Writing about a city with a complex and expansive history is a daunting task. In City as Memory: A Short Biography of Srinagar, Sadaf Wani has attempted to tell the story of Srinagar in all its different forms. Her task, as she rightly states in the introduction, is complex. How does one attempt the biography of a whole city, which, by extension, is also the biography of a whole people? What must one exclude and include? The book tells the story of Srinagar through the eyes of Wani as well as a lived collective memory of people who have lived through different versions of the city. She explores Srinagar using Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological framework of ‘lifeworlds’—a concept that refers to the subjective experiences of individuals in everyday life, which shape their understanding of the world around them.
January 2025, volume 49, No 1