A shikara is built without plans

There is no drawing. That is the first thing you notice in a shikara yard, and it takes a while to accept that it is not modesty or secrecy. There is genuinely no plan. A man who has built several hundred boats stands over a stack of deodar planks and starts cutting angles from memory, and three weeks later the thing floats level.

Why deodar and nothing else

Cedrus deodara is the whole reason the craft works. It is buoyant, it resists splitting, and its own resins keep insects and rot out of it — which matters enormously for a hull that will sit permanently in fresh water rather than being hauled out each season. Deodar does not decay in water the way most timber does. A well-kept shikara lasts decades.

The wood comes down from the forests around the valley and arrives as unprocessed logs, which are then reduced to long slivers — anything from roughly twenty-five to forty feet, depending on what is being built. A passenger shikara is shorter than that suggests; the long stock is cut down.

Three parts

A shikara is understood by its builders in three sections, and they have names.

The brohnam is the front: the raised, pointed prow, tapering to what the yards call the zero point. It carries a decorative kalla, a finial, and that piece is traditionally chinar rather than deodar — a different wood for the part that is purely ornamental, which tells you something about how seriously the ornament is taken.

The middle is the passenger section, built up from around eight planks. This is where the whole modern character of the boat lives: the sprung seating, the backrests, the cushions, the canopy. The arrangement is straightforwardly Mughal in ancestry — a low, curtained, cushioned platform for reclining on water — and it has been iterated on for four hundred years without ever being redesigned.

The pathnam is the flat stern where the boatman sits and steers. Everything about the boat's balance is calculated backwards from a single man's weight sitting there.

The canopy is the hard part

The hull is joinery — difficult, but it is joinery. The canopy frame is judgement. Those hoops are bent to a curve that is never measured, and they have to end up symmetrical, evenly spaced, and low enough to clear the bridges. Getting a set of hoops to agree with each other by eye is the thing that separates a yard's work from a workshop's, and it is why two shikaras that appear identical from the far shore look completely different from ten feet away.

Ten days to twenty is the usual build time, depending on how much carving the buyer is paying for.

The paddle

Heart-shaped, or spade-shaped depending on who is describing it, on a short shaft. It is not an oar and there is no rowlock. The boatman kneels or sits at the stern and works it on one side, switching to correct, and the boat tracks straight — which it has no business doing, and does anyway, because the hull is asymmetrically weighted to expect it.

Watch a shikara-wallah cross open water on the Dal against a wind. It looks slow and it is not.

What it is not

Three wooden boats get confused constantly on the Dal, and the distinction is worth having:

• Shikara — the paddled taxi. Canopied, cushioned, for people and short distances.
• Doonga — the older working boat. Longer, plainer, and until recently lived in. Whole families were raised on them.
• Houseboat — not a boat in any useful sense. It does not go anywhere. It is a carved timber building moored to the bed of the lake, and it exists because in the nineteenth century foreigners were barred from owning land in Kashmir. The workaround was to build on water. The entire houseboat tradition is a piece of legal ingenuity that became an architecture.

The yards

There are not many left. A handful of workshops behind the bazaar still build new hulls; a great deal more of the trade is now repair, which is honest work but does not train anyone. The craft is passed down within families and the economics of it have not improved.

If you want to see it, ask us and we will take you — not to a showroom, to a yard, where somebody will be irritated at first and then, after ten minutes, will start explaining the angles.