EXCERPTS: TAXING PARADISE

Toronto Star rowing correspondent Gordon Sinclair entered Kashmir through LahoreJammu route in 1935 summer. While his narration indicates he mistook the boatmen as the sole Srinagar residents, his travelogue, however, offers interesting anecdotes about how getting into Kashmir was inhumanly different from living in Kashmir, even years after the 1931 uprising

I had to fill out nine sets of papers about myself and family, another batch for Baboo and Narayan and a third for the Chevrolet.

ENTERING KASHMIR

Then the gimme boys measured my gas, soaked me 18 cents a gallon duty in spite of the fact I’d already paid twenty-three cents a gallon tax, charged me on my rifle, some food I had along in case of mountain siege and on an alone tin of cigarettes. A woman in a bus behind me had to pay one cent duty on a cucumber, and did she put up a howl! These formalities ended, we were waved through but soon came to more toll barriers one after another. Keepers here asked if we were going to Srinagar, the Kashmir capital, and when we said we were they abandoned the toll charge. That was just a come-on gag which I learned about later....

...We proceeded perhaps fifty feet and were stopped by the army, backed up by six clerks who looked the car over and commanded: “There is a twenty rupee toll to pay.” I expected this and had the coins in my hand.

I don’t speak much Hindustani but at this time I noticed my own servants grow apprehensive; they were telling each other that the sahib was going to get very mad about something. A man dressed in yellow came over and explained, “You will have to pay the possession tax.”

“Possession tax? What’s a possession tax?”

“On the car. You possess a car. You take the car to Kashmir; the possession tax is thirty dollars.”

“But I’ve been in Kashmir for days. I paid duty on my gas and oil, on my rifle, my food, my cigarettes when I came in at Jammu.”