There is a particular kind of shame that settles quietly; it arrives the moment a question is posed about a historical place, and no answer can be found. Not the architectural details, nor the location. Only the discomfiting awareness of a gap where knowledge should reside.The sting is sharpest when the forgotten site lies minutes from one’s own home, on streets walked since childhood, in a city, town, or village one has always claimed to know. Such encounters plant questions that do not easily translate to answers: What does it mean to not know the history that surrounds you? Who benefits from not knowing? And what kind of encounter or practice might be capable of closing this stark disconnect?Many young Kashmiris share this experience, having spent much of their youth confined indoors. In a place where carrying an identity card mattered more than money, parents feared letting children wander in public spaces. Heritage was inherited in fragments, through the stories parents tell, through the texts studied in schools, and through the pride with which elders speak of their experiences of bygone days. But there is a disconnect between the inherited knowledge and the material reality of the places. This is compounded when you fear venturing out for groceries, let alone visiting heritage sites. The disconnect is indifference, but a structural feature of epistemic displacement: a condition where cultural belonging persists without institutional scaffolding. In Kashmir, this manifests not as absence but as partial presence; historic thresholds endure in stone and wood, yet their social meaning remains unspoken and untaught.Yet, the intimacy of memory does not always translate into knowledge. What feels familiar often remains unnamed, unmapped, unspoken. It is in this quiet gap between experience and explanation that another feeling begins to surface – a subtle yet persistent sense of shame.To address this we, a group of university students, take part in Heritage Walks across Kashmir initiated by professor Khalid Wasim Hassan, who teaches at the Central University of Kashmir. They are combined with a reading club whose members discuss literature at these locations. What follows is an interpretation and reflection concerning our perception and purpose of this exercise.Why not just read a book?Heritage walks are often seen as pedagogical, making history tangible. History, in this account, moves from abstract to the embodied. From theory to experience.Yet this approach omits a critical reflection; Heritage walks do not merely illustrate knowledge; they generate it. Rooted in collective effort, individual experiences, spatial memory, and narrative exchange, they gather voices absent from archives. However, to us, heritage is not simply a site of history, but, in the words of G.J. Ashworth, late professor of Heritage Management at the University of Groningen, a “vehicle of communication”– tangible and intangible sites representing values, ideas and memories.Heritage transcends monuments, and resides in the vernacular. Vernacular architecture becomes a counter-memory against the homogenising effects of urban modernity. These structures embody environmental knowledge, local craftsmanship, and inherited ways of living that modern urban houses often marginalise. In this way, heritage resists the cultural amnesia of rapid urbanisation. These sites carry ‘living’ memories, constantly engaging with the present. Especially in Kashmir, where heritage sites are not distant manicured exhibits, but are woven intricately into everyday life. The bridges into the Old City, its narrow bylanes adorned with latticed window panes, the Khanqas on the way to university, the bund, the graveyard, the peyand (shopfront) are all heritage where memory is transmitted either through engagement with the physical or seena ba seena (oral text). “We realised we were not merely walking through towns, visiting mosques, or sitting in old courtyards, but were entering living archives of emotion and memory,” Shaista, a participant, recalled. Heritage is an indispensable part of memory transmission across generations. These sites, especially public spaces, anchor collective memory and help people define their identity. They are key tools for constructing an identity.Aali Masjid, Srinagar. Photo: Author provided.However, cultural memory requires active engagement to recover and reshape meanings. Joy Sather-Wagstaff, an anthropologist and a prominent heritage scholar, argues that heritage sites cannot exist without “active engagement of people within everyday life”. Tajamul, a university student, echoes this idea. “During our visit to Rinchan Mosque, often referred to as Kashmir’s first mosque, many participants from the same area admitted they had never heard about it before. This shows how easy heritage can fade when not engaged with. Without connection, even the history in our proximity can become shrouded in a veil of ignorance,” he reflects.Walking inevitably leads to conversations with people about their memories of the lanes and paths, the paths we might have walked today, but that they have walked their entire lives. ‘Conversations that cannot be made elsewhere’The walks foster an active engagement with memory while operating as a classroom on wheels. One in which the rigid rules of the curriculum do not apply. The participants are not mere passive receivers of a fixed narrative; instead, they create the narrative. In doing so, they create a space where knowledge is negotiated rather than just received. Errl and Rigney, two prominent scholars in the field of cultural memory studies, explain that cultural memory is an ongoing process of engagement and reconfiguration with the past and, by extension – we may argue – with the present. The walks themselves transform into a living archive, one where the repository of memories is built and unbuilt at each step.Perhaps the most important contribution of heritage walks is that they create spaces for conversations that rarely emerge elsewhere. Classrooms and magazines are bound by institutional limits; social media invites censorship or trolling. In contrast, the walkers converse spontaneously and in good faith, in alleys or before monuments, unfiltered, unpredictable, and genuinely open.