Record-Keeper of Kashmir’s Pictorial History
Chance sight of an old photograph inspired an engineer to build a huge archive of historical images.
Khalid Bashir Ahmad
Nostalgic Kashmir, a collection of rare photographs portraying hundred years of the Valley’s life and times since 1850 AD, owned by Showkat Rashid Wani and his son, Wasim Wani, has come up with its annual calendar for 2023. The initiative is an innovative step to generate awareness about Kashmir’s past through images. Over the years, the father-son duo has built an amazingly rich collection of photographs, covering almost all shades of Kashmir and its people, which were on display at several exhibitions in Srinagar held in recent years. The first Nostalgic Kashmir calendar was published in 2008.
The Wanis started bringing out annual calendars as a medium to popularize their pictorial wealth and, at the same time, create awareness about Kashmir’s past. That year, they published a calendar based on some historic photographs with an introductory note about each image. The calendar was well received by Kashmir lovers, inspiring a repeat in the next year. There onwards, it turned out to be a regular feature until 2014 when the activity was disrupted for four years due to the Great Flood that ravaged the Srinagar City and also consumed the Wanis’ treasure-trove which then comprised 4500 plus images stored in 85 steel trunks on the ground floor of their house. Like thousands of other buildings in different parts of Srinagar, the house remained inundated for about two weeks after the vastly swollen Jhelum breached at several places in the city during the night intervening 7 and 8 September. Fortunately, soft backups of all but 429 photographs were saved, minimizing the enormity of the loss. It took them four year’s hard work to rebuild the collection and also substantially add to it.
The Wanis were able to resume publication of the calendar in 2018. However, in 2019, there was another disruption for two years, first, due to an uncertain situation caused by the imposition of prolonged curfew and snapping of telephony and internet services following the abrogation of Article 370, and then, outbreak of Covid-19. In 2021, instead of a printed calendar, an e-calendar with limited print copies was issued which was repeated in 2022 and this year. The 2023 calendar, a complimentary copy of which was delivered to me by post last Tuesday, carries, besides a cover picture of Old Bridge at Ganderbal clicked in 1913, twelve photographs including of Amira Kadal (1862), Hazratbal Shrine (1877), CMS School, Fateh Kadal (1901), Garhi Dak Bungalow (1907), Durgjan area (1910), Koh-i-Mara’n (1913), Shadipore- Sumbal (1918), Srinagar City (1925), Jhelum in Winter (1929), Shali Store or Supplies Department (1940), Banihal Cart Road (1941) and Gulmarg (1942).
The coming into being of Nostalgic Kashmir is an interesting story. In 1996, Showkat Rashid Wani shifted his residence from uptown Batmaloo to a newly purchased house at Shopore, a locality in Srinagar sitting in the loop of the Jhelum River upstream of Sonawar. The house was previously owned by the Diwans, a Dogra ruling elite family from Jammu. As he was taking a round of the premises, Wani noticed three framed photographs hanging on the wall of an annexe next to the house. One picture depicting the coronation procession of Maharaja Hari Singh, the last Dogra ruler of undivided Jammu & Kashmir, held on 29 March 1926 at his Mubarak Mandi Palace, Jammu, immediately caught his eye. The new ruler had succeeded his uncle, Maharaja Pratap Singh, who had died on 23 September 1925 without a male issue. For the coronation ceremony, filmed by Eastman Kodak, Hari Singh wore jewels worth $20 million (approximately $292,400,000 in today’s value).
The photograph inspired Wani to collect old photographs of Kashmir, and, over a period, he built a treasure-trove of historical images representing different walks of life in the Valley. Today, he is a pride possessor of about fifteen thousand photographs, related mostly to the Dogra rule (1846–1947). The Dogra rule was established in the Muslim majority Kashmir in the wake of the infamous Treaty of Amritsar executed on 16 March 1846 between the British East India Company and Gulab Singh of Jammu under which the former sold to the latter the Valley in lieu of 75 lakh Nanak Shahi rupees. The Treaty followed the defeat of the Sikhs, who then also ruled Kashmir, in the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1846. Since the vanquished Sikhs were not in a position to pay the war indemnity, Gulab Singh came forward, offered the money and, as a trophy, got ownership of Kashmir with its inhabitants and resources.
