When I stepped outside, my contemplation was broken by a series of successive whistles from a military convey, and I was woken up to the present reality of Srinagar. As the cavalry passed by, several brightly coloured posters with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s face and details of the G20 event peeked at me from the vehicles. Srinagar was hosting the G20 Tourism Working Group meeting under India’s G20 presidency in May 2023. Foreign delegates from twenty-seven countries were visiting Srinagar to participate in the meeting. This was the first such official international visit since the abrogation of Article 370 in 2019. Consequently, security was intensified, and the event was heavily publicized to mark “Kashmir’s return to normalcy”.
I walked along the length of the graveyard on the remnants of a footpath to reach the other side. I noticed the far end of the graveyard had enormous structures on both sides; one side was an under-construction multifloored concrete monstrosity that is supposed to be a nursing school, and on the other side stood a board that read “Makhdoom Sahib Rope Way by JK Tourism”. The ropeway was accompanied by a building which was decorated with hoardings of different coloured fish; it said “Kashmir Trout”. I had arrived from Delhi a couple of days earlier, and it had been a while since I had visited this side of the city, so I was still coming to terms with the infrastructural changes as well as the sheer scale of the G20 insignia that had taken over the city.
I stopped to look at the magnificent Haer Parbat one last time, and at the graves that rested peacefully at its foothills, and found myself thinking: in this rapidly urbanising “Smart City” of Srinagar, how long would the dead be allowed to rest in this historically and culturally significant landscape, which has been reduced to its potential as lucrative real estate? Once the cable car tourism expands, the nursing home occupies the other half, and the living starts encroaching on the little space that was left for the dead, the view of the Haer Parbat will be blocked by a series of banal structures. Will the coming generations be able to forge a sense of connection with visual scapes devoid of their collective historical, cultural, and personal memories?
I drove past the grand G20 billboard advertisements and the new “smart bunkers” in the strife-torn Smart City of Srinagar. Government officials had commented unironically that the aim behind beautifying the bunkers was to maintain surveillance but with a more aesthetically pleasing appearance. I moved past the newly renovated Polo View market which had been made fancy for the foreign delegates. The tiled stretch of barely 150 metres, meant to be a recreational space in the middle of the city, was guarded by eight police vehicles and close to a dozen fully armed personnel. Moving about Srinagar, I noticed that a lot of new infrastructural additions in the city, like the “I LOVE Srinagar” signages, Indian flags, and tricoloured lights had been added, perhaps to ensure that there is visual continuity with other Indian cities.
On these hoardings, selfie points, T-shirts, and fridge magnets, “Srinagar” was spelt the way one saw in newspapers, reports by human rights organisations, and other historical and political accounts. Yet it felt different on these surfaces. It looked brighter, happier than the city I knew Srinagar to be; perhaps it is what airbrushing the context can do to names. I realised the distance I felt at the sight of the term “Srinagar” was also a product of my auditory experience of hearing the name.
The realisation came to me a couple of weeks later when I went to meet academic and media trainer, Dr Rashid Maqbool, at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Kashmir. Our first conversation is memorable because, within the first five minutes of our meeting, Dr Rashid stood up suddenly and started to trace Srinagar’s historically evolving boundaries on a sheet of paper he put up on the chart board of his office. After a conversation of forty minutes, we finally got to exchanging names and discussing the purpose of my visit, when he politely interjected in Kashmiri, “Before we move any further, I must point out that you are pronouncing the name wrong. It is not Srinagar, there is no sri sound in Kashmiri. It’s pronounced Sirinagar.”
At that moment, it dawned on me that I had never actually heard anyone in Kashmir, including my own family, friends, relatives, and acquaintances (who did not go to convent schools) say “Srinagar”. It was always Sirinagar. After years of staying in Delhi and having heard the term being used in mainstream media, academia, popular culture, and airport announcements over and over again, I had internalised the non-Kashmiri pronunciation of the name. Every time I heard it being said as “Sirinagar”, I had been subconsciously correcting the pronunciation in my head. After our meeting, I stood outside Kashmir University for a while, relearning the “mispronunciation” I had learned to needlessly correct. “Sirinagar”, “Sirinagar”.
Excerpted with permission from City as Memory: A Short Biography of Srinagar, Sadaf Wani, Aleph Book Company.
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