Ancient billboard: Tiny tales emerge from Kashmiri epigraphs
A new project is archiving the bits of history detailed in these stone tablets at monuments: tales of Hindus working on a masjid; Muslims restoring a mosque.
Above the southern entrance of the 600-year-old Jamia Masjid in Srinagar is an inscription singing praises to Allah. Most visitors miss it. It isn’t their fault. It sits far above eye-level, and is written in Persian.
It is, however, an evocative piece of history.
Like most epigraphs, it lists the dates of the mosque’s construction. But it also lists the subsequent repairs and reconstructions, all the way from the 1400s to the reign of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, in the early 17th century.
Perhaps its most evocative detail: The main calligrapher was named Muhammad Murad, and the master craftsman was a man named Hari Ram.
“This was something that had not been documented, that a Hindu craftsman had worked on the Jamia Masjid,” says Srinagar-based art historian Hakim Sameer Hamdani, 48.
He and his team of architects, historians and conservationists have been snatching bits of history out of obscurity, in this manner, for over a year, surveying and recording details missed in the public records but etched into stone.
At the moment, their focus is epigraphs at 44 monuments in the region, built between the 15th and 19th centuries. (They started out with a list of more than 100 sites, Hamdani says, but many of the structures are so crumbling that the plaques are long gone, or damaged beyond legibility. At other sites, they had simply been painted over.)
Piece-meal
The idea of documenting the notes from such plaques occurred to Hamdani eight years ago, during a site visit to a 15th-century shrine of the Sufi mystic Malik Ahmad Itoo, at Safa Kadal, near the Jhelum River.
He was pursuing a PhD in Islamic architecture in New Delhi at the time.
It struck him that his great-grandfather Mirza Munshi Hussain Ali, a famous calligrapher and teacher of Persian, would have been fascinated by the stories such plaques hold.
What messages might be waiting to be discovered in epigraphs at shrines, mosques or temples in his home state, he wondered?
Touring the region in the years since, he has found missives of piety, gratitude, devotion and, in some cases, a sort of introduction to the religion.
“You can compare them to modern-day billboards,” Hamdani says. “The messages are advertising something and attempting to draw the reader in.”
The syncretism they reflect, meanwhile, is affirmation of the oneness Kashmir was once known for.
There are Hindu and Sikh temples with Persian inscriptions, Muslim monuments paying tribute to Hindu craftsmen, a pride in the collaborative efforts that yielded beautiful religious and communal spaces.
While a majority of the inscriptions studied are in Persian, the researchers have also found texts in Arabic and the Kashmiri Sharda script.
History channels
It’s been a journey of mixed emotions, Hamdani says. Sometimes history feels just out of reach. British-era records and post-Independence Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) data, for instance, point to plaques that simply aren’t at the sites any longer.
There was one missing, for instance, at the early-20th-century Aqil Mir mosque, which the team finally found 2 km away, at a Sufi shrine.
Who knows how many like it have been displaced, and are still waiting to be discovered, Hamdani says.
The Shankaracharya temple in Srinagar, meanwhile, is believed to be more than 2,000 years old and is said to have been repaired during the rule of the Shahmiri Sultans. But it is also missing its epigraph.
According to details recorded by ASI superintendent Henry Cole in the 1870s, this epigraph was etched in Persian and recorded a person named Bishishti Zargaras as responsible for the repairs. “It’s interesting to think that one of the oldest temples in Srinagar was at some point repaired during the reign of Muslim rulers and was carried out by a Muslim,” Hamdani says.
For now, some of the stories he has unearthed will find their way into his new book, Srinagar: A Popular History, to be published by Hurst later this year. A monograph will follow.
But he isn’t done, Hamdani says. As design director with the Jammu and Kashmir chapter of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), he will likely come upon more epigraphs as he makes his way across the region.
“We found that these small slabs reveal so much about how society evolved over those three or four centuries,” he says. He is hoping more stories will tumble out, still written in stone.
