SHORT of martyrdom, an extreme test of loyalty is to use the latrines on our side of the Wagah border. They challenge one’s patriotism. Cross over to the Indian side and the ones there are clean, hygienic and welcoming to the point of propaganda.

It is almost as if someone in Indian immigration, smarting from V.S. Naipaul’s memorable opening line in his book An Area of Darkness (“Indians defecate everywhere.…”), was determined that Naipaul would never have an opportunity of riling India again.

Everyone along the 200-kilometre road from the border at Atari to Jammu seemed remarkably continent. That road snakes parallel to the Pakistani border, passing through Batala, Gurdaspur and Pathankot until, crossing the bridge over the river Ravi, one reaches Lakhanpur — the gateway to Jammu and Kashmir. Thereafter the Shivalik hills climb gradually, then steeply, until one enters the city of Jammu to be greeted by Mahatma Gandhi, stranded on a traffic island.

Have no expectations of Jammu city. Its mediocrity explains why the emperor Jahangir preferred Kashmir (he considered making Srinagar his summer capital), or why the wily Gulab Singh (then raja of Jammu) should have manoeuvred to purchase Kashmir from a bankrupt Sikh durbar in March 1846.

Yesterday’s brigand is today’s national hero. Not surprisingly, Gulab Singh is commemorated with an imposing statue in the grounds of the Amar Mahal Palace, a mansion designed as a French chateau and built in the 1890s. The building is now a museum extolling almost two centuries of Dogra Raj, in particular the career of Dr Karan Singh, presently the dispossessed maharaja of a still bitterly contested state.

The walls of its Conference Hall display the enchanting miniature paintings of the Nala-Damayanti legend. To view them in the sequence of the story is to savour the best in Pahari painting. Their composition, delicacy of line, personification of femininity, and fidelity to the text are examples of an art form that owed less to patronage than to the innate talent of local artists.

The upper private apartments of the Amar Mahal were occupied by the late Maharani Tara Devi, the fourth wife of Maharaja Hari Singh. Unable to control her licentious husband, Tara Devi sought solace in religion. Prominent in her modest apartments hangs a painting of her, dressed in saffron robes, by the Sikh artist Sobha Singh. Tellingly, he depicts her as Meera the mystic poetess and devotee of Krishna.

The fabled 120-kilogramme gold throne of the Dogras is on show, protected by iron grilles. Not on display at the museum is the Treaty of 1846 by which Gulab Singh acquired Kashmir.

(The receipt for the Rs75 lakhs he paid in cash towards the purchase price of Rs2 crores is in the Punjab Archives at Lahore.)

Nor on display is the Instrument of Accession said to have been signed by Maharaja Hari Singh on Oct 26, 1947, conceding his state to the new Dominion of India.

The palace commands a view across the Tawi river towards the much older Bahu fort which is better seen floodlit at night. It helps disguise its modern refurbishments.

Jammu celebrated Eid on Oct 16. The only sound at dawn that morning was a faint azan from somewhere in the distance. It sounded almost apologetic for having disturbed the faithful.

A call to the hotel reception to ask when the Eid prayers would be held prompted the practised response: “Oh, between 7.30 and 10.30 am, in the coffee shop.” No one seemed to know for sure, except for a general wave of the hand in the direction of Residency Road.

This was perhaps understandable, considering only 11pc of Jammu city is Muslim and almost 84pc Hindu. Admitting that one was from Pakistan evoked a warmer smile, a firmer handshake, but none of the fervid outpourings such a disclosure would have released in Srinagar. Politics in Jammu, like the slow-flowing Tawi river, is at a low ebb.

No one seemed to have a high opinion of Dr Karan Singh’s political acumen, blaming the decline of his political authority to an over-dependence on self-serving advisers and his preference for Delhi over Jammu.

How much could one see of Jammu in two days? And that, too, over two Eid holidays? The solution was to avoid the present and to go into its woodlands in search of history.

For 40 years, ever since I began studying Pahari painting, my wife and I had wanted to visit sites connected with an important patron Raja Balwant Singh Jasrotia.

By some miracle, made possible by the Mr Kirpal Singh (director, Dogra Art Gallery), we were able not only to locate the ruins of his small baradari on the banks of Saruin lake but also talk to his descendants, now middle-class professionals living in suburban modernity on the site of their ancestor’s jagir. Balwant Singh belonged to nearby Jasrota.

The palace there is now a nature preserve. It is in ruins, its leaning walls held back by tenacious vines. Once, perhaps in this very hall which was now congested with undergrowth, Raja Balwant Singh had listened and succumbed to the dulcet tones of his favourite singer Ladvai.

We were not so lucky. Weeks earlier, Srinagar got to hear Zubin Mehta conduct the Bavarian State Orchestra in the Shalimar Gardens. At Jammu, we were assailed by pop songs broadcast by carousing male teenagers celebrating Eid amongst the ruins.

The writer is an author and art historian. www.fsaijazuddin.pk