On a biting December morning in 2019, as snow blanketed the steep wooden rooftops of Kilshay village near the Line of Control in Kashmir, Bashir Ahmad Teroo sat cross-legged on the floor of his home, spinning chaku—a traditional thread used in weaving. He had just returned from a long shift at the sub-district hospital. That evening, in the dim, warm glow of the hearth, his mother silently handed him a bundle—75 cherished objects: handwoven fabrics, worn utensils, ceremonial jewellery, even a rusted wristwatch that once belonged to her grandmother, who had lived in Gilgit. “These are not things to be thrown away,” she told him gently. “They are our history. Promise me you’ll preserve them.”
That promise became a life’s calling.
Nestled 125 km from Srinagar, Gurez Valley sits like a forgotten jewel between mountains, close to the volatile Line of Control. It is home to the Dard Shin tribe—keepers of an ancient culture and the Shina language. They have kin across the border in Gilgit. Among them is Bashir, a 50-year-old government health worker from the Tulail Valley, who has become an unlikely guardian of this fading past. In 2021, he turned the second floor of his modest home in Mastan village, just a kilometre from Dawar, Gurez’s main town, into a museum—the Dard Shin Museum. The space is humble and self-funded: a cultural sanctuary preserving the tools, textiles, and oral traditions of one of Jammu and Kashmir’s oldest ethnic communities. What began with 75 heirlooms has now grown into a living archive of over 450 artefacts, donated by villagers or collected by Bashir on his long journeys through the Dardic belt.
One room in the museum glows with traditional jewellery and rare costumes. The adjacent room hums with ancestral knowledge—wooden shoes, farming tools, wild herbs, and even the weathered verses of Ghulam Rasool Mushtaq, a Shina poet whose songs still echo in the valleys. He remembers a day during the pandemic at the Nehru Nallah in Tulail, he spotted an elderly man tossing out an old pheran. Bashir offered `1,000 for it on the spot. He then walked eight kilometres, drenched in sweat under his PPE suit, lugging the seven-kilogram cloak like a sacred relic. “I was sweating and exhausted,” he recalls, “but my love for my tribe and culture gave me strength that day.” Today, that pheran rests safely in his museum.
Despite its modest size, the museum has welcomed more than 2,700 visitors—journalists, scholars, vloggers, army officers, students, and curious travellers, all eager to understand this secluded world. For Bashir, it’s not just a collection. “This is a revival,” he says. “A cultural sanctuary that preserves our heritage, our traditional life, and our art.”
Yet, the Dard Shin Museum runs without any government support—no funding, no staff, no professional preservation. Bashir manages it all alone. Still, he dreams. One day, if funding arrives, he wishes to donate half the museum’s income to widows in the valley, fulfilling a promise to his mother.
The rise of the internet in Gurez has become a powerful, if fragile, ally. Bashir runs two Facebook groups with nearly 10,000 followers, spreading Dardic culture to corners as far as Drass, Kargil, and Gilgit. But limited bandwidth and no tech team make this work painstaking. “If we had resources,” he says, “this could become a digital archive for the entire Dard Shin community.”
With rising tensions along the Line of Control, Bashir now worries for the safety of his museum. “We live under the threat of shelling and uncertainty,” he says. And yet, hope persists. “By God’s will, my children will carry this work forward,” he says. “Because our stories deserve to live on, just like my mother wanted.”