TALES OF DOWNTOWN
A book on the mundane facets of mid20th century life in the author’s home town
For the past nine years, Zahid G Mohammad has been writing a column entitled ‘Nostalgia’ in the Greater Kashmir newspaper. In his columns, he attempts to reconstruct the politico-cultural history of old Srinagar, where he was born, simply by writing about the mundane facets of mid-20th century life in the city. Two collections of these columns have appeared so far: Srinagar: My City, My Dreamland and Srinagar, The City of Resistance and Culture: Story of Downtown Boy. In the summer of 1968, Khana-e-Khuda (The House of God), a film about the Hajj pilgrimage, was screened at Shiraz theatre in Srinagar. To make it fit for the screening, the theatre was sacralised by giving it a bath. It was also probably for the first time that patriarchy didn’t stifle women’s enthusiasm to visit a movie house. The author recalls watching people cry merely by seeing posters of the film because only a few people could afford the pilgrimage in those days. The government had exempted the film from entertainment tax, schools were directed to take the children to the theatre, and special shows were organized in schools and colleges. Today, Shiraz is a CRPF camp. Vignettes like these make the two collections interesting. Zahid wants to underscore the singularity of the experience of growing up in one of the least studied cultures in the world - Downtown Srinagar. In these columns one detects the anxiety of a writer who frets that if he were not to pen down his experiences, nobody else would because children are not taught their own history in Kashmir’s schools.
Walking distance from Zahid’s native place in old Srinagar are Sufi shrines, the Mughal-era Jamia Masjid, the tomb of Sultan Budshah, clusters where master craftsmen make traditional Kashmiri crafts, a Pathan-era fort, and a now-extinct water canal where people would take a boat ride to Dal Lake. This area was and remains the hotbed of politics and Zahid’s columns encompass all its richness.
Two miles from the author’s native place, some two dozen shawl weavers, who were protesting against harsh taxes, were drowned after the maharaja’s cavalry ran over them on a narrow bridge. This was probably the first workers’ rebellion in the subcontinent. A few historians have mentioned the massacre but it did not become part of the collective consciousness. Zahid’s collections preserve such precarious memories. The columns would be boring if Zahid didn’t bring them alive with digressions that explain burning issues of the present. While recollecting how exam results were declared out loud at morning assembly and how happy kids ran home to break the news, the author takes a detour to reminisce about how, at dusk in summer and autumn, boys would break into sloganeering at the sight of flocks of birds.
Kawa yenwoel, Mirdadun byoel khodayan gole/Kawa yenwoel, Kripun byoel khodayan gole (Listen, the assembly of crows, may God wipe out the progeny of Mirdad and Kripa)
Mirdad Khan, an Afghan governor, and Kripa Ram, a dewan of a Dogra Maharaja, were notorious for enforcing harsh diktats during cruel eras in Kashmir history. In a strife-torn place, such slogans linger and pop up at the unlikeliest moments. These volumes bring to life an era when small groups of charas smokers (shodas) had their own sanctuaries called shoda taqi ,a sort of opium bar (Shodas were looked upon as kind Sufi-spirited men and were served wazwan on special occasions); when a cyclist called Afsar Khan cycled non-stop for a week in a tent (People named their kids ‘Afsar’ (officer). The contemporary situation in Kashmir finds resonance in the chapter entitled ‘Children of Resistance’ from the more recent volume. There were stone throwers even half-acentury ago. One, a girl named Syeda in the author’s mohalla, “threw stones at police from the attic of her home”.
“Many boys were envious of her”.