Stunning Kashmir James Pembroke
In his gap year, James Pembroke was banned from entering Kashmir. Thirty years on, he was finally allowed in to a heavenly world, rich with memories of Mountbatten, maharajahs and Gandhi
Until last October, I had been waiting to visit Kashmir since I was 18¾. I can be precise about the date because that is when the Indian Vice-consul in Kathmandu refused my school-friend Simon and me re-entry into his native land. It was 1985, the Golden Age of the Gap Year, when recently demobbed schoolboys and girls were encouraged by their indulgent yet distance-seeking parents to go a long way away.
That May, when temperatures in Rajasthan hover around 105F, we had embarked on a six-week tour of India with that lethal combination of optimism and incompetence.
We had braved a 72-hour train
journey from the beaches of Goa, which we had assumed was an island because we arrived by boat, to the mountains of Nepal. We had sat by an open loo all the way, so were not a little tantrum-bound when, on arrival in Kathmandu, we discovered that Everest is always covered in thick fog in early summer.
So we decided to move on to the houseboats of cool Kashmir immediately. Simon, to whom forgiveness is forever denied, had only ticked the single-entry Indian visa box, instead of the one clearly marked ‘multiple entry’. So, when he and I were told we had to apply for a new visa, all the subsumed rage of our disastrous, dysentery-ridden trip exploded.
The poor Vice-consul quite
understandably thought that, having enjoyed 38 years of independence from being ruled by infantile white-skins like us, India could look to a better future without us.
Simon and I spent a week pleading for release from the nightmare that was fogbound Kathmandu. We only just made it to Delhi in time to get back to Blighty.
With every bulletin during subsequent decades declaring that tourists were barred from travelling there, Kashmir became an ever more impossible Xanadu.
My penance might well have been eternal had I not begged my wife, after a fortnight of sightseeing – shopping,
mainly – in Rajasthan, to forego the usual finale on the beaches of Goa or Kerala, in favour of Kashmir.
After the colour bomb of Udaipur, whose lake boasted two Mughal palaces, the drive from Srinagar airport brought back memories of Kathmandu – only there was a far higher number of armed troops lining the streets of closed shops. It was election day, said our driver, Manzour. We quickly became aware that we were practically the only Western tourists on Dal Lake.
Kashmir, the victim of one of the world’s great political errors, has been suffering ever since the rush to partition in 1947. It has swapped hands many times. The Mughals invaded in 1339, introducing Islam, together with its architecture, gardens and crafts, all of which are highly visible today. They held
sway until the 18th century, when the Afghans, under Ahmad Shah Durrani, seized power, only to lose it to the Sikhs in 1819. And 27 years later, after losing the First Anglo-sikh War, they forfeited it to the East India Company after they were unable to pay the extortionate indemnity of 15 million rupees.
We Brits, displaying our natural property developer instincts, promptly flipped Muslim Kashmir to the Raja of Jammu, despite his being a Hindu, for 7.5 million rupees. It was his descendant Hari Singh who initiated the current mess in 1947.
Like other princely rulers whose territories ran close to the Indo-pakistan border, he was given the choice of acceding to either country or heading an independent kingdom. As the Hindu ruler of a Muslim-majority population, Hari Singh was in a fix – so he opted for independence. Within two months, there was an uprising backed by Pashtun tribesmen who marched on Srinagar. Hari Singh called on the Indian government, who refused to help unless he acceded Kashmir to India.
This prompted the First Kashmir War of 1948 between India and Pakistan. The UN resolution allowed them to split the country 60:40 but required a plebiscite to determine its future. That referendum has never been called, and the civilian population has since endured ethnic cleansing, extrajudicial killings and rape, all enabled by India’s 1958 Special Powers Act.
The justification for the military presence is the threat of terrorist attacks; yet there haven’t been many more attacks in Kashmir than in Britain in the past decade. One can’t help suspecting that
the region’s plentiful water supply is what the Indians can’t afford to lose.
Under the oppression of one million troops who are billeted in former hotels and with families, one would understand if the 4.5 million Kashmiris were demoralised and bitter. Yet, ostensibly, they are liberal, ungloomy and welcoming especially to tourists from ‘groovy London’ – their English is delightfully time-warped in the 1960s, when Mick Jagger, George Harrison and assorted groupies set up camp in the houseboats of Dal Lake.
Their nostalgia for those happier times is celebrated in the names of the 500-odd floating hostels: Rolls-royce, Rowallan, Helen of Troy and Prince of Wales among them.
Four hundred years ago, looking up at the mountains, the Mughal Emperor Jahangir saw the lake and proclaimed, ‘If there is a heaven on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here...’
He built the uplifting Shalimar Gardens, near Srinagar, whose terraces and cascading water flights are still beautifully tended, as are all the Mughal gardens, where tulips run riot in the spring.
We spent as much of our five days as we could on Sukoon, our 100ft houseboat, which had just five bedrooms, a great cook and a terrace overlooking the lake and mountains. The peace of this noiseless lake – wonderfully bereft of water-skiers and motorboats – is only mildly interrupted by the flight of lapwings, herons and white kingfishers. Oh, and the calls of the men on sikharas (canoes), selling seeds and bulbs, barbecued fish, and vodka for thirsty, holidaying Indians who imbue chilly Kashmir with the same desire we hold for the sunny Med.
At 6am, we were taken to the floating vegetable market, where local farmers sell their lakeside produce to locals, hotels and restaurants. We were coming down from the high of our shopathon in Rajasthan, so we indulged in another fix, with purchases of Kashmiri saffron and sweet cakes from Mr Delicious.
One seller was only too happy to launch into a full rendition of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins, only to be usurped by my wife at the sixth syllable.
On our final day, the allure of the region’s eponymous product got the better of us, as we came out of the Lalit Grand Palace Hotel, formerly the last Maharajah’s residence, where he met Gandhi and Mountbatten to decide his kingdom’s fate. Right on the banks of the lake is Shaw Brothers, respected purveyors of cashmere rugs, shawls and scarves since 1840.
Hussain Shaw was able to demonstrate the distinct difference in quality between the soft material taken from the undercoat of goats in Kashmir, which were transported to Scotland in the 1980s, and pashmina, which comes from the beards and underbellies of goats living above 4,000m.
Next time you are sweltering in Delhi, take a £25 flight to one of the last places in Asia unblighted by mass tourism. As with Cuba, the dilemma is that the absence of commercialisation is made possible by oppression. And the only chance of that being reduced is by exposure in the shape of many more visits by tourists.
Sukoon Houseboat, doubles from £140 for half board; www.sukoonkashmir.com