What do you think?
City of Kashmir: Srinagar: A Popular History
INTO THE MARROW OF INDIA'S URBAN JOHN MURRAY INDIA'S 'CITIES IN TIME' SERIES
Sameer Hamdani invites readers to explore the long and layered history of a city shaped by over two millennia of cultural, political and artistic evolution. Through stories drawn from historical texts, oral traditions, art and everyday life, the book uncovers how Srinagar's identity was formed and continually reshaped across centuries. Hamdani's narrative spans from the city's pre-Islamic roots to its medieval and early modern Muslim eras, placing a strong emphasis on its material culture - architecture, craft and poetry - as windows into its past.
City of Kashmir is both a personal chronicle and a scholarly deep dive based on twenty years of close engagement with Srinagar as a heritage professional. It reclaims the city's place as a historic centre of knowledge and creativity in South Asia, offering an essential entry point into Kashmir's urban and cultural memory.
Sameer Hamdani invites readers to explore the long and layered history of a city shaped by over two millennia of cultural, political and artistic evolution. Through stories drawn from historical texts, oral traditions, art and everyday life, the book uncovers how Srinagar's identity was formed and continually reshaped across centuries. Hamdani's narrative spans from the city's pre-Islamic roots to its medieval and early modern Muslim eras, placing a strong emphasis on its material culture - architecture, craft and poetry - as windows into its past.
City of Kashmir is both a personal chronicle and a scholarly deep dive based on twenty years of close engagement with Srinagar as a heritage professional. It reclaims the city's place as a historic centre of knowledge and creativity in South Asia, offering an essential entry point into Kashmir's urban and cultural memory.
282 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 28, 2025
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review
February 23, 2026
The research is not exhaustive. Despite written in a scholarly style, and meticulously edited by the publisher, it is little cursory with the history details on Kashmir. For avid readers of Kashmir history, especially ones who have read books by local authors from local presses, this book will not offer them a pathbreaking new perception, bearing a few instances. Maybe, the strategic aim of the author was to present Kashmir history to global readers, in less than 250 pages. That plan sounds ambitious to a reader like me who has been a student of history too.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review