Srinagar: The upgradation of a Sufi shrine on Srinagar’s Shankaracharya hill has hit an unexpected roadblock, with a Kashmiri Pandit group questioning how a Muslim religious space has appeared “out of nowhere” in the middle of a road leading towards the centuries-old temple dedicated to Lord Shiva.Last week, Ravinder Pandita, who heads All India Kashmiri Samaj (AIKS) – a global Pandit body boasting of membership from both within India and the Indian diaspora – shared visuals of a vacant plot inside the forested summit of the Shankaracharya hill, a major landmark in the city that rises above the banks of the famous Dal Lake.Visuals posted on social media showed two stone cenotaphs fenced with an iron railing and overhung with the votive drapery. Some of this drapery was also wrapped around plastic crates that marked the presence of a shrine, which lacked any superstructure.Photo shared by Ravinder Pandita of All India Kashmir Samaj last week on X still showed the names on the board before they were painted over. Photo: Shakir MirFurther visuals of the same spot were shared by Pandit activist Amit Raina on X, showing similar green-coloured fabrics covering a few stone blocks strewn near the site. He raised alarm over what he believed was a threat to “Kashmir’s ancient Hindu heritage”.In the video, the activists appear to be rummaging through the plastic crates and stone blocks. The voiceover suggests that blocks had been placed as “decoys” to fraudulently make the case for a Muslim shrine at the supposedly unoccupied spot on the hill associated with the eponymous Hindu temple.According to the circular by the Jammu & Kashmir Public Works (Roads & Buildings) Department, the tender for the upgradation of the shrine of Syed Usman Sahib on the hill was allotted to Aziz Kashmiri and Co Prop, a local construction agency. The advertised cost for the work is around Rs 45 lakh.Speaking to The Wire, Pandita said that no member of the local Pandit community had ever seen the shrine on the hill. “We invited a discussion. We did not object. We simply asked whether anyone has seen the shrine because while some of us know of the graves, no one knows about the shrine,” he said.Pandita said that if the revenue records prove the shrine has been here, then its devotees must be offered a separate approach from the other side of the hill. “They must not encroach on the main Shankaracharya route. When a full dargah is built, we cannot object to it. Then there will be rush on Thursdays (special days) and they will occupy the whole road and block it. Ultimately, the sanctity of going to the Shankaracharya would be lost,” he added.After a fierce online campaign led by the Pandit groups, the work on the Sufi shrine has been halted, The Wire can confirm.“We received a communication from the office of deputy magistrate Srinagar saying that the work must be stopped for security reasons,” an official from the roads and buildings department said. “The details of everyone who is working at the site will be scrutinised first before the work is resumed.”The official, however, did not specify why the work was halted. The Wire also reached out to Aziz Kashmiri and Co Prop. They refused to talk on the matter.However, a contractor familiar with the upgradation on the site said that the work had been originally approved by the Directorate of Archeology, Archives and Museums, J&K. Also read: Why the Renovation of a 15th-Century Srinagar Mosque Has Had Heritage Experts Worried“Unless the archives department had this site in their records, how did they commission the work?,” he asked, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “If the shrine didn’t exist, how would they float the tender for its conservation?”He said that the videos circulating on social media were misleading. “The videos have been shot selectively. The site that’s supposed to see the upgradation work is further up the hill,” he said.He accused the activists of allegedly defacing the board at the site that mentioned the names of the two saints, Syed Usman Sahib and Syed Asad Allah Sahib, buried therein. The Wire couldn’t confirm exactly who tampered with the board but when it visited the site earlier this week, the board had been painted over with a green colour, erasing the names of the saints. In the earlier pictures of the same site uploaded on X by Pandita, the names are clearly visible. An old banner showing the way towards the spot where the graves of the two Sufi saints are located. Photo: Shakir MirIshtiyaq Mohuiddin, executive magistrate and tehsildar (revenue officer), The Jammu and Kashmir Waqf Board, told The Wire that these graves are not administered by them. “Those (graves) aren’t Waqf-notified or Waqf-administered,” he said.When The Wire reached Pranjal Hazarika, the director of the archeology, archives and museums department, he said that he wouldn’t immediately be able to speak about the matter as he had joined