The Lahore-Kashmir Mughal Imperial Road: Traversing a Terrain

of Conflict
Dr. Raja Muzaffar Bhat |Columnist and Social Activist, Srinagar
Parshati Dutta | Architectural Theoretician, New Delhi

Contextualizing the Cultural Route

Sitting in 2018, at a time when Kashmir is most often a prefix to the word
‘problem’, synonymous with conflict, and described as the ‘flashpoint of
violence’ in the South Asian landscape, it is not easy to comprehend the
circumstances of Mahatma Gandhi’s words - “While the rest of the
country burns in communal fire, I see a shining ray of hope
in Kashmir only.” Peace in Kashmir now exists either in distant memory
or in a long anticipated future.

In the days that followed immediately after Partition though, Kashmir

had navigated the turbulent territories of violence well, unlike the states
of Punjab and Bengal that were worst affected by the Radcliffe Line, or
some landlocked states such as Hyderabad and Junagadh that were
scarred by strife as they tried, however unsuccessfully, to maintain
autonomy in an attempt to neutralize religious differences alienating a
majority of subjects from their rulers.

But eventually Kashmir too had to face a dilemma. At the time of

Partition, Kashmir was governed by the Dogra Dynasty of a Hindu Rajput
lineage, who ruled over subjects of whom nearly 80% were followers of
Islam. Demography apart, what appeared to tilt Kashmir’s scales in
favour of joining the Union of Pakistan, much to the consternation of the
then Maharaja – Maharaja Hari Singh – was the physiographic contiguity
that enabled this merger. But as the final decision ultimately lay in the
hands of Hari Singh, it was also deemed equally plausible that he would
join the secular Union of India rather than be a part of the Islamic entity
of Pakistan. However, the Indian National Congress’ growing intimacy
with Kashmir’s popular leader and Hari Singh’s rival Sheikh Abdullah
(who had initiated the Quit Kashmir agitation aimed at de-throning Hari
Singh only a year prior to Independence) antagonized this probability as
well. Hari Singh decided upon autonomy, a decision that Kashmir was at
peace with. But neither this peace, nor the state of independence was
destined to endure.

As refugees began to cross the border and arrive at Jammu, bringing

with them distressing tales of atrocities faced in Pakistan, Hindu and
Sikh extremists retaliated in Jammu region by massacring Muslims, with
the estimate of people killed and displaced varying from report to report
between fifty thousand and one lakh killed, and between two and three
lakhs displaced. While it is contested whether this massacre and
subsequent forced migration of Muslims from Jammu to Pakistan was
abetted by the Maharaja or not, these events set to motion the chain of
reactions and sowed the seeds of unrest that plague the state till date. It
was allegedly in response to this brutality against Muslims that a tribal
army recruited from its north-western provinces were deployed by
Pakistan down the Muzaffarabad - Baramulla Route into Kashmir to
overthrow Dogra Ruler Hari Singh. During this attack the tribal militia -
the Qabailis - killed many Hindus and Sikhs and looted their towns and
villages.

In the bloodshed and chaos that ensued, the Maharaja, with his limited
resources was left with no alternative but to seek military assistance
from India and propose an accession. Accepted provisionally against an
impending endorsement by the people of Kashmir and the appointment of
Sheikh Abdullah to the government, The Instrument of Accession was
formally signed on 26th October 1947. In the days that followed, the
United Nation’s Commission for India and Pakistan was set-up and the
Resolution 47 passed in April 1948 calling for Pakistan to withdraw from
Jammu and Kashmir, and India to minimize military presence to secure
an environment where the plebiscite could then be held. However, these
preconditions to plebiscite were never met on accounts of India being
unwilling to be held at the same category as Pakistan – whom they
deemed as aggressors, Pakistan denying accountability on matters of
patronizing agitations that they deemed natural reactions of the
indigenous population against an incompetent Maharaja, the unresolved
fate of Pakistani controlled Kashmir, and mistrust between the two
countries preventing either from withdrawing forces. The situation was
further problematized with the observation that UN’s decision was
possibly coloured by the Cold War politics and also lead to the rejection
of US citizen and past Fleet Admiral of US Navy, Chester Nimitiz as
plebiscite administrator by India. Many more attempts at reconciliation
since, the fate of Kashmir remains as irresolute.

In the absence of a conclusive decision and in the face of diminishing

autonomy, dissatisfaction grew in the people, sometimes spilling over in
the form of protests, but more often resulting in a longing for freedom. At
the peak of insurgency, as nostalgia surrounding the idea of a free
Kashmir reached its zenith, its population looked back upon the many
dynasties of rule to fixate on the Chak reign as the last time Kashmir was
free before one by one the Mughals, the Afghans, the Sikhs, the Dogras
and finally the Indian Government took over and controlled Kashmir. It is
this same idolization of freedom that resulted in a tendency in Kashmiris
to demonize the Mughals as pioneers in a cycle of domination that they
now deemed as precursor to the current state of unrest.

