alat,
Intoxicated and drunk with joy was she,
One cup of this God-intoxicating drink,
Shatters reason into bits,
A little drowsiness from from it is heavier than
Intoxication from a hundred jars of wine.


~ Nund Rishi quoted by Suhrawardiyya Sufi Baba Dawud Mishkati*




Adam is the progenitor of the human race,
The Mother Eve has the same primordiality,
(So) from where have the ‘low-castes’ descended?
How can a ‘high born’ deride his own ancestry?


One who harps proudly upon one’s caste?
Is bereft of reason and wisdom,
Here the good alone can claim noble descent;
In the Hereafter ‘caste’ will be extinct,
Were you to imbibe the essence of Islam?
Then no one would be purer than you.


(By) displaying the caste in the world,
What will thou gain?
Into dust will turn the bones,
When the earth envelopes the body:
To utter disgrace will he come?
Who, forgetting himself, jeers at others


Among the brothers of the same parents
Why did you create a barrier?
Muslims and Hindus are one
When will God be kind to His servants?


~ Sheikh Noor-ud-Din


The three alphabets -Sha-Ra-Ka, are in fact the etymological representation of the three alphhabets – Ka-Sha-Ra or Kasheer


~ Professor Fida Hassnain


O, King! I hail from the land far away;
Where there is no truth and evil knows no limit.
I appeared in the Maleecha country, and I suffered at
 their hands.
I am known as Ishvara Putram (the Son of God)
Born of Kanya-Garban, the virgin
I teach love, truth and purity of heart,
I ask human beings to serve the lord.
The lord God is in the centre of the Sun, and the elements.
And God and the Sun are forever,
Bliss giving Lord being always in my heart,
My name has been established Isha-Mase


~ Bhavishya-Maha-Purana, 115 A.D.


‘During this period, Hazrat Yuzu Asaph, having come from the Holy Land to the Holy Valley, proclaimed his ministery. He devoted his days and nights in prayers, and having attained the highest status in spiritual hierarchy, declared himself as the Prophet sent to Kashmiris. I have seen in a work of Hindus that this Prophet was really Hazrat Isa, the Spirit of God, who had assumed the name of Yuzu-Asaph in Kashmir.’


~ Kashmiri historian, Mullah Nadri


‘I would like to see whole colonies of English artist, men of science and literature and divines, proceeding to Cashmer’


~ Joseph Wolff in Mission to Bokhara (1832)


When Kashmiris are prosperous, traitors are devastated
When Dhars are prosperous, Kashmiris get devastated


~a Kashmiri proverb


“There is one God
But with hundred names!”


“We belong to the same parents:
Then why this difference


Let Hindus and Muslims (together)
Worship God alone


~Nund Reshi




The mess we inherited. There are some select snippets from a collection of essays titled ‘Kashmiriyat through the ages’, edited and compiled by Professor Fida Mohammad Hassanain (who it seems spent an inordinate duration of his life trying to prove Jesus was in Kashmir and even talked to the famous charioteer of UFO gods, Erich von Däniken ) from various articles published over last decade or so by various people for various platforms. It arrived as  a gift to me from its Srinagar based publishers Gulshan Books.


An elder cousin caught me reading this book and paused at the name of the editor. 


‘He used to be our neighbour in Chanapora. We didn’t know he was a writer till the day his daughter-in-law got kidnapped.’


In 1991 Nahida Imtiaz, daughter of Saifuddin Soz was kidnapped by militants. Her release was secured in exchange for some other militants. My cousins tells me Nahida was Fida Mohammad Hassanain’s daughter-in-law.


None of it makes sense. Not at this late-hour. Not in this place. To call everything by its true name and the trouble to be reminded that everything is double.


“We must treat our lives as we treat our writings, put them in accord, give harmony to the middle, the end, and the beginning. In order to do this, we must make many erasures.”


~ Joseph Joubert, the French writer who spent all his life preparing to write a book but never published anything while alive. 


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*Baba Dawud Mishkati and Abdul’l-Wahhab say that while the Shaikh and his brothers were once trying to break into a house. Lalla, who happened to be there, cried to Nurru’d-Din: “What will you get from this house? Go to a big house (i.e. God). you will get something there.” On hearing this Nuru’d-Din, who was thirty years old at the time, immediatley left his brothers and dug out a cave at the village of Kaimuh. Here for many years he performed his austere penances, withdrawing entirely from the life that surrounded him.


