Folk tales from Kashmir by S.L. Sadhu,1962

Almost seventy five years after Rev. John Hinton Knowles came out with his famous collection of Kashmiri folk tales, in 1962, S.L. Sadhu, came out with a new collection of Kashmiri folktales that had some old popular stories, like ‘Himal and Nagrai’, ‘Akanandun’, ‘Shabrang’ and ‘Musa – Kapas’ (interestingly, a cousin recently informed me that a version of this famous Kashmiri folktale was published in popular Indian Children’s magazine Target in 1980s with phrase ‘Musa – Kapas’ replaced with ‘Kong – Posh’) and then it had some new stories too. While Knowles told these stories like an Orientalist, with extensive notes and with an eye for origins of the tales, in a language that was at times too pedantic, S.L. Sadhu seems to have written the same stories with a sense of enjoy, a joy that might have been felt while hearing these stories in person, on cold dark night, curled up in bed, holding on to a Kangri, doing Shalfa with family. The Kashmiri in these stories does not come across as a specimen compiled by an Orientalist for study. Kashmiri in these stories comes across more strongly. And the language is what would now qualify for ‘Indian English’ with its seemingly strange use of phrases (the kind that makes western readers throw fits).

The book is also interesting as it also ties to add some new folktales to the Kashmiri literary space. Thus we have a story like ‘The Hydra-Headed’: they say a mysterious monstrous creature now infests waters of Jhelum, it is devouring unsuspecting people, waters are dangerous. The story is about the way news used to float around Srinagar. We are offered various sound-bites from the city-folks about this monster.
As we near these sounds, a picture of Kashmri society – imagined, dreamed -around 1960s and not from early 1900 when this news about a ‘man-eating crocodile’ was in fact doing the rounds of the city, an incident recorded by Tyndale Biscoe and a imaginary beast slayed by ‘Biscoe Boys’ by swimming en-mass in the river. S.L. Sadhu, a former student of C.M.S. Biscoe School, was probably paying tribute to his school in that tale.

Reading S.L. Sadhu’s collection along with the book from Knowles actually broadens the space of Folk tales in Kashmir. Sadhu wrote these stories with young readers in mind. The book embellished with some wonderful sketches by Mohan Ji Raina.

It is a shame that while the book by Knowles is still in print and easily available both offline and online, S.L. Sadhu’s book is not so easy to find.

I came across the book recently at Digital Library of India and converted it to pdf format for easy reading.

 

[Download Here]
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Happy Valley in pen and pencil, 1907

Illustrations from ‘A Holiday in the Happy Valley with pen and pencil’ (1907) by Major T. R Swinburne.
 

Bund

Circular Road, Gulmarg

Dal

Gangbal

Harmukh

View of Hari Parbat

Srinagar

Jhelum Bank

Kolahoi

Lidarwat

Nanga Parbat from Kitardaji (6000 feet, near Baramulla)

Doonga

Nishat

Dal

Jhelum

Pandrethan 

Pir Panjal from Alsu (??)

Ramparts of Kashmir

Srinagar

Srinagar Flooded

Tronkol

way to kashmir

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17 tomatoes : tales from Kashmir by Jaspreet Singh

17 tomatoes : tales from Kashmir by Jaspreet Singh
First published 2004. 
Publisher : IndiaInk (2006)
Rs. 225

It is one of those book in which something really strange happens exactly on page 30. In this one, an ageing Sardarji who is about to Umpire an India-Pakistan cricket match in Srinagar gets kidnapped by a bunch of veiled Kashmiri women who want him make India win so that a vengeful Army does not destroy their homes in case India loses. The episode ends with Sardarji getting fatally hit by a ball to his head and the match ending in an nail-biting towards an Indian win, a win decided by the dying man trying to save his recently one eared daughter. This is just one of the many strange tales told in this book about two Sikh boys growing up in an Army camp.