Born in 1950 to a prominent political family of Batmaloo, Showkat Rashid Wani is an electrical engineer by training who retired as Jammu & Kashmir’s Development Commissioner Power in 2008. He had completed his degree of Bachelor of Engineering in 1971 from the Regional Engineering College, Srinagar (now the National Institute of Technology). He is also in tourism business and owns a hotel, Madhuban, located on the banks of the famed Dal Lake, at Gagribal.
Starting with just three photographs, Wani’s hobby has since turned into a passion. Today, he boasts of a collection of 14,800 plus photographs, in both hard and soft format, subject-wise divided into 43 sections including education, crafts, administration, culture, communication, social life, women, temples, mosques, shrines, festivals, landscape, river and surface transport including the Jhelum Valley Road, the then only road link connecting Kashmir with the rest of the world, and, not to miss, the notorious institution of begaar or unpaid forced labour, a hallmark of the hundred year-long Dogra administration in Kashmir. It is said that a photograph can explain what a thousand words cannot. If that be so, the Wanis have compiled a 14, 800, 000-word story of Kashmir, a window on its past that offers in black and white a wide-angle view of its multi-faceted existence. The best thing about the collection is that each photograph carries the name of the photographer and the year it was clicked.
In building this huge collection, Showkat Rashid Wani is actively assisted by his son, Wasim Wani, who collects and processes photographs including their transfer to digital form while former researches and writes introductory pieces and frames the photographs. Without a sharp sense of history, it would not have been possible for Wani to build such a treasure-trove of historical images. He buys and reads books on Kashmir and keeps himself abreast of new titles. The earliest photograph in the arguably the largest assortment of apolitical photographs of Kashmir including 53 albums at one place and spanning over a century between 1850s to 1950s, is an image of a bridge over the Jhelum at Bijbihara, a south Kashmir highway town, 47 kms from Srinagar, captured in 1857 AD by an Italian traveler.
About building up his collection, Wani says, “If someone has an old picture of Kashmir we request for a copy. If it needs restoration, we restore it and keep a copy and return the original with a copy to the donor.” Besides, the Wanis scan through bids in auctions, and, if their purse permits, bid for an item they choose. They go through online auction houses and antiquity stores for purchase of images as a single photograph or old family albums. Another source of their treasure are first editions of the books on Kashmir mostly written by foreign travelers and officers in the service of the then Kashmir Government between mid-19th and mid-20th century. These books carry amazing photographs and illustrations, and Wanis are always on the look-out for buying such books to add to their collection.
It may be recalled that from the mid-19th century when the British Government started direct interference into the affairs of Kashmir by appointing a Resident in Jammu & Kashmir, a large number of European visitors including British Army officers, travelers, civil servants, missionaries and explorers started arriving in the Valley for annual summer vacations or exploration. There were some like Walter Lawrence, Francis Younghusband and Tyndale Biscoe who took up jobs in Kashmir. Another category of visitors like Marion Doughty, Margaret Cotter Morison, A. Petrocokino, P. Pirie el al. came to explore Kashmir. One thing all these worthies shared among themselves was that they wrote down and published their experiences and observations about Kashmir and its people. These works carried photographs and illustrations representing various facets of Kashmir and forming an important pictorial source of its history. Wani has significantly drawn from this rich source.
Sharing his unique possession with people, Wani held several exhibitions of his collection. His first exhibition was inaugurated in Srinagar by the then President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam, in 2006. Till 2014, when the Great Deluge struck Kashmir, he had held seven such exhibitions. At the Kashmir Heritage Exhibition held in 2013 by the J&K Academy of Art, Culture & Languages under my stewardship, Wani’s collection drew a large number of enthusiastic viewers who gave him good feedback. The rich collection is also shared with people through a Facebook page, Pakaan Gos Wuchhan Gos, meaning ‘I observed as I walked’, with well researched introductory write-ups.