Sep 30, 4:01 PM
Kashmir’s wedding feast is still alive — just not standing still
Wazwan has survived for six centuries by doing what traditions often do when they want to last: changing without admitting it too loudly.
In Kashmir, a feast can still announce a marriage before the bride does. The Wazwan, a lavish multi-course meal built around mutton, remains one of the region’s most stubborn cultural markers, even as the people preparing it begin to move elsewhere. Its survival says as much about continuity as it does about compromise — a useful lesson for anyone who thinks traditions either freeze or vanish.
The dish dates back to the 14th century, when rulers brought skilled chefs from Central Asia to the valley. Those cooks settled in Srinagar’s old city and formed the community known as Wazpora, helping shape a culinary practice that became tied to Kashmiri identity. Today, the feast is served on a trami, a traditional copper platter, and still carries social meaning beyond the menu: the number of dishes, and the amount of meat, often signal a family’s wealth.
Among the best-known guardians of the craft is Ghulam Nabi Baba, 74, who says his family line reaches back to those early migrants. He recalls that Wazwan once had only seven mutton dishes; over time, the spread expanded to around 20. He also remembers the scale of the business in practical terms: in Delina, in north Kashmir, he once cooked 4,500 kilograms of meat for a single wedding, while an average marriage, he says, involves about 200 kilograms.
The methods, for now, have changed far less than the circumstances around them. Meat is still pounded by hand with wooden mallets, then simmered slowly over wood fires in heavy copper degchis. Dishes such as rista, gushtaba, rogan josh, tabak maaz and kabab still form the backbone of the meal, with gushtaba traditionally arriving as the final course, the polite signal that the feast is over.
Yet modern life has begun to tug at the edges of this elaborate ritual. Baba’s son has chosen restaurant work over wedding catering, saying the round-the-clock demands are too exhausting. He still sees himself as carrying the family’s culinary inheritance forward, only in a different setting. That may sound like a modest adjustment, but it is how living traditions actually endure: not by posing for photographs, but by finding a business model that works.
That shift is already visible in Srinagar, where younger chefs are moving from wedding kitchens into restaurants and diners now sit down to Wazwan outside the marriage season. The old feast has not disappeared. It has simply found a second life, which is more than many customs manage once they meet the modern economy.
Written by Thomas Nussbaumer thomas.nussbaumer@alpineweekly.com
