‘Across the roof of the world; a record of sport and travel through Kashmir, Gilgit, Hunza, the Pamirs, Chinese Turkistan, Mongolia and Siberia’ (1911) by Percy Thomas Etherton.
Changing Tangas on the road to Srinagar
A waterway in Srinagar
Tragbal Pass
Ravine in Gilgit Valley
Minimerg
Telegraph station buried in Snow at Minimerg
A summer view of the valley leading to the Burzil Pass
It is comical that the format of writing such pieces is still the same and has been well adopted by the freshest set of Kashmiri pundit diaspora. There are the Aryans and there are our esteemed ancestors.
“Kashmiri Brahmans – The usual surnames of the Kashmir Brahmans is Pandit. The following observations in Sir George Campbell’s Ethnology of India give an exact description of their ethnology and character :-
The Kashmiri Brahmans are quite High Aryan in the type of their features, very fair and handsome, with high chiselled features,
and no trace of intermixture of the blood of any lower race. ***The Kashmiri Pandits are known all over Northern India as a
very clever and energetic race of office-seekers. As a body they excel the same numbers of any other race with whom they come in
contact.- Ethnology of India, pp. 57-50.
The late Mr. Justice Sambhu Nath Pandit of the Bengal High Court was a member of this class. So was also the late Pandit Ayodhya Nath, who was one of the ablest advocates of the Allahabad High Court, and ‘also one of the principal leaders of the Congress.
Babu Gobind Prasad Pandit, who was one of the pioneers of the coal mining industry of Bengal, was also a Kashmiri. He amassed such wealth by the success of his enterprise, that he became known as one of the richest men in the country in his lifetime, and,
after his death, his descendants obtained the title of Maharaja from the Government of India.”
~ ‘Hindu Castes and Sects. An Exoisition of the origin of the Hindu Caste System and the Bearing of the Sects towards each other and towards other religious Systems’ (1896) by Jogendra Nath Bhattacharya.
Mask of the Dalai Lama descending the temple steps, Hemis,
Leh
Leh Bazaar
Kanjut Valley near Kyber
Kafirs. (From Kafiristan. The so called ‘cannibals’. In one incident given in this book, this group of ‘Kafirs’ comes across as people who were capable of taking that title and play joke upon other people based on their dietary notoriety.
Hunza Envoy
Hunza Raja’s Band
Hunza Castle and Town
Raft of inflated Skins, Kapalu
The Devil Dance, Hemis.
Hamis Monastery.
The Mystery Play, Hemis
Baltis.
From what I have heard these folks were never treated humanely in Srinagar.
Kashmiri man caught singing Bumbro Bumbro, Shyam Rang Bumbro, just the refrain, ad infinitum, at 6:00 in the morning while carrying loads of vegetables on his back working in the bustling Sabzi Mandi of Jammu.
The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir
Sudha Koul
Beacon Press (2002)
The book is about a woman born in Kashmir, about growing up in the happy valley, about working in acursed dry plains of India and about getting older in blessed America remembering Kashmir. It is diasporic writing. It’s about endings. It’s about women making new beginnings. It is women’s diasporic writing. It is about ‘Tiger Ladies’ to make these beginnings. It is about grandmothers, mothers and daughters. In a way it is about the past, the present, the future. When not a memoir it is a lyrical elegy to a world that is gone. And yet it celebrates life and the strange women that make life possible. A magical world occupied by women who have midnight baths in chilling water to conceive children. A world where women tell stories of a sad god-woman whose husband offered her only guilty sex and mother complex instead of love. O yes, this writing is done with an alien reader in mind, so we have a really ‘modern’ and yet magical re-telling of the life story of Rupa Bhavani (1620-1721). It is about stories like that. About the undercurrents, about the flooding and the resettlement. The class divisions, the economic divisions, the religious difference and everything else, in true Kashmiri tradition, is alluded to without any clear spelling out of chasms. Nehru and Indira and the famous family planning scheme of her son make an appearance and probably sum up ‘India’ experience in the book. The picture of ‘Kashmir as it was’ that gets painted which almost all of Kashmiri diaspora may find identifiable: the paradise that it was. Everything in the writing almost makes sense. is convincing and beautiful. By the end of it when some woman like Ayesha Andrabi is included in list of Tiger Ladies, you are convinced of the book’s underlying theme of woman as harbingers of new beginning and as custodians of past.
I liked the book, the stories that women tell are always interesting, do read it for the nostalgia. It just that after reading this book I read two Kashmiri short stories that made Sudha Koul’s memoir all the more interesting as these two stories offered a parallel image of good ol’Kashmir. We keep reading about how in old days woman on a Kashmiri street has nothing to fear, that people were nice and respectful. Trukunjal (A New Triangle) by Rattan Lal Shant is a sort of love story set in Kashmir of what can be guessed to be late 1970s or the 1980s. In an incident presented in the story, a woman has her cloths torn off by a mob even as her husband tries to be a ‘hero’ beating a tongawalla who tried to make a pass on his wife. Pagah (Tomorrow?) written in late 1970s by Hari Krishen Kaul tells the funny sad story of two Kashmiri boys, two friends, a Pandit and a Muslim, who successfully manage to fail every year at school and hence stay in the same class of their government school for almost two decades dreading tomorrow because they would have to go to school again. As a kid, the pandit boy used to gawk at a ‘convent going’ pandit girl who later goes on to marry a nice pandit boy while our two foolhardy protagonist still worry about tomorrow. Sudha Koul’s book is in many ways about the world of that ‘convent girl’ who went on to be the first woman Kashmiri IAS officer.
He is nowhere, he is nowhere,
Don’t look hither and thither,
Under this tree, there is no root,
If you are awake, do look.
~ Rupa Bhavani (1620-1721) – The lady, more famous for riding tigers and turning into ball of light at night much to the horror of her husband and mother-in-law, famous for floating down a mat on Jhelum river preaching difference between silver, gold and pearls to a Muslim missionary, was also a poet.
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“The language is archaic; there are double and occasionally more meanings to what she said. The expressions are obscure, unintelligible, mystical and esoteric. The devotees, afraid to incur the saint’s displeasure, refuse to explain the sacred secrets; probably they themselves know precious little of what they recite or contemplate in blind admiration. “
~ Prem Nath Bazaz writing on Rupa Bhavani’s Vakhs in his book Daughters of Vitasta.