~Biographical encyclopedia of Sufis By N. Hanif


Baba Dawud Mishkati was a follower of Suhrawardiyya Baba Nasibuddin Ghazi of Bijbehara. In his ‘Asrar-ul-Abrar’, written around 1654 AD, and acknowledged as the first work to mention Lal Ded, Baba Dawud Mishkati mentions that word Rishi is derived from the Persian word raish or rish meaning the feathers or wings of a bird. 


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Raja Vikarmajitery Kath


  dyar hase chu saf’ras
     yar hase chu na as’nas
  ash’nav hasa chu as’nas
gaye tre kathe beye ze kathe hasa chy’au
  sa zanana chy’auvna pane’ny
     yesa na asi pan’es sai’th
beye hasa
     yus rats bedar rozi
     suy hasa zae’ni raje Vikramajit’ney kur

Monies, sirs, is for a journey.
A friend, sirs, is for when there is no money.
A near relation, sirs, is for when there is money.
That makes three things, and, sirs, there are two others : —
 That woman is not for you
 one not in know of herself
And, again, sirs : —
 He only will win Raja Vikramaditya’s daughter
Who keepeth awake by night.

I never imagined I will read these Kashmiri stories. But here they are, preserved. Preserved complete with all the intellectual rigor that their listening induced among its recorders. The above lines form a mishmash of a particular verse in ‘Hatim’s Tales: Kashmiri Stories and Songs’ (1928), recorded with the assistance of Pandit Govind Kaul by Sir Aurel Stein. I created this mishmash based on the two version offered by Aurel Stein and Pandit Govind Kaul.

The Kashmiri songs and stories in this book were recited to Sir Aurel Stein in 1896, at Mohand Marg, high in Haramukh range, in Kashmir, by one Hatim Tilwon of Panzil, in the Sind Valley, a cultivator and a professional story- teller. They were taken down at his dictation by Sir Aurel Stein himself, and, simultaneously, by Pandit Govinda Kaul. The work is unique in the sense that (as the introduction to the book explains):

“[…] Hatim’s language was not the literary language of Kashmiri Pandits, but was in a village dialect, and Sir Aurel Stein’s phonetic record of the patois, placed alongside of the standard spelling of Kashmiri Pandits, gives what is perhaps the only opportunity in existence for comparing the literary form of an Oriental speech with the actual pronunciation of a fairly educated villager.”

The stories that Hatim told included not just a story of fabled Vikarmajit, but also of Mahmud of Ghazni, albeit in a familiar fabled grab of a benevolent king who goes around town at night in the grab of a poor man. He also tells the story of a farmer’s wife who complains to a Honey-bee about harshness of a revenue collector. The stories are told in songs and verses. The most amusing Kashmiri song offered by this book is the one about the turmoil created in lives of Kashmiri working class by Sir Douglas Forsyth‘s mission to Yarkand in 1873-4.  The workers, cobblers, tillers, carpenters and all with a typical tongue-in-cheek Kashmiri humor sing:

Yarkand anan zenan

Khoni keth doda-not ware heth
bari drav
Lokan chu sapharun tav
Tahkhith doda-gur Jenatuk bagwan


Yarkand anon zenan
Watal dop watje bonay sara zah


Chim mangan dalomuy ta kah
Tsoratsh ta or heth met hay, pakanawan

I found Govinda Kaul’s translation (rather his pick of English works for certain Kashmiri work) a bit too easy on Imperialists, almost turning the song on its head.  Here’s what the song conveyed to be:

Yarkand he is conquering
Carrying a milk-pail in his haunch,
earthern pots in a load
he goes forth

For people
journey is exhaustion

He , forsooth

White horse

Heavenly God
Yarkand he is conquering

Cobbler said to Cobbler’s wife
“I shall not remember forever,
they want my leather and lace,
leather-cutter and awl,
and they want me.
O, they are taking me too”

Yarkand he is conquering

You may read the complete book here at openlibrary.org
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Related Post:

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Pandit Govinda Kaul belonged to the clan of famous Birbal Dhar. Famous D.P. Dhar was a direct decedent of Birbal Dhar.

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Unrelated Post:
about short film that I was involved with in a minor way Raag Sarkari. (Nominated for IFFI, 2011).The story of a day in the life of a Jailer somewhere in U.P. and day happens to be D.P Dhar’s first death anniversary.

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