Therefore, it is through this prism of the current political scenario that

one must now observe the history of Mughal Imperial Road. Clearly, it is
not only our understanding of history that helps us analyze our present
but inversely, our analysis of our present that helps us understand history
better as well.

Polarized Culture, Politicized Heritage

Azaadi. Independence. Sovereignty. Autonomy.

These are key words that have dominated the Kashmiri vocabulary for
more than 70 years now, reaching their zenith of popularity in the 90’s.
The idea of a free Kashmir that these words represent is the same idea
that has equated the Mughal Rule as a dark chapter in Kashmir’s history
in public conception. Half baked and abetted by divisive political agendas
as this idea is, it has led people to react adversely to the Mughal Road
heritage as a harbinger of foreign aggressors, even as other cultural
assets introduced by these same deemed invaders continue to be
celebrated consciously or unconsciously in the daily life of Kashmiris, be
it as language, artistic traditions, or built heritage of the form of forts
and pleasure gardens. The fact that the Mughal Road lacks access,
identification, delineation, research, interpretation, and is missing
altogether from education and awareness only alienates it further.

In November 1586, Yusuf Shah Chak, widely hailed now as ‘the last
independent king of Kashmir’ was defeated by Akbar’s Mughal Army,
under the command of Qasim Shah, in Shopian. Kashmir was not directly
ruled from Delhi until the reign of Shah Jahan when from an erstwhile
part of Kabul Province, Kashmir was segregated as an individual
provincial entity.

Even though the first road widening activity happened to facilitate

Akbar’s journey to Kashmir, it was during the reign of Jahangir that the
Mughal Road received maximum attention and attained its full glory.
Jahangir is known to have undertaken the journey through this Road
more than ten times, often accompanied by Empress Nur Jahan and her
brother Asif Khan. Not only did they develop Kashmir as a recreational
destination with production of the many pleasure gardens such as
Shalimar, Nishat, Achabal, Verinag etc., but they also contributed to the
architecture and infrastructure of travel as well with the construction of
caravanserais, towers, gateways, bridges, and retaining walls, along the
Mughal Road that passed through the key sites of Gujarat, Kotla Arab Ali
Khan, Bhimber, Jhangar, Nowshera, Narian, Chingus, Rajouri, Fatehpur,
Thanamandi, Surankot, Buffliaz, Noori Chamb, Chandimurh, Poshiana,
Peer ki Gali, Aliabad, Lal Gulam, Suh Sarai, Dubjan, Shopian, Heerpur,
Shadimarg, and Khampur Sarai enroute Lahore to Srinagar.

According to the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri, when a royal or noble entourage

moved down the Road, residents from adjacent settlements celebrated
the event by lining the path, beating drums, and cheering the Mughal
regime. In the far flung hamlets, where the contemporary tendency of
cultural polarization for political ambition is yet to proliferate, the hills
are alive till date with echoes of this sentiment as evident in the many
fond anecdotal associations that are attributed to sites along the Road.
The settlements are rich repositories of Mughal oral history, reporting as
many tales of miracle as regular life events of royal births, deaths,
weddings, battles, and funerals. While the information that these
histories provide may not always be accurate (as in the case of Chadoora,
which some locals believe to be the birth place of Nur Jahan, while others
are of the opinion that this concept actually exists because Nur Jahan
was married to Jahangir from the home of Malik Hyder whom she
respected like a father, the pride is authentic.

Situated in a remotely accessible, landlocked valley that is covered in

snow for a quarter of the year, Kashmir had long been compromised by
the reaches of civilisation. While the rest of India had been developing
not only in terms of secure living through progressive agriculture,
healthcare, and trade, but also high thinking with advancements in art,
architecture, literature, music, and crafts, inadequacy remained in
remote Kashmir in terms of opportunities and resources, both financial
and intellectual. With periods of stability being sparsely distributed, for
the larger part, the history of Kashmir was marked by rapid shift of
reigns, few of whom brought relief to a population for whom the
changing dynasties often meant little more than an obligatory change of
faith to avoid persecution. Rulers as versatile and prolific as Sultan Zain-
ul-Abidin were few and far between, and unmatched in terms of their
scales of influence with Mughals. Thus, while pre-Mughal Kashmir is now
glorified for its state of independence, the cost that this independence
came at for the common people, with poor quality of life and lack of
livelihood opportunities, cannot be ignored.

