While visiting Kashmir in 2016, the first thing locals told me was that outsiders care more about the place than they care for the people who live there. Beyond causing me to pause and re-examine my own relationship between the place and people I was visiting, this observation made me wonder how this unsettling dynamic came to be, and how affection for a place might shape its history and people.

For this reason, I was excited when a friend told me about The Syncretic Traditions of Islamic Religious Architecture of Kashmir (Early 14th-18th Century) by Hakim Sameer Hamdani. The author positions the Kashmiri people at the centre of their history in his analysis of Kashmir’s syncretic architectural traditions.

Design Director at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage in New Delhi, India, and post-doctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Hamdani’s study is readable for those without the author’s architectural expertise, and will be an evocative experience for those with a Kashmiri background or an interest in Kashmir.

The work places itself within a literature that seeks to identify the historical roots of identity, culture and the relationship with the state, by tracing how each new ruling dynasty — from Lohara, to the Shahmiri, Chak, Mughal, Durrani, Sikh and finally, Dogra — changed the region’s architectural style.

Interacting with a broad corpus of Kashmir studies, Hamdani sets the focus of his study apart from the argument of historian Chitralekha Zutshi, who claims in her book Languages of Belonging: Islam, Regional Identity and the Making of Kashmir that “the axiom of Kashmir as the paradise on earth … was coined by the Mughal emperor Jahangir.” Zutshi posits that it was during this era that “Kashmiri poets first began to self-consciously articulate a sense of regional belonging.”

A scholar posits that Kashmiri architecture is evidence of a syncretic tradition and identity far earlier than Mughal rule

Hamdani rejects Zutshi’s claim as “historically incorrect.” Instead, he contends that a notion of Kashmiri uniqueness existed from the earliest of times, the handiwork of both locals and outsiders alike. This Kashmiri exceptionalism is distinct from the modern sense of nationalism, but Hamdani locates it along the same historical continuity.

He cites the 12th century CE poet Mankha — “who conveys a sense of Kashmiri distinctness by contrasting it with the other: the lands that are different from Kashmir” — to support his claim that “it is the geography much more than descent or language that defines the image of Kashmir during the mediaeval period.”

The mountains of Kashmir did not impose just physical limitations on Kashmir’s contact with the outside world. Kashmir’s frontiers clearly defined where Kashmiris’ homeland began and where it ended, which enabled the mountains to serve also as conceptual barriers that inculcated a sense of Kashmiri identity. This identity was syncretic in the sense of a “shared memory of the past”, a memory inextricably tied to the Kashmir Valley as a place.

With this argument, Hamdani is adding to not only mediaeval but also modern history, by tracing the roots of Kashmiri identity to the mediaeval period, escaping the way modern nationalisms distort our understanding of what it means to be Kashmiri. In this sense, he is building on what Zutshi and historian Mridu Rai have already done. Rai showed in her work, Hindu Rulers, Muslim Subjects: Islam, Rights and the History of Kashmir, that the identity of ‘Kashmiriyat’ did not appear explicitly until 1947.

This revelation helps us understand how modernity weaves anachronisms into our collective understanding of the past and its relevance to the contemporary world. What Hamdani is saying is that, even though the Kashmiri identity did not yet take this explicit political form, its framework can still be found further back in the way that Islamic culture took on local forms of expression through its architecture. Like Zutshi and Rai, Hamdani seeks to take the past on its own terms, yet still ascertain its impact on the present.

With this framing, the Mughals take a backseat for Hamdani — again a departure from Zutshi’s thesis. Mughal architecture introduced imperial motifs to assert the permanence of Mughal rule and rejected local architectural traditions, causing the new constructions to be mostly abandoned by the local population.

A good example is the Masjid-i-Nau in Srinagar, commonly called Patthar Masjid, which was abandoned for many years before being converted into a granary. It was only recovered as a religious site in the early 20th century, after the British called for its preservation and the then maharaja announced its use as a Hindu orphanage, sparking protests among the Kashmiri Muslim population that would result in its eventual restoration and use as a mosque in 1932.

Meanwhile, a local Kashmiri urban legend developed around the conceit of the Mughal empress Noor Jahan who, when asked how much the Patthar Masjid cost, pointed to the jewel on her shoe. This story is probably untrue, but it nevertheless shows that Kashmiris viewed Mughal architecture as being unreflective of the needs and interests of the community and were unimpressed by imperial display of power and grandeur.

This is a novel contribution to how we think about Mughal architecture in Kashmir. Much of the existing scholarship on architecture in Kashmir focuses on the Mughal era exclusively, overlooking it as a point of departure from the local style. It also challenges us to consider Kashmiris’ responses to Mughal imperial rule — often unrecorded in historical sources — creating the assumption of acquiescence towards outsider rule. This assumption contributed, especially during the British era, to ideas about Kashmiris’ supposed weak and timid character.

By identifying Mughal architecture as a disruption along Kashmir’s historical continuity, Hamdani has forged a new path for scholars to puncture this myth. He also shows how the most popular of Mughal architectural contributions, the Hazratbal dargaah — which contains a relic believed to be a hair of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) — “was entirely a Kashmiri venture” that co-opted the local Mughal court into the endeavour.

Studies that do not focus on the Mughal era are often distorted by their colonial context. Hamdani credits the colonials for undertaking the first systematic study of architecture in Kashmir, but he explains how relying on self-referential colonial assessments results in hollow analysis that reduces the Kashmiri architectural style to the product of mosques built on top of destroyed Hindu temples.

If the Muslim community was so actively engaged in destroying non-Muslim symbols and building traditions, Hamdani asks, then why was the physical form of this new Islamic architecture constructed in a way that was so familiar to what came before?

As for religion, Hamdani understands “Islam as a cultural force with an architectural image and its manifestation in a geographical area which was derived from the local experience of the community.” Wherever Muslims built, they synthesised the style of earlier architecture with “the yearning of new spiritual order in creation of a uniquely new art form — Islamic architecture.”

Hamdani situates his understanding of synthesis within the universalism of Islam; although the faith remained the same, the cultural expression differed and took on local forms. Architecture was one of the Islamic forms of expression shaped most by locality. Whereas consensus in jurisprudence was written down and codified, architectural developments were never restricted into a written or unwritten dogma. As a result, it had more freedom to accommodate previous cultural motifs within the new idiomatic style.

The author also calls attention to a line of inquiry for future scholarship: after the Kashmiri Muslim community failed to affiliate itself with the architectural endeavours of the Mughals, why did the Kashmiri Hindu Pandit community, to the contrary, associate itself with those of the Dogra dynasty?

It is easy to picture oneself walking through these architectural sites while Hamdani describes them. Those familiar with Kashmiri architecture will enjoy following along as Hamdani places sites within their historical context. The author has given Kashmiri scholars much to consider, but his insights will fascinate the interested layperson as well.

The reviewer is a PhD candidate at the Contemporary History Institute, Ohio University. His research focuses on Kashmir during the British colonial era. He tweets @ATurnerHoward

The Syncretic Traditions of Islamic Religious Architecture of Kashmir (Early 14th-18th Century)
By Hakim Sameer Hamdani
Routledge, India
ISBN: 978-1032189611
232pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, January 30th, 2022