Kashmir is a land where history refuses to stay still. It settles into mountain passes and riverbanks, into bridges worn smooth by centuries of footsteps, into lanes that bend and narrow as if remembering something. Monuments stand as visible markers of the past, but it is often quieter spaces—village paths, courtyards, shrines, neighbourhood streets—that hold the most intimate stories. To understand Kashmir, one must not only read about it, but walk through it. History here reveals itself fully only in presence.
This belief—that a place can be read like a living text—shaped an initiative now drawing Kashmir’s youth back to their own histories. The idea took form through Dr Khalid Wasim Hassan, Senior Assistant Professor at the Central University of Kashmir. In 2018, he began walking alone through Srinagar’s Downtown, not as a guide but as a learner, intrigued by how streets spoke politics and buildings carried memory.
Those solitary walks soon became shared journeys. One student asked to join, then another. Without plans or formal structure, the walks grew into a collective practice—heritage walks that blend history, architecture, politics, and lived experience. For Khalid, the intrigue lay not in presenting heritage as a finished past, but in encountering it as something unfolding, shaped by conversation and curiosity.
On a late summer afternoon, long shadows stretch across the old bridge at Safa Kadal. The Jhelum moves slowly beneath it, carrying centuries of stories. A small group gathers near the wooden railing, books in hand. There are no attendance sheets, no instructions. When Khalid arrives, the walk begins quietly—with a question about the bridge itself. Prabash remembers thinking he had signed up for a guided tour. A PhD scholar from Puducherry, he arrived in Srinagar expecting dates and explanations. Instead, he found himself standing inside history. At Yarkand Sarai, the group paused beneath old stone arches. Someone spoke of trade routes, another of merchants who once crossed Central Asia without passports. “That’s when it struck me,” Prabash says. “1947 didn’t just redraw borders. It changed mobility, economy, entire ways of being.” Politics, he realised, was etched into walls.
Questions moved easily through the group. Why were windows built inward? Why did doorways curve this way? Each answer led to another story. Learning travelled sideways—through listening, disagreement, and shared reflection.
Mariam, an architect raised in Srinagar, walks slower now. She stops often, touching surfaces she once passed without noticing. Outside an old house, she gestures toward a carved lattice. “This isn’t decoration,” she says. “It’s intelligence.” Light, privacy, climate—everything had been considered. “A lane isn’t a shortcut,” she adds. “It’s memory.” What stays with her most is not the architecture alone, but the people walking beside her, each reading the city differently. Stories surface naturally. A shrine hidden behind shopfronts. A haveli locked for decades. A bakery whose kulchas are “famous in the world.” Someone mentions a haunted house; another recalls a riverbank once alive with workshops. Folklore and fact coexist. No one rushes to correct. The city has always carried both.
Hamreen joined the walks three years ago, while still a student. She remembers tracing inscriptions at Shah-e-Hamdan, standing in the wide courtyard of Aali Masjid, sensing how monuments breathe with everyday life. “They’re not frozen,” she says. “They’re lived.” For her, the walk became a way of reading beyond books—of learning through movement.
Aayat remembers standing before a heritage site near her own home and realising she knew nothing about it. “Every structure holds triumph and loss,” she says. On one walk in Baramulla, an elderly woman advised the group to recite verses before entering an abandoned house believed to be haunted. “Academically, it may not matter,” Aayat laughs, “but it keeps the place alive.”
When the walking ends, the reading begins—sometimes by the river, sometimes under a chinar tree. Books open without ceremony: Kafka, poetry, essays, travel writing. Ahsan recalls a time when university felt heavy, until a reading of In the Penal Colony unlocked conversation. “Listening to others helped me understand my own discomfort,” he says. “Cities are the same. You peel layers.” Khalid usually listens more than he speaks. He never imagined this becoming a movement. “I had no perfect end goal,” he says. “These walks are part of a journey.” Over time, routes expanded—to craft clusters, shawl dyers, wood carvers at Safa Kadal, copper artisans, Tibetan Muslim neighbourhoods, Sikh mohallahs, potter villages, Pashtu settlements. Heritage widened, becoming both tangible and intangible.
Reading, Khalid believes, completes the walk. “Participating in public reading becomes an act of reclaiming space,” he says. Reflection turns movement into dialogue. As evening settles over Safa Kadal, the group forms a loose circle. Pages turn softly. Someone leans forward to speak; another responds. Traffic hums in the distance. The Jhelum flows on, as it always has—carrying stories, and returning them.
Here, a walk becomes a classroom. A region, a text. And every conversation, a step toward belonging.