SRINAGAR: In the autumn of 1947, as Kashmir stood on the edge of a historic rupture, Srinagar’s elite were preparing for a different kind of celebration. The Dussehra festival, usually a modest event in the city’s social calendar, was to take on an unprecedented character that year, an effort to bridge divides at a time when the world around was falling apart.
“The Dussehra ‘At Home’ of 1947 was meant to be different,” recalls Salim Beg, who leads INTACH Kashmir. “For the first time, the organisers had decided to invite their ‘Muslim brethren’ to what had till then been a community event. The invitation list, preserved in the Amar Singh Club archives, offers a rare glimpse into a moment of intended social outreach that history never allowed to happen.”
Traditionally, Kashmir’s festivals have been private, family-centred affairs. Whether among Pandits or Muslims, celebrations were defined by devotion, quiet gatherings, and a distinct lack of public spectacle. Dussehra, by contrast, belonged largely to the city’s non-Kashmiri residents, mainly the Khatri traders who had settled in Srinagar since the late 19th century. They had risen as a prosperous mercantile class, dominating the wholesale trade in imported goods. Their Dussehra festivities, marked by the ritual burning of Ravana’s effigy at Hazuri Bagh or Gol Bagh (today’s Iqbal Park), were a vibrant reflection of their social life.
From 1935 onwards, these festivities were followed by an “At Home” gathering at the Amar Singh Club, a colonial-era institution whose membership largely comprised non-local officials and traders. By October 1947, the Dogra rule was in its twilight, and Kashmir was already feeling the tremors of partition. Yet, the Dussehra Celebration Committee sent out a letter on October 17, inviting 176 prominent Muslims to the function scheduled for the afternoon of October 25.
The letter, now part of the club’s conserved archives, survives as a document of poignant irony. The event never took place. Three days before it was to be held, on October 22, tribal raiders crossed into Kashmir. By October 24, they had reached Baramulla. Srinagar descended into panic, and most organisers of the celebration fled.
What remains is the invitation list, a roll call of the city’s political, military, and social elite on the eve of an upheaval that would change everything. The names include several Muslim officers in the Dogra army, such as Brigadier Rematullah, Colonel Sher Ali, Major Haroon, and Captain Ali Sher, alongside regional nobles like Raja Mohammad Khan of Garhi Dupatta and Raja Zabardast Khan. Brigadier Rematullah, who owned vast tracts of land including the area now known as Bagh-i-Mehtab, would soon migrate to Pakistan.
Among Kashmiri Muslims, the list features merchants, doctors, government officials, and political leaders — Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, Mirza Afzal Beg, and Maulana Syed among them. Their names, written in spellings of that era, Ghulam Mohammad Bakshi, Mohammad Afzal Beg, lend a strangely personal touch to the document, a snapshot of Kashmir’s transitional moment.
One particularly interesting entry is that of Dr Saifuddin Kitchloo, the prominent leftist leader from Punjab, who was then staying at the Regina Hotel in Srinagar. As Beg notes, “This suggests how politically charged the Valley already was. Leaders from both India and Pakistan were visiting, trying to shape Kashmir’s future even as the Dogra state still held formal authority.”
The Naqshbandis, a family of long-standing prominence since Mughal times, also figure on the list, as do several notable business families, the Shahsons, who once used “Pir” as a surname, and the Agas, who earlier carried the suffix Qizilbash . Religious figures like Mufti Jalal-ud-Din, Mirwaiz Hamadani, Moulvi Mohammad Hassan, and Mir Maqbool Geelani round off a register that reads almost like a miniature directory of pre-1947 Srinagar society.
“The invitation was an earnest gesture of inclusion,” Beg says. “But it came too late — perhaps the first and the last such attempt by an old social order struggling to find relevance in a changing world.”
The Dussehra of 1947 thus remains an event that never was — a symbolic moment buried beneath the noise of invasion, migration, and partition. Yet, the surviving list and the story it tells endure as a reminder that even amid turmoil, there were people who sought connection rather than separation.
