It has taken me a long time to get over Srinagar.\u00a0 Even though we crossed the Himalayas and moved from the green \u00a0Sind Valley to the arid lunar-scape of Ladakh, I still found myself thinking about Srinagar.\u00a0 Srinagar is a very Moslem place.\u00a0 It was (and still is) Ramadan, and the muezzin called across the river every morning.\u00a0 There is a kind of intensity and urgency to the place; our hosts want to engage with us, to talk politics, fundamentalism, what is was like to go through the last 18 years when thousands died.\u00a0 They want to engage.<\/p>\n
In a piece in an old Granta on India, James Buchan writes of his visit to Srinagar in 1997.\u00a0 The place he finds is a shadow of its former self.\u00a0 It is an occupied territory.<\/p>\n
Srinagar, the chief town of Kashmir with about half a million inhabitants, sits at the western end of the lake.\u00a0 It was always a place quite unlike any other, Old British guidebooks compare it with Venice \u2013 and the valley with the Southern Tyrol, but to paddle through its canals at sundown between rotten wooden buildings and sagging houseboats aground in the filthy mud is to feel far from Italy.\u00a0 The mosques have corrugated-iron roofs and canopied minarets that might have been designed in Iran but fabricated in Tibet\u2026This phantasmagoric city, an unimaginable mixture of Istafan, Lhasa, Sunningdale and the Underworld, which seemed to me on earlier visits to be suspended for ever in its particularity, has altered out of recognition.\u00a0 No doubt all famous cities should be imagined in their ruin.<\/em><\/p>\n That was long ago.\u00a0 Stability has returned, and the place is full of shikaras ferrying Indians from the South\u00a0 around the lake to escape the terrible heat. The Indians stop in the middle and don bright red and green costumes to have their picture taken, presumably in some kind of re-enactment of the days of the Maharajah. We see an odd boat of pale Germans off to buy pashminas.<\/p>\n There are still plenty of police around.\u00a0 More than we have ever seen in our lives. They have large guns and moustaches.<\/p>\n Boats pull up at our houseboat to sell us jewellery, to hem our clothes, to show us old postcards.\u00a0 The man selling postcards has been doing this since he was a child.\u00a0 I press him for more old photos.\u00a0 He returns the next day.<\/p>\n It is beautiful on the lake, but it is a bracketed beauty, inherited from the long history of the lake as an image.\u00a0 It is a surface beauty. \u00a0I have to work hard to ignore the rubbish floating in the lake, the plastic bottles and empty crisp packets.\u00a0 I try not to worry about the thick green weed choking the water, or about the lack of environmental consciousness of all and sundry. \u00a0I have a mild bout of stomach cramps.<\/p>\n Our boat is old and in desperate need of being dragged into the 21 century.\u00a0 Our hosts are attentive, ever-present.\u00a0 They have brought their lovely mother in to cook, thinking that we need English food (which I call Pashmiri cuisine, a strange mixture of 1950s Pommie and Kashmiri).\u00a0 We tell them we like Indian food, Kashmiri food.<\/p>\n There are no coffee shops.\u00a0 We buy a beer from a fallen Kashmiri, who everyone knows sells all kinds of illicit wares.\u00a0 Later we hear he was arrested.<\/p>\n From Leh we read in the paper that thousands of fish have died in the Lake.\u00a0 A mysterious death, the newspaper says, but there are no real mysteries when you see the choked wetland and the dubious waste management.<\/p>\n Srinagar is recovering, but it needs to be challenged by visitors who ask for more of this place; more of its rich and diverse openness to influence.\u00a0 Less of the same, more of the different.<\/p>\n Josephine<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It has taken me a long time to get over Srinagar.\u00a0 Even though we crossed the Himalayas and moved from the green \u00a0Sind Valley to the arid lunar-scape of Ladakh, I still found myself thinking about Srinagar.\u00a0 Srinagar is a very Moslem place.\u00a0 It was (and still is) Ramadan, and the muezzin called across the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-josie"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2Afwe-ab","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":634,"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions\/634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josephinewilson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}