Category Archives: Halcyon Days

Operas of the East

Published December 12, 2017 / by Jehangir

In our childhood days an old family retainer would regale us with his rambling retelling of the adventures of two heroes – Prince Gulfaam and the unnamed hero of Gul-e-Bakawali ( whose name he probably could not recall 😉 )

I. Gul-e-Bakawali

In 1712, Sheikh Izzat Ullah wrote a medieval romance Taj-ul-Mulk Gul-e-Bakawali narrating the tale of Prince Taj-ul-Mulk, Princess Bakawali and a magical flower that could restore sight to the blind. His book was written in Farsi (Persian) prose and over the years a number of authors published their own poetry/prose versions, and plays and later films in various Indian languages were based on the fable.

In 1835, Pandit Daya Shankar Naseem, belonging to a Kashmiri family settled in Lucknow wrote ‘Gulzar-e-Naseem‘ a masnavi (poem with rhyming couplets) based on ‘Gul-e-Bakawali‘. Reputedly verses from the poem became very popular and excerpts from the poem were included in text books.

dekha to woh gul hawa hua hai
kuchh aur hi gul khila hua hai

jis kaf men woh gul ho daagh ho jaaye
jis ghar men ho gul chiraagh ho jaaye

When the poem ran into controversy over its antecedents, Pandit Daya Shankar Naseem was defended spiritedly by Brij Narain Chakbast. Apparently the controversy was fanned at the time by Awadh Punch, an Urdu weekly. Who knew that Punch (1841-1992), the famous satirical British journal, had an Indian clone in the shape of the Awadh Punch (1877-1936), that dared to make fun of British rule during the heydays of the Raj in India!

Pandit Brij Narain Chakbast (1882–1926) himself belonged to a Kashmiri family settled in the erstwhile United Provinces. He wrote some highly-regarded poetry, most famously the following couplet:

zarra zarra hai mere kashmir ka mehmaan nawaaz
raah mein patthar ke tukdon ne diya paani mujhe

[I was reminded of this couplet when our thirsty trekking party encountered cool sweet water flowing out of the rocks on the way to Gangabal from Naranag]

II. Indar Sabha

The story of Prince Gulfaam is even more interesting.

Nawab Wajid Ali Shah, the last Nawab of Oudh (Awadh), was so enamoured by accounts of famous European operas that he commissioned Syed Agha Hassan Amanat to compose an opera in Urdu. The Nawab supervised the production, composed part of the music and performed one of the leading roles in the opera whenever it was performed before courtiers at Kaisar Bagh in Lucknow!

The opera called The Court of Indra or Indar Sabha is a fantasy about the forbidden attraction between Prince Gulfaam (the Flower Prince), son of Gulzar Shah (the King of the Flower-Garden) in Hindustan and the Sabz Pari (the Emerald Fairy) of the heavenly court of Raja Indra, ruler of Paristan (the Land of Fairies) in Koh-e-Qaf (the Caucasus Mountains) beyond Iran.

Gulfaam is a recurring motif in Kashmiri literature, and a mystical couplet describes an idyllic setting thus:

Springtime, fragrant goblets
the evening of the full moon
rhythms of songs of youth
and Gulfaam in front of my eyes

III. Bombur ta Yemberzal

The first opera in Kashmiri was Bombur ta Yemberzal (The Bumblebee and the Narcissus) written by Pandit Dina Nath Nadeem. It is a tale about the doomed love between the Narcissus (Yembarzal) which blooms in springtime and withers away, and the Bumblebee (Bombur) which arrives in summer and searches from flower to flower till it goes blind.

Mohan Lal Aima composed the music for the opera including the famous Bumbro Bumbro song. ‘Bombur ta Yemberzal’ was performed at Tagore Hall in 1955 for Russian dignitaries Nikita Khruschev and Nikolai Bulganin.


Image credit: RIA Novosti

Bombur-Yemberzal as a symbol of selfless love is quite common in popular culture. Mahjoor’s lyrics provide the theme of a Kashmiri-Urdu-Persian fusion song which is a huge hit with Kashmiri youth.

tamanna chaani deedaruk chumo yemberzale bumbro
phaejis yamath laejis wuchney gaejis chaney kaley bumbro

karan mahjoor chu husnas gath vanan yaaras patho akh kath
ye dil deewan gow sei path beyis seith na raley bumbro

Coming back to the old retainer, I don’t know where that illiterate rascal had heard these fantastic tales but his dastangoi – mixing up elements from each other and from other unrelated tales – used to be hilarious yet curiously compelling.

Ah sweet nostalgia!

The Trout Angle

Published March 17, 2014 / by Jehangir

Kashmir has earned a well-deserved reputation as an angler's paradise. With the demise of the great Mahseer, the Trout is the undisputed numero uno game fish of Kashmir.

