With the tourists frightened away by Kashmir’s separatist struggle, the famous Dal Lake is slowly succumbing to pollution.
By Jason Overdorf – GlobalPost
Published: July 28, 2009 07:36 ET
Updated: July 29, 2009 08:38 ET
SRINAGAR, Kashmir — From the shores of Srinagar’s Dal Lake, once described as heaven on earth, the water looks dull and brackish. The storied houseboats that were the summer playgrounds of India’s British colonizers are lined up across what from this vantage appears to be a weed-choked pond, no larger than a football field.
The boats’ garish decorations and cheery names — “New Australia,” “Sansouci,” “Young Dreams,” “The Golden Fleece” — hint at a Gatsbyish heyday of long, lazy afternoons and parties that echoed across the water through the night. But packed chock-a-block, in all their faded grandeur, most of the boats lie empty.
Dal Lake is dying, and along with it a remarkable culture.
“If you had seen Kashmir 20 years back, 30 years back, then half of the population lived in boats,” Rashid Dangola, owner of a houseboat named “Hilton Kashmir” tells me. “In the next 20 years, day by day, this culture will go.”
In fact, the football field-sized parcel where the Hilton Kashmir lies moored is only a tiny portion of the real Dal Lake, which spreads over six square miles but which over the last 30 years has shrunk to half its original size. It has been reclaimed by weeds and eventually land, paved over by the government in an effort to improve roadways and accommodate Srinagar’s growing population, or simply converted to real estate and farmland by people in need of a place to live.
Only a small part of the remaining lake can be seen from the shore, because at its heart it is a sort of floating, rural Venice — a maze of canals, vegetable gardens and lotus-root farms where houseboats have been converted into souvenir stores and papier mache factories, and islands have been reclaimed to erect towering colonial brick houses.
These islands, and the “floating land” that an estimated 40,000 farmers use to grow eggplant, squash and tomatoes, multiplies every year. So do the people. And so does the waste they create. Garbage spills into the water from the Dal’s banks, and a thick green scum covers canals that 20 years ago were splashing playgrounds for local children.
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