MAHOOR HAYA SHAH
“La beauté n’a pas besoin de traduction.”
They say beauty needs no translation, but in Gantagar, it has been translated too many times until it lost its accent.
In recent times, the square glows like it is trying too hard. Unheimlich!!! is that strange German word for something both homely and haunting which fits perfectly here. Because Gantagar feels familiar, yes, but not quite ours anymore. Gantagar does not simply exist; it performs existence, and in doing so, mirrors a world addicted to the gloss of visibility.
There is something outré about it these days. The streets, once pulsing with the soft rhythm of life… the hiss of samovars, the bargaining with shopkeepers, the laughter of students huddled under the grey sky, now move to a different beat. Louder. Shinier. A little too rehearsed. Kashmir has always known its own grammar of warmth- Kangris cradled in palms, songs that rise like mist, weddings that dance even under curfew. But what is happening around Gantagar from few years is not a celebration. It is a blatant broadcast. Gantagar has become a microcosm of the times — a stage where stories are performed rather than lived. The square glows as if it were its own protagonist, each light a punctuation mark in a narrative we are only half-authoring. We are participants, yet also witnesses; the gaze we direct is mirrored back at us in pixels, hashtags and fleeting recognition.
Walk through it now, and you will find banners, pomp and show, crowds and noise screaming optimism, looped like borrowed dreams and cameras — always cameras — recording what feels like a scene from someone else’s movie. Why is it decked to nines everytime? There is spectacle, sure. But it’s the kind that leaves a lump in your throat…the kind that glitters but doesn’t glow.
Gantagar wasn’t always this loud. It used to be our pause… a space where strangers exchanged greetings, where the scent of kebabs mingled with rain, where the world slowed down enough for you to feel human again. Today, it’s a showroom of curated joy.
Has it become a microcosm of something much larger — a theatre of “normalcy,” performed with so much precision that the rough edges of real life have been edited out? Every new installation, every “cultural event,” feels less like celebration and more like broadcast. It is like someone turned our home into a film set and forgot to tell us we’re extras.
Here one sees the architecture of contemporary human existence: performativity, hyperreality and the seduction of image. You can almost hear it; the language of it all: words like normalcy, development, progress scattered around like autumn leaves. Pretty words, yes. But in the wrong mouths, they start to sound like instructions. And in a place like Kashmir, where memory has a long shelf life, instructions don’t sit well.
Gantagar is a stage for simulacra. There is subtle complicity in every smile framed for the camera, every gesture paused for effect. It is here that philosophy and poetry intersect. Kierkegaard’s crowd is present, Hegel’s dialectic creeps beneath the surface, and yet, phenomenologically, the square is alive with what Merleau-Ponty might call “lived corporeality”: the imperceptible textures of life. These are minor miracles, impervious to curation, resisting translation into a story meant to be consumed.
That is the tragedy and the tenderness of it that Gantagar has become a metaphor for us. Always illuminated, always watched, always told how to feel. We have learnt to smile for the camera, to nod at the right time, to perform belonging even when belonging feels borrowed.
And yet… we endure. We always do. Because underneath the spectacle, there’s still that heartbeat — the one that beats in our air as if the world has not changed.
Maybe that’s the rebellion no one films… the decision to stay human.
This valley keeps teaching us, over and over again: that peace shouldnt and isnt performed. It is lived. Quietly. Patiently. Just like a prayer whispered to no one, but heard by everyone who still believes this place can heal.
MAHOOR HAYA SHAH
Writer from Srinagar
