… culmination of grand tradition and warm hospitality

We don’t realise how important Google and Wikipedia have become in our lives. But with the age of blogging, looking up just about everything on the internet—that too, on our cellphones—it is inexcusable to be ignorant about the culture and cuisine of a destination that you are just about to visit. I offer all this up as the reason why I reached Kashmir in July 1987, without knowing anything at all about either its culture or cuisine: Google was still over a decade away.

I was on a photography assignment, and my only brief had been—“we don’t want any more pictures of shikaras and houseboats. Concentrate on the rest of the stuff”. There was only one slight hitch: I had no idea at all what the other “stuff” constituted, and whether, indeed, there was anything in Kashmir apart from shikaras and houseboats. Twenty-seven years and marriage to my Kashmiri boyfriend later, I can only cringe at my ignorance.

Hardly had the plane touched the ground, than I was heading towards Hazratbal, the shrine that is located on the banks of the Dal. I found it the very essence of poetry. A white marble shrine, topped by a dome, reflected upon the water of the lake. Once I went there, I figured that it was like a separate village on the outskirts of the city. There were bread sellers with breads of several sizes and shapes; there were vegetable shops and vendors with coal-fired bhattis from where the irresistible aroma of spicy mutton tikkas arose. There were little old ladies with tinned copper vessels in front of them selling steamed rajma interspersed with grains of husked wheat.

I have watched the funky little row of tumbledown stalls grow bigger and more self-assured over the decades. I have also realised that the little old ladies are all from the nearby village of Telbal and steam one or two types of dal—rajma or moth ki dal—all night long on a slow fire, to sell it to those who come to offer prayers at the Hazratbal shrine. And that few family elders would visit the shrine without bringing back a handful of the dal, sprinkled over with spice powder, for the children in the family. I learnt, too, that shrines and playgrounds were the best places to scout around for snacks, and that Kashmiri snacks contained no preservatives and were not even necessarily fried. The one exception to the rule was moinj gool.

Either my husband’s family are moinj gool fiends or every Kashmiri is a secret moinj gool freak, but the vertically cut lotus stems, roasted grams, small whole fish, and potato chips all dipped in seasoned rice flour batter and deep-fried, are more than a treat: it’s an addiction. Served with an accompaniment of chopped onions with green chillies and vinegar, it’s our collective tea-time snack.

In 1987, it was easy enough to walk around the city. Hazratbal was at the furthest end: the old city crowded around the hillock of Hari Parbat, and the Dal and Nageen Lakes were navigable by boat. I soon found out that shikaras were just one type of transport on the water, and that the entire city seemed to be built on a network of waterways that led off from the River Jehlum. There were tiny skiffs, large boats called bahach, residential boats called doongas and a host of others. At the very top of the chain was the tourist’s houseboat. Houseboat owners were warm, hospitable people and their interaction with foreign tourists over a century, have given them an edge in knowing what non- Kashmiris like. So it was with trepidation that one of them offered me my first cup of noon chai. One sip, and I was hooked onto salt tea.

Fortunate that I acquired a taste for it, because in my new home, salt tea was served at breakfast with a couple of types of bread and at tea-time, with a whole host of biscuits, breads and savouries. My favourite has always been the soft as butter kulcha, sprinkled over with poppy seed, but there are baqarkhani, sheermal, pheni, tchot and tchachvoru as well. They were completely distinct from the cookies and tea-cakes that accompanied regular tea. You could visit a friend or relative and come back home too full to even think of dinner—such was Kashmiri hospitality.

With the prosperity that has set in over the last few decades, thanks in part to the tourism buck, mutton has overtaken every other ingredient as suitable nourishment for the body and the soul. To go to someone’s home for a meal and not to be given at least one mutton dish is to get a strong and rather negative social message! Go for a wedding or one of the myriad ceremonies around it, and you will be fed at least 10 if not 20 dishes, most of them of meat. Is it overkill? For an outsider, it is as much of a challenge to sit on the floor around a large platter of rice, along with three others of the same gender, all eating neatly from your own side of the platter. For a Kashmiri, however, polishing off most of the meat is an art borne of long practice. “The trick,” a kindly aunt told me in the first month of my marriage, “is to eat hardly any rice, but as much meat as you can.”

It is advice that has stood me in good stead for 23 years. For the wazwan is certainly the culmination of a grand tradition of dealing with every part of the lamb, leaving no waste. Each dish in the wazwan calls for a particular part of the animal. You can no more use shoulder to cook methi maaz than you can use the breast to make dhaniphol. Each dish is cooked differently and combined with different spices, and each has a complete different texture. It is only the male members of a particular community called Wazas who are qualified to cook the wazwan, and they cook it traditionally over a wood fire on enormous tinned copper pots.

“There is a protocol to the way wazwan is cooked, served and eaten, and at the risk of sounding like a fundamentalist, you only mess with this protocol at the risk of interfering with the final product.” That is our family Waza’s favourite dictum and I tend to agree with him.

To have a restaurant serving wazwan is meaningless: you need a modern kitchen for that, which means no wood fires burning in an open courtyard, and that is the death-knell for a banqueting tradition that has survived at least a couple of centuries. It will certainly be a shame the day we have to Google wazwan to know what it tasted like!