In 1899 Frank Mitchell, Colonel's Ward and Unwin, and Captain Allan contributed the sum of 50 pounds each to import trout from Scotland to Kashmir. The Duke of Bedford provided a consignment of 10,000 trout ova, but the first batch perished at sea. The second batch of eyed-ova travelled by steamer to Bombay, then by rail upto Rawalpindi – and survived an ardous bus journey to reach Srinagar in December 1900. The hatchlings were reared in a pond in Frank Mitchell’s carpet factory at Bagh-i-Dilawar Khan before being transferred to a hatchery established under his supervision at Harwan at the outlet of the Dagwan stream from Dachigam.

Trout thrive in rushing cold streams and the Dagwan running through the Maharaja's shooting preserve proved to be the perfect trout stream. Later aged ova and yearling trout were introduced in other streams in Kashmir like Achabal, Wangat, Veshav, Kishenganga, Liddar, Marwar and Erin among others. Yearlings were also released in the Burzil and Gurez streams, the Gangarbal Lake, and in the Poonch River. In the 1950's, rainbow trout from Denmark were introduced in Kashmir.

The brown (Salmo trutta) and rainbow (Oncorhynchus mykiss) varieties adapted to Kashmir's rivers and thrived to the extent that they were later introduced in other states like Himachal Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Sikkim and Bhutan.

Anyway, Hermes and not Mammon is my muse when I avow that the sport of trout fishing is addictive to the point of becoming an obsession. There can be no better introduction to the thrill of angling for trout in Kashmir than the first few paragraphs of this article from the New York Times circa 1983. Compare it to the reprint of A Day on a Kashmir Trout Stream from a century earlier.

The Masjid and Yennar beats on the Lidder in Pahalgam remain my favourite beats as I have rarely angled any other stream except for a few unsuccessful casts in the Ferozepur Nallah. A whole day on Tilwan Kol, the little creek that runs through the exquisite untamed Bangus valley proved entirely fruitless while the plop-and-land excess of the Gangabal Lake provided a full bag but little sport. In my experience the trout from high-altitude lakes like Gangabal have bigger heads but smaller bodies, while the farm-reared variety are spongier than the fish caught in streams.

Trout from Kashmir's glacial streams, though smaller than elsewhere, are considered to be among the most delicious in the world. The State Department of Fisheries have a highly-popular sale for farmed trout on Saturdays, but we rarely avail the opportunity. The tastiest trout is the one that satisfies the appetite triggered by the thrill of having landed it with my own Shakespeare. One of the most memorable meals one can have in Kashmir is a trout hooked, gutted and cooked on-the-go. This page has a trout recipe fit for a king (quite literally, since the author is the present Maharaja of of Indore)

Nothing finer, anywhere, indeed.

Update: (2019) After 120 years, 2.25 lakh eyed ova have been imported from Denmark to the hatchery set up for the rearing of genetically improved Rainbow Trout at Beerwah Budgam.

Note: The official record holder for Kashmir is a 17+ pounder caught in the Verinag stream.

The Age Of Innocence

Published August 13, 2010 / by Jehangir

I grew up on the banks of the Jehlum but spent most evenings in and around the Dal Lake with my cousins. My maternal grandmother's family occupied an estate on the Boulevard Road that encompassed a colonial bungalow with walnut, apple and quince-apple orchards. The orchards were interspersed with reed-beds and marshes that had once been connected with the lake.

My childhood memories of the Dal Lake echo crystal clear waters, weeds that were visible only underwater and house-boats so far away from the Boulevard Road that one had to strain to make out a familiar face. I remember my cousin Irfan – aka Hero, sadly no longer with us – warning younger kids that these unseen underwater weeds would entangle and drown the careless. The ubiquitous red-green algae that today seems to cover the entire lake was confined to the marshes and confounded our efforts to retrieve the wooden "birra" or unwieldy "cork" balls that we used to play cricket with.

Angling and boat-rides on "borrowed" Dakotas – our term for larger, uncovered shikaras – were favourite pastimes. The irate owner of the commandeered dakota would be immediately pacified by a mention of my grandmothers name. Begum Jalaluddin, or Barkat Begum as she was affectionately known, was a legend in her lifetime.

If the wind was favourable, kites flown from the pier below Almond Villa would consume multiple spools of expensive thread and soar way beyond Kotar Khana towards the Hazratbal shrine.

It was truly the age of innocence.

The orchards and marshes are long gone, sacrificed at the altar of crass commercialism. The estate was was acquired by the government to build an ugly concrete monolith which towers above my grandmother's house. The expansive orchard-lined driveway has disappeared and access is now through a filthy side-street narrowed by encroachments and choked with parked cars.

Shikara's still ply the waves though the mirror of the Dal Lake is scarred and rust-tarnished. The number of anglers has increased but they cast their lines between floating piles of filth. The corruption of the Dal Lake into a cesspool seems to mirror the degradation of the Kashmir Valley and of us, its people.