The loss of Srinagar as a cosmopolitan city

Sameer Hamdani's book brings alive the details that once defined life in one of South Asia's oldest cities but stops short of reflecting on the present

- Nipa Charagi

Ghanta Ghar at Lal Chowk, which was named after Moscow's Red Square in the 1940s.

(ISTOCKPHOTO)

Historically, for the people of Kashmir, there is only one shahr or city, writes Sameer Hamdani in his new book City of Kashmir—Srinagar: A Popular History.

Depending on which part of Kashmir you are in, you are either going up (khasun) or down (vasun) to Srinagar.

The common inclination is to look at Srinagar through the prism of militancy, violence and stone-pelting—like a fault line, there’s a clear demarcation between before and after 1990's Srinagar. But this is a city older than Delhi and Lahore, shaped over two millennia by Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic cultures. Mongols, Turks, Persians, Dogras, Sikhs, British... all have been here.

It’s a city where the old and the new are perpetually colliding, writes Hamdani.

The imprints of the past are scattered through the city. The ruins of a Buddhist monastery in Harwan on the outskirts of Srinagar, discovered by archaeologist R.C. Kak in 1923, date from the Ist to the 6th century CE. It is believed that the 4th Mahayana Buddhist council was held here. The Persian influence is reflected in the crafts, language and architecture of Kashmir. (At a Kashmiri-Punjabi-Iranian wedding in Delhi a few years ago, a US-based Iranian guest remarked that I had a “Persian surname”; her cousin had the same second name. The bride’s Kashmiri side of the family found some rituals similar to the groom's Persian ones—like the use of a mirror for the groom to see the bride’s face.) In Srinagar, the Mughals built their famed gardens: Shalimar Bagh by emperor Jehangir; Nishat Bagh by his brother-in-law Asif Khan, among others.