the department only recently. “I don’t have any knowledge about it at present,” he said. Remnants of Sufi historyDotted across different parts of the Valley, the Sufi shrines have historically played an important role in dissemination of Muslim religious ideas in Kashmir. The Sufi brotherhood councils adhered to the common monastic codes called tariqas or silsilas of which there have historically been six in Kashmir. Although most of these shrines and Sufi monasteries have been thoroughly documented throughout history, not much information is available about the origins of this shrine dedicated to the two graves on the Shankaracharya hill. Saleem Beg, convenor of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (Intach) in J&K, said that while the shrine is not found in their record, the use of ‘Syed’ as prefix suggests it is older than at least 200 years.“All Syed shrines across Kashmir are of the earlier dates. During the last 200 years, we haven’t found any shrine dedicated to a Sufi with Syed lineage,” Beg told The Wire. “What we find instead are shrines consecrated to some Baba or some Ganai etc. Only very venerated Sufi masters were buried high up in the mountains.”Hakim Sameer Hamdani, art historian and conservationist, told The Wire that “stylistically the tombstones of the two graves can be assigned to the Sultanate Period (14th to 16th-century) though we see similar designs even as late as the Mughal period (16th to 18th-century) during which the tradition of carving the funerary stones in these styles was prevalent,” he argued. One hill, many facesThe Shankaracharya hill’s religious importance for the worshippers in the Valley has cut across the religious divide.Kalhana, the Sanskrit chronicler of 12th-century Kashmir, suggests the hill may have been called Gopadri in earlier times for being associated with an agrahara (tax-free) land granted by the King Gopaditya during the rule of Alchon Huns in the 6th or 7th-century. Its association with the patronage of Jalauka, one of the Mauryan Emperor Ashoka’s sons, also adds a Buddhist layer to it.The temple built on its summit was called interchangeably as Jyeshteshwara or Jyeshtarudra. The current structure, however, dates to Kashmir’s 8th-century Karkota Dynasty, although it has since seen significant reconstruction activities.Within the site’s enclosure, there were also two Persian inscriptions recorded by Henry Hardy Cole of ASI in 1869 (of which one is missing), which suggest that significant repairs on the temple were carried out by Kashmir’s Muslim rulers.“The original stone base of the temple is of a square plan with offsets similar to those of Kashmir’s ancient temples and stupas,” said Hamdani, who has authored The Syncretic Traditions of Islamic Religious Architecture of Kashmir (Early 14th –18th Century).“The base dates to the mediaeval period. However, there’s an octagonal foundation atop it over which a temple of a later date was erected, whose features mark a radical departure from the prevailing stone temple architecture of the mediaeval times,” he added Hamdani argues that the difference is due to the temple being subjected to repair and rebuilding activities twice; first time during Kashmir’s Sultanate period and later during the Mughal rule. Kashmir’s contested pastsIt was in the mid-19th or 20th-century that the hill came to be called as Shankaracharya, based on the popular legend among the local Pandit community that Adi Shankaracharya, an eighth-century Hindu ascetic associated with non-dualistic advaita philosophy, had meditated on the hill’s summit.Its continued reference by local Muslims as Takht-e-Suleiman (Solomon’s throne) – based on local myths that Prophet Solomon had landed there on his winged horse – has often been a source of friction between the two communities in modern times.However, as historians have pointed out, the use of Takht-e-Suleiman for the hill’s nomenclature predates its renaming as Shankaracharya by centuries.One of the strongest pieces of evidence continues to survive in the form of a 15th-century tombstone in Srinagar’s Mazar-e-Kalan cemetery.The grave commemorates the death of one Sayyid Khan on the foothills of Shankaracharya in medieval times.The 15th-century tombstone of Sayyid Khan inside an old cemetery in Srinagar. The inscriptions on the grave are bilingual (Persian and Sanskrit) and describe the hill interchangeably as Jyeshtarudra and Takht-e-Suleiman. Photo: Shakir MirThe Farsi side of the bilingual epigraph refers to the hill as Takht-e-Suleiman and the Sharada (Sanskrit) side calls it Jyeshtarudra, indicating that both names had been in use without the conflict between the two communities until the hill was renamed in the 20th-century. “There’s no road dedicated exclusively for access to any particular religious place of worship on the hill,” Intach’s Beg said. “Historically, people have approached the hill from every possible direction.”