Wood carving workshop on Jhelum river.
Fateh Kadal, Urdu Bazaar.
Way to the Ghat
Upper floor
The entire building used to be wooden. It is now being remade in cement and bricks. The upper floor was still under works. If I could get into that floor, the view would have been something like this:
Vinden och floden (The Wind and the River),1951 by great Swedish filmmaker, Arne Sucksdorff. Based on the life of boat people of Kashmir. Lyrically capturing the songs and images of that life in one of the most beautiful films ever made on Kashmir.
Arne Sucksdorff visited India in 1950, it seems with the objective of documenting the life of its working people. Out of this visit came two films: Village Hindou (Hindu Village) about the lack of water in an Indian village, and Vinden och floden (The Wind and the River), about river life of Kashmir.
The film begins with a quote (missing in the extract above) which summarises the vision of the film, “Når de tunge pramme stages op ad Jelum-floden, sker det under en storslået dialog mellem Allah, Mennesket og Skønheden. (When the heavy barges poled up the Jelum River, she does so in a magnificent dialogue between God, Man and beauty.)”
The music of the film, a blend Kashmir folk and India Classical, is by Ravi Shankar, who was yet to attain international acclaim back then. He was working with AIR at the time and probably artists form AIR station Srinagar were used for creating the sounds.
The film begins with scene of a Hindu ascetic mediating atop a hill in Srinagar. Down below, the city is brimming with scenes of lyrical songs of life. A life sustained by a river that quietly flows through it and weaving a web of ecology in which people seem to be at peace. A peace for which people thank their benevolent gods.
Kashmiris it seems are very conscious about it. A young girl walking on the bridge stopped to suggest that I take pictures in Summer when there is more water.
‘The Rope Bridge at Serinagur’ by Thomas Daniell (1800)
“One can only wonder at the fortitude of the early travellers men such as Huien Tsang, or the painters Thomas and William Daniel. Their determination must have been supreme in order to press them ever forward and eventually reach the Vale, settled as it is high among seemingly impenetrable mountains at the end of a route that was, and still is, full of hazards.”
~ Visiting Kashmir by Allan Stacey (1988).
All that is fine but…
Sometimes a familiar image and a familiar name can cause all find of confusion. A lot of people consider Thomas and William Daniel to be among the first Europeans to reach and paint Kashmir. Painting titled ‘The Rope Bridge at Serinagur’ by Thomas Daniell only confirms it. There are a bunch of books that claim this. All this because the place they visited is Srinagar. But the fact remains, the two never visited Kashmir. Thomas Daniell (1749-1840) and his nephew William Daniell (1769-1837) were in India during 1785 and 1794. In 1789 they visited of the city of Srinagar on the banks Alaknanda river in Garwhal which is named so because . That’s were ‘The Rope Bridge at Serinagur’ comes from.
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Now, coming back to ‘Srinagar’ or rather the two ‘Srinagars’, and continuing with the word games and antonymic folklores… it is believed that the town of Garwhal gets its name after the goddess of Fortune, Sri or Laxmin. Some say the same of the city of Srinagar in Garwhal gets its name from ‘Sri Yantra’, a giant rock which could kill you if you even looked at it. The rock had origins in a tale in which a Goddess kills a demon named Kalasura thanks to the device/rock . The local storytellers say that this rock was turned upside down by Adi Shankaracharya, in the 8th century AD and chucked into Alaknanda. He thus put an end to all the tantric exercises associated with the rock and laid down the plan for the city of Srinagar. Interestingly, there are places in Garwhal were Sri Yantra is worshipped. One of the belief associated with Sri Yantra in Garwhal is that installing a roof over Sri Yantra would bring disaster. [This last bit from ‘Marriage And Customs Of Tribes Of India’ by J. P. Singh Rana (1998)]
The Srinagar in Kashmir still has the Sri Yantra rock at Hari Parbat. The origin of the rock/hill in local folklore has killing of a demon named Jalobhava by a Goddess using a rock, hence laying the foundation of Srinagar. The temple that was reclaimed in Srinagar by Adi Shankaracharya is across this Hill and on top of another Hill that is now renamed after Shankaracharya. The Sri Yantra is roofed at Hari Parbat. Done only in recent times. The only person to protest construction around the rock was an artist named G.R. Santosh.
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Mr. Vigne is responsible for the strange derivation of the name of the Kasmir capital, Srinagar (Srinagara, or as he spells it, ‘Siri-nagur,’ from ” Surya Nagur, the city of the sun” (p. ii. 137). Judging from the persistence with which the error has been copied by a succession of modern writers on Kasmir, this etymology bids fair to establish itself as a piece of orthodox creed with European visitors to the Valley.
~ Ancient Geography Of Kashmir by M A Stein (1895).
White horse outside
‘Bank of Baroda’,
Pestonjee Building, Kothibagh,
Residency Road
I knew this one was going to be a special book but what I didn’t expect was an image of a prized memory of Srinagar City: Pestonji’s White Horse.
Raghubir Singh’s ‘Kashmir: Garden of the Himalayas’ (1983) has the photograph explained as, “The white wooden horse was a joke-present from one polo-playing Maharaja (Jaipur) to another (Kashmir). A White Horse whiskey dealer rescued it from a junk heap and installed it in front of a building in Srinagar which he rents to a bank.”
Although the book does not mention it, yet I had heard so much about it (although not the story about its origin), I knew I was looking at the famous Pestonji Ka Ghoda.
Pestonji name figures in history of Kashmir right from late 1800s to the early times of Sheikh Abdullah (Jinnah and his wife apparently stayed with him during a trip to Srinagar in 1920s).
A shopping mall now stands in its place.
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The book took almost 14 days. Whoever said world has become smaller hasn’t obviously tried bringing in a book from overseas. Originally costing Rs. 280. It cost me around Rs.1600 for a second hand first edition. Some more on the book later. And also some more rare books. And when I get some time some old writings of an incredible Parsi on Kashmir, its lore, Pandits and their ways of life.
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Update: From my father’s camera. The White Horse (rather a replica?) now in November 2013, alone in a M S Shoping Mal, Residency Rd, Regal Chowk, Rajbagh, Srinagar.
And the below one titled ‘Kashir hund Nak’shi’, Map of Kashmir, is from ‘An introduction to spoken Kashmiri; a basic course and reference manual for learning and teaching Kashmiri as a second language’ by Braj B. Kachru. 1973.