It was effectively the Mughal Road that encouraged a change in this way
of life. Under the Mughal Rule, it brought to Kashmir peace and
prosperity, opened the Valley to a possibility of exchange and expansion
in trade and culture, and celebrated it in the world map for its generous
endowments of natural and cultural heritage on which the state’s
thriving tourism industry still relies. Even if the contributions of Mughals
were to be quantifies, as a people who have brought down the GDP of
their land to 3.65% from the highest of 25 % during the Mughal era, it
leaves one with little right to belittle their legacy. After 500 years of
reaping their benefits, if Mughal heritage cannot be adopted as one’s
own, that is a tragedy. Lack of ownership of Mughal heritage is a matter
of national shame already, with cultural heritage assets such as the Taj
Mahal itself with a daily footfall of up to 60,000 national and
international tourists being pointedly ignored by the government as
Mughal heritage is deemed colonial and hence second in priority.

It is important to delegitimize this notion of Mughals being colonisers, as

even though Babur came to India as a foreign invader, the generations
that followed made it their home. They did not govern India to the
advantage a distant native soil, but subsumed their identity with India
politically, culturally, economically, and genetically, to an extent where
when the time came to counter actual colonizers – the British – in the
Mutiny of 1857, it was under the banner of Mughal Emperor Bahadur
Shah Zafar that India chose to integrate and fight.

Thus, in spite of any political will to polarize cultures, the idea of India
itself remains multicultural and needs to be understood as such. In this
light, the Mughal Road needs to be re-established not as an emblem of
oppression but as the Road that gave the world its first glimpse of
Kashmir.

The Idea that is the Mughal Road

The decline of the Mughal Road started soon after the reign of
Aurungzeb, as the next set of rulers - the Afghans - used an alternate
road – the Northern Route - via Uri and Baramulla following the Jhelum
basin that was more accessible from their capital at Peshawar. In these
seventy years that the Mughal Road lay unused, the mountainous and
landslide prone terrain ensured that it was no longer fit to be used by the
time the Sikhs came to power, leading them to continue using the
Northern Route that later came to be known as the Jhelum Valley Road
during Dogra regime. The Banihal Road, through an otherwise
inaccessible region in comparison with the Jhelum Valley Road, was
constructed during the Dogra Period and gained prominence as the
shortest connector of Srinagar with the Dogra winter capital of Jammu,
further overshadowing the Mughal Road.
Map 1: Key Routes of Kashmir – Mughal Imperial Road (yellow), Banihal Road (blue)
and Northern Route/Jhelum Valley Road; Mapped by: Parshati Dutta

Thus, in the three hundred year that followed Aurungzeb’s death, the
Mughal Road ceased to exist in public memory, remaining alive only to
Gujjar and Bakkarwal herders who continued to use it for their bi-annual
migration from the hills of Kashmir to the plains of Jammu, following the
same route and sometimes taking nightly shelter on the same sarais that
once housed royalty. In fact, when the re-construction of Mughal Road
started in 2005, the path it would trace was determined through
extensive consultation with the Gujjars and Bakarwals. However, the
road currently promoted by the PWD as the Mughal Road is only a short
segment of the entire stretch of the Mughal Road of the Indian section,
that too not entirely historically accurate. While engineering concerns
were responsible for some deviations, conflict and politics also shaped
the current Road to a large extent.

Photo 1: Bakkarwal Migration at Peer ki Gali, Mughal Road; Credit: Parshati Dutta

While the idea to re-establish the Mughal Road and reduce the distance
between Poonch and Rajouri with Kashmir from 400 kilometres to 170
kilometres had been conceived by Chief Minister Sheikh Abdullah in
1979, one of the unspoken reasons owing to which it was delayed by
more than 40 years, is because of security concern regarding the
ramifications of allowing a direct physical connection between Kashmir
Valley with the Muslim dominated areas of Jammu such as Poonch and
Rajouri. While the imperative to restrict the volatile atmosphere of
insurgency in Kashmir strictly within the Valley is known to be the real
underlying reason, the vacillation regarding the development of the route
is publicly more often attributed to the fact that the Mughal Road is
within the firing range of Pakistani Army - a claim dubitable on accounts
of both Pakistan’s policy of appeasing Kashmiri civilians whom the
Mughal Road services, and the improbably long range of the Road from
Pakistan with the exception of Krishna Gathi. Interestingly, now that the
Road is open for movement, locals in Jammu division are of the opinion
that it is being used to facilitate a deliberate and calculated migration
Muslim populations from Kashmir to Jammu in an attempt to alter its
Hindu majority demography in a bid to consolidate Jammu within the
area ideologically ordained by separatists to someday form an
independent Kashmir.

Photo 2: The Mughal Road Passes through the Forest Division of Poonch; Credit:
Parshati Dutta

Impact of conflict has also adversely affected the tangible remains

associated with the Mughal Road. Of the built assets that can still be
traced along the historic route, a majority are in advanced stages of
dilapidation - lacking in identification, protection, or conservation – born
of neglect that if often attributed by authorities as a result of more
urgent priorities of encountering security threats. While the physical
fabric of many of the sarais such as Heerpur, Thanamandi, Narian, and
Chingus have been fully or partially demolished and/or altered, to
accommodate security forces in times of military emergencies, locals also
hold the lack of management plans responsible for the road not having
been included in the UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List as part of
the Sites along the Uttarapath, Badshahi Sadak, Sadak-e-Azam, and
Grand Trunk Road.

