Suhail Dar
By the banks of the Jhelum in Batengoo, Anantnag, Abdul Ahad Gilkar stands in silence, watching the water that has drastically gone down. His eyes, heavy with age and sorrow, reflect the anguish of a man who has witnessed the river shrink year after year.
He murmurs to himself, recalling a time when the Jhelum was vast and alive, when its waters stretched far and wide, nourishing fields and quenching thirsts.
“This river was once our lifeline,” he says, his voice low. “We built our lives around it. Now, it is struggling to survive.”
A few kilometers away in Bijbehara, 65-year-old Ghulam Hassan Dar sits outside his small shop, rubbing his hands together as he gazes at the riverbed. Hassan says that many see the Jhelum as just another water body, but those who are Kashmiris or have truly lived what Kashmir is, beyond external cultural and political influences, know that this river is deeply woven into our identity.
“Jhelum is not just water—it is history, poetry, and memory. It carried the boats of kings, the bodies of fallen warriors, the cries of traders in the old city of Srinagar,” he says.
He pauses before reciting:
‘Tsolh wanai myani Jhelumas, Guv be-dardi koor’
(My Jhelum cries out to me,
But cruelty has made us deaf.)
“This is what our poet wrote,” Dar says. “Do we not see the cruelty now?”
He added that, “The Jhelum has seen empires rise and fall. It was the river that bore witness when Mughal caravans stopped at Khanabal, their boats heavy with silk and spices.”
Reciting the history of the river, he said, it carried the blood of Kashmiri rebels in 1931 when they were shot and their bodies thrown into its waters. The same river that sustained the valley is now shrinking, retreating like the past it holds within.
With spring approaching, the crisis is spreading beyond the riverbanks. In the farmlands of Anantnag and Bijbehara, farmers like Nazir Ahmad are growing restless. “The season is near,” he says, standing on a patch of dry land. “But if there’s no water, what will we harvest?”
The Meteorological Department has warned that Kashmir may be heading toward a drought, with snowfall levels this winter among the lowest in decades.
“Our rivers, streams, and even groundwater levels are depleting,” says a government official in Anantnag. “If the trend continues, agriculture will be hit first, then drinking water supply.”
The Achabal stream, which once fed the famed Achabal waterfall, has already dried up. “There was a time when the water would gush out from the earth like a fountain, cold and pure,” says Azia Begum, a farmer from Achabal. “Now, there is nothing but dry rocks.”
Omar Abdullah recently warned that Kashmir is “staring at a major water crisis,” urging authorities to take immediate measures. “We have always known Jhelum as our mother river,” says 70-year-old Nazir Ahmed from Bijbehara. “Mothers do not abandon their children. But we have abandoned her.”
A River’s Lament
For boatmen like Manzoor Ahmad Shah in Bijbehara, the Jhelum’s decline has meant the loss of an entire way of life. “People used to cross the river in my shikara. They would pay me a few rupees, and I would take them across. Now, there is barely any water left to row through,” he laments.
He recites a couplet he remembers from his father:
“Jhelum yaar myon sangrat, Dazith wanai paan”
(My beloved Jhelum turns to stone,
Crying out in flames.)
In Anantnag, 80-year-old Haji Habibullah, who once worked as a carpenter making wooden bridges, walks slowly toward the riverbank with a stick in hand.
“I built small bridges over the Arpat (Jhelum river tributary) for decades,” he says, his voice trembling. “Now I wonder—what good is a bridge if there’s no river left to cross?”
The river that once overflowed its banks in anger during the 2014 floods now struggles to touch the edges of its own history.
As Abdul Ahad Gilkar stands by its side, he wonders if the Jhelum remembers the poetry written for it, the battles fought over it, or the tears shed into its waters.
Perhaps, like the people who have lived by it for centuries, the river, too, is learning how to mourn.