The yarbals of the Jhelum

We are named after a set of stone steps, so it is reasonable to want to know what they are.

A yarbal is a stepped landing on the water — on the Jhelum as it runs through Srinagar, or on the channels and streams that feed it. The word is a compound and it is not subtle about its meaning: yaar, friend, and bal, a water body or the edge of one. Local writing on them translates the term more or less literally as a place of friendship.

What they were for

Everything. This is the difficulty in explaining them to anyone whose city has always had taps.

Water was drawn at the yarbal. Clothes and utensils were washed there. People bathed there. Boats came alongside there — the yarbals were the city's landing stages, the points at which the river network, which was the real transport system of old Srinagar, connected to the streets. If you were crossing the river or travelling downstream, you walked down the steps at your yarbal and a boatman took you.

And the textile trade used them. Srinagar's shawl industry needed running water at scale, and pashmina was washed at the river's edge. The connection between the Jhelum and the shawl is direct and physical: the fibre that ends up in a piece worth a great deal of money spent part of its life being worked in that water.

What they were also for

The functional account misses the reason the word contains "friend".

The yarbal was where the women of a neighbourhood met, daily, without it having to be arranged. Accounts of the period describe groups so habitual that they left for the yarbal together and came back together, and the women who kept these gatherings were known as yarbal kakini. It was the place where a household's news left the household. For women whose movement was otherwise constrained, it was a space that belonged to them — somewhere to complain, negotiate, arrange marriages, and be temporarily off-duty.

It was not a facility that happened to be sociable. It was a social institution that happened to supply water.

The bridges

You cannot talk about the yarbals without the kadals. Old Srinagar is organised around its bridges — Amira Kadal, Habba Kadal, Fateh Kadal, Zaina Kadal, Safa Kadal and the rest — and neighbourhoods are still named and located by them. The bridges and the landings were one system: the kadal took you across, the yarbal took you along.

Walk the old city with that in mind and the street plan stops being confusing. It is not a grid that failed. It is a riverbank that grew inland.

What happened

Piped water arrived, which removed the daily reason to go. Embankments and road-building cut the city's relationship with its own riverbank. The Jhelum's water quality declined to the point where washing in it stopped being sensible. Boat transport gave way to the road. Some yarbals were built over; more were simply left.

Several are still there. They are quiet now in a way that people who remember them find genuinely painful — steps going down to water with nobody on them, in the middle of a city of over a million people.

Why we took the name

Partly because it is ours and it is not used, and partly for a reason that is harder to say without sounding grand: a travel company is a yarbal or it is a shopfront. The whole function is to be the place where people who are from here and people who are not meet, at the water's edge, and something gets exchanged that is not only money.

The Old City walk we run goes down to a working yarbal on the Jhelum. It is not the most photogenic stop on the itinerary. It is the one we would keep if we had to cut the rest.