Footloose, NOS, The News International
Town called Mirpur
Mirpur really has nothing to show for itself.
It is only a place you pass through — a rather poor start for
a great motorcycle journey through our part of Kashmir
By Salman Rashid
There is Great Britain and then there is Mirpur Britain where you can, especially in winters, meet young folks who speak with all sorts of British accents from the deep south to Yorkshire and even up into Scotland. Everyone you meet in this Kashmiri town has close relatives in Britain. And the young college boys I met were all a-raring to head off to ‘Eng laand’ with the accent heavy on the second syllable.
Tradition has it that from sometime late in the 19th century, men from Mirpur joined the Royal Indian Navy and merchant marine in large numbers. These were days of coal-fired steam boats and the men were mostly stokers manning the grimy innards with the blazing furnaces and the huge pounding engines. Even when diesel and furnace oil burning ships became usual, the men of Mirpur continued to work in the engine rooms. It is said that they had a knack for working around large machinery.
After the end of WWII, Britain was severely depleted of its male workforce and there was urgent need for manpower to work the factories. And so, it is said, the sons of the men who started out as stokers on ships went away to Britain in large numbers to work the Midlands factories. The trend never stopped. With all the restriction on entry into Britain now in force, young men from Mirpur nevertheless end up getting across because they all wed their cousins for the visa and the good life offered in the West.
It can scarcely be called good, however. With their eyes set on those distant shores, the men of Mirpur care no whit for education for if their grandfathers could make a good life in Britain without education, so can they, they argue. Not one of the twenty or so college students I spoke to were interested in professional education; all they wanted was to finish high school and wait for the wedding and the visa.
Of all these youngsters, there was only one not interested in going to Britain. He was working through a degree in finance and accounting and was an avid player of football. He said, “Men who wouldn’t do a jot of work here at home, get out there and work sixteen hours a day at low-paying menial jobs before eventually working their way to some respectable position.” And that, he added, was the limit of their ambition. None of them wanted professional training that could land them a white collar job. Britain or Bust is the motto of most young men in Mirpur.
In the early 1960s, Mirpur town underwent a great upheaval. The Jhelum River was to be dammed and the resulting lake was to drown the town which then sat on the slopes of the low hills west of the present town. A new Mirpur was established by the government. Now, we have to admit that we Pakistani Muslims like to exhibit our wealth. And so over the last two decades, very much like the village of Beval near Gujar Khan, Mirpur got a crop of new palatial houses. These are generally three-storeyed houses, coloured and shaped very like coffee icing cakes with large panes of tinted glass on their windows.
Many of them lack the vibrancy that comes from being lived in. They were built at huge costs never to be peopled; their only purpose, like the mansions of Beval, being to show off the wealth of the owners who live in Britain. One such mansion had two cell phone towers on its roof. Two of these with their generators pounding away on the columns and foundations of the house during the long hours of load shedding are bound to reduce the building to rubble by the time the owner comes around for a visit next time. But for the absentee landlord, the tens of thousands of rupees to be had as rent seem to be a good enough justification to shake up the foundations of a house he or she may never live in.
In two days in Mirpur the greatest activity I saw was in the town’s only playground. Situated behind the boys’ college, it was crowded with players. During the afternoons, there were two or three games of football in progress simultaneously. In the morning an equal number of cricket matches took place. In between out of school children played whatever took their fancy. But other than this activity which engaged about a couple of hundred boys, it was hard to gauge what the young people of Mirpur did with their spare time.
None of the boys I had spoken to mentioned being readers of books. Not one of them had a collection at home or went to the local library. There were no cinemas in town to engage them, yet, for some peculiar reason, teenage and early twenties men were missing from the streets in the evenings. Most of the people I saw were trader types with their beards and shalwar-kameez suits of white. They even infested the restaurants.
My friend Professor Mohiyuddin who teaches psychology at a local college was upset that I was going to form an opinion by meeting only with lower middle class boys who went to government institutions and that I was not seeing youngsters, especially girls, from private colleges. The problem was that I had mistimed my visit and arrived at the end of the week. So the impression may actually be skewed. That having been said, I saw enough to get a sense of the life of young people in Mirpur.
The question of what amusement youngsters engaged in was answered on the second afternoon. In the local park I saw a pair engaged in what could only be one of the earliest dates of their romance: the girl appropriately, if somewhat excessively, bashful and the boy almost falling over himself to impress. Even though I did not point my camera anywhere near their direction, their fast exit may have been because of me. So, the young people of Mirpur did engage in some normal activity.
The greatest attraction that Mirpur has to offer is the northern shore of Mangla Lake. Blue and placid, it had jetty from where boats left for the western side and for picnickers to reach the dramatic Ramkot Fort that sits on a lofty hillock at the spot where the Jhelum and Poonch rivers converge.
I should have expected at least some water sports. But there were none. The only answer to the question why all those Mirpur-wallahs who live in Britain have never thought of setting up a water sports centre in such an ideal situation is that we simply are not adventurous enough for such outdoor activity. Walking hand in hand (same gender) along busy streets is the last limit of our adventures.
There was one thing that excited me: the appearance of the buildings of old Mirpur annually when the level of the lake falls in March. My friend Professor Aslam Chaudhry gave me a graphic enough account to entice me to return again in that month. A mosque, a mausoleum and some houses emerge from the water in almost complete form. By his account, this makes for a regular pilgrimage as everyone heads for the ghost town. Elders can still recognise the streets they lived in and their houses.
This was the town that Frederic Drew, a geologist working for the Maharaja of Kashmir, visited in the 1860s. He noted that Mirpur, sitting on an eroded plateau, was a large town in the lower hills, second only to Jammu. It was a major market where wheat from the neighbouring hills was collected to be freighted down to the plains by boats on the Jhelum River.
Drew also noted the nice, large houses belonging to the Khatris (Hindu traders) who had enriched themselves from this traffic. With partition the Hindus migrated to the other side and this status of Mirpur came to an abrupt end. If the wheat trade still continued, it was dealt the coup de grace by the building of the dam that put an end to river traffic.
Having been built only fifty years ago, Mirpur really has nothing to show for itself. Since the character of cities comes from age, Mirpur is way too young to have acquired it. And that is the only way to describe it. It is simply not a destination. Mirpur is only a place you pass through. It was a rather poor start for a great motorcycle journey through our part of Kashmir.