About This Edition and Introduction

About This Edition

This book gives the complete Urdu text and a new English translation of *Sair-e-Kashmir* (A Tour of Kashmir) by Pandit Kanhaiya Lal of Delhi, who wrote under the pen name Ashiq. It is the diary he kept, stage by stage, as guide and interpreter to an English traveller on a journey from Lahore through Jammu into the valley of Kashmir, from 17 April to 29 June 1847, together with his own preface and a closing description of the city of Kashmir.

Source of the Urdu text: Urdu Wikisource (ur.wikisource.org), the pages سیر کشمیر, in three parts (preface, diary and conclusion), taken from the Wikimedia dump of October 2026. The book ends with a chronogram for its printing by Ali Muhammad Khan Wali, giving the year 1278 AH (1861–62). A typeset copy of the book on archive.org ("Sair E Kashmir") was also consulted.

What is left out and what was changed: the whole of the author's text is given, in his order, with the contemporary chronogram. The Wikisource page headers and notes are left out. At one point the printed book has a family tree of Maharaja Gulab Singh drawn as a flowering plant; it is a picture, its names cannot be read in the available copy, and it is not reproduced; a note marks the place. The diary has been divided into five chapters for easier reading; the chapter titles are new. Nothing modern has been added to the Urdu.

Copyright: the author was a grown man in government service in 1847 and the book was printed in 1861–62, so he cannot have been alive in 1961; works of Urdu authors who died in 1961 or earlier are out of copyright in Pakistan and India. The English translation, the chapter divisions and titles, this introduction and the glossary are new.

Translation: the English follows the Urdu sentence by sentence and keeps the diary's dated entries. The many Persian inscriptions and verses the author copied from mosques, gardens, shrines and gates are translated line by line, with a translator's note [TN: ...] saying that they are in Persian in the original. Hijri dates are given with the Western year in a note. Place names are given as the author spells them. Urdu and Persian terms kept in the translation are explained in the glossary at the end.

Introduction

In his preface Kanhaiya Lal tells us that he was the son of Pandit Thakur Das of Delhi, first teacher at the government school there; that he went to Agra for work in 1840, and in 1846 joined the office of the British Agent at Lahore. In 1847 an English gentleman whose name he writes as Winterbottom, then about fifty-three years old, came to Lahore wishing to see Kashmir and needing someone who knew the languages of the country. No other English-speaker could be found, and Colonel Lawrence, the Resident, sent Kanhaiya Lal himself.

The diary follows the party on elephant and pony and on foot from Lahore by Sialkot to Jammu, where they met the heir of Maharaja Gulab Singh, over the snows of the Pir Panjal to the springs and Mughal gardens of the valley, to Mattan, where they met the Maharaja himself, and on to the city of Kashmir, the Dal lake, the Shalimar and Nishat gardens, Gulmarg, the rope bridge at Uri and the Wular lake. At Gurez the Englishman went on towards Gilgit alone, and the author, recalled on government business, struggled back through a snowstorm.

The book is a short, plain and observant record of Kashmir in the first months of Gulab Singh's rule. It notes distances, crops, prices, revenue, local officials, diseases and customs, and copies the inscriptions it finds, while its author also enjoys the waterfalls, flowers and fruit, and ends with high praise of the city of Kashmir.