Journey
Kashmir
One valley in four layers: stone temples on a colonnaded peristyle plan with no parallel in India, the only sustained history written in Sanskrit, an Islam that grew out of the local ascetic tradition rather than arriving over it, and four crafts that all date their present form from one fifteenth-century sultan.
Stops (22)
- Harwan · 3rd–5th century
Harwan, a terraced Buddhist complex near Srinagar with moulded tile pavements showing figures in Central Asian dress, and an apsidal stupa court. The tiles are the clearest material evidence for the Kashmir and Central Asian Buddhist interface that carried the canon north. The tiles are the clearest material evidence for the Kashmir and Central Asian Buddhist interface that carried the canon north, and the figures on them wear trousers, boots and pointed caps.
- Lalitāditya Muktāpīḍa · 724–760
The Karkota king who, according to Kalhana, campaigned from Bengal to Central Asia and built the Martand temple and the city of Parihasapura. A Tang history records an embassy from a Kashmiri king generally identified with him asking for help against Tibet, so the foreign policy is independently attested. His temples use a colonnaded peristyle and a trefoil arch found in no other Indian style.
- Mārtānd Sun Temple · 8th century
The Martand sun temple on an open plateau above the Jhelum valley, a colonnaded court around a central shrine with trefoil-arched niches and a fluted pediment. It is the fullest surviving statement of the Kashmiri style, and with Amarnath and Sharada one of the three great Pandit sites. It stands roofless, and the plateau it sits on has no other building on it.
- Parihaspora · 8th century
Parihasapura, Lalitaditya's new capital on a plateau above the Jhelum, of which the stupa base, the monastery plinths and enormous cut blocks remain. The city was abandoned within a few reigns, so the site is a Karkota foundation plan with nothing later built over it. The blocks are among the largest used in any Indian building of the period.
- Avantipora temples · late 9th century
Awantipora's two temples, Avantisvamin and Avantisvara, built by Avantivarman, founder of the Utpala line, and buried under flood silt until they were dug out in the 1900s. Being buried is why their ground-level sculpture survives better than Martand's. Avantivarman's engineer Suyya is credited by Kalhana with the drainage works that reclaimed the valley's flooded land, and the temples themselves lay under flood silt for a thousand years before they were dug out.
- Shankaracharya hill, Srinagar · Jyeshtheshwara
The stone temple on the hill above Dal Lake, which Kalhana knows as Jyeshtheshwara and later tradition attached to Adi Shankara's visit. The hill has been called Gopadri, Jyeshtheshwara and Takht-i-Sulaiman in turn and carries a Persian inscription beside the Sanskrit associations — four names and three languages on one outcrop, with the whole valley laid out below it.
- Pandrethan · c. 921
Pandrethan, the small Shiva temple in a tank on the site of Puranadhisthana, the valley's older capital. Its pyramidal roof and carved ceiling are the best-preserved instance of the Kashmiri temple on a small scale, and the water around it is part of the design rather than an accident. Its carved ceiling is the finest small piece of Kashmiri stonework to survive intact.
- Naranag · 8th–9th century
Naranag, a group of stone temples in a high side valley below Harmukh, built in massive dressed blocks with a bathing tank fed by the stream. It is the least disturbed Kashmiri temple group, because it is remote, and it is still the trailhead for the Gangabal pilgrimage. It is still the trailhead for the Gangabal lake pilgrimage every August.
- Kalhaṇa · c. 1149
A Kashmiri Brahmin, son of a minister of King Harsha, who wrote the Rajatarangini — the only sustained work of dynastic history in Sanskrit. He states his method at the outset: to write without love or hatred, from older chronicles, inscriptions, grants and coins. Nothing else is known about his life beyond what the poem itself says, and he is severe about the kings nearest his own time.
- Rājataraṅgiṇī · eight books, c. 1149
Kalhana's history of the kings of Kashmir in nearly eight thousand verses, which judges its rulers rather than praising them and names villages, canals and temples precisely enough to be surveyed. Stein's 1900 translation and topographical commentary is still the tool for locating Kashmiri sites. Almost everything known about the Karkota and Utpala dynasties comes from this one book, and its early books are legendary and unusable.