The stories draw on the time tested formula of telling ‘growing-up’ stories and ‘Kashmir’. So we have spin-offs on events that really happened, in this case Kargil war, The Cricket match, the ‘milk-guzzling-Ganesh’, (and I suspect Top Gun?) things like that. For Kashmir, we have silent un-speaking Kashmiris and we have Kashmiris who have strange view of the world, which include its poets. There was a time when no book on Kashmir could be published without a line or two from Thomas Moore. It seems that literary space have now been accorded to our very own Agha Shahid Ali. So we have a tale about a captured Pakistani ISI Intelligence officer and an Indian Intelligence officer, his interrogator,  both lovers of  Shahid. And in between the author pays tribute to master story-tellers. Author does a little number on Manto – in one of the stories, in a obvious allusion to a Manto story, we have a bewda Major named Manto who is haunted by thoughts of his run-away wife.  Then there are tales that are inspired by Rushdie’s work – there are passages that offer what seems to be magic realism, or it’s just that the realities offered here are just oddly unrecognizable as they unfold in Kashmir that is almost unrecognizable (even the geography of it) in these tales. (What would one call a pregnant woman who develops a fetish for jumping down from hill tops. A parachute aunty). Oddly enough when the action shifts to Indian plane, even though the oddness continues, the canvas on which they unfold become recognizable with all their madness and violence.

Strange set of stories, almost like ‘The Wonder Years’ meets ‘The Twilight Zone’ meets Kashmir meets India. Nah…I exaggerate. Just another book on Kashmir. But this one about two Sikh boys growing up in an Army camp. And yet a happy read because the writer has deliberately kept things simple. The real problem is that as not all these tales were written originally to be part of a single tale, reading them together is a bit confusing, if for no other reason, just the timeline of the stories.

P.S. I like the fact that in one of the stories that old villain of Kashmiri women, Victor Jacquemont is made butt of a joke. How did he get away with saying something like this, ‘In Kashmir, my friend, I find it difficult to disrobe and make love until I have satisfactorily explained to my beloved Kepler’s laws of planetary motion.’ But to be fair, in this particular case Jacquemont was making a fool of himself by talking about a French actress named Mademoiselle Schiasetti.

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Archaeological Remains In Kashmir by Pandit Anand Koul, 1935

Part 1 of this old book lists the various ancient Hindu shrine spots of Kashmir along with their contentious history (most of these places are already forgotten and so, not so contentious anymore).

Part 2 lists all the Gardens of Kashmir, not just the bog famous ones but almost all the gardens ever built in Kashmir during Mughal time). Anand Koul argues that C.M. Villiers Stuart’s ‘Gardens of the Great Mughals’ (1913) ( posted earlier here for easy reading) had only scratched the surface and that the history of these gardens had a deeper link with the locals and were not just a result of Mughal passion of Gardens. I believe these two works, one by Anand Koul and the other by C.M. Villiers Stuart, together cover all that you ever wanted to know about history of Kashmiri Gardens.

[Download and Google Doc link for sharing: HERE]
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Came across the book at Digital Library of India. It was available in a difficult to browse and read format, needed all kind of plug-ins and what not, so I converted the book to pdf format and uploaded it here for easy consumption. Happy reading!

Sketches of Happy Valley, 1879

Illustrations from ‘The Happy Valley: Sketches of Kashmir & the Kashmiris’ by W. Wakefield (1879)

Fateh Kadal,  the third bridge

Shah Hamadan

View of Anantnag town

Marble Pavilion, Shalimar

Martand

Shankrachraya Temple

Sind Valley between Sonamarg and Baltal

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who spends the summer wandering in Kashmir

wanderers in Gulmarg. 2008.

To feel the cool breeze on a body
covered with drops of perspiration;
to taste the water, cold and clear,
in a mouth all parched with thirst;
after travelling far, to rest
the tired limbs beneath the shade:
blessed indeed is one who spends
the summer wandering in Kashmir

~ Bhatta Bana, Sanskrit stylist in court of King Harsha of 7th Century CE, Kannauj.

Came across it in ‘Subhashitavali: An Anthology of Comic, Erotic and Other Verse’, translated from the Sanskrit Subhashitavali of Vallabhadeva (fifteenth-century CE, Kashmir ) by A. N. D. Haksar.