Cultural Routes: Lost and Found

In no other place in India has conflict shaped the built
environment as extensively as it has in Kashmir. From a land
situated at the crossroads of the world’s most culturally
influential corridors, epitomized by syncretic living, high
thinking and creative vibrancy, with linkages between its past
and present broken, Kashmir is now the most heavily
militarized region of the world and among the most disputed.
‘Conflict is endemic to heritage’, as David Lowenthal states,
where, ‘victors and victims proclaim disparate and divisive
versions of common pasts’. And it is this very fate of
politicising history that now needs to be avoided by ensuring
that threads of research objectively documents and analyse the
impact of modern conflict on heritage by recording both the
archival and current, because the longer the delay the more
space there is for manipulation of evidences recording the
past. Unbiased studies are required to document the present
and recent past through heritage before it can be destroyed as
evidence, misinterpreted to strengthen nationalist, religious,
or ethnic agendas, or re-contextualized to reconstruct history
even at the cost of obliterating identities and transforming a
culture of peace into a culture of conflict.

Photo 3: Ancient Sarais Function Currently as Security Outposts along the Mughal
Road; Credit: Parshati Dutta
Navigating this environment of conflict, mistrust and emergency
in the Valley, studies have only recently begun now that aim to
understand, manage, and reconcile the relationship of aspects
such as conflict, heritage, dark histories, identity, politics,
socio-cultural trauma, ethical recording and use of memories,
institutional frameworks for protection of heritage, terror-
scape management, and implications of decisions made during
or after conflict and methods by which post-conflict
reconstruction and interpretation can be ensured to be
neutral. While every single of these aspects require inspection
at great depths, they also need to be understood in entirety as
each of these individual elements influence the idea of Mughal
Road – a prospect as interesting as it is challenging.

Photo 4: High Military Surveillance on the Mughal Road near the Indo-Pak Border;
Credit: Parshati Dutta

But then there are many such challenges along the multiple
routes in Kashmir that are yet to capture public attention. This
is particularly true of the roads leading out of India into
hostile hinterlands of Gilgit-Balistan.
One of these is the Turtuk - Khapulu Road that was split into two
by the Line of Control in 1971 when Indian Army captured the
territory up to the village of Thang in Nubra. Earlier, on that
particular day of capture, Mohammad Ali (then 5 years old)
had been left behind at home, in the charge of his grandfather.
His grandmother and both parents had journeyed on a
domestic purpose to the neighbouring village of Franu, which
from that day on till date is with Pakistan. As Mohammad’s
grandmother and parents attempted to return to their home,
entry was barred and a grave Indian Army told them to turn
away at gunpoint. No amount of reasoning, pleading, or crying
would help, as within a few short hours, their homeland had
been transformed to a foreign and hostile territory. Even as the
physical distance separating Franu and Thang remained one
kilometre, politically they were farther than this estranged
family could ever hope to travel. For over forty years, the family
could not re-connect. More than forty years were spent in futile
hopes, that following the example of Teetwal, some meeting
points on the LoC would be thrown open on humanitarian
grounds to allow the many estranged families to meet each
other again, however briefly. Growing up practically as an
orphan, Mohammad would often go as close to the border as he
could – to a point from where he could glimpse the village of
Franu at a distance – straining his eyes to see if one of the
silhouetted human shapes were his parents, and whether they
would respond to his whistling, drum-beating, or flag-waving.
With a burning and unfulfilled need to convey to the other half
of the family that one side was well and missed the other, each
day was tormented, knowing that the fragmented family was
barely a kilometre away from each other and yet too far out of
reach. Eventually, Mohammad’s grandparent perished on
either side of the LoC, broken hearted, before they could see
each other again. Finally, it was as recently as 2014 that
Mohammad was issued a visa to Pakistan. Travelling through
Leh, Delhi, Wagah, Lahore, Islamabad (where he had to wait
several months for permission to access Skardu as a town
under federally administered Gilgit-Baltistan region), that
Mohammad, in his late forties, finally met his family again. It
had taken him forty-three years and a detour of nearly three
thousand kilometres of travel to cover the one kilometre of
mountain track that lay between the family fragments in Thang
and Franu.
In comparison, the Mughal Road stretches across 500 kilometres,
divided almost equally between India and Pakistan. And our
attempt to reconcile this journey has only just begun.

Photo 5: Children Hiking up a Road at Turtuk Valley; Credit: Vrinda Jariwala