- Shāradā Peeth · the older seat
Sharada Peeth on the Neelum, a ruined temple and monastic site counted among the Shakta pithas and a seat of learning substantial enough that the Sharada script is named for it. Al-Biruni names it among the most visited Hindu shrines of his day, and Kashmiri scholars signed themselves as having studied there. It has been across the Line of Control since 1947.
- Kheer Bhawani, Tulmulla · the spring
Kheer Bhawani at Tulmulla, the shrine of Ragnya Devi built over a hexagonal spring in a grove of chinars, and the most important goddess site of the Kashmiri Pandits. Milk and kheer are poured into the spring itself and no animal is killed. The water is said to change colour, and a blackish cast is read as a warning.
- Lal Ded · 14th century
Lal Ded, whose vakhs are the earliest substantial Kashmiri literature and are quoted by Pandits and Muslims alike. She left her husband's house, went about barely clothed, and produced a body of verse that is Shaiva in vocabulary and indistinguishable in idiom from what the Rishi order wrote a generation later.
- Nund Rishi · d. 1438
Nund Rishi, founder of the Kashmiri Rishi order, whose shruks are recited across the valley and who claimed Lal Ded as his predecessor. The Rishi shrines are the reason Kashmiri Islam is usually described as having grown out of the valley rather than arriving in it — an ascetic tradition that changed its vocabulary and kept its practice.
- Charār-e-Sharīf · burned 1995, rebuilt
Nund Rishi's shrine at Charar-i-Sharief, a wooden building of the fifteenth century and one of the great timber structures of the Himalaya, which burned down in May 1995 during a siege between militants and the army, along with much of the town. It has been rebuilt, and both Muslims and Pandits attended it before 1990.
- Hazratbal Shrine, Srinagar · the relic
Hazratbal on the Dal, which holds a hair of the Prophet brought to Kashmir in the seventeenth century, and the only domed marble mosque in a valley that otherwise builds in wood. The relic's disappearance in December 1963 and its recovery weeks later produced the largest mass demonstrations the valley had seen, and is generally read as the beginning of modern Kashmiri politics.
- Jamia Masjid, Srinagar · founded 1394
The Jamia Masjid at Srinagar, on three hundred and seventy deodar columns each cut from a single tree, around an open courtyard with chinars in it — a square plan with four arched entrances and pyramidal roofs, closer to the valley's own shrine architecture than to anything in the plains. Friday prayers here have been a political event for six centuries.
- Mughal Gardens of Kashmir · 1620s onward
The Mughal gardens — Shalimar, Nishat, Chashma Shahi, Achabal, Verinag — terraced down the slopes above the Dal and fed by the springs behind them. They are hydraulic before they are horticultural: each one takes an existing spring, several of them already sacred, and gives it an architecture of channels, tanks and pavilions.
- Kani shawl weaving and pashmina · two years on a loom
The kani shawl, woven not with a shuttle but with dozens of small wooden kanis each carrying one colour, worked from a coded chart called a talim that a reader calls out to the weavers. The wool is pashm combed from Changthangi goats on the Ladakh plateau and carried three hundred kilometres over the passes to be spun in Srinagar.
- Srinagar papier-mâché and khatamband · from the 15th century
Papier-mâché and khatamband, brought from Persia by way of Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin, whom Kashmiris call Budshah: paper pulp moulded, lacquered and painted in fine brushwork, and geometric ceilings of small deodar pieces cut to interlock without nails or glue. A khatamband ceiling can be taken apart and reassembled, which houseboats have been doing for a century.
- Baramulla · the only gap
Baramulla, Varahamula, where the Jhelum leaves the valley through its one natural gap — which made it the gateway for everything for two thousand years, including Xuanzang in the seventh century, the Mughal road from Lahore, and in October 1947 the tribal column whose days spent sacking the town are why Srinagar was not taken before Indian troops landed.
- Red Fort, Muzaffarabad · 1559, and 1947
The road out of the valley, and where the line fell. The fort stands on the bend where the Neelum — the Kishanganga once it has crossed the ceasefire line — meets the Jhelum, begun by the Chak rulers of Kashmir in 1559 against Mughal pressure and rebuilt by the Bomba chiefs in 1646, then held by the Dogras until 1947. In October that year tribal fighters entering from the frontier took the town, the Maharaja acceded to India in response, and this became a border post. The 2005 earthquake brought down much of what stood.