City of Kashmir: Seeing Srinagar through the layers of its past

Sameer Hamdani’s City of Kashmir brings together Srinagar’s architecture, culture, objects and everyday life, making the familiar city appear layered and newly alive

Every time I read a book on Kashmir’s history, I am overcome by a strange sense of feeling.

I don’t know if I should call it happiness. There is something very gratifying in learning more about the place where I come from.

Maybe because when we inhabit the same place for too long, its spatiality becomes all too familiar for us.

We see the same roads, the same buildings, the same river, the same shrines. Gradually, we stop wondering about the possibilities of it being any different.

But reading Sameer Hamdani’s City of Kashmir: Srinagar, A Popular History, somehow kindled that sense of perturbation within me that my overfamiliarity with the city had somehow sedated all these years.

The book doesn’t make Srinagar’s history feel as though it was something we have left behind. Instead, it brings the past and present together in a way that they feel conversationally connected.

The past dwells in the present and we happen to inhabit both worlds simultaneously.

It’s just that sometimes we become oblivious to this layered nature of the city.

One chapter which became very personal for me was the one about Khanqah-e-Moula. Obviously, because I live in its vicinity.

The picture of Khanqah-e-Moula included in the book from the British Library was one of the things which amazed me the most.

I kept staring at it incredulously, even though I see the popular shrine every day. It made me realise how estranged I was from the captivating past that this place had historically embodied.

The Khanqah also made me think about the kind of life that existed in Srinagar.

The idea of people from communities sharing spaces, sitting together and having a kind of brotherhood that we don’t see very often today was very interesting.

We often talk about Kashmir’s culture in generic ways, but it feels oddly different when we get to experience it by shuffling through historical anecdotes.

There were traditions, spaces and relationships which connected people with each other. Reading about these things made me wonder how much we have lost through centuries.

This is also where I felt that the book made me reflect soberly about the present.

History is never about what happened hundreds of years ago. When we read about the social life of Srinagar, we automatically start comparing it with our own time.

We start questioning what happened to those relationships, those spaces, and that feeling of belonging. Maybe this is one of the reasons I found the book so engaging.

The part about the Mughals was another section which I found interesting.

The Mughal connection to Kashmir is often manifested through the presence of pleasure gardens, and of the Emperors having serenaded through them while admiring Kashmir’s paradisical beauty.

Hamdani makes you experience the Mughal presence in Srinagar as something that goes beyond gardens.

The Mughals brought their aesthetic ideas, designs and cultural influences into the city and added a fresh layer to its history, architecture, religious life, markets and culture.

What fascinated me more was the story about how Mughal art survived in unexpected places.

There is something unbelievable about reading that in the nineteenth century Mughal paintings from the famous Hamza Nama were found being used in a tea shop in Srinagar.

Paintings connected to one of the imperial artistic projects of the Mughal court, made in the time of Akbar, somehow ended up in a local tea shop, being repurposed to shield the shop from being drenched by the bad weather.

For me, this was one of those details in the book which stayed in my head because it tells us something bigger about Srinagar.

Things travelled. Art travelled. People travelled. Ideas travelled. Sometimes they travelled in ways which we can hardly imagine today.

The chapter on the Bund (promenaded embankment) also stayed with me.

The Bund has become such a ubiquitous element to our lives today to the extent that we hardly have the time to contemplate how its past may have been.

However, after reading about it in the book, it occurred to me as an epiphany how important the river has always been to the city and its commercial life, something that we take for granted today.

The bund embodies the symbiotic relationship between the city and the river.

I liked this aspect of Hamdani’s writing where something so mundane is brought into the realm of the extraordinary.

Then there is chai.

Being a Kashmiri who loves chai, this chapter was probably one of the most enjoyable for me.

I was fascinated to read how a cup of tea reached our table and how it became an important emblem of our collective social life.

The story becomes more interesting when Hamdani brings in the colonial connection and the story associated with Thomas Lipton.

Reading about Lipton’s visit to Kashmir and the way the history of tea in Kashmir became connected with the colonial tea trade made me look at that ordinary packet of Lipton tea differently.

Something which today feels completely normal and commercial has a history behind it involving travel, trade, colonial interests and Kashmir.

Then there is the samovar. We don’t always think about where it came from or how it became part of our culture.

Hamdani shows the reader how even this object has reached Kashmir through a long journey.

What I liked was that he does not present the samovar simply as some decorative Kashmiri object.

It became part of life, part of hospitality and part of the way people sit together and talk. A samovar is never just about the tea. It is about the people sitting around it.

That is what I found beautiful about the chapter on chai. It made me understand that even ordinary objects can become the carriers of history.

As much as I enjoyed the book I was also nagged by a different sort of feeling.

Since this is a book about the history of Srinagar and the city is not just historically rich but also a very politically charged city, I felt that the political side of the city’s history could have been brought out more.

Hamdani talks about history beautifully, especially through architecture, culture, objects, art, poetry and everyday life.

But a reader may have wanted to know more about how the political changes moulded and remoulded the city’s cultural and social textures.

That could have added further dimensions to the history that Hamdani is already telling eloquently.

Overall, City of Kashmir is a beautiful book, especially for someone who wants to know more about Srinagar beyond the usual stories we hear every now and then.

For me, the biggest thing the book did was to make my own surroundings familiar again.

I could walk through a place I had already seen many times and suddenly wonder what happened here before me. I could sit with a cup of chai and reflect on how much of a history is bound within that cup.

I could look at Khanqah-e-Moula and tell myself that I know this place but also that I don’t know it enough.

Maybe that is the best thing a history book can do. It doesn’t just tell you about the past. It makes you look at the present differently.

The author is a final-year undergraduate student with a keen instinct for history, architecture and politics. He loves writing.