Documenting Chinar Trees Through Art
- Touyiba binti Javaid
- Jul 10
- 4 min read
In 1568, Akbar ensured that before a child like me ever read history, I should walk through it.
Autumn evenings at my grandparents’ home in Naseem Bagh always ended the same way—with a walk through the University of Kashmir where my grandfather had taught history for decades. The grand Chinars (Platanus orientalis), planted centuries ago by this emperor, rose around us like gentle giants, their roots tangled in memories of empire, exile and everything in between. Their ancient limbs glowed in the weak sun as our footsteps stirred the burning orange carpet.
I had learned, with a child’s strange precision, which angles yielded the most satisfying crunch. There was a rhythm to it, like a forgotten song, and I took it seriously, skipping, pausing and angling each step to strike the perfect note. The music of a thousand footsteps resounded through the gnarly trunks. I didn’t understand it then, but those walks were my first lessons in memory, inheritance, and the quiet poetry of place.
The Chinar (Kashmiri: bouin) came to the valley through stories as much as through soil.
Legend says it first arrived with the 14th-century Sufi saint Mir Syed Ali Hamdani from Persia. One tale tells of someone seeing its flaming red leaves and exclaiming, ‘Che-Naar ast?’ (What fire is this?). Its name was born in awe, and rightly so.
In time, the Chinar became the royal tree of the Mughals and Akbar its greatest patron. Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama celebrates their beauty. In one remarkable episode, he writes of a storm during which Akbar and 34 of his soldiers found shelter inside the hollow trunk of an aged Chinar. Shah Jahan, inheriting both empire and admiration, planted the Char Chinar—four sentinels on each corner of a small island in Dal Lake. Jahangir too, in Tuzk-i-Jehangiri, recalls seeking refuge inside the belly of a Chinar, with seven horsemen and their steeds.
Those hollows — once imperial shelters — were, in my childhood, places of warning. At dusk, the elders would tell us not to linger too close, lest a jinn be hiding inside, waiting for night to fall.
From history and myth, the Chinar moved into art.
The tree curls itself into the golden thread of Kashmiri shawls, flanked by paisleys and vines. Its leaves turn everyday objects sacred through memory — papier mâché boxes, kandkari copper plates , walnut-wood furniture, pheran borders.
To live in the valley is to carry the Chinar in your hands, your home, your breath.
Chinar in craft: leaves etched in wood and metal. Whether on a serving vessel or a doorway’s frame, the Chinar is more than a motif. Photos: Touyiba
The Chinar also burns bright in poetry.
Allama Iqbal, dreaming of a revived East, found in it an immortal fire, a people’s deathless perseverance:
Jis khaak ke zameer mein hai aatish-e-Chinar
Mumkin nahin ke sard ho woh khaak-e-arjumand
The soil that holds within its conscience the fire of the Chinar
That exalted soil can never grow cold.
Lal Ded, the 14th-century mystic whose vaakhs wandered barefoot through these very groves, once likened a faithful wife to a “shihij bouin” — a comforting Chinar.
Centuries later, Agha Shahid Ali would remember them with the ache of exile in The Last Saffron — “I will die in autumn in Kashmir,” he wrote, as if only the blazing Chinars could cradle his final breath.
Even in distant tongues, the tree found its echo. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in Evangeline, invoked the Chinar, though he called it by its Persian twin, the plane tree:
Each glittering tree of the forest
Flashed like the plane-tree the Persian adorned with mantles and jewels.
And Mahjoor, the Wordsworth of Kashmir, wrote with tender longing:
Should my love come to rest under Mahjoor’s Chinars
With the soft breeze blowing from the Arigam stream,
I’ll spread jasmine under his feet.
Autumn in Kashmir feels like remembering.
As the Chinars blaze into red and gold, so do old stories and older songs. Painters return to their palettes. Grandmothers stir samovars and speak of the past with smoky eyes. The valley slows down, bracing for the harsh winters to knock.
And always, in the center of it all, stands the Chinar. A standing memory, rooted in silence, crowned in fire. It has seen the footsteps of kings and the prayers of mystics, the shadows of soldiers and the games of barefoot children. It has listened to weeping brides, the hush of lovers and the chants of temples. It has watched seasons repeat and rupture, empires fall and rise again.
They say when the world will be asked to remember itself, when even the trees will be made to speak, the Chinar will rise in witness, and the valley will be remembered through its tongue.
About the author
Touyiba is a valley child who loves history, politics and Johnny from Hotel Transylvania.
She's keen to explore the bridge between nature and culture through folktales and vivid narrations. You might envy her for her WhatsApp sticker collection.
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