Place · valley gateway town · India
Baramulla
Also known as Baramulla, Varahamula, Varmul, Baramula
Varahamula, the boar's molar, where the Jhelum leaves the valley through its only natural gap — which made it the gateway to Kashmir for everything and everyone for two thousand years, including the Mughal road from Lahore and the trade road to Rawalpindi.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.198, 74.364
Worth knowing
Xuanzang entered the valley through it in the seventh century and Kalhana treats it as the valley's door. The 1947 invasion came through it too: the tribal column that crossed from Pakistan took Baramulla on 26 October, and the days lost sacking the town are generally held to be why Srinagar was not taken before Indian troops landed.
Connections (2)
- Trade routeKani shawl weaving and pashmina
Shawls left the valley through the Baramulla gap and went down to Amritsar, Lahore and the Company ports, and European demand from the 1780s turned a court cloth into a fashion. The mechanical imitation woven at Paisley then took both the trade and the name, so a Scottish town is called after a Kashmiri pattern and a Kashmiri industry was destroyed by a loom.
- Route adjacencyTakshashilā / Taxila
Baramulla is the only natural gap in the ring of mountains around the Kashmir valley, so everything entered through it: Xuanzang in the seventh century on the road from Taxila, the Mughal highway from Lahore, the trade road to Rawalpindi, and in October 1947 the tribal column whose days spent sacking the town are why Srinagar was not taken before Indian troops landed.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Baramulla”. Kalhana, Rājataraṅgiṇī; Xuanzang, Da Tang Xiyu Ji; V.P. Menon, The Story of the Integration of the Indian States (1956).
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