Kshemendra Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir by A. N. D. Haksar

‘Victory to that lord supreme,
the illustrious bureaucrat,
infalliable, who can at will
delude the whole world with deceptions’

~Narma Mala, Satire 1

‘This humbug is a scoundrel in search of prestige and recognition. Indifferent to merit, he will fawn on those without it. Hostile to his own kin, he will exude fraternal compassion for outsiders. He is also pitiless. With bowed head, he will be all sweetness when it suits him. But once his purpose is served, he will only wrinkle his brow and say nothing.’
[…]
Hambug seemed upset at having to wait for long. He fixed his gaze on his progenitor and the god’s lotus throne, and stood proud and motionless, as if impaled on a spear. The four-headed god realized that the newcomer wished to be seated. His teeth gleaming in a smile, as if at his carrier, the swan, he said kindly,’Son, sit in my lap. You are worthy of it by virtue of the dignity that your great and remarkable austerity and other merits have given you.’
On hearing these words, hambug carefully sprinkled water on the creator god’s lap to purify it, and quickly sat upon it.’Do not speak loudly,’ he said to the god,’and if you have to, please cover your mouth with your hand so that your breath does not touch me.’ Brahma smiled at this unparalleled concern for ritual purity. ‘ Hambug you certainly are!’ he said with a wave of his hand. ‘Arise. Go to the sea-gridled earth and enjoy pleasures unknown even to the denizens of heaven.’

~Kalavilasa, Satire 2

Victory to the Heramba!
The ten directiond smile, lit up
by the brilliant radiance
of the playful raising of his tusk,
slender as lotus.
And victory to the courtesan,
lightning in the clouds of vice;
to libertines, the thespians
in the artful play of crookery;
and to that river of deception,
the procuress, whose forceful current
sweeps away, like trees, the people.

Desopadesa, Advice from the Countryside, Satire 3

More about the eleventh century CE funny guy from Kashmir:

‘Kshemendra’s work was earlier known only from quotations in some anthologies and a refrence in the Rajatarangini. In modern times, its first manuscript was discovered by A.C. Burnell, at Tanjore, in 1871. This was the Brihatkathamanjari, the abridgement of the lost work [of Gunadhya’s] already mentioned. In the succeeding half-century Indologists G. Buhler, A. Stein, B. Peterson, S.C. Das and M.S. Kaul located manuscripts of his other works, at different times, mainly in Kashmir. So far, eighteen of these have been found, and their texts edited and printed. Another sixteen are known, at least by title, from reference or quotations in the discovered texts, but still remain lost.’

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It is tempting but wrong to see present in past. To read these ancient sketches, to see the scene in front of you and go, ‘Indeed nothing has changed.’  Even if it is not the intention, the work for the troubled place of its origin, and the way it is presented in this book, the translated words of this ancient Kashmiri does seem to offer the bitter sweet pill of present coated in past. The book runs a little trick on simple readers, casual book-self browsers. Trick, the cover say’s ‘Three Satires from Ancient Kashmir’ but inside you find one of the satires, Kalavilasa, the one in which Muladeva, the king of thieves describes the ways of swindlers of the world, was in fact set in Ujjayani, near present Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh. The blurb on the last page claims, ‘these little-known exposes of eleventh-century society find resonance in India even today.’ If sketch of  bureaucrats, scribes, gurus, traders, and the all thieves of the world in Kshemendra’s writing be true, be still relevant, then what about his sketch of women, his blood sucking witches. who make a man ‘struct and dance like a pet peacock.’ While Kshemendra’s sketch of men may still be acceptable, identifiable, to today’s Shabhya people, but probably not his sketch of women and ‘their ways’. No cultured man will quote Kshemendra to score a point in a debate on ‘women’s liberation’. This is not ancient times. There has been progress.  We live in modern age. We…

‘A Nit-picking man. One of the many hambugs infesting Kal-yug. Listen, stop scratching your bum, wondering what-this-what-that, you Kashmiri bum, trader of black-ink, dweller of ivory island. You have to run down one of your own. Look around, ask the man on street what he thinks of ‘women and their ways’. The man pours his heart and piss on walls of public urinals. Don’t be surprised if he says the same sundry things that I wrote a thousand years ago. Just read me in translation. Me in translation by a bureaucrat and marvel. ‘

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