Place · valley lake · India
Dal Lake, Srinagar
Also known as Dal, Dal Lake, Srinagar Lake
The eighteen-square-kilometre urban lake at the heart of Srinagar, divided by causeways into four basins — Gagribal, Lokut Dal, Bod Dal and Nagin — and ringed by Mughal gardens on its eastern shore and the city on its western. Floating vegetable gardens on the lake and houseboats introduced under British rule when Kashmiri rulers forbade them from owning land, together make it one of the most inhabited lakes in the world. The present shoreline bears the signatures of successive rulers: Zain-ul-Abidin's fifteenth-century shrines, the Mughal charbaghs of Jahangir, the Dogra Shankaracharya rebuild and the twentieth-century houseboat industry.
- Function
- Landscape & environmental change
- River basin
- Jhelum
- Tradition
- Kalhana's Rajatarangini on the valley lakes; Mughal garden sources; Lakes and Waterways Development Authority of Kashmir reports.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 34.122, 74.853
Worth knowing
The houseboat convention began in the 1880s when Kashmir's Dogra administration forbade non-Kashmiris from buying land in the valley, so British visitors to the summer court lived on water instead. The lake has been shrinking under encroachment, sewage and weed since the 1980s — about forty per cent of its area is lost since the mid-twentieth century — and the clean-up has run as a continuous political issue through conservation plans. From the water the Shankaracharya hill and the Hari Parbat fort frame the view.
Connections (1)
- Site withinSrinagar
Dal Lake is the central landscape fact of Srinagar — eighteen square kilometres of water inside the city, with houseboats on its western edge and the Mughal gardens on its eastern. Every ruler of Kashmir from the Sultanate onward has marked the lake, and the city's old quarters, its summer palaces, its new airport and the ongoing shoreline conservation debates all reference it. Srinagar is unimaginable without the lake and the lake has no meaning outside Srinagar.