Motorsport in Kashmir

Published February 20, 2011 / by Jehangir

The Jhelum Valley Cart Road from Kohala to Baramulla, then famous as 'the most wonderful mountain road in the world', was completed in 1889 and was extended to Srinagar in 1897. Prior to the advent of the automobile in Kashmir, circa 1915, travellers to Kashmir made the journey in a two-horse four-seater tonga or a single-horse two-seater ekka.
In 1922, public transport was allowed on the Banihal Cart Road, which connected Srinagar with Jammu.

Traffic across the Banihal Cart Road
It was the Maharaja's of Kashmir (surprise, surprise) who owned the first cars in the Valley. During the 1920's Maharaja Hari Singh put together a collection of custom-made Rolls-Royce cars including a 1925 Barker Tourer, 1927 Windovers Limousine and a 1929 Thrupp & Maberly Tourer.

In the late 1920s, the Northern Motor Company, headquartered in Rawalpindi, opened a showroom in the Ganda Singh Building in Lal Chowk. They sold small four-cylinder Chevrolet tourers to local customers for a few thousand rupees.

Chevrolet Tourer on the Jhelum Valley Cart Road
From an endurance point of view the greatest motor adventure was the 1931 Citroën-Haardt Trans-Asiatic Expedition. The achievement of crossing the Himalayas between Srinagar and Gilgit over a pony track across the Burzil Pass (13775 ft) will probably never be surpassed.

Georges-Marie Haardt and his team set out for China from Srinagar on the 12th of July 1931 in specially designed Citroën Kegresse half-tracks. This expedition marked the first motorised crossing of the Greater Himalaya range.

This famous photograph from the Citroën-Haardt Expedition has inspired book covers and movie posters.

Here is a video of the expedition on YouTube. Watch out for 2.15:

More motor stuff next time. Enjoy !

Revolutions and Roosting Hawks

Published February 7, 2011 / by Jehangir

Watching the revolt in Egypt on TV while helping my son with his poetry assignment, I had a flashback. From the depths of memory a Persian ode translated by Khushwant Singh popped into my head. I had read it in the Illustrated Weekly in 1979 alongside a caricature of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi following the Iranian Revolution.

Think not, 0 King! thy sceptre or thy pow'r
one moment can arrest the destin'd hour !

Only time will tell whether the tumultuous events of the past week in the Middle East are genuinely popular movements, or are strings being pulled to replace politically-inconvenient stooge-dictators with politically-correct stooge-democracies?

Meanwhile enjoy the powerful imagery of Ted Hughes' ode to megalomaniac despots – the Hosni Mubaraks and the Ben Alis and their ilk.

Hawk Roosting*

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly –
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads –
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:
The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.