A Classroom Without Walls

A professor in Srinagar leads his growing stream of learners through the city's undocumented landmarks to unmasks its mysteries

- By INSHA RASHID

Dr Khalid Wazim Hassan with a group of Kashmiri youths

Kashmir is a land where history refuses to stay still. It settles into mountain passes and riverbanks, into bridges worn smooth by centuries of footsteps, into lanes that bend and narrow as if remembering something.

Monuments stand as visible markers of the past, but it is often quieter spaces—village paths, courtyards, shrines, neighbourhood streets—that hold the most intimate stories. To understand Kashmir, one must not only read about it, but walk through it. History here reveals itself fully only in presence.

This belief that a place can be read like a living text—shaped an initiative now drawing Kashmir's youth back to their own histories. The idea took form through Dr Khalid Wasim Hassan, Senior Assistant Professor at the Central University of Kashmir. In 2018, he began walking alone through Srinagar's Downtown, not as a guide but as a learner, intrigued by how streets spoke politics and buildings carried memory.

Those solitary walks soon became shared journeys. One student asked to join, then another. Without plans or formal structure, the walks grew into a collective practice—heritage walks that blend history, architecture, politics, and lived experience. For Khalid, the intrigue lay not in presenting heritage as a finished past, but in encountering it as something unfolding, shaped by conversation and curiosity.