Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar

• 1. Introduction

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  Shalimar Bagh sits at the northeast edge of Dal Lake in Srinagar, and carved into the black marble of its highest pavilion is a Persian couplet that reads, in translation: "If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here." Those words were written by the poet Orfi Shirazi during a visit to Kashmir. They have since been inscribed on buildings across the Indian subcontinent. What kind of place could inspire such a claim, repeated three times as if once were not enough? The garden was built by the Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1619, and it is considered the high point of Mughal horticulture. It is also known by at least three other names. It stretches nearly 587 metres along a central water channel, holds 410 fountains, and has been called the Crown of Srinagar. It gave its name to a Lahore garden, a Delhi garden, a 2005 novel by Salman Rushdie, and a famous European poem. This documentary follows the garden from its Mughal origins through the hands of emperors, maharajas, and poets to the present day.

• 2. A Garden's Many Names

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  The word "Shalimar" itself has no settled origin. The most plausible explanation traces it to a Persian-Arabic mixed expression, shah al-'imarat, meaning Master of Buildings. When Jahangir enlarged an ancient garden on this site in 1619, he called it Farah Baksh, which means "the delightful." When Emperor Shah Jahan sent the governor of Kashmir, Zafar Khan, to extend it further in 1630, the name changed again to Faiz Baksh, meaning "the bountiful." That double naming reflects how the garden was treated by successive rulers: not a fixed monument but a living project, expanded and renamed by each generation that claimed it. The Sikh governors of the province later used it as a pleasure ground. During Maharaja Ranjit Singh's rule, the marble pavilion served as a guest house for European visitors. Maharaja Hari Singh had the premises electrified. Through all those transformations, the name Shalimar Bagh endured as the most popular, and it remains so today.

• 3. Water, Stone, and Three Terraces

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  The garden covers 12.4 hectares, shaped into a rectangle 587 metres long and 251 metres wide. Its organizing principle is water. The central channel, called the Shah Nahar, runs axially from the highest point to the lowest through three distinct terraces, each assigned a different social role. The design adapts the Persian garden layout, known as the Chahar Bagh, which originally called for four radiating arms from a central water source. Here, the hilly terrain and the need to divert water from a higher elevation forced a shift: the radial arms were dropped and the plan became rectangular. A canal roughly 1.6 kilometres long and 11 metres wide connected the garden to Dal Lake, cutting through swampy ground flanked by willow groves and rice terraces. Inside the garden, chinar trees lined the broad green paths along the lake, and avenues of aspen trees were planted at intervals of 0.61 metres along trellised walkways. The 410 fountains fed by the Shah Nahar supplied each terrace in succession, moving water downward through the public zone, the private audience hall, and finally the imperial harem.

• 4. Chambers of Power and Seclusion

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  The first terrace was the garden's public face, anchored by the Diwan-e-Aam, the hall of public audience. Over the waterfall in that hall, a small black marble throne was installed. The second terrace held the Diwan-e-Khas, the Hall of Private Audience, accessible only to noblemen and court guests. That hall is now derelict, though its carved stone bases and a platform ringed by fountains still stand. Royal bathrooms were placed on the northwest boundary of the same enclosure. The third and most secluded terrace housed the Zenana garden, the women's quarter of the royal harem. Entry was controlled through two small pavilions built in Kashmiri style on stone plinths. Shah Jahan built a baradari of black marble inside this innermost garden, known as the Black Pavilion. It sits encircled by a fountain pool fed from the terrace above, with a double cascade falling against a low wall carved with small arched niches called chini khanas. Two octagonal pavilions define the garden's end wall, with a backdrop of snow-covered mountains beyond. The stone doors of the baradari are said to have been salvaged from old temples demolished during Shah Jahan's reign, though this remains conjecture.

• 5. Light Behind the Waterfalls

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  Chini khanas, the arched niches set into the walls behind garden waterfalls, are among the most distinctive features of Shalimar Bagh. At night, these niches were lit with oil lamps, so that the falling water appeared to carry light rather than simply reflect it. A chronicler who visited the garden left a description of what that atmosphere felt like: "A subtle air of leisure and repose, a romantic indefinable spell, pervades the royal Shalimar: this leafy garden of dim vistas, shallow terraces, smooth sheets of falling water, and wide canals, with calm reflections broken only by the stepping stones across the streams." Today, the niches hold pots of flowers instead of oil lamps, so the colours of the blooms reflect through the cascading water. The garden is considered especially striking in autumn and spring, when the chinar trees change colour. It remains a public park and a prominent attraction around Dal Lake.

• 6. Jahangir's Kashmir Obsession

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  Jahangir and his wife Nur Jahan made the journey from Delhi to Srinagar at least 13 times during summer, bringing the full imperial court with them each time. To reach the city, they crossed the snowy passes of the Pir Panjal mountain range on elephants. Shalimar Bagh was their summer residence and the seat of the Royal Court during those stays. The inscription carved into the black pavilion speaks to what Kashmir meant to Jahangir personally. On his deathbed, when asked what he most desired, he is credited with saying: "Kashmir, the rest is worthless." The poet Orfi Shirazi, whose couplet about paradise on earth was later wrongly attributed to Amir Khusrau, captured that feeling for visitors across centuries. The garden that Jahangir built as Farah Baksh in 1619 went on to inspire the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, begun in 1641, and the Shalimar Bagh in Delhi, begun in 1653 by Izz-un-Nissa, the wife of Shah Jahan.

• 7. The Garden in Literature

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  The poet Laurence Hope, whose real name was Violet Nicolson, opened her poem "Kashmiri Song" with the line "Pale hands I loved beside the Shalimar." Amy Woodforde-Finden set the poem to music, and the song became widely popular across Europe. Salman Rushdie's 2005 novel Shalimar the Clown takes both its title and the name of its central character from the garden. That character, the novel explains, was once a tightrope-walking clown in a Kashmiri village who became a Muslim terrorist. The book moves between California and Kashmir and was described by The Globe and Mail as a "devastating portrait of the destruction of Kashmir." The garden that Jahangir called Farah Baksh in 1619 had, by 2005, become a symbol capacious enough to carry both a European love song and a novel about political violence.