The lost art of the Kashmiri ‘piknik’
Despite years of unrest, turmoil and instability, picnicking has endured. But the meaning of recreation is shifting in favour of consumption and markets.
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When I moved to Delhi from Kashmir for undergraduate studies in 2018, one of the many things that struck me in the metropolitan hubbub was how recreation was centred around markets and obsessive consumption.
For the people around me, weekends meant incurring expenses to buy and consume – food, malls, cafes, clothes and movies. I was not accustomed to this when I was growing up. But I soon fell into step. After I’d run through the exhaustive list of ancient tombs and monuments to explore, I also found myself going to ticketed places, and spending weekends making purchases.
The Delhi ways of spending my Sundays contradicted my Kashmiri sensibilities. In Kashmiri culture, recreation meant picnics, or as my Dadi says, “piknik”. Unlike Delhi, Kashmir has an abundance of streams, lakes and mountains. In my childhood, recreation meant planning trips to Mughal gardens like Chasma Shahi and Nehru Park around the Dal Lake in Srinagar.
Occasionally, we’d set off early Saturday mornings for Pahalgam, Gulmarg, or Sonmarg, further away from Srinagar. The extended family would book a Matador or Tempo Traveller, and we’d play music all the way to our destination.
If we were lucky, there would be an overnight stay in the serene valleys and lunch by the...
