Hamdani Brings City of Kashmir to Life

The book traces Srinagar's journey through empire, trade, and everyday life, revealing the city's texture and enduring spirit.

- Fiza Masoodi

I stepped into City of Kashmir like a traveller entering streets shaped by empires, saints, and ordinary lives.

It felt like walking beside Joseph Roth in Hotel Years, through narrow streets and scarred cafés, reading the small moments that captured a Europe in decline.

Roth traced a wounded continent's slow transformations. Hamdani traces Srinagar with equal attentiveness.

He moves through the city's history with care, allowing its memory, buildings, stories, and everyday life to emerge naturally.

The timing of the book matters, as Srinagar today is surrounded by accounts that flatten its past and simplify its present.

The city circulates through ideas shaped by romance, conflict, and mistrust. Often described as the second-oldest city in South Asia, once a Central Asian crossroads before 1947, it now exists inside frames built by scholars, sightseers, scribes, and storytellers who carried admiration and unease in equal measure. Their writings hardened into myths, misunderstandings, and competing claims.

Against this background, Hamdani writes as someone intent on recovery rather than correction.

His Srinagar emerges as a place shaped by centuries of movement, exchange, and layered belonging.

Hamdani's training as an architectural historian gives the book its distinctive touch. Buildings, shrines, streets, and objects serve as points of entry into larger histories.

The narrative opens deep in the past, with Lalitaditya Muktapida, the eighth-century Kashmiri ruler whose campaigns carried power beyond the mountains and into the plains. Lalitaditya appears neither as legend nor ornament. His presence signals an early moment when Kashmir stepped into a wider political imagination.

Through this figure, Hamdani establishes a central idea of the book: Srinagar has always stood in conversation with distant worlds.

From there, the narrative flows forward with ease.