“The walks have ushered me into a different world, where I interact comfortably with professors, peers, and my seniors. The discussions have changed how I view my surroundings. It feels like I’ve been elevated to a new space for sharing ideas. I used to be insecure about discussing ideas before, but hearing reflections from people across Kashmir has made me confident. It has pushed me out of my comfort zone”, reflects Rameez, a university student.Koh-i-Maran/ Hari Parbat Hill. Photo: Author providedMemory, trade and migrationFar from being on the periphery, Kashmir was once a hotspot for cultural exchange through the bustling central asian trade network. The walks have revealed to us the international character (history) of downtown Srinagar.The evidence sits in plain sight, in things we use every day. Noon chai (salted butter tea), a salient feature of Kashmiri culture, has its origins in Yarkand (present-day Xinjiang). The famed Kashmiri Samavār is a direct cousin of the Russian Samovar. The Lavāsa (flatbread) is easily identifiable with flatbreads cooked across West Asia. Professor Mumtaz Ahmed Yatoo, an expert in prehistoric archaeology, argues, with the discovery of Millet grains, that Kashmir was a crucial node in early global networks, linking Kashmir to China and West Asia. He calls it “Globalisation in Prehistory”.If objects tell one story, the people tell another. When trade flourished in the 15th century, historian David G. Atwell notes that Kashmiri traders even settled in Tibet and intermarried there. Their descendants returned only as refugees in the late 1950s, with nothing except their Kashmiri surnames to claim refuge in the land of their ancestors.The walks have revived memories of a time when people-to-people connections shaped the very identity that makes the valley unique and famous. The confluence does not remain on the margins of memory, but survives in Srinagar’s eateries. Over the past few decades, Hawal, in Srinagar, has become the city’s momo hub, home to a cluster of eateries run by Tibetans who found refuge in Kashmir decades ago.The crumbling walls of Yarkand Sarai bear testimony to these memories. Once a sprawling resthouse on the ancient Silk Route, connecting Srinagar to Yarkand, Kashgar, and Khotan, it now shelters descendants of displaced Yarkandi traders, its walls cracking under institutional neglect. Eviction notices threaten even this fragile presence. Walking through the Sarai is to acknowledge, however fleetingly, that Kashmir was once a crossroad and not a frontier. The structure recalls a past free from the present constraints of the nation-state. Now, the Sarai fades, cracks laid bare, its ruination mirroring Kashmir’s own geography.Yarkhand Sarai, Srinagar. Photo: Author providedHowever, herein lies an opportunity. The Sarai does not have to become another ruin we mourn after it’s gone. It could be restored; its rooms turned into a small archive of the stories held by the families still residing there. Kashmir’s museums preserve shawls and stone, but almost nothing of this more recent, more human history. To save the Sarai would be to save more than a building. It would be to remember that Kashmir was once a place people passed through, and gave it its identity. Each walk is like a poemEvery heritage walk has felt for us like a poem. Like a beautiful couplet, each individual reads the town, mohalla, shrine, house, and person differently. Cities, like books, tell stories. Every layer reveals something new, some obvious, and some hidden.Heritage walks and reading clubs cultivate observant behaviour in the participants, fostering a culture of conscious living. To live consciously is to reflect on experiences.Ikhlaq, a university student, now reflects on the daily, otherwise mundane mornings in his family kitchen with a new realisation. “The smoke from fried ghee fills the kitchen with bluish fog, laying siege on the murky roshandan, while the Zeenat radio, placed on an arched bay window with small squares of stained-glass gracing its shutters, plays an age-old sufiyana. Growing up, this scene must have characterised many mornings for many Kashmiris; and the sufiyana, sung in Persian, of which I knew no word, has now become the carrier of a single emotion for me: Home”. The group discussing a reading at the Hari Parbat Fort on the Koh-i-Maran/Hari Parbat Hill. Photo: Author provided.Similar social experiences repeated across a group of people and shared between them are what develop an identity. A home, a shop front, a mosque, can be both locations for private and shared experiences. Places like these do not merely become part of individual experiences; but the interactions between individuals in these spaces are where values and meanings are developed. This is how collective memories are developed and how a common identity is formed.Jann Assmann, renowned cultural historian and late professor of egyptology at the University of Heidelberg, argues that rites are semiotic actions carrying cultural memory across generations. Heritage walks, we suggest, are a new ritual: deliberate and conscious. Each step engages collective memory. This is especially relevant in the digital age, where young people often limit interactions to social media. Walks both preserve heritage and invite critical engagement.One walk ended at Badamwari, after descending from Koh-i-Maran/Hari Parbat. A walker’s family joined us in the garden, with tea and biscuits. Among almond blossoms in late afternoon light, we discussed our reading, not as detached observers but as people connected to the past. The text didn’t sit above the place, and the place didn’t sit above the text; they read each other.Aayat Syed is PhD scholar at the Islamic University of Science and Technology in J&K. Ahsan Ul Haq Shah is pursuing a masters in Political Science at the Central University of Kashmir. A regular at the Heritage Walks.Khalid Wasim Hassan is an Assistant Professor in the Central University of Kashmir, where he teaches courses on Political Theory and Human Rights.